Les Misérables
“It will not be opened at all,” replied the usher.
“What! It will not be opened when the hearing is resumed? Is not the
hearing suspended?”
“The hearing has just been begun again,” replied the usher, “but the
door will not be opened again.”
“Why?”
“Because the hall is full.”
“What! There is not room for one more?”
“Not another one. The door is closed. No one can enter now.”
The usher added after a pause: “There are, to tell the truth, two or
three extra places behind Monsieur le Président, but Monsieur le
Président only admits public functionaries to them.”
So saying, the usher turned his back.
He retired with bowed head, traversed the antechamber, and slowly
descended the stairs, as though hesitating at every step. It is
probable that he was holding counsel with himself. The violent conflict
which had been going on within him since the preceding evening was not
yet ended; and every moment he encountered some new phase of it. On
reaching the landing-place, he leaned his back against the balusters
and folded his arms. All at once he opened his coat, drew out his
pocket-book, took from it a pencil, tore out a leaf, and upon that leaf
he wrote rapidly, by the light of the street lantern, this line: _M.
Madeleine, Mayor of M. sur M._; then he ascended the stairs once more
with great strides, made his way through the crowd, walked straight up
to the usher, handed him the paper, and said in an authoritative
manner:—
“Take this to Monsieur le Président.”
The usher took the paper, cast a glance upon it, and obeyed.
CHAPTER VIII—AN ENTRANCE BY FAVOR
Although he did not suspect the fact, the mayor of M. sur M. enjoyed a
sort of celebrity. For the space of seven years his reputation for
virtue had filled the whole of Bas Boulonnais; it had eventually passed
the confines of a small district and had been spread abroad through two
or three neighboring departments. Besides the service which he had
rendered to the chief town by resuscitating the black jet industry,
there was not one out of the hundred and forty communes of the
arrondissement of M. sur M. which was not indebted to him for some
benefit. He had even at need contrived to aid and multiply the
industries of other arrondissements. It was thus that he had, when
occasion offered, supported with his credit and his funds the linen
factory at Boulogne, the flax-spinning industry at Frévent, and the
hydraulic manufacture of cloth at Boubers-sur-Canche. Everywhere the
name of M. Madeleine was pronounced with veneration. Arras and Douai
envied the happy little town of M. sur M. its mayor.
The Councillor of the Royal Court of Douai, who was presiding over this
session of the Assizes at Arras, was acquainted, in common with the
rest of the world, with this name which was so profoundly and
universally honored. When the usher, discreetly opening the door which
connected the council-chamber with the court-room, bent over the back
of the President’s armchair and handed him the paper on which was
inscribed the line which we have just perused, adding: “The gentleman
desires to be present at the trial,” the President, with a quick and
deferential movement, seized a pen and wrote a few words at the bottom
of the paper and returned it to the usher, saying, “Admit him.”
The unhappy man whose history we are relating had remained near the
door of the hall, in the same place and the same attitude in which the
usher had left him. In the midst of his reverie he heard some one
saying to him, “Will Monsieur do me the honor to follow me?” It was the
same usher who had turned his back upon him but a moment previously,
and who was now bowing to the earth before him. At the same time, the
usher handed him the paper. He unfolded it, and as he chanced to be
near the light, he could read it.
“The President of the Court of Assizes presents his respects to M.
Madeleine.”
He crushed the paper in his hand as though those words contained for
him a strange and bitter aftertaste.
He followed the usher.
A few minutes later he found himself alone in a sort of wainscoted
cabinet of severe aspect, lighted by two wax candles, placed upon a
table with a green cloth. The last words of the usher who had just
quitted him still rang in his ears: “Monsieur, you are now in the
council-chamber; you have only to turn the copper handle of yonder
door, and you will find yourself in the court-room, behind the
President’s chair.” These words were mingled in his thoughts with a
vague memory of narrow corridors and dark staircases which he had
recently traversed.
The usher had left him alone. The supreme moment had arrived. He sought
to collect his faculties, but could not. It is chiefly at the moment
when there is the greatest need for attaching them to the painful
realities of life, that the threads of thought snap within the brain.
He was in the very place where the judges deliberated and condemned.
With stupid tranquillity he surveyed this peaceful and terrible
apartment, where so many lives had been broken, which was soon to ring
with his name, and which his fate was at that moment traversing. He
stared at the wall, then he looked at himself, wondering that it should
be that chamber and that it should be he.
He had eaten nothing for four and twenty hours; he was worn out by the
jolts of the cart, but he was not conscious of it. It seemed to him
that he felt nothing.
He approached a black frame which was suspended on the wall, and which
contained, under glass, an ancient autograph letter of Jean Nicolas
Pache, mayor of Paris and minister, and dated, through an error, no
doubt, the _9th of June_, of the year II., and in which Pache forwarded
to the commune the list of ministers and deputies held in arrest by
them. Any spectator who had chanced to see him at that moment, and who
had watched him, would have imagined, doubtless, that this letter
struck him as very curious, for he did not take his eyes from it, and
he read it two or three times. He read it without paying any attention
to it, and unconsciously. He was thinking of Fantine and Cosette.
As he dreamed, he turned round, and his eyes fell upon the brass knob
of the door which separated him from the Court of Assizes. He had
almost forgotten that door. His glance, calm at first, paused there,
remained fixed on that brass handle, then grew terrified, and little by
little became impregnated with fear. Beads of perspiration burst forth
among his hair and trickled down upon his temples.
At a certain moment he made that indescribable gesture of a sort of
authority mingled with rebellion, which is intended to convey, and
which does so well convey, _“Pardieu! who compels me to this?”_ Then he
wheeled briskly round, caught sight of the door through which he had
entered in front of him, went to it, opened it, and passed out. He was
no longer in that chamber; he was outside in a corridor, a long, narrow
corridor, broken by steps and gratings, making all sorts of angles,
lighted here and there by lanterns similar to the night taper of
invalids, the corridor through which he had approached. He breathed, he
listened; not a sound in front, not a sound behind him, and he fled as
though pursued.
When he had turned many angles in this corridor, he still listened. The
same silence reigned, and there was the same darkness around him. He
was out of breath; he staggered; he leaned against the wall. The stone
was cold; the perspiration lay ice-cold on his brow; he straightened
himself up with a shiver.
Then, there alone in the darkness, trembling with cold and with
something else, too, perchance, he meditated.
He had meditated all night long; he had meditated all the day: he heard
within him but one voice, which said, “Alas!”
A quarter of an hour passed thus. At length he bowed his head, sighed
with agony, dropped his arms, and retraced his steps. He walked slowly,
and as though crushed. It seemed as though some one had overtaken him
in his flight and was leading him back.
He re-entered the council-chamber. The first thing he caught sight of
was the knob of the door. This knob, which was round and of polished
brass, shone like a terrible star for him. He gazed at it as a lamb
might gaze into the eye of a tiger.
He could not take his eyes from it. From time to time he advanced a
step and approached the door.
Had he listened, he would have heard the sound of the adjoining hall
like a sort of confused murmur; but he did not listen, and he did not
hear.
Suddenly, without himself knowing how it happened, he found himself
near the door; he grasped the knob convulsively; the door opened.
He was in the court-room.
CHAPTER IX—A PLACE WHERE CONVICTIONS ARE IN PROCESS OF FORMATION
He advanced a pace, closed the door mechanically behind him, and
remained standing, contemplating what he saw.
It was a vast and badly lighted apartment, now full of uproar, now full
of silence, where all the apparatus of a criminal case, with its petty
and mournful gravity in the midst of the throng, was in process of
development.
At the one end of the hall, the one where he was, were judges, with
abstracted air, in threadbare robes, who were gnawing their nails or
closing their eyelids; at the other end, a ragged crowd; lawyers in all
sorts of attitudes; soldiers with hard but honest faces; ancient,
spotted woodwork, a dirty ceiling, tables covered with serge that was
yellow rather than green; doors blackened by handmarks; tap-room lamps
which emitted more smoke than light, suspended from nails in the
wainscot; on the tables candles in brass candlesticks; darkness,
ugliness, sadness; and from all this there was disengaged an austere
and august impression, for one there felt that grand human thing which
is called the law, and that grand divine thing which is called justice.
No one in all that throng paid any attention to him; all glances were
directed towards a single point, a wooden bench placed against a small
door, in the stretch of wall on the President’s left; on this bench,
illuminated by several candles, sat a man between two gendarmes.
This man was _the_ man.
He did not seek him; he saw him; his eyes went thither naturally, as
though they had known beforehand where that figure was.
He thought he was looking at himself, grown old; not absolutely the
same in face, of course, but exactly similar in attitude and aspect,
with his bristling hair, with that wild and uneasy eye, with that
blouse, just as it was on the day when he entered D——, full of hatred,
concealing his soul in that hideous mass of frightful thoughts which he
had spent nineteen years in collecting on the floor of the prison.
He said to himself with a shudder, “Good God! shall I become like that
again?”
This creature seemed to be at least sixty; there was something
indescribably coarse, stupid, and frightened about him.
At the sound made by the opening door, people had drawn aside to make
way for him; the President had turned his head, and, understanding that
the personage who had just entered was the mayor of M. sur M., he had
bowed to him; the attorney-general, who had seen M. Madeleine at M. sur
M., whither the duties of his office had called him more than once,
recognized him and saluted him also: he had hardly perceived it; he was
the victim of a sort of hallucination; he was watching.
Judges, clerks, gendarmes, a throng of cruelly curious heads, all these
he had already beheld once, in days gone by, twenty-seven years before;
he had encountered those fatal things once more; there they were; they
moved; they existed; it was no longer an effort of his memory, a mirage
of his thought; they were real gendarmes and real judges, a real crowd,