Les Misérables
without being himself aware of it.
Jean Valjean was in the shadow, and stood motionless, with his iron
candlestick in his hand, frightened by this luminous old man. Never had
he beheld anything like this. This confidence terrified him. The moral
world has no grander spectacle than this: a troubled and uneasy
conscience, which has arrived on the brink of an evil action,
contemplating the slumber of the just.
That slumber in that isolation, and with a neighbor like himself, had
about it something sublime, of which he was vaguely but imperiously
conscious.
No one could have told what was passing within him, not even himself.
In order to attempt to form an idea of it, it is necessary to think of
the most violent of things in the presence of the most gentle. Even on
his visage it would have been impossible to distinguish anything with
certainty. It was a sort of haggard astonishment. He gazed at it, and
that was all. But what was his thought? It would have been impossible
to divine it. What was evident was, that he was touched and astounded.
But what was the nature of this emotion?
His eye never quitted the old man. The only thing which was clearly to
be inferred from his attitude and his physiognomy was a strange
indecision. One would have said that he was hesitating between the two
abysses,—the one in which one loses one’s self and that in which one
saves one’s self. He seemed prepared to crush that skull or to kiss
that hand.
At the expiration of a few minutes his left arm rose slowly towards his
brow, and he took off his cap; then his arm fell back with the same
deliberation, and Jean Valjean fell to meditating once more, his cap in
his left hand, his club in his right hand, his hair bristling all over
his savage head.
The Bishop continued to sleep in profound peace beneath that terrifying
gaze.
The gleam of the moon rendered confusedly visible the crucifix over the
chimney-piece, which seemed to be extending its arms to both of them,
with a benediction for one and pardon for the other.
Suddenly Jean Valjean replaced his cap on his brow; then stepped
rapidly past the bed, without glancing at the Bishop, straight to the
cupboard, which he saw near the head; he raised his iron candlestick as
though to force the lock; the key was there; he opened it; the first
thing which presented itself to him was the basket of silverware; he
seized it, traversed the chamber with long strides, without taking any
precautions and without troubling himself about the noise, gained the
door, re-entered the oratory, opened the window, seized his cudgel,
bestrode the window-sill of the ground floor, put the silver into his
knapsack, threw away the basket, crossed the garden, leaped over the
wall like a tiger, and fled.
CHAPTER XII—THE BISHOP WORKS
The next morning at sunrise Monseigneur Bienvenu was strolling in his
garden. Madame Magloire ran up to him in utter consternation.
“Monseigneur, Monseigneur!” she exclaimed, “does your Grace know where
the basket of silver is?”
“Yes,” replied the Bishop.
“Jesus the Lord be blessed!” she resumed; “I did not know what had
become of it.”
The Bishop had just picked up the basket in a flower-bed. He presented
it to Madame Magloire.
“Here it is.”
“Well!” said she. “Nothing in it! And the silver?”
“Ah,” returned the Bishop, “so it is the silver which troubles you? I
don’t know where it is.”
“Great, good God! It is stolen! That man who was here last night has
stolen it.”
In a twinkling, with all the vivacity of an alert old woman, Madame
Magloire had rushed to the oratory, entered the alcove, and returned to
the Bishop. The Bishop had just bent down, and was sighing as he
examined a plant of cochlearia des Guillons, which the basket had
broken as it fell across the bed. He rose up at Madame Magloire’s cry.
“Monseigneur, the man is gone! The silver has been stolen!”
As she uttered this exclamation, her eyes fell upon a corner of the
garden, where traces of the wall having been scaled were visible. The
coping of the wall had been torn away.
“Stay! yonder is the way he went. He jumped over into Cochefilet Lane.
Ah, the abomination! He has stolen our silver!”
The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he raised his grave eyes,
and said gently to Madame Magloire:—
“And, in the first place, was that silver ours?”
Madame Magloire was speechless. Another silence ensued; then the Bishop
went on:—
“Madame Magloire, I have for a long time detained that silver
wrongfully. It belonged to the poor. Who was that man? A poor man,
evidently.”
“Alas! Jesus!” returned Madame Magloire. “It is not for my sake, nor
for Mademoiselle’s. It makes no difference to us. But it is for the
sake of Monseigneur. What is Monseigneur to eat with now?”
The Bishop gazed at her with an air of amazement.
“Ah, come! Are there no such things as pewter forks and spoons?”
Madame Magloire shrugged her shoulders.
“Pewter has an odor.”
“Iron forks and spoons, then.”
Madame Magloire made an expressive grimace.
“Iron has a taste.”
“Very well,” said the Bishop; “wooden ones then.”
A few moments later he was breakfasting at the very table at which Jean
Valjean had sat on the previous evening. As he ate his breakfast,
Monseigneur Welcome remarked gayly to his sister, who said nothing, and
to Madame Magloire, who was grumbling under her breath, that one really
does not need either fork or spoon, even of wood, in order to dip a bit
of bread in a cup of milk.
“A pretty idea, truly,” said Madame Magloire to herself, as she went
and came, “to take in a man like that! and to lodge him close to one’s
self! And how fortunate that he did nothing but steal! Ah, mon Dieu! it
makes one shudder to think of it!”
As the brother and sister were about to rise from the table, there came
a knock at the door.
“Come in,” said the Bishop.
The door opened. A singular and violent group made its appearance on
the threshold. Three men were holding a fourth man by the collar. The
three men were gendarmes; the other was Jean Valjean.
A brigadier of gendarmes, who seemed to be in command of the group, was
standing near the door. He entered and advanced to the Bishop, making a
military salute.
“Monseigneur—” said he.
At this word, Jean Valjean, who was dejected and seemed overwhelmed,
raised his head with an air of stupefaction.
“Monseigneur!” he murmured. “So he is not the curé?”
“Silence!” said the gendarme. “He is Monseigneur the Bishop.”
In the meantime, Monseigneur Bienvenu had advanced as quickly as his
great age permitted.
“Ah! here you are!” he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. “I am glad
to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too,
which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get
two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and
spoons?”
Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop
with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.
“Monseigneur,” said the brigadier of gendarmes, “so what this man said
is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is
running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this
silver—”
“And he told you,” interposed the Bishop with a smile, “that it had
been given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had
passed the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him
back here? It is a mistake.”
“In that case,” replied the brigadier, “we can let him go?”
“Certainly,” replied the Bishop.
The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.
“Is it true that I am to be released?” he said, in an almost
inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.
“Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?” said one of the
gendarmes.
“My friend,” resumed the Bishop, “before you go, here are your
candlesticks. Take them.”
He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and
brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering
a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the
Bishop.
Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks
mechanically, and with a bewildered air.
“Now,” said the Bishop, “go in peace. By the way, when you return, my
friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always
enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with
anything but a latch, either by day or by night.”
Then, turning to the gendarmes:—
“You may retire, gentlemen.”
The gendarmes retired.
Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.
The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:—
“Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money
in becoming an honest man.”
Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything,
remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he
uttered them. He resumed with solemnity:—
“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good.
It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts
and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”
CHAPTER XIII—LITTLE GERVAIS
Jean Valjean left the town as though he were fleeing from it. He set
out at a very hasty pace through the fields, taking whatever roads and
paths presented themselves to him, without perceiving that he was
incessantly retracing his steps. He wandered thus the whole morning,
without having eaten anything and without feeling hungry. He was the
prey of a throng of novel sensations. He was conscious of a sort of
rage; he did not know against whom it was directed. He could not have
told whether he was touched or humiliated. There came over him at
moments a strange emotion which he resisted and to which he opposed the
hardness acquired during the last twenty years of his life. This state
of mind fatigued him. He perceived with dismay that the sort of
frightful calm which the injustice of his misfortune had conferred upon
him was giving way within him. He asked himself what would replace
this. At times he would have actually preferred to be in prison with
the gendarmes, and that things should not have happened in this way; it
would have agitated him less. Although the season was tolerably far
advanced, there were still a few late flowers in the hedge-rows here
and there, whose odor as he passed through them in his march recalled
to him memories of his childhood. These memories were almost
intolerable to him, it was so long since they had recurred to him.
Unutterable thoughts assembled within him in this manner all day long.
As the sun declined to its setting, casting long shadows athwart the
soil from every pebble, Jean Valjean sat down behind a bush upon a
large ruddy plain, which was absolutely deserted. There was nothing on
the horizon except the Alps. Not even the spire of a distant village.
Jean Valjean might have been three leagues distant from D—— A path
which intersected the plain passed a few paces from the bush.
In the middle of this meditation, which would have contributed not a
little to render his rags terrifying to any one who might have
encountered him, a joyous sound became audible.
He turned his head and saw a little Savoyard, about ten years of age,
coming up the path and singing, his hurdy-gurdy on his hip, and his
marmot-box on his back.
One of those gay and gentle children, who go from land to land
affording a view of their knees through the holes in their trousers.
Without stopping his song, the lad halted in his march from time to
time, and played at knuckle-bones with some coins which he had in his