BOOK SECOND.— THE SHIP ORION
1.C.2.1. NUMBER 24,601 BECOMES NUMBER 9,430
JEAN VALJEAN had been recaptured.
The reader will be grateful to us if we pass rapidly over the
sad details. We will confine ourselves to transcribing two
paragraphs published by the journals of that day, a few
months after the surprising events which had taken place at
M. sur M.
These articles are rather summary. It must be remembered,
that at that epoch the Gazette des Tribunaux was not
yet in existence.
We borrow the first from the Drapeau Blanc. It bears
the date of July 25, 1823.
An arrondissement of the Pas de Calais has just been the theatre
of an event quite out of the ordinary course. A man, who was a
stranger in the Department, and who bore the name of M. Madeleine,
had, thanks to the new methods, resuscitated some years ago an
ancient local industry, the manufacture of jet and of black glass
trinkets. He had made his fortune in the business, and that of the
arrondissement as well, we will admit. He had been appointed mayor,
in recognition of his services. The police discovered that M. Madeleine
was no other than an ex-convict who had broken his ban, condemned
in 1796 for theft, and named Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean
has been recommitted to prison. It appears that previous to his
arrest he had succeeded in withdrawing from the hands of M. Laffitte,
a sum of over half a million which he had lodged there, and
which he had, moreover, and by perfectly legitimate means, acquired
in his business. No one has been able to discover where Jean Valjean
has concealed this money since his return to prison at Toulon.
The second article, which enters a little more into detail, is
an extract from the Journal de Paris, of the same date.
A former convict, who had been liberated, named Jean Valjean,
has just appeared before the Court of Assizes of the Var, under
circumstances calculated to attract attention. This wretch had succeeded
in escaping the vigilance of the police, he had changed his
name, and had succeeded in getting himself appointed mayor of one
of our small northern towns; in this town he had established a
considerable commerce. He has at last been unmasked and arrested,
thanks to the indefatigable zeal of the public prosecutor. He had
for his concubine a woman of the town, who died of a shock at the
moment of his arrest. This scoundrel, who is endowed with Herculean
strength, found means to escape; but three or four days after
his flight the police laid their hands on him once more, in Paris
itself, at the very moment when he was entering one of those little
vehicles which run between the capital and the village of Montfermeil
(Seine-et-Oise). He is said to have profited by this interval
of three or four days of liberty, to withdraw a considerable sum deposited
by him with one of our leading bankers. This sum has been
estimated at six or seven hundred thousand francs. If the indictment
is to be trusted, he has hidden it in some place known to himself
alone, and it has not been possible to lay hands on it. However
that may be, the said Jean Valjean has just been brought
before the Assizes of the Department of the Var as accused of highway
robbery accompanied with violence, about eight years ago, on
the person of one of those honest children who, as the patriarch of
Ferney has said, in immortal verse,
". . . Arrive from Savoy every year,
And who, with gentle hands, do clear
Those long canals choked up with soot."
This bandit refused to defend himself. It was proved by the skilful
and eloquent representative of the public prosecutor, that the
theft was committed in complicity with others, and that Jean Valjean
was a member of a band of robbers in the south. Jean Valjean
was pronounced guilty and was condemned to the death penalty
in consequence. This criminal refused to lodge an appeal. The
king, in his inexhaustible clemency, has deigned to commute his
penalty to that of penal servitude for life. Jean Valjean was immediately
taken to the prison at Toulon.
The reader has not forgotten that Jean Valjean had religious
habits at M. sur M. Some papers, among others the
Constitutional, presented this commutation as a triumph of
the priestly party.
Jean Valjean changed his number in the galleys. He was
called 9,430.
However, and we will mention it at once in order that we
may not be obliged to recur to the subject, the prosperity of
M. sur M. vanished with M. Madeleine; all that he had foreseen
during his night of fever and hesitation was realized;
lacking him, there actually was
a soul lacking. After this
fall, there took place at M. sur M. that egotistical division of
great existences which have fallen, that fatal dismemberment
of flourishing things which is accomplished every day,
obscurely, in the human community, and which history has
noted only once, because it occurred after the death of Alexander.
Lieutenants are crowned kings; superintendents improvise
manufacturers out of themselves. Envious rivalries
arose. M. Madeleine's vast workshops were shut; his buildings
fell to ruin, his workmen were scattered. Some of them
quitted the country, others abandoned the trade. Thenceforth,
everything was done on a small scale, instead of on a
grand scale; for lucre instead of the general good. There
was no longer a centre; everywhere there was competition
and animosity. M. Madeleine had reigned over all and
directed all. No sooner had he fallen, than each pulled things
to himself; the spirit of combat succeeded to the spirit of
organization, bitterness to cordiality, hatred of one another
to the benevolence of the founder towards all; the threads
which M. Madeleine had set were tangled and broken, the
methods were adulterated, the products were debased, confidence
was killed; the market diminished, for lack of orders;
salaries were reduced, the workshops stood still, bankruptcy
arrived. And then there was nothing more for the poor. All
had vanished.
The state itself perceived that some one had been crushed
somewhere. Less than four years after the judgment of the
Court of Assizes establishing the identity of Jean Valjean and
M. Madeleine, for the benefit of the galleys, the cost of collecting
taxes had doubled in the arrondissement of M. sur M.;
and M. de Villele called attention to the fact in the rostrum,
in the month of February, 1827.
1.C.2.2. IN WHICH THE READER WILL PERUSE TWO VERSES, WHICH ARE
OF THE DEVIL'S COMPOSITION, POSSIBLY
BEFORE proceeding further, it will be to the purpose to
narrate in some detail, a singular occurrence which took place
at about the same epoch, in Montfermeil, and which is not
lacking in coincidence with certain conjectures of the
indictment.
There exists in the region of Montfermeil a very ancient
superstition, which is all the more curious and all the more
precious, because a popular superstition in the vicinity of
Paris is like an aloe in Siberia. We are among those who
respect everything which is in the nature of a rare plant.
Here, then, is the superstition of Montfermeil: it is thought
that the devil, from time immemorial, has selected the forest
as a hiding-place for his treasures. Goodwives affirm that
it is no rarity to encounter at nightfall, in secluded nooks
of the forest, a black man with the air of a carter or a wood-chopper,
wearing wooden shoes, clad in trousers and a blouse
of linen, and recognizable by the fact, that, instead of a cap
or hat, he has two immense horns on his head. This ought,
in fact, to render him recognizable. This man is habitually
engaged in digging a hole. There are three ways of profiting
by such an encounter. The first is to approach the man and
speak to him. Then it is seen that the man is simply a
peasant, that he appears black because it is nightfall;
that he is not digging any hole whatever, but is cutting
grass for his cows, and that what had been taken for
horns is nothing but a dung-fork which he is carrying on his
back, and whose teeth, thanks to the perspective of evening,
seemed to spring from his head. The man returns home and
dies within the week. The second way is to watch him, to wait
until he has dug his hole, until he has filled it and has gone
away; then to run with great speed to the trench, to open it
once more and to seize the "treasure" which the black man
has necessarily placed there. In this case one dies within the
month. Finally, the last method is not to speak to the black
man, not to look at him, and to flee at the best speed of one's
legs. One then dies within the year.
As all three methods are attended with their special inconveniences,
the second, which at all events, presents some
advantages, among others that of possessing a treasure, if only
for a month, is the one most generally adopted. So bold men,
who are tempted by every chance, have quite frequently, as we
are assured, opened the holes excavated by the black man,
and tried to rob the devil. The success of the operation
appears to be but moderate. At least, if the tradition is to be
believed, and in particular the two enigmatical lines in barbarous
Latin, which an evil Norman monk, a bit of a sorcerer,
named Tryphon has left on this subject. This Tryphon is
buried at the Abbey of Saint-Georges de Bocherville, near
Rouen, and toads spawn on his grave.
Accordingly, enormous efforts are made. Such trenches are
ordinarily extremely deep; a man sweats, digs, toils all night
— for it must be done at night; he wets his shirt, burns out
his candle, breaks his mattock, and when he arrives at the
bottom of the hole, when he lays his hand on the "treasure,"
what does he find? What is the devil's treasure? A sou,
sometimes a crown-piece, a stone, a skeleton, a bleeding body,
sometimes a spectre folded in four like a sheet of paper in a
portfolio, sometimes nothing. This is what Tryphon's verses
seem to announce to the indiscreet and curious:—
"Fodit, et in fossa thesauros condit opaca,
As, nummas, lapides, cadaver, simulacra, nihilque."
It seems that in our day there is sometimes found a powder-horn
with bullets, sometimes an old pack of cards greasy and
worn, which has evidently served the devil. Tryphon does not
record these two finds, since Tryphon lived in the twelfth
century, and since the devil does not appear to have had the
wit to invent powder before Roger Bacon's time, and cards
before the time of Charles VI.
Moreover, if one plays at cards, one is sure to lose all that
one possesses! and as for the powder in the horn, it possesses
the property of making your gun burst in your face.
Now, a very short time after the epoch when it seemed to
the prosecuting attorney that the liberated convict Jean Valjean
during his flight of several days had been prowling
around Montfermeil, it was remarked in that village that a
certain old road-laborer, named Boulatruelle, had "peculiar
ways" in the forest. People thereabouts thought they knew
that this Boulatruelle had been in the galleys. He was subjected
to certain police supervision, and, as he could find work
nowhere, the administration employed him at reduced rates
as a road-mender on the cross-road from Gagny to Lagny.
This Boulatruelle was a man who was viewed with disfavor
by the inhabitants of the district as too respectful, too humble,
too prompt in removing his cap to every one, and trembling
and smiling in the presence of the gendarmes,— probably
affiliated to robber bands, they said; suspected of lying in
ambush at verge of copses at nightfall. The only thing in
his favor was that he was a drunkard.
This is what people thought they had noticed:—
Of late, Boulatruelle had taken to quitting his task of
stone-breaking and care of the road at a very early hour, and to
betaking himself to the forest with his pickaxe. He was
encountered towards evening in the most deserted clearings,
in the wildest thickets; and he had the appearance of being in
search of something, and sometimes he was digging holes.
The goodwives who passed took him at first for Beelzebub;
then they recognized Boulatruelle, and were not in the least
reassured thereby. These encounters seemed to cause Boulatruelle
a lively displeasure. It was evident that he sought to
hide, and that there was some mystery in what he was
doing.
It was said in the village: "It is clear that the devil has
appeared. Boulatruelle has seen him, and is on the search.
In sooth, he is cunning enough to pocket Lucifer's hoard."
The Voltairians added, "Will Boulatruelle catch the devil,
or will the devil catch Boulatruelle?" The old women made
a great many signs of the cross.
In the meantime, Boulatruelle's manoeuvres in the forest
ceased; and he resumed his regular occupation of road-mending;
and people gossiped of something else.
Some persons, however, were still curious, surmising that in
all this there was probably no fabulous treasure of the legends,
but some fine windfall of a more serious and palpable sort
than the devil's bank-bills, and that the road-mender had half
discovered the secret. The most "puzzled" were the schoolmaster
and Thenardier, the proprietor of the tavern, who was
everybody's friend, and had not disdained to ally himself with
Boulatruelle.
"He has been in the galleys," said Thenardier. "Eh!
Good God! no one knows who has been there or will be there."
One evening the schoolmaster affirmed that in former times
the law would have instituted an inquiry as to what Boulatruelle
did in the forest, and that the latter would have been
forced to speak, and that he would have been put to the torture
in case of need, and that Boulatruelle would not have resisted
the water test, for example. "Let us put him to the wine
test," said Thenardier.
They made an effort, and got the old road-mender to drinking.
Boulatruelle drank an enormous amount, but said very
little. He combined with admirable art, and in masterly
proportions, the thirst of a gormandizer with the discretion
of a judge. Nevertheless, by dint of returning to the charge
and of comparing and putting together the few obscure words
which he did allow to escape him, this is what Thenardier
and the schoolmaster imagined that they had made out:—
One morning, when Boulatruelle was on his way to his
work, at daybreak, he had been surprised to see, at a nook
of the forest in the underbrush, a shovel and a pickaxe,
concealed, as one might say.
However, he might have supposed that they were probably
the shovel and pick of Father Six-Fours, the water-carrier, and
would have thought no more about it. But, on the evening of
that day, he saw, without being seen himself, as he was hidden
by a large tree, "a person who did not belong in those parts,
and whom he, Boulatruelle, knew well," directing his steps
towards the densest part of the wood. Translation by Thenardier:
A comrade of the galleys. Boulatruelle obstinately refused
to reveal his name. This person carried a package—
something square, like a large box or a small trunk. Surprise
on the part of Boulatruelle. However, it was only after the
expiration of seven or eight minutes that the idea of following
that "person" had occurred to him. But it was too late; the
person was already in the thicket, night had descended, and
Boulatruelle had not been able to catch up with him. Then
he had adopted the course of watching for him at the edge of
the woods. "It was moonlight." Two or three hours later,
Boulatruelle had seen this person emerge from the brushwood,
carrying no longer the coffer, but a shovel and pick. Boulatruelle
had allowed the person to pass, and had not dreamed of
accosting him, because he said to himself that the other man
was three times as strong as he was, and armed with a pickaxe,
and that he would probably knock him over the head on recognizing
him, and on perceiving that he was recognized.
Touching effusion of two old comrades on meeting again.
But the shovel and pick had served as a ray of light to Boulatruelle;
he had hastened to the thicket in the morning, and
had found neither shovel nor pick. From this he had drawn
the inference that this person, once in the forest, had dug a
hole with his pick, buried the coffer, and reclosed the hole with
his shovel. Now, the coffer was too small to contain a body;
therefore it contained money. Hence his researches. Boulatruelle
had explored, sounded, searched the entire forest and
the thicket, and had dug wherever the earth appeared to him
to have been recently turned up. In vain.
He had "ferreted out" nothing. No one in Montfermeil
thought any more about it. There were only a few brave gossips,
who said, "You may be certain that the mender on the
Gagny road did not take all that trouble for nothing; he was
sure that the devil had come."
1.C.2.3. THE ANKLE-CHAIN MUST HAVE UNDERGONE A CERTAIN
PREPARATORY
MANIPULATION TO BE THUS BROKEN WITH A
BLOW FROM A HAMMER
TOWARDS the end of October, in that same year, 1823, the
inhabitants of Toulon beheld the entry into their port, after
heavy weather, and for the purpose of repairing some damages,
of the ship Orion, which was employed later at Brest as a
school-ship, and which then formed a part of the Mediterranean
squadron.
This vessel, battered as it was,— for the sea had handled it
roughly,— produced a fine effect as it entered the roads. It
flew some colors which procured for it the regulation salute of
eleven guns, which it returned, shot for shot; total, twenty-two.
It has been calculated that what with salvos, royal and military
politenesses, courteous exchanges of uproar, signals of
etiquette, formalities of roadsteads and citadels, sunrises and
sunsets, saluted every day by all fortresses and all ships of
war, openings and closings of ports, etc., the civilized world,
discharged all over the earth, in the course of four and twenty
hours, one hundred and fifty thousand useless shots. At six
francs the shot, that comes to nine hundred thousand francs a
day, three hundred millions a year, which vanish in smoke.
This is a mere detail. All this time the poor were dying of
hunger.
The year 1823 was what the Restoration called "the epoch
of the Spanish war."
This war contained many events in one, and a quantity of
peculiarities. A grand family affair for the house of Bourbon;
the branch of France succoring and protecting the branch of
Madrid, that is to say, performing an act devolving on the
elder; an apparent return to our national traditions, complicated
by servitude and by subjection to the cabinets of the
North; M. le Duc d'Angouleme, surnamed by the liberal
sheets
the hero of Andujar, compressing in a triumphal attitude
that was somewhat contradicted by his peaceable air, the
ancient and very powerful terrorism of the Holy Office at variance
with the chimerical terrorism of the liberals; the
sansculottes
resuscitated, to the great terror of dowagers, under the
name of
descamisados; monarchy opposing an obstacle to
progress described as anarchy; the theories of '89 roughly
interrupted in the sap; a European halt, called to the French
idea, which was making the tour of the world; beside the son
of France as generalissimo, the Prince de Carignan, afterwards
Charles Albert, enrolling himself in that crusade of
kings against people as a volunteer, with grenadier epaulets
of red worsted; the soldiers of the Empire setting out on a fresh
campaign, but aged, saddened, after eight years of repose,
and under the white cockade; the tricolored standard waved
abroad by a heroic handful of Frenchmen, as the white standard
had been thirty years earlier at Coblentz; monks mingled
with our troops; the spirit of liberty and of novelty brought to
its senses by bayonets; principles slaughtered by cannonades;
France undoing by her arms that which she had done by her
mind; in addition to this, hostile leaders sold, soldiers hesitating,
cities besieged by millions; no military perils, and yet
possible explosions, as in every mine which is surprised and
invaded; but little bloodshed, little honor won, shame for
some, glory for no one. Such was this war, made by the
princes descended from Louis XIV., and conducted by generals
who had been under Napoleon. Its sad fate was to
recall neither the grand war nor grand politics.
Some feats of arms were serious; the taking of the Trocadero,
among others, was a fine military action; but after all,
we repeat, the trumpets of this war give back a cracked sound,
the whole effect was suspicious; history approves of France
for making a difficulty about accepting this false triumph. It
seemed evident that certain Spanish officers charged with
resistance yielded too easily; the idea of corruption was connected
with the victory; it appears as though generals and not
battles had been won, and the conquering soldier returned
humiliated. A debasing war, in short, in which the
Bank of
France could be read in the folds of the flag.
Soldiers of the war of 1808, on whom Saragossa had fallen
in formidable ruin, frowned in 1823 at the easy surrender of
citadels, and began to regret Palafox. It is the nature of
France to prefer to have Rostopchine rather than Ballesteros
in front of her.
From a still more serious point of view, and one which it is
also proper to insist upon here, this war, which wounded the
military spirit of France, enraged the democratic spirit. It
was an enterprise of inthralment. In that campaign, the
object of the French soldier, the son of democracy, was the
conquest of a yoke for others. A hideous contradiction.
France is made to arouse the soul of nations, not to stifle it.
All the revolutions of Europe since 1792 are the French Revolution:
liberty darts rays from France. That is a solar fact.
Blind is he who will not see! It was Bonaparte who said it.
The war of 1823, an outrage on the generous Spanish
nation, was then, at the same time, an outrage on the French
Revolution. It was France who committed this monstrous
violence; by foul means, for, with the exception of wars of liberation,
everything that armies do is by foul means. The
words passive obedience indicate this. An army is a strange
masterpiece of combination where force results from an enormous
sum of impotence. Thus is war, made by humanity
against humanity, despite humanity, explained.
As for the Bourbons, the war of 1823 was fatal to them.
They took it for a success. They did not perceive the danger
that lies in having an idea slain to order. They went astray,
in their innocence, to such a degree that they introduced the
immense enfeeblement of a crime into their establishment as
an element of strength. The spirit of the ambush entered into
their politics. 1830 had its germ in 1823. The Spanish campaign
became in their counsels an argument for force and for
adventures by right Divine. France, having re-established el
rey netto in Spain, might well have re-established the absolute
king at home. They fell into the alarming error of taking
the obedience of the soldier for the consent of the nation.
Such confidence is the ruin of thrones. It is not permitted
to fall asleep, either in the shadow of a machineel tree, nor in
the shadow of an army.
Let us return to the ship Orion.
During the operations of the army commanded by the prince
generalissimo, a squadron had been cruising in the Mediterranean.
We have just stated that the Orion belonged to this
fleet, and that accidents of the sea had brought it into port at
Toulon.
The presence of a vessel of war in a port has something
about it which attracts and engages a crowd. It is because it
is great, and the crowd loves what is great.
A ship of the line is one of the most magnificent combinations
of the genius of man with the powers of nature.
A ship of the line is composed, at the same time, of the
heaviest and the lightest of possible matter, for it deals at one
and the same time with three forms of substance,— solid,
liquid, and fluid,— and it must do battle with all three. It has
eleven claws of iron with which to seize the granite on the
bottom of the sea, and more wings and more antennae than
winged insects, to catch the wind in the clouds. Its breath
pours out through its hundred and twenty cannons as through
enormous trumpets, and replies proudly to the thunder. The
ocean seeks to lead it astray in the alarming sameness of its
billows, but the vessel has its soul, its compass, which counsels
it and always shows it the north. In the blackest nights, its
lanterns supply the place of the stars. Thus, against the wind,
it has its cordage and its canvas; against the water, wood;
against the rocks, its iron, brass, and lead; against the
shadows, its light; against immensity, a needle.
If one wishes to form an idea of all those gigantic proportions
which, taken as a whole, constitute the ship of the line,
one has only to enter one of the six-story covered construction
stocks, in the ports of Brest or Toulon. The vessels in process
of construction are under a bell-glass there, as it were. This
colossal beam is a yard; that great column of wood which
stretches out on the earth as far as the eye can reach is the
main-mast. Taking it from its root in the stocks to its tip
in the clouds, it is sixty fathoms long, and its diameter at its
base is three feet. The English main-mast rises to a height of
two hundred and seventeen feet above the water-line. The
navy of our fathers employed cables, ours employs chains. The
simple pile of chains on a ship of a hundred guns is four feet
high, twenty feet in breadth, and eight feet in depth. And
how much wood is required to make this ship? Three thousand
cubic metres. It is a floating forest.
And moreover, let this be borne in mind, it is only a question
here of the military vessel of forty years ago, of the simple
sailing-vessel; steam, then in its infancy, has since added new
miracles to that prodigy which is called a war vessel. At the
present time, for example, the mixed vessel with a screw is a
surprising machine, propelled by three thousand square metres
of canvas and by an engine of two thousand five hundred
horse-power.
Not to mention these new marvels, the ancient vessel of
Christopher Columbus and of De Ruyter is one of the masterpieces
of man. It is as inexhaustible in force as is the Infinite
in gales; it stores up the wind in its sails, it is precise in the
immense vagueness of the billows, it floats, and it reigns.
There comes an hour, nevertheless, when the gale breaks that
sixty-foot yard like a straw, when the wind bends that mast
four hundred feet tall, when that anchor, which weighs tens
of thousands, is twisted in the jaws of the waves like a fisherman's
hook in the jaws of a pike, when those monstrous cannons
utter plaintive and futile roars, which the hurricane bears
forth into the void and into night, when all that power and all
that majesty are engulfed in a power and majesty which are
superior.
Every time that immense force is displayed to culminate
in an immense feebleness it affords men food for thought,
Hence in the ports curious people abound around these marvellous
machines of war and of navigation, without being able
to explain perfectly to themselves why.
Every day, accordingly, from morning until night, the
quays, sluices, and the jetties of the port of Toulon were covered
with a multitude of idlers and loungers, as they say in
Paris, whose business consisted in staring at the Orion.
The Orion was a ship that had been ailing for a long time;
in the course of its previous cruises thick layers of barnacles
had collected on its keel to such a degree as to deprive it of
half its speed; it had gone into the dry dock the year before
this, in order to have the barnacles scraped off, then it had
put to sea again; but this cleaning had affected the bolts of the
keel: in the neighborhood of the Balearic Isles the sides had
been strained and had opened; and, as the plating in those
days was not of sheet iron, the vessel had sprung a leak. A
violent equinoctial gale had come up, which had first staved in
a grating and a porthole on the larboard side, and damaged
the foretop-gallant-shrouds; in consequence of these injuries,
the Orion had run back to Toulon.
It anchored near the Arsenal; it was fully equipped, and repairs
were begun. The hull had received no damage on the
starboard, but some of the planks had been unnailed here and
there, according to custom, to permit of air entering the hold.
One morning the crowd which was gazing at it witnessed an
accident.
The crew was busy bending the sails; the topman, who had
to take the upper corner of the main-top-sail on the starboard,
lost his balance; he was seen to waver; the multitude thronging
the Arsenal quay uttered a cry; the man's head overbalanced
his body; the man fell around the yard, with his hands
outstretched towards the abyss; on his way he seized the foot-rope,
first with one hand, then with the other, and remained
hanging from it: the sea lay below him at a dizzy depth; the
shock of his fall had imparted to the foot-rope a violent swinging
motion; the man swayed back and forth at the end of that
rope, like a stone in a sling.
It was incurring a frightful risk to go to his assistance; not
one of the sailors, all fishermen of the coast, recently levied for
the service, dared to attempt it. In the meantime, the unfortunate
topman was losing his strength; his anguish could not
be discerned on his face, but his exhaustion was visible in every
limb; his arms were contracted in horrible twitchings; every
effort which he made to re-ascend served but to augment the
oscillations of the foot-rope; he did not shout, for fear of exhausting
his strength. All were awaiting the minute when he
should release his hold on the rope, and, from instant to
instant, heads were turned aside that his fall might not be
seen. There are moments when a bit of rope, a pole, the
branch of a tree, is life itself, and it is a terrible thing to see
a living being detach himself from it and fall like a ripe fruit.
All at once a man was seen climbing into the rigging with
the agility of a tiger-cat; this man was dressed in red; he was
a convict; he wore a green cap; he was a life convict. On
arriving on a level with the top, a gust of wind carried away
his cap, and allowed a perfectly white head to be seen: he was
not a young man.
A convict employed on board with a detachment from the
galleys had, in fact, at the very first instant, hastened to the
officer of the watch, and, in the midst of the consternation and
the hesitation of the crew, while all the sailors were trembling
and drawing back, he had asked the officer's permission to risk
his life to save the topman; at an affirmative sign from the
officer he had broken the chain riveted to his ankle with one
blow of a hammer, then he had caught up a rope, and had
dashed into the rigging: no one noticed, at the instant, with
what ease that chain had been broken; it was only later on that
the incident was recalled.
In a twinkling he was on the yard; he paused for a few
seconds and appeared to be measuring it with his eye; these
seconds, during which the breeze swayed the topman at the
extremity of a thread, seemed centuries to those who were
looking on. At last, the convict raised his eyes to heaven and
advanced a step: the crowd drew a long breath. He was seen
to run out along the yard: on arriving at the point, he fastened
the rope which he had brought to it, and allowed the other end
to hang down, then he began to descend the rope, hand over
hand, and then,— and the anguish was indescribable,— instead
of one man suspended over the gulf, there were two.
One would have said it was a spider coming to seize a fly,
only here the spider brought life, not death. Ten thousand
glances were fastened on this group; not a cry, not a word;
the same tremor contracted every brow; all mouths held their
breath as though they feared to add the slightest puff to the
wind which was swaying the two unfortunate men.
In the meantime, the convict had succeeded in lowering himself
to a position near the sailor. It was high time; one minute
more, and the exhausted and despairing man would have allowed
himself to fall into the abyss. The convict had moored
him securely with the cord to which he clung with one hand,
while he was working with the other. At last, he was seen to
climb back on the yard, and to drag the sailor up after him;
he held him there a moment to allow him to recover his
strength, then he grasped him in his arms and carried him,
walking on the yard himself to the cap, and from there to the
main-top, where he left him in the hands of his comrades.
At that moment the crowd broke into applause: old
convict-sergeants among them wept, and women embraced each other
on the quay, and all voices were heard to cry with a sort of
tender rage, "Pardon for that man!"
He, in the meantime, had immediately begun to make his
descent to rejoin his detachment. In order to reach them the
more speedily, he dropped into the rigging, and ran along one
of the lower yards; all eyes were following him. At a certain
moment fear assailed them; whether it was that he was fatigued,
or that his head turned, they thought they saw him hesitate
and stagger. All at once the crowd uttered a loud shout:
the convict had fallen into the sea.
The fall was perilous. The frigate Algesiras was anchored
alongside the Orion, and the poor convict had fallen between
the two vessels: it was to be feared that he would slip under
one or the other of them. Four men flung themselves hastily
into a boat; the crowd cheered them on; anxiety again took
possession of all souls; the man had not risen to the surface;
he had disappeared in the sea without leaving a ripple, as
though he had fallen into a cask of oil: they sounded, they
dived. In vain. The search was continued until the evening:
they did not even find the body.
On the following day the Toulon newspaper printed these
lines:—
"Nov. 17, 1823. Yesterday, a convict belonging to the
detachment on board of the Orion, on his return from rendering
assistance to a sailor, fell into the sea and was drowned.
The body has not yet been found; it is supposed that it is entangled
among the piles of the Arsenal point: this man was
committed under the number 9,430, and his name was Jean
Valjean."