Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER VII—THE INTERIOR OF DESPAIR
2934 words | Chapter 96
Let us try to say it.
It is necessary that society should look at these things, because it is
itself which creates them.
He was, as we have said, an ignorant man, but he was not a fool. The
light of nature was ignited in him. Unhappiness, which also possesses a
clearness of vision of its own, augmented the small amount of daylight
which existed in this mind. Beneath the cudgel, beneath the chain, in
the cell, in hardship, beneath the burning sun of the galleys, upon the
plank bed of the convict, he withdrew into his own consciousness and
meditated.
He constituted himself the tribunal.
He began by putting himself on trial.
He recognized the fact that he was not an innocent man unjustly
punished. He admitted that he had committed an extreme and blameworthy
act; that that loaf of bread would probably not have been refused to
him had he asked for it; that, in any case, it would have been better
to wait until he could get it through compassion or through work; that
it is not an unanswerable argument to say, “Can one wait when one is
hungry?” That, in the first place, it is very rare for any one to die
of hunger, literally; and next, that, fortunately or unfortunately, man
is so constituted that he can suffer long and much, both morally and
physically, without dying; that it is therefore necessary to have
patience; that that would even have been better for those poor little
children; that it had been an act of madness for him, a miserable,
unfortunate wretch, to take society at large violently by the collar,
and to imagine that one can escape from misery through theft; that that
is in any case a poor door through which to escape from misery through
which infamy enters; in short, that he was in the wrong.
Then he asked himself:—
Whether he had been the only one in fault in his fatal history. Whether
it was not a serious thing, that he, a laborer, out of work, that he,
an industrious man, should have lacked bread. And whether, the fault
once committed and confessed, the chastisement had not been ferocious
and disproportioned. Whether there had not been more abuse on the part
of the law, in respect to the penalty, than there had been on the part
of the culprit in respect to his fault. Whether there had not been an
excess of weights in one balance of the scale, in the one which
contains expiation. Whether the over-weight of the penalty was not
equivalent to the annihilation of the crime, and did not result in
reversing the situation, of replacing the fault of the delinquent by
the fault of the repression, of converting the guilty man into the
victim, and the debtor into the creditor, and of ranging the law
definitely on the side of the man who had violated it.
Whether this penalty, complicated by successive aggravations for
attempts at escape, had not ended in becoming a sort of outrage
perpetrated by the stronger upon the feebler, a crime of society
against the individual, a crime which was being committed afresh every
day, a crime which had lasted nineteen years.
He asked himself whether human society could have the right to force
its members to suffer equally in one case for its own unreasonable lack
of foresight, and in the other case for its pitiless foresight; and to
seize a poor man forever between a defect and an excess, a default of
work and an excess of punishment.
Whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely those
of its members who were the least well endowed in the division of goods
made by chance, and consequently the most deserving of consideration.
These questions put and answered, he judged society and condemned it.
He condemned it to his hatred.
He made it responsible for the fate which he was suffering, and he said
to himself that it might be that one day he should not hesitate to call
it to account. He declared to himself that there was no equilibrium
between the harm which he had caused and the harm which was being done
to him; he finally arrived at the conclusion that his punishment was
not, in truth, unjust, but that it most assuredly was iniquitous.
Anger may be both foolish and absurd; one can be irritated wrongfully;
one is exasperated only when there is some show of right on one’s side
at bottom. Jean Valjean felt himself exasperated.
And besides, human society had done him nothing but harm; he had never
seen anything of it save that angry face which it calls Justice, and
which it shows to those whom it strikes. Men had only touched him to
bruise him. Every contact with them had been a blow. Never, since his
infancy, since the days of his mother, of his sister, had he ever
encountered a friendly word and a kindly glance. From suffering to
suffering, he had gradually arrived at the conviction that life is a
war; and that in this war he was the conquered. He had no other weapon
than his hate. He resolved to whet it in the galleys and to bear it
away with him when he departed.
There was at Toulon a school for the convicts, kept by the Ignorantin
friars, where the most necessary branches were taught to those of the
unfortunate men who had a mind for them. He was of the number who had a
mind. He went to school at the age of forty, and learned to read, to
write, to cipher. He felt that to fortify his intelligence was to
fortify his hate. In certain cases, education and enlightenment can
serve to eke out evil.
This is a sad thing to say; after having judged society, which had
caused his unhappiness, he judged Providence, which had made society,
and he condemned it also.
Thus during nineteen years of torture and slavery, this soul mounted
and at the same time fell. Light entered it on one side, and darkness
on the other.
Jean Valjean had not, as we have seen, an evil nature. He was still
good when he arrived at the galleys. He there condemned society, and
felt that he was becoming wicked; he there condemned Providence, and
was conscious that he was becoming impious.
It is difficult not to indulge in meditation at this point.
Does human nature thus change utterly and from top to bottom? Can the
man created good by God be rendered wicked by man? Can the soul be
completely made over by fate, and become evil, fate being evil? Can the
heart become misshapen and contract incurable deformities and
infirmities under the oppression of a disproportionate unhappiness, as
the vertebral column beneath too low a vault? Is there not in every
human soul, was there not in the soul of Jean Valjean in particular, a
first spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in
the other, which good can develop, fan, ignite, and make to glow with
splendor, and which evil can never wholly extinguish?
Grave and obscure questions, to the last of which every physiologist
would probably have responded no, and that without hesitation, had he
beheld at Toulon, during the hours of repose, which were for Jean
Valjean hours of reverie, this gloomy galley-slave, seated with folded
arms upon the bar of some capstan, with the end of his chain thrust
into his pocket to prevent its dragging, serious, silent, and
thoughtful, a pariah of the laws which regarded the man with wrath,
condemned by civilization, and regarding heaven with severity.
Certainly,—and we make no attempt to dissimulate the fact,—the
observing physiologist would have beheld an irremediable misery; he
would, perchance, have pitied this sick man, of the law’s making; but
he would not have even essayed any treatment; he would have turned
aside his gaze from the caverns of which he would have caught a glimpse
within this soul, and, like Dante at the portals of hell, he would have
effaced from this existence the word which the finger of God has,
nevertheless, inscribed upon the brow of every man,—hope.
Was this state of his soul, which we have attempted to analyze, as
perfectly clear to Jean Valjean as we have tried to render it for those
who read us? Did Jean Valjean distinctly perceive, after their
formation, and had he seen distinctly during the process of their
formation, all the elements of which his moral misery was composed? Had
this rough and unlettered man gathered a perfectly clear perception of
the succession of ideas through which he had, by degrees, mounted and
descended to the lugubrious aspects which had, for so many years,
formed the inner horizon of his spirit? Was he conscious of all that
passed within him, and of all that was working there? That is something
which we do not presume to state; it is something which we do not even
believe. There was too much ignorance in Jean Valjean, even after his
misfortune, to prevent much vagueness from still lingering there. At
times he did not rightly know himself what he felt. Jean Valjean was in
the shadows; he suffered in the shadows; he hated in the shadows; one
might have said that he hated in advance of himself. He dwelt
habitually in this shadow, feeling his way like a blind man and a
dreamer. Only, at intervals, there suddenly came to him, from without
and from within, an access of wrath, a surcharge of suffering, a livid
and rapid flash which illuminated his whole soul, and caused to appear
abruptly all around him, in front, behind, amid the gleams of a
frightful light, the hideous precipices and the sombre perspective of
his destiny.
The flash passed, the night closed in again; and where was he? He no
longer knew. The peculiarity of pains of this nature, in which that
which is pitiless—that is to say, that which is
brutalizing—predominates, is to transform a man, little by little, by a
sort of stupid transfiguration, into a wild beast; sometimes into a
ferocious beast.
Jean Valjean’s successive and obstinate attempts at escape would alone
suffice to prove this strange working of the law upon the human soul.
Jean Valjean would have renewed these attempts, utterly useless and
foolish as they were, as often as the opportunity had presented itself,
without reflecting for an instant on the result, nor on the experiences
which he had already gone through. He escaped impetuously, like the
wolf who finds his cage open. Instinct said to him, “Flee!” Reason
would have said, “Remain!” But in the presence of so violent a
temptation, reason vanished; nothing remained but instinct. The beast
alone acted. When he was recaptured, the fresh severities inflicted on
him only served to render him still more wild.
One detail, which we must not omit, is that he possessed a physical
strength which was not approached by a single one of the denizens of
the galleys. At work, at paying out a cable or winding up a capstan,
Jean Valjean was worth four men. He sometimes lifted and sustained
enormous weights on his back; and when the occasion demanded it, he
replaced that implement which is called a jack-screw, and was formerly
called _orgueil_ [pride], whence, we may remark in passing, is derived
the name of the Rue Montorgueil, near the Halles [Fishmarket] in Paris.
His comrades had nicknamed him Jean the Jack-screw. Once, when they
were repairing the balcony of the town-hall at Toulon, one of those
admirable caryatids of Puget, which support the balcony, became
loosened, and was on the point of falling. Jean Valjean, who was
present, supported the caryatid with his shoulder, and gave the workmen
time to arrive.
His suppleness even exceeded his strength. Certain convicts who were
forever dreaming of escape, ended by making a veritable science of
force and skill combined. It is the science of muscles. An entire
system of mysterious statics is daily practised by prisoners, men who
are forever envious of the flies and birds. To climb a vertical
surface, and to find points of support where hardly a projection was
visible, was play to Jean Valjean. An angle of the wall being given,
with the tension of his back and legs, with his elbows and his heels
fitted into the unevenness of the stone, he raised himself as if by
magic to the third story. He sometimes mounted thus even to the roof of
the galley prison.
He spoke but little. He laughed not at all. An excessive emotion was
required to wring from him, once or twice a year, that lugubrious laugh
of the convict, which is like the echo of the laugh of a demon. To all
appearance, he seemed to be occupied in the constant contemplation of
something terrible.
He was absorbed, in fact.
Athwart the unhealthy perceptions of an incomplete nature and a crushed
intelligence, he was confusedly conscious that some monstrous thing was
resting on him. In that obscure and wan shadow within which he crawled,
each time that he turned his neck and essayed to raise his glance, he
perceived with terror, mingled with rage, a sort of frightful
accumulation of things, collecting and mounting above him, beyond the
range of his vision,—laws, prejudices, men, and deeds,—whose outlines
escaped him, whose mass terrified him, and which was nothing else than
that prodigious pyramid which we call civilization. He distinguished,
here and there in that swarming and formless mass, now near him, now
afar off and on inaccessible table-lands, some group, some detail,
vividly illuminated; here the galley-sergeant and his cudgel; there the
gendarme and his sword; yonder the mitred archbishop; away at the top,
like a sort of sun, the Emperor, crowned and dazzling. It seemed to him
that these distant splendors, far from dissipating his night, rendered
it more funereal and more black. All this—laws, prejudices, deeds, men,
things—went and came above him, over his head, in accordance with the
complicated and mysterious movement which God imparts to civilization,
walking over him and crushing him with I know not what peacefulness in
its cruelty and inexorability in its indifference. Souls which have
fallen to the bottom of all possible misfortune, unhappy men lost in
the lowest of those limbos at which no one any longer looks, the
reproved of the law, feel the whole weight of this human society, so
formidable for him who is without, so frightful for him who is beneath,
resting upon their heads.
In this situation Jean Valjean meditated; and what could be the nature
of his meditation?
If the grain of millet beneath the millstone had thoughts, it would,
doubtless, think that same thing which Jean Valjean thought.
All these things, realities full of spectres, phantasmagories full of
realities, had eventually created for him a sort of interior state
which is almost indescribable.
At times, amid his convict toil, he paused. He fell to thinking. His
reason, at one and the same time riper and more troubled than of yore,
rose in revolt. Everything which had happened to him seemed to him
absurd; everything that surrounded him seemed to him impossible. He
said to himself, “It is a dream.” He gazed at the galley-sergeant
standing a few paces from him; the galley-sergeant seemed a phantom to
him. All of a sudden the phantom dealt him a blow with his cudgel.
Visible nature hardly existed for him. It would almost be true to say
that there existed for Jean Valjean neither sun, nor fine summer days,
nor radiant sky, nor fresh April dawns. I know not what vent-hole
daylight habitually illumined his soul.
To sum up, in conclusion, that which can be summed up and translated
into positive results in all that we have just pointed out, we will
confine ourselves to the statement that, in the course of nineteen
years, Jean Valjean, the inoffensive tree-pruner of Faverolles, the
formidable convict of Toulon, had become capable, thanks to the manner
in which the galleys had moulded him, of two sorts of evil action:
firstly, of evil action which was rapid, unpremeditated, dashing,
entirely instinctive, in the nature of reprisals for the evil which he
had undergone; secondly, of evil action which was serious, grave,
consciously argued out and premeditated, with the false ideas which
such a misfortune can furnish. His deliberate deeds passed through
three successive phases, which natures of a certain stamp can alone
traverse,—reasoning, will, perseverance. He had for moving causes his
habitual wrath, bitterness of soul, a profound sense of indignities
suffered, the reaction even against the good, the innocent, and the
just, if there are any such. The point of departure, like the point of
arrival, for all his thoughts, was hatred of human law; that hatred
which, if it be not arrested in its development by some providential
incident, becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the
hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation, and which
manifests itself by a vague, incessant, and brutal desire to do harm to
some living being, no matter whom. It will be perceived that it was not
without reason that Jean Valjean’s passport described him as _a very
dangerous man_.
From year to year this soul had dried away slowly, but with fatal
sureness. When the heart is dry, the eye is dry. On his departure from
the galleys it had been nineteen years since he had shed a tear.
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