1.F.2.7. 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 revery, 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.