Les Misérables
skulls of dead men! This was much talked of, so that one of the elegant
and malicious young women of M. sur M. came to him one day, and asked:
“Monsieur le Maire, pray show us your chamber. It is said to be a
grotto.” He smiled, and introduced them instantly into this “grotto.”
They were well punished for their curiosity. The room was very simply
furnished in mahogany, which was rather ugly, like all furniture of
that sort, and hung with paper worth twelve sous. They could see
nothing remarkable about it, except two candlesticks of antique pattern
which stood on the chimney-piece and appeared to be silver, “for they
were hall-marked,” an observation full of the type of wit of petty
towns.
Nevertheless, people continued to say that no one ever got into the
room, and that it was a hermit’s cave, a mysterious retreat, a hole, a
tomb.
It was also whispered about that he had “immense” sums deposited with
Laffitte, with this peculiar feature, that they were always at his
immediate disposal, so that, it was added, M. Madeleine could make his
appearance at Laffitte’s any morning, sign a receipt, and carry off his
two or three millions in ten minutes. In reality, “these two or three
millions” were reducible, as we have said, to six hundred and thirty or
forty thousand francs.
CHAPTER IV—M. MADELEINE IN MOURNING
At the beginning of 1820 the newspapers announced the death of M.
Myriel, Bishop of D——, surnamed “Monseigneur Bienvenu,” who had died in
the odor of sanctity at the age of eighty-two.
The Bishop of D—— to supply here a detail which the papers omitted—had
been blind for many years before his death, and content to be blind, as
his sister was beside him.
Let us remark by the way, that to be blind and to be loved, is, in
fact, one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness upon this
earth, where nothing is complete. To have continually at one’s side a
woman, a daughter, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you
need her and because she cannot do without you; to know that we are
indispensable to a person who is necessary to us; to be able to
incessantly measure one’s affection by the amount of her presence which
she bestows on us, and to say to ourselves, “Since she consecrates the
whole of her time to me, it is because I possess the whole of her
heart”; to behold her thought in lieu of her face; to be able to verify
the fidelity of one being amid the eclipse of the world; to regard the
rustle of a gown as the sound of wings; to hear her come and go,
retire, speak, return, sing, and to think that one is the centre of
these steps, of this speech; to manifest at each instant one’s personal
attraction; to feel one’s self all the more powerful because of one’s
infirmity; to become in one’s obscurity, and through one’s obscurity,
the star around which this angel gravitates,—few felicities equal this.
The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is
loved; loved for one’s own sake—let us say rather, loved in spite of
one’s self; this conviction the blind man possesses. To be served in
distress is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? No. One does not
lose the sight when one has love. And what love! A love wholly
constituted of virtue! There is no blindness where there is certainty.
Soul seeks soul, gropingly, and finds it. And this soul, found and
tested, is a woman. A hand sustains you; it is hers: a mouth lightly
touches your brow; it is her mouth: you hear a breath very near you; it
is hers. To have everything of her, from her worship to her pity, never
to be left, to have that sweet weakness aiding you, to lean upon that
immovable reed, to touch Providence with one’s hands, and to be able to
take it in one’s arms,—God made tangible,—what bliss! The heart, that
obscure, celestial flower, undergoes a mysterious blossoming. One would
not exchange that shadow for all brightness! The angel soul is there,
uninterruptedly there; if she departs, it is but to return again; she
vanishes like a dream, and reappears like reality. One feels warmth
approaching, and behold! she is there. One overflows with serenity,
with gayety, with ecstasy; one is a radiance amid the night. And there
are a thousand little cares. Nothings, which are enormous in that void.
The most ineffable accents of the feminine voice employed to lull you,
and supplying the vanished universe to you. One is caressed with the
soul. One sees nothing, but one feels that one is adored. It is a
paradise of shadows.
It was from this paradise that Monseigneur Welcome had passed to the
other.
The announcement of his death was reprinted by the local journal of M.
sur M. On the following day, M. Madeleine appeared clad wholly in
black, and with crape on his hat.
This mourning was noticed in the town, and commented on. It seemed to
throw a light on M. Madeleine’s origin. It was concluded that some
relationship existed between him and the venerable Bishop. _“He has
gone into mourning for the Bishop of D——”_ said the drawing-rooms; this
raised M. Madeleine’s credit greatly, and procured for him, instantly
and at one blow, a certain consideration in the noble world of M. sur
M. The microscopic Faubourg Saint-Germain of the place meditated
raising the quarantine against M. Madeleine, the probable relative of a
bishop. M. Madeleine perceived the advancement which he had obtained,
by the more numerous courtesies of the old women and the more plentiful
smiles of the young ones. One evening, a ruler in that petty great
world, who was curious by right of seniority, ventured to ask him, “M.
le Maire is doubtless a cousin of the late Bishop of D——?”
He said, “No, Madame.”
“But,” resumed the dowager, “you are wearing mourning for him.”
He replied, “It is because I was a servant in his family in my youth.”
Another thing which was remarked, was, that every time that he
encountered in the town a young Savoyard who was roaming about the
country and seeking chimneys to sweep, the mayor had him summoned,
inquired his name, and gave him money. The little Savoyards told each
other about it: a great many of them passed that way.
CHAPTER V—VAGUE FLASHES ON THE HORIZON
Little by little, and in the course of time, all this opposition
subsided. There had at first been exercised against M. Madeleine, in
virtue of a sort of law which all those who rise must submit to,
blackening and calumnies; then they grew to be nothing more than
ill-nature, then merely malicious remarks, then even this entirely
disappeared; respect became complete, unanimous, cordial, and towards
1821 the moment arrived when the word “Monsieur le Maire” was
pronounced at M. sur M. with almost the same accent as “Monseigneur the
Bishop” had been pronounced in D—— in 1815. People came from a distance
of ten leagues around to consult M. Madeleine. He put an end to
differences, he prevented lawsuits, he reconciled enemies. Every one
took him for the judge, and with good reason. It seemed as though he
had for a soul the book of the natural law. It was like an epidemic of
veneration, which in the course of six or seven years gradually took
possession of the whole district.
One single man in the town, in the arrondissement, absolutely escaped
this contagion, and, whatever Father Madeleine did, remained his
opponent as though a sort of incorruptible and imperturbable instinct
kept him on the alert and uneasy. It seems, in fact, as though there
existed in certain men a veritable bestial instinct, though pure and
upright, like all instincts, which creates antipathies and sympathies,
which fatally separates one nature from another nature, which does not
hesitate, which feels no disquiet, which does not hold its peace, and
which never belies itself, clear in its obscurity, infallible,
imperious, intractable, stubborn to all counsels of the intelligence
and to all the dissolvents of reason, and which, in whatever manner
destinies are arranged, secretly warns the man-dog of the presence of
the man-cat, and the man-fox of the presence of the man-lion.
It frequently happened that when M. Madeleine was passing along a
street, calm, affectionate, surrounded by the blessings of all, a man
of lofty stature, clad in an iron-gray frock-coat, armed with a heavy
cane, and wearing a battered hat, turned round abruptly behind him, and
followed him with his eyes until he disappeared, with folded arms and a
slow shake of the head, and his upper lip raised in company with his
lower to his nose, a sort of significant grimace which might be
translated by: “What is that man, after all? I certainly have seen him
somewhere. In any case, I am not his dupe.”
This person, grave with a gravity which was almost menacing, was one of
those men who, even when only seen by a rapid glimpse, arrest the
spectator’s attention.
His name was Javert, and he belonged to the police.
At M. sur M. he exercised the unpleasant but useful functions of an
inspector. He had not seen Madeleine’s beginnings. Javert owed the post
which he occupied to the protection of M. Chabouillet, the secretary of
the Minister of State, Comte Anglès, then prefect of police at Paris.
When Javert arrived at M. sur M. the fortune of the great manufacturer
was already made, and Father Madeleine had become Monsieur Madeleine.
Certain police officers have a peculiar physiognomy, which is
complicated with an air of baseness mingled with an air of authority.
Javert possessed this physiognomy minus the baseness.
It is our conviction that if souls were visible to the eyes, we should
be able to see distinctly that strange thing that each one individual
of the human race corresponds to some one of the species of the animal
creation; and we could easily recognize this truth, hardly perceived by
the thinker, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the pig to the
tiger, all animals exist in man, and that each one of them is in a man.
Sometimes even several of them at a time.
Animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and our vices,
straying before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls. God shows
them to us in order to induce us to reflect. Only since animals are
mere shadows, God has not made them capable of education in the full
sense of the word; what is the use? On the contrary, our souls being
realities and having a goal which is appropriate to them, God has
bestowed on them intelligence; that is to say, the possibility of
education. Social education, when well done, can always draw from a
soul, of whatever sort it may be, the utility which it contains.
This, be it said, is of course from the restricted point of view of the
terrestrial life which is apparent, and without prejudging the profound
question of the anterior or ulterior personality of the beings which
are not man. The visible _I_ in nowise authorizes the thinker to deny
the latent _I_. Having made this reservation, let us pass on.
Now, if the reader will admit, for a moment, with us, that in every man
there is one of the animal species of creation, it will be easy for us
to say what there was in Police Officer Javert.
The peasants of Asturias are convinced that in every litter of wolves
there is one dog, which is killed by the mother because, otherwise, as
he grew up, he would devour the other little ones.
Give to this dog-son of a wolf a human face, and the result will be
Javert.
Javert had been born in prison, of a fortune-teller, whose husband was
in the galleys. As he grew up, he thought that he was outside the pale
of society, and he despaired of ever re-entering it. He observed that
society unpardoningly excludes two classes of men,—those who attack it
and those who guard it; he had no choice except between these two
classes; at the same time, he was conscious of an indescribable