1.F.2.6. JEAN VALJEAN
TOWARDS the middle of the night Jean Valjean woke.
Jean Valjean came from a poor peasant family of Brie. He
had not learned to read in his childhood. When he reached
man's estate, be became a tree-pruner at Faverolles. His
mother was named Jeanne Mathieu; his father was called
Jean Valjean or Vlajean, probably a sobriquet, and a contraction
of
viola Jean, "here's Jean."
Jean Valjean was of that thoughtful but not gloomy disposition
which constitutes the peculiarity of affectionate natures.
On the whole, however, there was something decidedly sluggish
and insignificant about Jean Valjean in appearance, at
least. He had lost his father and mother at a very early age.
His mother had died of a milk fever, which had not been
properly attended to. His father, a tree-pruner, like himself,
had been killed by a fall from a tree. All that remained to
Jean Valjean was a sister older than himself, — a widow with
seven children, boys and girls. This sister had brought up
Jean Valjean, and so long as she had a husband she lodged
and fed her young brother.
The husband died. The eldest of the seven children was
eight years old. The youngest, one.
Jean Valjean had just attained his twenty-fifth year. He
took the father's place, and, in his turn, supported the sister
who had brought him up. This was done simply as a duty and
even a little churlishly on the part of Jean Valjean. Thus his
youth had been spent in rude and ill-paid toil. He had never
known a "kind woman friend" in his native parts. He had
not had the time to fall in love.
He returned at night weary, and ate his broth without uttering
a word. His sister, mother Jeanne, often took the best
part of his repast from his bowl while he was eating, — a bit of
meat, a slice of bacon, the heart of the cabbage, — to give to
one of her children. As he went on eating, with his head bent
over the table and almost into his soup, his long hair falling
about his bowl and concealing his eyes, he had the air of perceiving
nothing and allowing it. There was at Faverolles, not
far from the Valjean thatched cottage, on the other side of
the lane, a farmer's wife named Marie-Claude; the Valjean
children, habitually famished, sometimes went to borrow from
Marie-Claude a pint of milk, in their mother's name, which
they drank behind a hedge or in some alley corner, snatching
the jug from each other so hastily that the little girls spilled it
on their aprons and down their necks. If their mother had
known of this marauding, she would have punished the delinquents
severely. Jean Valjean gruffly and grumblingly paid
Marie-Claude for the pint of milk behind their mother's back,
and the children were not punished.
In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he
hired out as a hay-maker, as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm,
as a drudge. He did whatever he could. His sister worked
also but what could she do with seven little children? It was
a sad group enveloped in misery, which was being gradually
annihilated. A very hard winter came. Jean had no work.
The family had no bread. No bread literally. Seven
children!
One Sunday evening, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the
Church Square at Faverolles, was preparing to go to bed, when
he heard a violent blow on the grated front of his shop. He
arrived in time to see an arm passed through a hole made by
a blow from a fist, through the grating and the glass. The
arm seized a loaf of bread and carried it off. Isabeau ran out
in haste; the robber fled at the full speed of his legs. Isabeau
ran after him and stopped him. The thief had flung away the
loaf, but his arm was still bleeding. It was Jean Valjean.
This took place in 1795. Jean Valjean was taken before
the tribunals of the time for theft and breaking and entering
an inhabited house at night. He had a gun which he used
better than any one else in the world, he was a bit of a
poacher, and this injured his case. There exists a legitimate
prejudice against poachers. The poacher, like the smuggler,
smacks too strongly of the brigand. Nevertheless, we will
remark cursorily, there is still an abyss between these races of
men and the hideous assassin of the towns. The poacher lives
in the forest, the smuggler lives in the mountains or on the
sea. The cities make ferocious men because they make corrupt
men. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men;
they develop the fierce side, but often without destroying the
humane side.
Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty. The terms of the
Code were explicit. There occur formidable hours in our
civilization; there are moments when the penal laws decree a
shipwreck. What an ominous minute is that in which society
draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonment of
a sentient being! Jean Valjean was condemned to five years
in the galleys.
On the 22d of April, 1796, the victory of Montenotte, won
by the general-in-chief of the army of Italy, whom the message
of the Directory to the Five Hundred, of the 2d of Floreal,
year IV., calls Buona-Parte, was announced in Paris; on
that same day a great gang of galley-slaves was put in chains
at Bicetre. Jean Valjean formed a part of that gang. An
old turnkey of the prison, who is now nearly eighty years old,
still recalls perfectly that unfortunate wretch who was chained
to the end of the fourth line, in the north angle of the courtyard.
He was seated on the ground like the others. He did
not seem to comprehend his position, except that it was horrible.
It is probable that he, also, was disentangling from
amid the vague ideas of a poor man, ignorant of everything,
something excessive. While the bolt of his iron collar was
being riveted behind his head with heavy blows from the
hammer, he wept, his tears stifled him, they impeded his
speech; he only managed to say from time to time, "I was a
tree-pruner at Faverolles." Then still sobbing, he raised his
right hand and lowered it gradually seven times, as though he
were touching in succession seven heads of unequal heights,
and from this gesture it was divined that the thing which he
had done, whatever it was, he had done for the sake of clothing
and nourishing seven little children.
He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of
twenty-seven days, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At
Toulon he was clothed in the red cassock. All that had constituted
his life, even to his name, was effaced; he was no longer
even Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601. What became of
his sister? What became of the seven children? Who
troubled himself about that? What becomes of the handful
of leaves from the young tree which is sawed off at the root?
It is always the same story. These poor living beings, these
creatures of God, henceforth without support, without guide,
without refuge, wandered away at random, — who even knows?
— each in his own direction perhaps, and little by little buried
themselves in that cold mist which engulfs solitary destinies;
gloomy shades, into which disappear in succession so many
unlucky heads, in the sombre march of the human race. They
quitted the country. The clock-tower of what had been their
village forgot them; the boundary line of what had been their
field forgot them; after a few years' residence in the galleys,
Jean Valjean himself forgot them. In that heart, where there
had been a wound, there was a scar. That is all. Only once,
during all the time which he spent at Toulon, did he hear his
sister mentioned. This happened, I think, towards the end of
the fourth year of his captivity. I know not through what
channels the news reached him. Some one who had known
them in their own country had seen his sister. She was in
Paris. She lived in a poor street Rear Saint-Sulpice, in the
Rue du Gindre. She had with her only one child, a little boy,
the youngest. Where were the other six ? Perhaps she did
not know herself. Every morning she went to a printing
office, No. 3 Rue du Sabot, where she was a folder and stitcher.
She was obliged to be there at six o'clock in the morning —
long before daylight in winter. In the same building with
the printing office there was a school, and to this school she
took her little boy, who was seven years old. But as she
entered the printing office at six, and the school only opened
at seven, the child had to wait in the courtyard, for the school
to open, for an hour — one hour of a winter night in the open
air! They would not allow the child to come into the printing
office, because he was in the way, they said. When the
workmen passed in the morning, they beheld this poor little
being seated on the pavement, overcome with drowsiness, and
often fast asleep in the shadow, crouched down and doubled
up over his basket. When it rained, an old woman, the
portress, took pity on him; she took him into her den, where
there was a pallet, a spinning-wheel, and two wooden chairs,
and the little one slumbered in a corner, pressing himself close
to the cat that he might suffer less from cold. At seven
o'clock the school opened, and he entered. That is what was
told to Jean Valjean.
They talked to him about it for one day; it was a moment,
a flash, as though a window had suddenly been opened upon
the destiny of those things whom he had loved; then all closed
again. He heard nothing more forever. Nothing from them
ever reached him again; he never beheld them; he never met
them again; and in the continuation of this mournful history
they will not be met with any more.
Towards the end of this fourth year Jean Valjean's turn to
escape arrived. His comrades assisted him, as is the custom
in that sad place. He escaped. He wandered for two days in
the fields at liberty, if being at liberty is to be hunted, to turn
the head every instant, to quake at the slightest noise, to be
afraid of everything, — of a smoking roof, of a passing man, of
a barking dog, of a galloping horse, of a striking clock, of the
day because one can see, of the night because one cannot see,
of the highway, of the path, of a bush, of sleep. On the evening
of the second day he was captured. He had neither eaten
nor slept for thirty-six hours. The maritime tribunal condemned
him, for this crime, to a prolongation of his term for
three years, which made eight years. In the sixth year his
turn to escape occurred again; he availed himself of it, but
could not accomplish his flight fully. He was missing at roll-call.
The cannon were fired, and at night the patrol found
him hidden under the keel of a vessel in process of construction;
he resisted the galley guards who seized him. Escape
and rebellion. This case, provided for by a special code, was
punished by an addition of five years, two of them in the
double chain. Thirteen years. In the tenth year his turn
came round again; he again profited by it; he succeeded no
better. Three years for this fresh attempt. Sixteen years.
Finally, I think it was during his thirteenth year, he made
a last attempt, and only succeeded in getting retaken at the
end of four hours of absence. Three years for those four
hours. Nineteen years. In October, 1815, he was released;
he had entered there in 1796, for having broken a pane of
glass and taken a loaf of bread.
Room for a brief parenthesis. This is the second time, during
his studies on the penal question and damnation by law,
that the author of this book has come across the theft of a loaf
of bread as the point of departure for the disaster of a
destiny. Claude Gaux had stolen a loaf; Jean Valjean had
stolen a loaf. English statistics prove the fact that four
thefts out of five in London have hunger for their immediate
cause.
Jean Valjean had entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering;
he emerged impassive. He had entered in despair; he
emerged gloomy.
What had taken place in that soul?