1.F.7.9. A PLACE WHERE CONVICTIONS ARE IN PROCESS OF FORMATION
HE advanced a pace, closed the door mechanically behind
him, and remained standing, contemplating what he saw.
It was a vast and badly lighted apartment, now full of
uproar, now full of silence, where all the apparatus of a
criminal case, with its petty and mournful gravity in the
midst of the throng, was in process of development.
At the one end of the hall, the one where he was, were
judges, with abstracted air, in threadbare robes, who were
gnawing their nails or closing their eyelids; at the other end,
a ragged crowd; lawyers in all sorts of attitudes; soldiers with
hard but honest faces; ancient, spotted woodwork, a dirty
ceiling, tables covered with serge that was yellow rather than
green; doors blackened by handmarks; tap-room lamps which
emitted more smoke than light, suspended from nails in the
wainscot; on the tables candles in brass candlesticks; darkness,
ugliness, sadness; and from all this there was disengaged
an austere and august impression, for one there felt that
grand human thing which is called the law, and that grand
divine thing which is called justice.
No one in all that throng paid any attention to him; all
glances were directed towards a single point, a wooden bench
placed against a small door, in the stretch of wall on the President's
left; on this bench, illuminated by several candles, sat
a man between two gendarmes.
This man was the man.
He did not seek him; he saw him; his eyes went thither
naturally, as though they had known beforehand where that
figure was.
He thought he was looking at himself, grown old; not absolutely
the same in face, of course, but exactly similar in attitude
and aspect, with his bristling hair, with that wild and
uneasy eye, with that blouse, just as it was on the day when he
entered D., full of hatred, concealing his soul in that hideous
mass of frightful thoughts which he had spent nineteen years
in collecting on the floor of the prison.
He said to himself with a shudder, "Good God! shall I
become like that again?"
This creature seemed to be at least sixty; there was something
indescribably coarse, stupid, and frightened about him.
At the sound made by the opening door, people had drawn
aside to make way for him; the President had turned his
head, and, understanding that the personage who had just
entered was the mayor of M. sur M., he had bowed to him;
the attorney-general, who had seen M. Madeleine at M. sur M.,
whither the duties of his office had called him more than once,
recognized him and saluted him also: he had hardly perceived
it; he was the victim of a sort of hallucination; he was
watching.
Judges, clerks, gendarmes, a throng of cruelly curious heads,
all these he had already beheld once, in days gone by, twenty-seven
years before; he had encountered those fatal things once
more; there they were; they moved; they existed; it was no
longer an effort of his memory, a mirage of his thought; they
were real gendarmes and real judges, a real crowd, and real
men of flesh and blood: it was all over; he beheld the monstrous
aspects of his past reappear and live once more around
him, with all that there is formidable in reality.
All this was yawning before him.
He was horrified by it; he shut his eyes, and exclaimed in
the deepest recesses of his soul, "Never!"
And by a tragic play of destiny which made all his ideas
tremble, and rendered him nearly mad, it was another self of
his that was there! all called that man who was being tried
Jean Valjean.
Under his very eyes, unheard-of vision, he had a sort of representation
of the most horrible moment of his life, enacted by
his spectre.
Everything was there; the apparatus was the same, the hour
of the night, the faces of the judges, of soldiers, and of spectators;
all were the same, only above the President's head there
hung a crucifix, something which the courts had lacked at the
time of his condemnation: God had been absent when he had
been judged.
There was a chair behind him; he dropped into it, terrified
at the thought that he might be seen; when he was seated, he
took advantage of a pile of cardboard boxes, which stood on
the judge's desk, to conceal his face from the whole room; he
could now see without being seen; he had fully regained consciousness
of the reality of things; gradually he recovered; he
attained that phase of composure where it is possible to listen.
M. Bamatabois was one of the jurors.
He looked for Javert, but did not see him; the seat of the
witnesses was hidden from him by the clerk's table, and then,
as we have just said, the hall was sparely lighted.
At the moment of this entrance, the defendant's lawyer had
just finished his plea.
The attention of all was excited to the highest pitch; the
affair had lasted for three hours: for three hours that crowd
had been watching a strange man, a miserable specimen of
humanity, either profoundly stupid or profoundly subtle, gradually
bending beneath the weight of a terrible likeness. This
man, as the reader already knows, was a vagabond who had
been found in a field carrying a branch laden with ripe apples,
broken in the orchard of a neighbor, called the Pierron
orchard. Who was this man? an examination had been made;
witnesses had been heard, and they were unanimous; light had
abounded throughout the entire debate; the accusation said:
"We have in our grasp not only a marauder, a stealer of fruit;
we have here, in our hands, a bandit, an old offender who has
broken his ban, an ex-convict, a miscreant of the most dangerous
description, a malefactor named Jean Valjean, whom
justice has long been in search of, and who, eight years ago,
on emerging from the galleys at Toulon, committed a highway
robbery, accompanied by violence, on the person of a child, a
Savoyard named Little Gervais; a crime provided for by
article 383 of the Penal Code, the right to try him for which
we reserve hereafter, when his identity shall have been judicially
established. He has just committed a fresh theft; it is a
case of a second offence; condemn him for the fresh deed; later
on he will be judged for the old crime." In the face of this
accusation, in the face of the unanimity of the witnesses, the
accused appeared to be astonished more than anything else;
he made signs and gestures which were meant to convey No,
or else he stared at the ceiling: he spoke with difficulty, replied
with embarrassment, but his whole person, from head to foot,
was a denial; he was an idiot in the presence of all these minds
ranged in order of battle around him, and like a stranger in
the midst of this society which was seizing fast upon him;
nevertheless, it was a question of the most menacing future
for him; the likeness increased every moment, and the entire
crowd surveyed, with more anxiety than he did himself, that
sentence freighted with calamity, which descended ever closer
over his head; there was even a glimpse of a possibility
afforded; besides the galleys, a possible death penalty, in case
his identity were established, and the affair of Little Gervais
were to end thereafter in condemnation. Who was this man?
what was the nature of his apathy? was it imbecility or craft?
Did he understand too well, or did he not understand at all?
these were questions which divided the crowd, and seemed to
divide the jury; there was something both terrible and puzzling
in this case: the drama was not only melancholy; it was
also obscure.
The counsel for the defence had spoken tolerably well, in
that provincial tongue which has long constituted the eloquence
of the bar, and which was formerly employed by all
advocates, at Paris as well as at Romorantin or at Montbrison,
and which to-day, having become classic, is no longer spoken
except by the official orators of magistracy, to whom it is suited
on account of its grave sonorousness and its majestic stride;
a tongue in which a husband is called a consort, and a woman
a spouse; Paris, the centre of art and civilization; the
king,
the monarch; Monseigneur the Bishop, a sainted pontiff; the
district-attorney, the eloquent interpreter of public prosecution;
the arguments, the accents which we have just listened
to; the age of Louis XIV., the grand age; a theatre, the
temple
of Melpomene; the reigning family, the august blood of our
kings; a concert, a musical solemnity; the General Commandant
of the province, the illustrious warrior, who, etc.; the
pupils in the seminary, these tender levities; errors imputed
to newspapers, the imposture which distills its venom through
the columns of those organs; etc. The lawyer had, accordingly,
begun with an explanation as to the theft of the apples,
— an awkward matter couched in fine style; but Benigne Bossuet
himself was obliged to allude to a chicken in the midst
of a funeral oration, and he extricated himself from the situation
in stately fashion. The lawyer established the fact that
the theft of the apples had not been circumstantially proved.
His client, whom he, in his character of counsel, persisted in
calling Champmathieu, had not been seen scaling that wall
nor breaking that branch by any one. He had been taken with
that branch (which the lawyer preferred to call a bough) in
his possession; but he said that he had found it broken off
and lying on the ground, and had picked it up. Where was
there any proof to the contrary? No doubt that branch had
been broken off and concealed after the scaling of the wall,
then thrown away by the alarmed marauder; there was no
doubt that there had been a thief in the case. But what proof
was there that that thief had been Champmathieu? One thing
only. His character as an ex-convict. The lawyer did not
deny that that character appeared to be, unhappily, well attested;
the accused had resided at Faverolles; the accused had
exercised the calling of a tree-pruner there; the name of
Champmathieu might well have had its origin in Jean
Mathieu; all that was true, — in short, four witnesses recognize
Champmathieu, positively and without hesitation, as that convict,
Jean Valjean; to these signs, to this testimony, the
counsel could oppose nothing but the denial of his client, the
denial of an interested party; but supposing that he was the
convict Jean Valjean, did that prove that he was the thief of
the apples? that was a presumption at the most, not a proof.
The prisoner, it was true, and his counsel, "in good faith,"
was obliged to admit it, had adopted "a bad system of defence."
He obstinately denied everything, the theft and his
character of convict. An admission upon this last point would
certainly have been better, and would have won for him the
indulgence of his judges; the counsel had advised him to do
this; but the accused had obstinately refused, thinking, no
doubt, that he would save everything by admitting nothing.
It was an error; but ought not the paucity of this intelligence
to be taken into consideration? This man was visibly stupid.
Long-continued wretchedness in the galleys, long misery outside
the galleys, had brutalized him, etc. He defended himself
badly; was that a reason for condemning him? As for the
affair with Little Gervais, the counsel need not discuss it; it
did not enter into the case. The lawyer wound up by beseeching
the jury and the court, if the identity of Jean Valjean
appeared to them to be evident, to apply to him the police
penalties which are provided for a criminal who has broken his
ban, and not the frightful chastisement which descends upon
the convict guilty of a second offence.
The district-attorney answered the counsel for the defence.
He was violent and florid, as district-attorneys usually are.
He congratulated the counsel for the defence on his "loyalty,"
and skilfully took advantage of this loyalty. He reached
the accused through all the concessions made by his lawyer.
The advocate had seemed to admit that the prisoner was Jean
Valjean. He took note of this. So this man was Jean Valjean.
This point had been conceded to the accusation and
could no longer be disputed. Here, by means of a clever autonomasia
which went back to the sources and causes of crime,
the district-attorney thundered against the immorality of the
romantic school, then dawning under the name of the Satanic
school, which had been bestowed upon it by the critics of the
Quotidienne and the Oriflamme; he attributed, not without
some probability, to the influence of this perverse literature
the crime of Champmathieu, or rather, to speak more correctly,
of Jean Valjean. Having exhausted these considerations,
he passed on to Jean Valjean himself. Who was this
Jean Valjean? Description of Jean Valjean: a monster
spewed forth, etc. The model for this sort of description is
contained in the tale of Theramene, which is not useful to
tragedy, but which every day renders great services to judicial
eloquence. The audience and the jury "shuddered." The
description finished, the district-attorney resumed with an
oratorical turn calculated to raise the enthusiasm of the journal
of the prefecture to the highest pitch on the following day:
And it is such a man, etc., etc., etc., vagabond, beggar, without
means of existence, etc., etc., inured by his past life to culpable
deeds, and but little reformed by his sojourn in the galleys,
as was proved by the crime committed against Little Gervais,
etc., etc.; it is such a man, caught upon the highway in the
very act of theft, a few paces from a wall that had been scaled,
still holding in his hand the object stolen, who denies the
crime, the theft, the climbing the wall; denies everything;
denies even his own identity! In addition to a hundred other
proofs, to which we will not recur, four witnesses recognize
him — Javert, the upright inspector of police; Javert, and
three of his former companions in infamy, the convicts Brevet,
Chenildieu, and Cochepaille. What does he offer in opposition
to this overwhelming unanimity? His denial. What obduracy!
You will do justice, gentlemen of the jury, etc., etc.
While the district-attorney was speaking, the accused listened
to him open-mouthed, with a sort of amazement in which some
admiration was assuredly blended. He was evidently surprised
that a man could talk like that. From time to time, at
those "energetic" moments of the prosecutor's speech, when
eloquence which cannot contain itself overflows in a flood of
withering epithets and envelops the accused like a storm, he
moved his head slowly from right to left and from left to right
in the sort of mute and melancholy protest with which he had
contented himself since the beginning of the argument. Two
or three times the spectators who were nearest to him heard
him say in a low voice, "That is what comes of not having
asked M. Baloup." The district-attorney directed the attention
of the jury to this stupid attitude, evidently deliberate,
which denoted not imbecility, but craft, skill, a habit of deceiving
justice, and which set forth in all its nakedness the
"profound perversity" of this man. He ended by making his
reserves on the affair of Little Gervais and demanding a severe
sentence.
At that time, as the reader will remember, it was penal
servitude for life.
The counsel for the defence rose, began by complimenting
Monsieur l'Avocat-General on his "admirable speech," then
replied as best he could; but he weakened; the ground was
evidently slipping away from under his feet.