Les Misérables
It was because,—strange phenomenon, and one which was possible only in
the situation in which he found himself,—in stealing the money from
that child, he had done a thing of which he was no longer capable.
However that may be, this last evil action had a decisive effect on
him; it abruptly traversed that chaos which he bore in his mind, and
dispersed it, placed on one side the thick obscurity, and on the other
the light, and acted on his soul, in the state in which it then was, as
certain chemical reagents act upon a troubled mixture by precipitating
one element and clarifying the other.
First of all, even before examining himself and reflecting, all
bewildered, like one who seeks to save himself, he tried to find the
child in order to return his money to him; then, when he recognized the
fact that this was impossible, he halted in despair. At the moment when
he exclaimed “I am a wretch!” he had just perceived what he was, and he
was already separated from himself to such a degree, that he seemed to
himself to be no longer anything more than a phantom, and as if he had,
there before him, in flesh and blood, the hideous galley-convict, Jean
Valjean, cudgel in hand, his blouse on his hips, his knapsack filled
with stolen objects on his back, with his resolute and gloomy visage,
with his thoughts filled with abominable projects.
Excess of unhappiness had, as we have remarked, made him in some sort a
visionary. This, then, was in the nature of a vision. He actually saw
that Jean Valjean, that sinister face, before him. He had almost
reached the point of asking himself who that man was, and he was
horrified by him.
His brain was going through one of those violent and yet perfectly calm
moments in which reverie is so profound that it absorbs reality. One no
longer beholds the object which one has before one, and one sees, as
though apart from one’s self, the figures which one has in one’s own
mind.
Thus he contemplated himself, so to speak, face to face, and at the
same time, athwart this hallucination, he perceived in a mysterious
depth a sort of light which he at first took for a torch. On
scrutinizing this light which appeared to his conscience with more
attention, he recognized the fact that it possessed a human form and
that this torch was the Bishop.
His conscience weighed in turn these two men thus placed before it,—the
Bishop and Jean Valjean. Nothing less than the first was required to
soften the second. By one of those singular effects, which are peculiar
to this sort of ecstasies, in proportion as his reverie continued, as
the Bishop grew great and resplendent in his eyes, so did Jean Valjean
grow less and vanish. After a certain time he was no longer anything
more than a shade. All at once he disappeared. The Bishop alone
remained; he filled the whole soul of this wretched man with a
magnificent radiance.
Jean Valjean wept for a long time. He wept burning tears, he sobbed
with more weakness than a woman, with more fright than a child.
As he wept, daylight penetrated more and more clearly into his soul; an
extraordinary light; a light at once ravishing and terrible. His past
life, his first fault, his long expiation, his external brutishness,
his internal hardness, his dismissal to liberty, rejoicing in manifold
plans of vengeance, what had happened to him at the Bishop’s, the last
thing that he had done, that theft of forty sous from a child, a crime
all the more cowardly, and all the more monstrous since it had come
after the Bishop’s pardon,—all this recurred to his mind and appeared
clearly to him, but with a clearness which he had never hitherto
witnessed. He examined his life, and it seemed horrible to him; his
soul, and it seemed frightful to him. In the meantime a gentle light
rested over this life and this soul. It seemed to him that he beheld
Satan by the light of Paradise.
How many hours did he weep thus? What did he do after he had wept?
Whither did he go! No one ever knew. The only thing which seems to be
authenticated is that that same night the carrier who served Grenoble
at that epoch, and who arrived at D—— about three o’clock in the
morning, saw, as he traversed the street in which the Bishop’s
residence was situated, a man in the attitude of prayer, kneeling on
the pavement in the shadow, in front of the door of Monseigneur
Welcome.
BOOK THIRD—IN THE YEAR 1817
CHAPTER I—THE YEAR 1817
1817 is the year which Louis XVIII., with a certain royal assurance
which was not wanting in pride, entitled the twenty-second of his
reign. It is the year in which M. Bruguière de Sorsum was celebrated.
All the hairdressers’ shops, hoping for powder and the return of the
royal bird, were besmeared with azure and decked with fleurs-de-lys. It
was the candid time at which Count Lynch sat every Sunday as
church-warden in the church-warden’s pew of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in
his costume of a peer of France, with his red ribbon and his long nose
and the majesty of profile peculiar to a man who has performed a
brilliant action. The brilliant action performed by M. Lynch was this:
being mayor of Bordeaux, on the 12th of March, 1814, he had surrendered
the city a little too promptly to M. the Duke d’Angoulême. Hence his
peerage. In 1817 fashion swallowed up little boys of from four to six
years of age in vast caps of morocco leather with ear-tabs resembling
Esquimaux mitres. The French army was dressed in white, after the mode
of the Austrian; the regiments were called legions; instead of numbers
they bore the names of departments; Napoleon was at St. Helena; and
since England refused him green cloth, he was having his old coats
turned. In 1817 Pelligrini sang; Mademoiselle Bigottini danced; Potier
reigned; Odry did not yet exist. Madame Saqui had succeeded to Forioso.
There were still Prussians in France. M. Delalot was a personage.
Legitimacy had just asserted itself by cutting off the hand, then the
head, of Pleignier, of Carbonneau, and of Tolleron. The Prince de
Talleyrand, grand chamberlain, and the Abbé Louis, appointed minister
of finance, laughed as they looked at each other, with the laugh of the
two augurs; both of them had celebrated, on the 14th of July, 1790, the
mass of federation in the Champ de Mars; Talleyrand had said it as
bishop, Louis had served it in the capacity of deacon. In 1817, in the
side-alleys of this same Champ de Mars, two great cylinders of wood
might have been seen lying in the rain, rotting amid the grass, painted
blue, with traces of eagles and bees, from which the gilding was
falling. These were the columns which two years before had upheld the
Emperor’s platform in the Champ de Mai. They were blackened here and
there with the scorches of the bivouac of Austrians encamped near
Gros-Caillou. Two or three of these columns had disappeared in these
bivouac fires, and had warmed the large hands of the Imperial troops.
The Field of May had this remarkable point: that it had been held in
the month of June and in the Field of March (Mars). In this year, 1817,
two things were popular: the Voltaire-Touquet and the snuff-box _à la
Charter_. The most recent Parisian sensation was the crime of Dautun,
who had thrown his brother’s head into the fountain of the
Flower-Market.
They had begun to feel anxious at the Naval Department, on account of
the lack of news from that fatal frigate, _The Medusa_, which was
destined to cover Chaumareix with infamy and Géricault with glory.
Colonel Selves was going to Egypt to become Soliman-Pasha. The palace
of Thermes, in the Rue de La Harpe, served as a shop for a cooper. On
the platform of the octagonal tower of the Hotel de Cluny, the little
shed of boards, which had served as an observatory to Messier, the
naval astronomer under Louis XVI., was still to be seen. The Duchesse
de Duras read to three or four friends her unpublished _Ourika_, in her
boudoir furnished by X. in sky-blue satin. The N’s were scratched off
the Louvre. The bridge of Austerlitz had abdicated, and was entitled
the bridge of the King’s Garden [du Jardin du Roi], a double enigma,
which disguised the bridge of Austerlitz and the Jardin des Plantes at
one stroke. Louis XVIII., much preoccupied while annotating Horace with
the corner of his finger-nail, heroes who have become emperors, and
makers of wooden shoes who have become dauphins, had two
anxieties,—Napoleon and Mathurin Bruneau. The French Academy had given
for its prize subject, _The Happiness procured through Study_. M.
Bellart was officially eloquent. In his shadow could be seen
germinating that future advocate-general of Broë, dedicated to the
sarcasms of Paul-Louis Courier. There was a false Chateaubriand, named
Marchangy, in the interim, until there should be a false Marchangy,
named d’Arlincourt. _Claire d’Albe_ and _Malek-Adel_ were masterpieces;
Madame Cottin was proclaimed the chief writer of the epoch. The
Institute had the academician, Napoleon Bonaparte, stricken from its
list of members. A royal ordinance erected Angoulême into a naval
school; for the Duc d’Angoulême, being lord high admiral, it was
evident that the city of Angoulême had all the qualities of a seaport;
otherwise the monarchical principle would have received a wound. In the
Council of Ministers the question was agitated whether vignettes
representing slack-rope performances, which adorned Franconi’s
advertising posters, and which attracted throngs of street urchins,
should be tolerated. M. Paër, the author of _Agnese_, a good sort of
fellow, with a square face and a wart on his cheek, directed the little
private concerts of the Marquise de Sasenaye in the Rue Ville l’Évêque.
All the young girls were singing the _Hermit of Saint-Avelle_, with
words by Edmond Géraud. _The Yellow Dwarf_ was transferred into
_Mirror_. The Café Lemblin stood up for the Emperor, against the Café
Valois, which upheld the Bourbons. The Duc de Berri, already surveyed
from the shadow by Louvel, had just been married to a princess of
Sicily. Madame de Staël had died a year previously. The body-guard
hissed Mademoiselle Mars. The grand newspapers were all very small.
Their form was restricted, but their liberty was great. The
_Constitutionnel_ was constitutional. _La Minerve_ called Chateaubriand
_Chateaubriant_. That _t_ made the good middle-class people laugh
heartily at the expense of the great writer. In journals which sold
themselves, prostituted journalists, insulted the exiles of 1815. David
had no longer any talent, Arnault had no longer any wit, Carnot was no
longer honest, Soult had won no battles; it is true that Napoleon had
no longer any genius. No one is ignorant of the fact that letters sent
to an exile by post very rarely reached him, as the police made it
their religious duty to intercept them. This is no new fact; Descartes
complained of it in his exile. Now David, having, in a Belgian
publication, shown some displeasure at not receiving letters which had
been written to him, it struck the royalist journals as amusing; and
they derided the prescribed man well on this occasion. What separated
two men more than an abyss was to say, the _regicides_, or to say the
_voters_; to say the _enemies_, or to say the _allies_; to say
_Napoleon_, or to say _Buonaparte_. All sensible people were agreed
that the era of revolution had been closed forever by King Louis
XVIII., surnamed “The Immortal Author of the Charter.” On the platform
of the Pont-Neuf, the word _Redivivus_ was carved on the pedestal that
awaited the statue of Henry IV. M. Piet, in the Rue Thérèse, No. 4, was
making the rough draft of his privy assembly to consolidate the
monarchy. The leaders of the Right said at grave conjunctures, “We must
write to Bacot.” MM. Canuel, O’Mahoney, and De Chappedelaine were