Les Misérables
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.
CHAPTER VIII—BILLOWS AND SHADOWS
A man overboard!
What matters it? The vessel does not halt. The wind blows. That sombre
ship has a path which it is forced to pursue. It passes on.
The man disappears, then reappears; he plunges, he rises again to the
surface; he calls, he stretches out his arms; he is not heard. The
vessel, trembling under the hurricane, is wholly absorbed in its own
workings; the passengers and sailors do not even see the drowning man;
his miserable head is but a speck amid the immensity of the waves. He
gives vent to desperate cries from out of the depths. What a spectre is
that retreating sail! He gazes and gazes at it frantically. It
retreats, it grows dim, it diminishes in size. He was there but just
now, he was one of the crew, he went and came along the deck with the
rest, he had his part of breath and of sunlight, he was a living man.
Now, what has taken place? He has slipped, he has fallen; all is at an
end.
He is in the tremendous sea. Under foot he has nothing but what flees
and crumbles. The billows, torn and lashed by the wind, encompass him
hideously; the tossings of the abyss bear him away; all the tongues of
water dash over his head; a populace of waves spits upon him; confused
openings half devour him; every time that he sinks, he catches glimpses
of precipices filled with night; frightful and unknown vegetations
seize him, knot about his feet, draw him to them; he is conscious that
he is becoming an abyss, that he forms part of the foam; the waves toss
him from one to another; he drinks in the bitterness; the cowardly
ocean attacks him furiously, to drown him; the enormity plays with his
agony. It seems as though all that water were hate.
Nevertheless, he struggles.
He tries to defend himself; he tries to sustain himself; he makes an
effort; he swims. He, his petty strength all exhausted instantly,
combats the inexhaustible.
Where, then, is the ship? Yonder. Barely visible in the pale shadows of
the horizon.
The wind blows in gusts; all the foam overwhelms him. He raises his
eyes and beholds only the lividness of the clouds. He witnesses, amid
his death-pangs, the immense madness of the sea. He is tortured by this
madness; he hears noises strange to man, which seem to come from beyond
the limits of the earth, and from one knows not what frightful region
beyond.
There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human
distresses; but what can they do for him? They sing and fly and float,
and he, he rattles in the death agony.
He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky,
at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.
Night descends; he has been swimming for hours; his strength is
exhausted; that ship, that distant thing in which there were men, has
vanished; he is alone in the formidable twilight gulf; he sinks, he
stiffens himself, he twists himself; he feels under him the monstrous
billows of the invisible; he shouts.
There are no more men. Where is God?
He shouts. Help! Help! He still shouts on.
Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven.
He implores the expanse, the waves, the seaweed, the reef; they are
deaf. He beseeches the tempest; the imperturbable tempest obeys only
the infinite.
Around him darkness, fog, solitude, the stormy and nonsentient tumult,
the undefined curling of those wild waters. In him horror and fatigue.
Beneath him the depths. Not a point of support. He thinks of the gloomy
adventures of the corpse in the limitless shadow. The bottomless cold
paralyzes him. His hands contract convulsively; they close, and grasp
nothingness. Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, gusts, useless stars! What is
to be done? The desperate man gives up; he is weary, he chooses the
alternative of death; he resists not; he lets himself go; he abandons
his grip; and then he tosses forevermore in the lugubrious dreary
depths of engulfment.
Oh, implacable march of human societies! Oh, losses of men and of souls
on the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip!
Disastrous absence of help! Oh, moral death!
The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws fling
their condemned. The sea is the immensity of wretchedness.
The soul, going downstream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall
resuscitate it?
CHAPTER IX—NEW TROUBLES
When the hour came for him to take his departure from the galleys, when
Jean Valjean heard in his ear the strange words, _Thou art free!_ the
moment seemed improbable and unprecedented; a ray of vivid light, a ray
of the true light of the living, suddenly penetrated within him. But it
was not long before this ray paled. Jean Valjean had been dazzled by
the idea of liberty. He had believed in a new life. He very speedily
perceived what sort of liberty it is to which a yellow passport is
provided.
And this was encompassed with much bitterness. He had calculated that
his earnings, during his sojourn in the galleys, ought to amount to a
hundred and seventy-one francs. It is but just to add that he had
forgotten to include in his calculations the forced repose of Sundays
and festival days during nineteen years, which entailed a diminution of
about eighty francs. At all events, his hoard had been reduced by
various local levies to the sum of one hundred and nine francs fifteen
sous, which had been counted out to him on his departure. He had
understood nothing of this, and had thought himself wronged. Let us say
the word—robbed.
On the day following his liberation, he saw, at Grasse, in front of an
orange-flower distillery, some men engaged in unloading bales. He
offered his services. Business was pressing; they were accepted. He set
to work. He was intelligent, robust, adroit; he did his best; the
master seemed pleased. While he was at work, a gendarme passed,
observed him, and demanded his papers. It was necessary to show him the
yellow passport. That done, Jean Valjean resumed his labor. A little
while before he had questioned one of the workmen as to the amount
which they earned each day at this occupation; he had been told _thirty
sous_. When evening arrived, as he was forced to set out again on the
following day, he presented himself to the owner of the distillery and
requested to be paid. The owner did not utter a word, but handed him
fifteen sous. He objected. He was told, _“That is enough for thee.”_ He
persisted. The master looked him straight between the eyes, and said to
him _“Beware of the prison.”_
There, again, he considered that he had been robbed.
Society, the State, by diminishing his hoard, had robbed him wholesale.
Now it was the individual who was robbing him at retail.
Liberation is not deliverance. One gets free from the galleys, but not
from the sentence.