Les Misérables
water, wood; against the rocks, its iron, brass, and lead; against the
shadows, its light; against immensity, a needle.
If one wishes to form an idea of all those gigantic proportions which,
taken as a whole, constitute the ship of the line, one has only to
enter one of the six-story covered construction stocks, in the ports of
Brest or Toulon. The vessels in process of construction are under a
bell-glass there, as it were. This colossal beam is a yard; that great
column of wood which stretches out on the earth as far as the eye can
reach is the main-mast. Taking it from its root in the stocks to its
tip in the clouds, it is sixty fathoms long, and its diameter at its
base is three feet. The English main-mast rises to a height of two
hundred and seventeen feet above the water-line. The navy of our
fathers employed cables, ours employs chains. The simple pile of chains
on a ship of a hundred guns is four feet high, twenty feet in breadth,
and eight feet in depth. And how much wood is required to make this
ship? Three thousand cubic metres. It is a floating forest.
And moreover, let this be borne in mind, it is only a question here of
the military vessel of forty years ago, of the simple sailing-vessel;
steam, then in its infancy, has since added new miracles to that
prodigy which is called a war vessel. At the present time, for example,
the mixed vessel with a screw is a surprising machine, propelled by
three thousand square metres of canvas and by an engine of two thousand
five hundred horse-power.
Not to mention these new marvels, the ancient vessel of Christopher
Columbus and of De Ruyter is one of the masterpieces of man. It is as
inexhaustible in force as is the Infinite in gales; it stores up the
wind in its sails, it is precise in the immense vagueness of the
billows, it floats, and it reigns.
There comes an hour, nevertheless, when the gale breaks that sixty-foot
yard like a straw, when the wind bends that mast four hundred feet
tall, when that anchor, which weighs tens of thousands, is twisted in
the jaws of the waves like a fisherman’s hook in the jaws of a pike,
when those monstrous cannons utter plaintive and futile roars, which
the hurricane bears forth into the void and into night, when all that
power and all that majesty are engulfed in a power and majesty which
are superior.
Every time that immense force is displayed to culminate in an immense
feebleness it affords men food for thought. Hence in the ports curious
people abound around these marvellous machines of war and of
navigation, without being able to explain perfectly to themselves why.
Every day, accordingly, from morning until night, the quays, sluices,
and the jetties of the port of Toulon were covered with a multitude of
idlers and loungers, as they say in Paris, whose business consisted in
staring at the _Orion_.
The _Orion_ was a ship that had been ailing for a long time; in the
course of its previous cruises thick layers of barnacles had collected
on its keel to such a degree as to deprive it of half its speed; it had
gone into the dry dock the year before this, in order to have the
barnacles scraped off, then it had put to sea again; but this cleaning
had affected the bolts of the keel: in the neighborhood of the Balearic
Isles the sides had been strained and had opened; and, as the plating
in those days was not of sheet iron, the vessel had sprung a leak. A
violent equinoctial gale had come up, which had first staved in a
grating and a porthole on the larboard side, and damaged the
foretop-gallant-shrouds; in consequence of these injuries, the _Orion_
had run back to Toulon.
It anchored near the Arsenal; it was fully equipped, and repairs were
begun. The hull had received no damage on the starboard, but some of
the planks had been unnailed here and there, according to custom, to
permit of air entering the hold.
One morning the crowd which was gazing at it witnessed an accident.
The crew was busy bending the sails; the topman, who had to take the
upper corner of the main-top-sail on the starboard, lost his balance;
he was seen to waver; the multitude thronging the Arsenal quay uttered
a cry; the man’s head overbalanced his body; the man fell around the
yard, with his hands outstretched towards the abyss; on his way he
seized the footrope, first with one hand, then with the other, and
remained hanging from it: the sea lay below him at a dizzy depth; the
shock of his fall had imparted to the foot-rope a violent swinging
motion; the man swayed back and forth at the end of that rope, like a
stone in a sling.
It was incurring a frightful risk to go to his assistance; not one of
the sailors, all fishermen of the coast, recently levied for the
service, dared to attempt it. In the meantime, the unfortunate topman
was losing his strength; his anguish could not be discerned on his
face, but his exhaustion was visible in every limb; his arms were
contracted in horrible twitchings; every effort which he made to
re-ascend served but to augment the oscillations of the foot-rope; he
did not shout, for fear of exhausting his strength. All were awaiting
the minute when he should release his hold on the rope, and, from
instant to instant, heads were turned aside that his fall might not be
seen. There are moments when a bit of rope, a pole, the branch of a
tree, is life itself, and it is a terrible thing to see a living being
detach himself from it and fall like a ripe fruit.
All at once a man was seen climbing into the rigging with the agility
of a tiger-cat; this man was dressed in red; he was a convict; he wore
a green cap; he was a life convict. On arriving on a level with the
top, a gust of wind carried away his cap, and allowed a perfectly white
head to be seen: he was not a young man.
A convict employed on board with a detachment from the galleys had, in
fact, at the very first instant, hastened to the officer of the watch,
and, in the midst of the consternation and the hesitation of the crew,
while all the sailors were trembling and drawing back, he had asked the
officer’s permission to risk his life to save the topman; at an
affirmative sign from the officer he had broken the chain riveted to
his ankle with one blow of a hammer, then he had caught up a rope, and
had dashed into the rigging: no one noticed, at the instant, with what
ease that chain had been broken; it was only later on that the incident
was recalled.
In a twinkling he was on the yard; he paused for a few seconds and
appeared to be measuring it with his eye; these seconds, during which
the breeze swayed the topman at the extremity of a thread, seemed
centuries to those who were looking on. At last, the convict raised his
eyes to heaven and advanced a step: the crowd drew a long breath. He
was seen to run out along the yard: on arriving at the point, he
fastened the rope which he had brought to it, and allowed the other end
to hang down, then he began to descend the rope, hand over hand, and
then,—and the anguish was indescribable,—instead of one man suspended
over the gulf, there were two.
One would have said it was a spider coming to seize a fly, only here
the spider brought life, not death. Ten thousand glances were fastened
on this group; not a cry, not a word; the same tremor contracted every
brow; all mouths held their breath as though they feared to add the
slightest puff to the wind which was swaying the two unfortunate men.
In the meantime, the convict had succeeded in lowering himself to a
position near the sailor. It was high time; one minute more, and the
exhausted and despairing man would have allowed himself to fall into
the abyss. The convict had moored him securely with the cord to which
he clung with one hand, while he was working with the other. At last,
he was seen to climb back on the yard, and to drag the sailor up after
him; he held him there a moment to allow him to recover his strength,
then he grasped him in his arms and carried him, walking on the yard
himself to the cap, and from there to the main-top, where he left him
in the hands of his comrades.
At that moment the crowd broke into applause: old convict-sergeants
among them wept, and women embraced each other on the quay, and all
voices were heard to cry with a sort of tender rage, “Pardon for that
man!”
He, in the meantime, had immediately begun to make his descent to
rejoin his detachment. In order to reach them the more speedily, he
dropped into the rigging, and ran along one of the lower yards; all
eyes were following him. At a certain moment fear assailed them;
whether it was that he was fatigued, or that his head turned, they
thought they saw him hesitate and stagger. All at once the crowd
uttered a loud shout: the convict had fallen into the sea.
The fall was perilous. The frigate _Algésiras_ was anchored alongside
the _Orion_, and the poor convict had fallen between the two vessels:
it was to be feared that he would slip under one or the other of them.
Four men flung themselves hastily into a boat; the crowd cheered them
on; anxiety again took possession of all souls; the man had not risen
to the surface; he had disappeared in the sea without leaving a ripple,
as though he had fallen into a cask of oil: they sounded, they dived.
In vain. The search was continued until the evening: they did not even
find the body.
On the following day the Toulon newspaper printed these lines:—
“Nov. 17, 1823. Yesterday, a convict belonging to the detachment on
board of the _Orion_, on his return from rendering assistance to a
sailor, fell into the sea and was drowned. The body has not yet been
found; it is supposed that it is entangled among the piles of the
Arsenal point: this man was committed under the number 9,430, and his
name was Jean Valjean.”
BOOK THIRD—ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PROMISE MADE TO THE DEAD WOMAN
CHAPTER I—THE WATER QUESTION AT MONTFERMEIL
Montfermeil is situated between Livry and Chelles, on the southern edge
of that lofty table-land which separates the Ourcq from the Marne. At
the present day it is a tolerably large town, ornamented all the year
through with plaster villas, and on Sundays with beaming bourgeois. In
1823 there were at Montfermeil neither so many white houses nor so many
well-satisfied citizens: it was only a village in the forest. Some
pleasure-houses of the last century were to be met with there, to be
sure, which were recognizable by their grand air, their balconies in
twisted iron, and their long windows, whose tiny panes cast all sorts
of varying shades of green on the white of the closed shutters; but
Montfermeil was nonetheless a village. Retired cloth-merchants and
rusticating attorneys had not discovered it as yet; it was a peaceful
and charming place, which was not on the road to anywhere: there people
lived, and cheaply, that peasant rustic life which is so bounteous and
so easy; only, water was rare there, on account of the elevation of the
plateau.
It was necessary to fetch it from a considerable distance; the end of
the village towards Gagny drew its water from the magnificent ponds
which exist in the woods there. The other end, which surrounds the
church and which lies in the direction of Chelles, found drinking-water
only at a little spring half-way down the slope, near the road to
Chelles, about a quarter of an hour from Montfermeil.
Thus each household found it hard work to keep supplied with water. The
large houses, the aristocracy, of which the Thénardier tavern formed a
part, paid half a farthing a bucketful to a man who made a business of
it, and who earned about eight sous a day in his enterprise of
supplying Montfermeil with water; but this good man only worked until