Les Misérables
much vivacity, and you are throwing your arms out from under the
clothes, and that makes you cough.”
In fact, fits of coughing interrupted Fantine at nearly every word.
Fantine did not murmur; she feared that she had injured by her too
passionate lamentations the confidence which she was desirous of
inspiring, and she began to talk of indifferent things.
“Montfermeil is quite pretty, is it not? People go there on pleasure
parties in summer. Are the Thénardiers prosperous? There are not many
travellers in their parts. That inn of theirs is a sort of a
cook-shop.”
M. Madeleine was still holding her hand, and gazing at her with
anxiety; it was evident that he had come to tell her things before
which his mind now hesitated. The doctor, having finished his visit,
retired. Sister Simplice remained alone with them.
But in the midst of this pause Fantine exclaimed:—
“I hear her! mon Dieu, I hear her!”
She stretched out her arm to enjoin silence about her, held her breath,
and began to listen with rapture.
There was a child playing in the yard—the child of the portress or of
some work-woman. It was one of those accidents which are always
occurring, and which seem to form a part of the mysterious
stage-setting of mournful scenes. The child—a little girl—was going and
coming, running to warm herself, laughing, singing at the top of her
voice. Alas! in what are the plays of children not intermingled. It was
this little girl whom Fantine heard singing.
“Oh!” she resumed, “it is my Cosette! I recognize her voice.”
The child retreated as it had come; the voice died away. Fantine
listened for a while longer, then her face clouded over, and M.
Madeleine heard her say, in a low voice: “How wicked that doctor is not
to allow me to see my daughter! That man has an evil countenance, that
he has.”
But the smiling background of her thoughts came to the front again. She
continued to talk to herself, with her head resting on the pillow: “How
happy we are going to be! We shall have a little garden the very first
thing; M. Madeleine has promised it to me. My daughter will play in the
garden. She must know her letters by this time. I will make her spell.
She will run over the grass after butterflies. I will watch her. Then
she will take her first communion. Ah! when will she take her first
communion?”
She began to reckon on her fingers.
“One, two, three, four—she is seven years old. In five years she will
have a white veil, and openwork stockings; she will look like a little
woman. O my good sister, you do not know how foolish I become when I
think of my daughter’s first communion!”
She began to laugh.
He had released Fantine’s hand. He listened to her words as one listens
to the sighing of the breeze, with his eyes on the ground, his mind
absorbed in reflection which had no bottom. All at once she ceased
speaking, and this caused him to raise his head mechanically. Fantine
had become terrible.
She no longer spoke, she no longer breathed; she had raised herself to
a sitting posture, her thin shoulder emerged from her chemise; her
face, which had been radiant but a moment before, was ghastly, and she
seemed to have fixed her eyes, rendered large with terror, on something
alarming at the other extremity of the room.
“Good God!” he exclaimed; “what ails you, Fantine?”
She made no reply; she did not remove her eyes from the object which
she seemed to see. She removed one hand from his arm, and with the
other made him a sign to look behind him.
He turned, and beheld Javert.
CHAPTER III—JAVERT SATISFIED
This is what had taken place.
The half-hour after midnight had just struck when M. Madeleine quitted
the Hall of Assizes in Arras. He regained his inn just in time to set
out again by the mail-wagon, in which he had engaged his place. A
little before six o’clock in the morning he had arrived at M. sur M.,
and his first care had been to post a letter to M. Laffitte, then to
enter the infirmary and see Fantine.
However, he had hardly quitted the audience hall of the Court of
Assizes, when the district-attorney, recovering from his first shock,
had taken the word to deplore the mad deed of the honorable mayor of M.
sur M., to declare that his convictions had not been in the least
modified by that curious incident, which would be explained thereafter,
and to demand, in the meantime, the condemnation of that Champmathieu,
who was evidently the real Jean Valjean. The district-attorney’s
persistence was visibly at variance with the sentiments of every one,
of the public, of the court, and of the jury. The counsel for the
defence had some difficulty in refuting this harangue and in
establishing that, in consequence of the revelations of M. Madeleine,
that is to say, of the real Jean Valjean, the aspect of the matter had
been thoroughly altered, and that the jury had before their eyes now
only an innocent man. Thence the lawyer had drawn some epiphonemas, not
very fresh, unfortunately, upon judicial errors, etc., etc.; the
President, in his summing up, had joined the counsel for the defence,
and in a few minutes the jury had thrown Champmathieu out of the case.
Nevertheless, the district-attorney was bent on having a Jean Valjean;
and as he had no longer Champmathieu, he took Madeleine.
Immediately after Champmathieu had been set at liberty, the
district-attorney shut himself up with the President. They conferred
“as to the necessity of seizing the person of M. le Maire of M. sur M.”
This phrase, in which there was a great deal of _of_, is the
district-attorney’s, written with his own hand, on the minutes of his
report to the attorney-general. His first emotion having passed off,
the President did not offer many objections. Justice must, after all,
take its course. And then, when all was said, although the President
was a kindly and a tolerably intelligent man, he was, at the same time,
a devoted and almost an ardent royalist, and he had been shocked to
hear the Mayor of M. sur M. say the _Emperor_, and not _Bonaparte_,
when alluding to the landing at Cannes.
The order for his arrest was accordingly despatched. The
district-attorney forwarded it to M. sur M. by a special messenger, at
full speed, and entrusted its execution to Police Inspector Javert.
The reader knows that Javert had returned to M. sur M. immediately
after having given his deposition.
Javert was just getting out of bed when the messenger handed him the
order of arrest and the command to produce the prisoner.
The messenger himself was a very clever member of the police, who, in
two words, informed Javert of what had taken place at Arras. The order
of arrest, signed by the district-attorney, was couched in these words:
“Inspector Javert will apprehend the body of the Sieur Madeleine, mayor
of M. sur M., who, in this day’s session of the court, was recognized
as the liberated convict, Jean Valjean.”
Any one who did not know Javert, and who had chanced to see him at the
moment when he penetrated the antechamber of the infirmary, could have
divined nothing of what had taken place, and would have thought his air
the most ordinary in the world. He was cool, calm, grave, his gray hair
was perfectly smooth upon his temples, and he had just mounted the
stairs with his habitual deliberation. Any one who was thoroughly
acquainted with him, and who had examined him attentively at the
moment, would have shuddered. The buckle of his leather stock was under
his left ear instead of at the nape of his neck. This betrayed unwonted
agitation.
Javert was a complete character, who never had a wrinkle in his duty or
in his uniform; methodical with malefactors, rigid with the buttons of
his coat.
That he should have set the buckle of his stock awry, it was
indispensable that there should have taken place in him one of those
emotions which may be designated as internal earthquakes.
He had come in a simple way, had made a requisition on the neighboring
post for a corporal and four soldiers, had left the soldiers in the
courtyard, had had Fantine’s room pointed out to him by the portress,
who was utterly unsuspicious, accustomed as she was to seeing armed men
inquiring for the mayor.
On arriving at Fantine’s chamber, Javert turned the handle, pushed the
door open with the gentleness of a sick-nurse or a police spy, and
entered.
Properly speaking, he did not enter. He stood erect in the half-open
door, his hat on his head and his left hand thrust into his coat, which
was buttoned up to the chin. In the bend of his elbow the leaden head
of his enormous cane, which was hidden behind him, could be seen.
Thus he remained for nearly a minute, without his presence being
perceived. All at once Fantine raised her eyes, saw him, and made M.
Madeleine turn round.
The instant that Madeleine’s glance encountered Javert’s glance,
Javert, without stirring, without moving from his post, without
approaching him, became terrible. No human sentiment can be as terrible
as joy.
It was the visage of a demon who has just found his damned soul.
The satisfaction of at last getting hold of Jean Valjean caused all
that was in his soul to appear in his countenance. The depths having
been stirred up, mounted to the surface. The humiliation of having, in
some slight degree, lost the scent, and of having indulged, for a few
moments, in an error with regard to Champmathieu, was effaced by pride
at having so well and accurately divined in the first place, and of
having for so long cherished a just instinct. Javert’s content shone
forth in his sovereign attitude. The deformity of triumph overspread
that narrow brow. All the demonstrations of horror which a satisfied
face can afford were there.
Javert was in heaven at that moment. Without putting the thing clearly
to himself, but with a confused intuition of the necessity of his
presence and of his success, he, Javert, personified justice, light,
and truth in their celestial function of crushing out evil. Behind him
and around him, at an infinite distance, he had authority, reason, the
case judged, the legal conscience, the public prosecution, all the
stars; he was protecting order, he was causing the law to yield up its
thunders, he was avenging society, he was lending a helping hand to the
absolute, he was standing erect in the midst of a glory. There existed
in his victory a remnant of defiance and of combat. Erect, haughty,
brilliant, he flaunted abroad in open day the superhuman bestiality of
a ferocious archangel. The terrible shadow of the action which he was
accomplishing caused the vague flash of the social sword to be visible
in his clenched fist; happy and indignant, he held his heel upon crime,
vice, rebellion, perdition, hell; he was radiant, he exterminated, he
smiled, and there was an incontestable grandeur in this monstrous Saint
Michael.
Javert, though frightful, had nothing ignoble about him.
Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things
which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when
hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human
conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues
which have one vice,—error. The honest, pitiless joy of a fanatic in
the full flood of his atrocity preserves a certain lugubriously
venerable radiance. Without himself suspecting the fact, Javert in his
formidable happiness was to be pitied, as is every ignorant man who
triumphs. Nothing could be so poignant and so terrible as this face,
wherein was displayed all that may be designated as the evil of the
good.
CHAPTER IV—AUTHORITY REASSERTS ITS RIGHTS
Fantine had not seen Javert since the day on which the mayor had torn