Chương Chương 22 · THE INTERIOR OF DESPAIR

Let us try to say it.

It is necessary that society should look at these things, because it is

itself which creates them.

He was, as we have said, an ignorant man, but he was not a fool. The

light of nature was ignited in him. Unhappiness, which also possesses a

clearness of vision of its own, augmented the small amount of daylight

which existed in this mind. Beneath the cudgel, beneath the chain, in

the cell, in hardship, beneath the burning sun of the galleys, upon the

plank bed of the convict, he withdrew into his own consciousness and

meditated.

He constituted himself the tribunal.

He began by putting himself on trial.

He recognized the fact that he was not an innocent man unjustly

punished. He admitted that he had committed an extreme and blameworthy

act; that that loaf of bread would probably not have been refused to

him had he asked for it; that, in any case, it would have been better

to wait until he could get it through compassion or through work; that

it is not an unanswerable argument to say, “Can one wait when one is

hungry?” That, in the first place, it is very rare for any one to die

of hunger, literally; and next, that, fortunately or unfortunately, man

is so constituted that he can suffer long and much, both morally and

physically, without dying; that it is therefore necessary to have

patience; that that would even have been better for those poor little

children; that it had been an act of madness for him, a miserable,

unfortunate wretch, to take society at large violently by the collar,

and to imagine that one can escape from misery through theft; that that

is in any case a poor door through which to escape from misery through

which infamy enters; in short, that he was in the wrong.

Then he asked himself:—

Whether he had been the only one in fault in his fatal history. Whether

it was not a serious thing, that he, a laborer, out of work, that he,

an industrious man, should have lacked bread. And whether, the fault

once committed and confessed, the chastisement had not been ferocious

and disproportioned. Whether there had not been more abuse on the part

of the law, in respect to the penalty, than there had been on the part

of the culprit in respect to his fault. Whether there had not been an

excess of weights in one balance of the scale, in the one which

contains expiation. Whether the over-weight of the penalty was not

equivalent to the annihilation of the crime, and did not result in

reversing the situation, of replacing the fault of the delinquent by

the fault of the repression, of converting the guilty man into the

victim, and the debtor into the creditor, and of ranging the law

definitely on the side of the man who had violated it.

Whether this penalty, complicated by successive aggravations for

attempts at escape, had not ended in becoming a sort of outrage

perpetrated by the stronger upon the feebler, a crime of society

against the individual, a crime which was being committed afresh every

day, a crime which had lasted nineteen years.

He asked himself whether human society could have the right to force

its members to suffer equally in one case for its own unreasonable lack

of foresight, and in the other case for its pitiless foresight; and to

seize a poor man forever between a defect and an excess, a default of

work and an excess of punishment.

Whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely those

of its members who were the least well endowed in the division of goods

made by chance, and consequently the most deserving of consideration.

These questions put and answered, he judged society and condemned it.

He condemned it to his hatred.

He made it responsible for the fate which he was suffering, and he said

to himself that it might be that one day he should not hesitate to call

it to account. He declared to himself that there was no equilibrium

between the harm which he had caused and the harm which was being done

to him; he finally arrived at the conclusion that his punishment was

not, in truth, unjust, but that it most assuredly was iniquitous.

Anger may be both foolish and absurd; one can be irritated wrongfully;

one is exasperated only when there is some show of right on one’s side

at bottom. Jean Valjean felt himself exasperated.

And besides, human society had done him nothing but harm; he had never

seen anything of it save that angry face which it calls Justice, and

which it shows to those whom it strikes. Men had only touched him to

bruise him. Every contact with them had been a blow. Never, since his

infancy, since the days of his mother, of his sister, had he ever

encountered a friendly word and a kindly glance. From suffering to

suffering, he had gradually arrived at the conviction that life is a

war; and that in this war he was the conquered. He had no other weapon

than his hate. He resolved to whet it in the galleys and to bear it

away with him when he departed.

There was at Toulon a school for the convicts, kept by the Ignorantin

friars, where the most necessary branches were taught to those of the

unfortunate men who had a mind for them. He was of the number who had a

mind. He went to school at the age of forty, and learned to read, to

write, to cipher. He felt that to fortify his intelligence was to

fortify his hate. In certain cases, education and enlightenment can

serve to eke out evil.

This is a sad thing to say; after having judged society, which had

caused his unhappiness, he judged Providence, which had made society,

and he condemned it also.

Thus during nineteen years of torture and slavery, this soul mounted

and at the same time fell. Light entered it on one side, and darkness

on the other.

Jean Valjean had not, as we have seen, an evil nature. He was still

good when he arrived at the galleys. He there condemned society, and

felt that he was becoming wicked; he there condemned Providence, and

was conscious that he was becoming impious.

It is difficult not to indulge in meditation at this point.

Does human nature thus change utterly and from top to bottom? Can the

man created good by God be rendered wicked by man? Can the soul be

completely made over by fate, and become evil, fate being evil? Can the

heart become misshapen and contract incurable deformities and

infirmities under the oppression of a disproportionate unhappiness, as

the vertebral column beneath too low a vault? Is there not in every

human soul, was there not in the soul of Jean Valjean in particular, a

first spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in

the other, which good can develop, fan, ignite, and make to glow with

splendor, and which evil can never wholly extinguish?

Grave and obscure questions, to the last of which every physiologist

would probably have responded no, and that without hesitation, had he

beheld at Toulon, during the hours of repose, which were for Jean

Valjean hours of reverie, this gloomy galley-slave, seated with folded

arms upon the bar of some capstan, with the end of his chain thrust

into his pocket to prevent its dragging, serious, silent, and

thoughtful, a pariah of the laws which regarded the man with wrath,

condemned by civilization, and regarding heaven with severity.

Certainly,—and we make no attempt to dissimulate the fact,—the

observing physiologist would have beheld an irremediable misery; he

would, perchance, have pitied this sick man, of the law’s making; but

he would not have even essayed any treatment; he would have turned

aside his gaze from the caverns of which he would have caught a glimpse

within this soul, and, like Dante at the portals of hell, he would have

effaced from this existence the word which the finger of God has,

nevertheless, inscribed upon the brow of every man,—hope.

Was this state of his soul, which we have attempted to analyze, as

perfectly clear to Jean Valjean as we have tried to render it for those

who read us? Did Jean Valjean distinctly perceive, after their

formation, and had he seen distinctly during the process of their

formation, all the elements of which his moral misery was composed? Had

this rough and unlettered man gathered a perfectly clear perception of

the succession of ideas through which he had, by degrees, mounted and

descended to the lugubrious aspects which had, for so many years,

formed the inner horizon of his spirit? Was he conscious of all that

passed within him, and of all that was working there? That is something

which we do not presume to state; it is something which we do not even

believe. There was too much ignorance in Jean Valjean, even after his

misfortune, to prevent much vagueness from still lingering there. At

times he did not rightly know himself what he felt. Jean Valjean was in

the shadows; he suffered in the shadows; he hated in the shadows; one

might have said that he hated in advance of himself. He dwelt

habitually in this shadow, feeling his way like a blind man and a

dreamer. Only, at intervals, there suddenly came to him, from without

and from within, an access of wrath, a surcharge of suffering, a livid

and rapid flash which illuminated his whole soul, and caused to appear

abruptly all around him, in front, behind, amid the gleams of a

frightful light, the hideous precipices and the sombre perspective of

his destiny.

The flash passed, the night closed in again; and where was he? He no

longer knew. The peculiarity of pains of this nature, in which that

which is pitiless—that is to say, that which is

brutalizing—predominates, is to transform a man, little by little, by a

sort of stupid transfiguration, into a wild beast; sometimes into a

ferocious beast.

Jean Valjean’s successive and obstinate attempts at escape would alone

suffice to prove this strange working of the law upon the human soul.

Jean Valjean would have renewed these attempts, utterly useless and

foolish as they were, as often as the opportunity had presented itself,

without reflecting for an instant on the result, nor on the experiences

which he had already gone through. He escaped impetuously, like the

wolf who finds his cage open. Instinct said to him, “Flee!” Reason

would have said, “Remain!” But in the presence of so violent a

temptation, reason vanished; nothing remained but instinct. The beast

alone acted. When he was recaptured, the fresh severities inflicted on

him only served to render him still more wild.

One detail, which we must not omit, is that he possessed a physical

strength which was not approached by a single one of the denizens of

the galleys. At work, at paying out a cable or winding up a capstan,

Jean Valjean was worth four men. He sometimes lifted and sustained

enormous weights on his back; and when the occasion demanded it, he

replaced that implement which is called a jack-screw, and was formerly

called _orgueil_ [pride], whence, we may remark in passing, is derived

the name of the Rue Montorgueil, near the Halles [Fishmarket] in Paris.

His comrades had nicknamed him Jean the Jack-screw. Once, when they

were repairing the balcony of the town-hall at Toulon, one of those

admirable caryatids of Puget, which support the balcony, became

loosened, and was on the point of falling. Jean Valjean, who was

present, supported the caryatid with his shoulder, and gave the workmen

time to arrive.

His suppleness even exceeded his strength. Certain convicts who were

forever dreaming of escape, ended by making a veritable science of

force and skill combined. It is the science of muscles. An entire

system of mysterious statics is daily practised by prisoners, men who

are forever envious of the flies and birds. To climb a vertical

surface, and to find points of support where hardly a projection was

visible, was play to Jean Valjean. An angle of the wall being given,

with the tension of his back and legs, with his elbows and his heels

fitted into the unevenness of the stone, he raised himself as if by

magic to the third story. He sometimes mounted thus even to the roof of

the galley prison.

He spoke but little. He laughed not at all. An excessive emotion was

required to wring from him, once or twice a year, that lugubrious laugh

of the convict, which is like the echo of the laugh of a demon. To all

appearance, he seemed to be occupied in the constant contemplation of

something terrible.

He was absorbed, in fact.

Athwart the unhealthy perceptions of an incomplete nature and a crushed

intelligence, he was confusedly conscious that some monstrous thing was

resting on him. In that obscure and wan shadow within which he crawled,

each time that he turned his neck and essayed to raise his glance, he

perceived with terror, mingled with rage, a sort of frightful

accumulation of things, collecting and mounting above him, beyond the

range of his vision,—laws, prejudices, men, and deeds,—whose outlines

escaped him, whose mass terrified him, and which was nothing else than

that prodigious pyramid which we call civilization. He distinguished,

here and there in that swarming and formless mass, now near him, now

afar off and on inaccessible table-lands, some group, some detail,

vividly illuminated; here the galley-sergeant and his cudgel; there the

gendarme and his sword; yonder the mitred archbishop; away at the top,

like a sort of sun, the Emperor, crowned and dazzling. It seemed to him

that these distant splendors, far from dissipating his night, rendered

it more funereal and more black. All this—laws, prejudices, deeds, men,

things—went and came above him, over his head, in accordance with the

complicated and mysterious movement which God imparts to civilization,

walking over him and crushing him with I know not what peacefulness in

its cruelty and inexorability in its indifference. Souls which have

fallen to the bottom of all possible misfortune, unhappy men lost in

the lowest of those limbos at which no one any longer looks, the

reproved of the law, feel the whole weight of this human society, so

formidable for him who is without, so frightful for him who is beneath,

resting upon their heads.

In this situation Jean Valjean meditated; and what could be the nature

of his meditation?

If the grain of millet beneath the millstone had thoughts, it would,

doubtless, think that same thing which Jean Valjean thought.

All these things, realities full of spectres, phantasmagories full of

realities, had eventually created for him a sort of interior state

which is almost indescribable.

At times, amid his convict toil, he paused. He fell to thinking. His

reason, at one and the same time riper and more troubled than of yore,

rose in revolt. Everything which had happened to him seemed to him

absurd; everything that surrounded him seemed to him impossible. He

said to himself, “It is a dream.” He gazed at the galley-sergeant

standing a few paces from him; the galley-sergeant seemed a phantom to

him. All of a sudden the phantom dealt him a blow with his cudgel.

Visible nature hardly existed for him. It would almost be true to say

that there existed for Jean Valjean neither sun, nor fine summer days,

nor radiant sky, nor fresh April dawns. I know not what vent-hole

daylight habitually illumined his soul.

To sum up, in conclusion, that which can be summed up and translated

into positive results in all that we have just pointed out, we will

confine ourselves to the statement that, in the course of nineteen

years, Jean Valjean, the inoffensive tree-pruner of Faverolles, the

formidable convict of Toulon, had become capable, thanks to the manner

in which the galleys had moulded him, of two sorts of evil action:

firstly, of evil action which was rapid, unpremeditated, dashing,

entirely instinctive, in the nature of reprisals for the evil which he

had undergone; secondly, of evil action which was serious, grave,

consciously argued out and premeditated, with the false ideas which

such a misfortune can furnish. His deliberate deeds passed through

three successive phases, which natures of a certain stamp can alone

traverse,—reasoning, will, perseverance. He had for moving causes his

habitual wrath, bitterness of soul, a profound sense of indignities

suffered, the reaction even against the good, the innocent, and the

just, if there are any such. The point of departure, like the point of

arrival, for all his thoughts, was hatred of human law; that hatred

which, if it be not arrested in its development by some providential

incident, becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the

hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation, and which

manifests itself by a vague, incessant, and brutal desire to do harm to

some living being, no matter whom. It will be perceived that it was not

without reason that Jean Valjean’s passport described him as _a very

dangerous man_.

From year to year this soul had dried away slowly, but with fatal

sureness. When the heart is dry, the eye is dry. On his departure from

the galleys it had been nineteen years since he had shed a tear.