Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER IX—A PLACE WHERE CONVICTIONS ARE IN PROCESS OF FORMATION
2651 words | Chapter 138
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 Bénigne 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
Théramène, 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.
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