Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER VI—JEAN VALJEAN
2126 words | Chapter 95
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, he
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 _voilà_ 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 Floréal, year IV., calls
Buona-Parte, was announced in Paris; on that same day a great gang of
galley-slaves was put in chains at Bicêtre. 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 near 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?
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