Les Misérables
fate, armed with all vindictiveness and all social scorn, had taken him
for her prey and had raged against him. He had accepted every extremity
when it had been necessary; he had sacrificed his inviolability as a
reformed man, had yielded up his liberty, risked his head, lost
everything, suffered everything, and he had remained disinterested and
stoical to such a point that he might have been thought to be absent
from himself like a martyr. His conscience inured to every assault of
destiny, might have appeared to be forever impregnable. Well, any one
who had beheld his spiritual self would have been obliged to concede
that it weakened at that moment. It was because, of all the tortures
which he had undergone in the course of this long inquisition to which
destiny had doomed him, this was the most terrible. Never had such
pincers seized him hitherto. He felt the mysterious stirring of all his
latent sensibilities. He felt the plucking at the strange chord. Alas!
the supreme trial, let us say rather, the only trial, is the loss of
the beloved being.
Poor old Jean Valjean certainly did not love Cosette otherwise than as
a father; but we have already remarked, above, that into this paternity
the widowhood of his life had introduced all the shades of love; he
loved Cosette as his daughter, and he loved her as his mother, and he
loved her as his sister; and, as he had never had either a woman to
love or a wife, as nature is a creditor who accepts no protest, that
sentiment also, the most impossible to lose, was mingled with the rest,
vague, ignorant, pure with the purity of blindness, unconscious,
celestial, angelic, divine; less like a sentiment than like an
instinct, less like an instinct than like an imperceptible and
invisible but real attraction; and love, properly speaking, was, in his
immense tenderness for Cosette, like the thread of gold in the
mountain, concealed and virgin.
Let the reader recall the situation of heart which we have already
indicated. No marriage was possible between them; not even that of
souls; and yet, it is certain that their destinies were wedded. With
the exception of Cosette, that is to say, with the exception of a
childhood, Jean Valjean had never, in the whole of his long life, known
anything of that which may be loved. The passions and loves which
succeed each other had not produced in him those successive green
growths, tender green or dark green, which can be seen in foliage which
passes through the winter and in men who pass fifty. In short, and we
have insisted on it more than once, all this interior fusion, all this
whole, of which the sum total was a lofty virtue, ended in rendering
Jean Valjean a father to Cosette. A strange father, forged from the
grandfather, the son, the brother, and the husband, that existed in
Jean Valjean; a father in whom there was included even a mother; a
father who loved Cosette and adored her, and who held that child as his
light, his home, his family, his country, his paradise.
Thus when he saw that the end had absolutely come, that she was
escaping from him, that she was slipping from his hands, that she was
gliding from him, like a cloud, like water, when he had before his eyes
this crushing proof: “another is the goal of her heart, another is the
wish of her life; there is a dearest one, I am no longer anything but
her father, I no longer exist”; when he could no longer doubt, when he
said to himself: “She is going away from me!” the grief which he felt
surpassed the bounds of possibility. To have done all that he had done
for the purpose of ending like this! And the very idea of being
nothing! Then, as we have just said, a quiver of revolt ran through him
from head to foot. He felt, even in the very roots of his hair, the
immense reawakening of egotism, and the _I_ in this man’s abyss howled.
There is such a thing as the sudden giving way of the inward subsoil. A
despairing certainty does not make its way into a man without thrusting
aside and breaking certain profound elements which, in some cases, are
the very man himself. Grief, when it attains this shape, is a headlong
flight of all the forces of the conscience. These are fatal crises. Few
among us emerge from them still like ourselves and firm in duty. When
the limit of endurance is overstepped, the most imperturbable virtue is
disconcerted. Jean Valjean took the blotter again, and convinced
himself afresh; he remained bowed and as though petrified and with
staring eyes, over those four unobjectionable lines; and there arose
within him such a cloud that one might have thought that everything in
this soul was crumbling away.
He examined this revelation, athwart the exaggerations of reverie, with
an apparent and terrifying calmness, for it is a fearful thing when a
man’s calmness reaches the coldness of the statue.
He measured the terrible step which his destiny had taken without his
having a suspicion of the fact; he recalled his fears of the preceding
summer, so foolishly dissipated; he recognized the precipice, it was
still the same; only, Jean Valjean was no longer on the brink, he was
at the bottom of it.
The unprecedented and heart-rending thing about it was that he had
fallen without perceiving it. All the light of his life had departed,
while he still fancied that he beheld the sun.
His instinct did not hesitate. He put together certain circumstances,
certain dates, certain blushes and certain pallors on Cosette’s part,
and he said to himself: “It is he.”
The divination of despair is a sort of mysterious bow which never
misses its aim. He struck Marius with his first conjecture. He did not
know the name, but he found the man instantly. He distinctly perceived,
in the background of the implacable conjuration of his memories, the
unknown prowler of the Luxembourg, that wretched seeker of love
adventures, that idler of romance, that idiot, that coward, for it is
cowardly to come and make eyes at young girls who have beside them a
father who loves them.
After he had thoroughly verified the fact that this young man was at
the bottom of this situation, and that everything proceeded from that
quarter, he, Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had so
labored over his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve
all life, all misery, and all unhappiness into love, looked into his
own breast and there beheld a spectre, Hate.
Great griefs contain something of dejection. They discourage one with
existence. The man into whom they enter feels something within him
withdraw from him. In his youth, their visits are lugubrious; later on
they are sinister. Alas, if despair is a fearful thing when the blood
is hot, when the hair is black, when the head is erect on the body like
the flame on the torch, when the roll of destiny still retains its full
thickness, when the heart, full of desirable love, still possesses
beats which can be returned to it, when one has time for redress, when
all women and all smiles and all the future and all the horizon are
before one, when the force of life is complete, what is it in old age,
when the years hasten on, growing ever paler, to that twilight hour
when one begins to behold the stars of the tomb?
While he was meditating, Toussaint entered. Jean Valjean rose and asked
her:—
“In what quarter is it? Do you know?”
Toussaint was struck dumb, and could only answer him:—
“What is it, sir?”
Jean Valjean began again: “Did you not tell me that just now that there
is fighting going on?”
“Ah! yes, sir,” replied Toussaint. “It is in the direction of
Saint-Merry.”
There is a mechanical movement which comes to us, unconsciously, from
the most profound depths of our thought. It was, no doubt, under the
impulse of a movement of this sort, and of which he was hardly
conscious, that Jean Valjean, five minutes later, found himself in the
street.
Bareheaded, he sat upon the stone post at the door of his house. He
seemed to be listening.
Night had come.
CHAPTER II—THE STREET URCHIN AN ENEMY OF LIGHT
How long did he remain thus? What was the ebb and flow of this tragic
meditation? Did he straighten up? Did he remain bowed? Had he been bent
to breaking? Could he still rise and regain his footing in his
conscience upon something solid? He probably would not have been able
to tell himself.
The street was deserted. A few uneasy bourgeois, who were rapidly
returning home, hardly saw him. Each one for himself in times of peril.
The lamp-lighter came as usual to light the lantern which was situated
precisely opposite the door of No. 7, and then went away. Jean Valjean
would not have appeared like a living man to any one who had examined
him in that shadow. He sat there on the post of his door, motionless as
a form of ice. There is congealment in despair. The alarm bells and a
vague and stormy uproar were audible. In the midst of all these
convulsions of the bell mingled with the revolt, the clock of
Saint-Paul struck eleven, gravely and without haste; for the tocsin is
man; the hour is God. The passage of the hour produced no effect on
Jean Valjean; Jean Valjean did not stir. Still, at about that moment, a
brusque report burst forth in the direction of the Halles, a second yet
more violent followed; it was probably that attack on the barricade in
the Rue de la Chanvrerie which we have just seen repulsed by Marius. At
this double discharge, whose fury seemed augmented by the stupor of the
night, Jean Valjean started; he rose, turning towards the quarter
whence the noise proceeded; then he fell back upon the post again,
folded his arms, and his head slowly sank on his bosom again.
He resumed his gloomy dialogue with himself.
All at once, he raised his eyes; some one was walking in the street, he
heard steps near him. He looked, and by the light of the lanterns, in
the direction of the street which ran into the Rue-aux-Archives, he
perceived a young, livid, and beaming face.
Gavroche had just arrived in the Rue de l’Homme Armé.
Gavroche was staring into the air, apparently in search of something.
He saw Jean Valjean perfectly well but he took no notice of him.
Gavroche after staring into the air, stared below; he raised himself on
tiptoe, and felt of the doors and windows of the ground floor; they
were all shut, bolted, and padlocked. After having authenticated the
fronts of five or six barricaded houses in this manner, the urchin
shrugged his shoulders, and took himself to task in these terms:—
“Pardi!”
Then he began to stare into the air again.
Jean Valjean, who, an instant previously, in his then state of mind,
would not have spoken to or even answered any one, felt irresistibly
impelled to accost that child.
“What is the matter with you, my little fellow?” he said.
“The matter with me is that I am hungry,” replied Gavroche frankly. And
he added: “Little fellow yourself.”
Jean Valjean fumbled in his fob and pulled out a five-franc piece.
But Gavroche, who was of the wagtail species, and who skipped
vivaciously from one gesture to another, had just picked up a stone. He
had caught sight of the lantern.
“See here,” said he, “you still have your lanterns here. You are
disobeying the regulations, my friend. This is disorderly. Smash that
for me.”
And he flung the stone at the lantern, whose broken glass fell with
such a clatter that the bourgeois in hiding behind their curtains in
the opposite house cried: “There is ‘Ninety-three’ come again.”
The lantern oscillated violently, and went out. The street had suddenly
become black.
“That’s right, old street,” ejaculated Gavroche, “put on your
night-cap.”
And turning to Jean Valjean:—
“What do you call that gigantic monument that you have there at the end