Les Misérables, page 28
CHAPTER VII--THE INTERIOR OF DESPAIR
Let us try to say it.
It is necessary that society should look at these things, because it isitself which creates them.
He was, as we have said, an ignorant man, but he was not a fool. Thelight of nature was ignited in him. Unhappiness, which also possesses aclearness of vision of its own, augmented the small amount of daylightwhich existed in this mind. Beneath the cudgel, beneath the chain, inthe cell, in hardship, beneath the burning sun of the galleys, upon theplank bed of the convict, he withdrew into his own consciousness andmeditated.
He constituted himself the tribunal.
He began by putting himself on trial.
He recognized the fact that he was not an innocent man unjustlypunished. He admitted that he had committed an extreme and blameworthyact; that that loaf of bread would probably not have been refused tohim had he asked for it; that, in any case, it would have been better towait until he could get it through compassion or through work; thatit is not an unanswerable argument to say, "Can one wait when one ishungry?" That, in the first place, it is very rare for any one to die ofhunger, literally; and next, that, fortunately or unfortunately, manis so constituted that he can suffer long and much, both morally andphysically, without dying; that it is therefore necessary to havepatience; that that would even have been better for those poor littlechildren; that it had been an act of madness for him, a miserable,unfortunate wretch, to take society at large violently by the collar,and to imagine that one can escape from misery through theft; that thatis in any case a poor door through which to escape from misery throughwhich infamy enters; in short, that he was in the wrong.
Then he asked himself--
Whether he had been the only one in fault in his fatal history. Whetherit was not a serious thing, that he, a laborer, out of work, that he, anindustrious man, should have lacked bread. And whether, the fault oncecommitted and confessed, the chastisement had not been ferocious anddisproportioned. Whether there had not been more abuse on the part ofthe law, in respect to the penalty, than there had been on the partof the culprit in respect to his fault. Whether there had not been anexcess of weights in one balance of the scale, in the one which containsexpiation. Whether the over-weight of the penalty was not equivalentto the annihilation of the crime, and did not result in reversing thesituation, of replacing the fault of the delinquent by the fault of therepression, of converting the guilty man into the victim, and the debtorinto the creditor, and of ranging the law definitely on the side of theman who had violated it.
Whether this penalty, complicated by successive aggravations forattempts at escape, had not ended in becoming a sort of outrageperpetrated by the stronger upon the feebler, a crime of society againstthe individual, a crime which was being committed afresh every day, acrime which had lasted nineteen years.
He asked himself whether human society could have the right to force itsmembers to suffer equally in one case for its own unreasonable lackof foresight, and in the other case for its pitiless foresight; and toseize a poor man forever between a defect and an excess, a default ofwork and an excess of punishment.
Whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely thoseof its members who were the least well endowed in the division of goodsmade by chance, and consequently the most deserving of consideration.
These questions put and answered, he judged society and condemned it.
He condemned it to his hatred.
He made it responsible for the fate which he was suffering, and he saidto himself that it might be that one day he should not hesitate to callit to account. He declared to himself that there was no equilibriumbetween the harm which he had caused and the harm which was being doneto him; he finally arrived at the conclusion that his punishment wasnot, in truth, unjust, but that it most assuredly was iniquitous.
Anger may be both foolish and absurd; one can be irritated wrongfully;one is exasperated only when there is some show of right on one's sideat bottom. Jean Valjean felt himself exasperated.
And besides, human society had done him nothing but harm; he had neverseen anything of it save that angry face which it calls Justice, andwhich it shows to those whom it strikes. Men had only touched him tobruise him. Every contact with them had been a blow. Never, sincehis infancy, since the days of his mother, of his sister, had he everencountered a friendly word and a kindly glance. From suffering tosuffering, he had gradually arrived at the conviction that life is awar; and that in this war he was the conquered. He had no other weaponthan his hate. He resolved to whet it in the galleys and to bear it awaywith him when he departed.
There was at Toulon a school for the convicts, kept by the Ignorantinfriars, where the most necessary branches were taught to those of theunfortunate men who had a mind for them. He was of the number who hada mind. He went to school at the age of forty, and learned to read,to write, to cipher. He felt that to fortify his intelligence was tofortify his hate. In certain cases, education and enlightenment canserve to eke out evil.
This is a sad thing to say; after having judged society, which hadcaused his unhappiness, he judged Providence, which had made society,and he condemned it also.
Thus during nineteen years of torture and slavery, this soul mounted andat the same time fell. Light entered it on one side, and darkness on theother.
Jean Valjean had not, as we have seen, an evil nature. He was still goodwhen he arrived at the galleys. He there condemned society, and feltthat he was becoming wicked; he there condemned Providence, and wasconscious that he was becoming impious.
It is difficult not to indulge in meditation at this point.
Does human nature thus change utterly and from top to bottom? Can theman created good by God be rendered wicked by man? Can the soul becompletely made over by fate, and become evil, fate being evil? Canthe heart become misshapen and contract incurable deformities andinfirmities under the oppression of a disproportionate unhappiness,as the vertebral column beneath too low a vault? Is there not in everyhuman soul, was there not in the soul of Jean Valjean in particular, afirst spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal inthe other, which good can develop, fan, ignite, and make to glow withsplendor, and which evil can never wholly extinguish?
Grave and obscure questions, to the last of which every physiologistwould probably have responded no, and that without hesitation, hadhe beheld at Toulon, during the hours of repose, which were for JeanValjean hours of revery, this gloomy galley-slave, seated with foldedarms upon the bar of some capstan, with the end of his chain thrust intohis pocket to prevent its dragging, serious, silent, and thoughtful,a pariah of the laws which regarded the man with wrath, condemned bycivilization, and regarding heaven with severity.
Certainly,--and we make no attempt to dissimulate the fact,--theobserving physiologist would have beheld an irremediable misery; hewould, perchance, have pitied this sick man, of the law's making; buthe would not have even essayed any treatment; he would have turned asidehis gaze from the caverns of which he would have caught a glimpse withinthis soul, and, like Dante at the portals of hell, he would have effacedfrom this existence the word which the finger of God has, nevertheless,inscribed upon the brow of every man,--hope.
Was this state of his soul, which we have attempted to analyze, asperfectly clear to Jean Valjean as we have tried to render it forthose who read us? Did Jean Valjean distinctly perceive, after theirformation, and had he seen distinctly during the process of theirformation, all the elements of which his moral misery was composed? Hadthis rough and unlettered man gathered a perfectly clear perception ofthe succession of ideas through which he had, by degrees, mounted anddescended to the lugubrious aspects which had, for so many years, formedthe inner horizon of his spirit? Was he conscious of all that passedwithin him, and of all that was working there? That is somethingwhich we do not presume to state; it is something which we do not evenbelieve. There was too much ignorance in Jean Valjean, even after hismisfortune, to prevent much vagueness from still lingering there. Attimes he did not rightly know himself what he felt. Jean Valjean was inthe shadows; he suffered in the shadows; he hated in the shadows; onemight have said that he hated in advance of himself. He dwelt habituallyin this shadow, feeling his way like a blind man and a dreamer. Only, atintervals, there suddenly came to him, from without and from within, anaccess of wrath, a surcharge of suffering, a livid and rapid flash whichilluminated his whole soul, and caused to appear abruptly all aroundhim, in front, behind, amid the gleams of a frightful light, the hideousprecipices and the sombre perspective of his destiny.
The flash passed, the night closed in again; and where was he? He nolonger knew. The peculiarity of pains of this nature, in whichthat which is pitiless--that is to say, that which isbrutalizing--predominates, is to transform a man, little by little, bya sort of stupid transfiguration, into a wild beast; sometimes into aferocious beast.
Jean Valjean's successive and obstinate attempts at escape would alonesuffice to prove this strange working of the law upon the human soul.Jean Valjean would have renewed these attempts, utterly useless andfoolish as they were, as often as the opportunity had presented itself,without reflecting for an instant on the result, nor on the experienceswhich he had already gone through. He escaped impetuously, like the wolfwho finds his cage open. Instinct said to him, "Flee!" Reason would havesaid, "Remain!" But in the presence of so violent a temptation, reasonvanished; nothing remained but instinct. The beast alone acted. Whenhe was recaptured, the fresh severities inflicted on him only served torender him still more wild.
One detail, which we must not omit, is that he possessed a physicalstrength which was not approached by a single one of the denizens of thegalleys. At work, at paying out a cable or winding up a capstan, JeanValjean was worth four men. He sometimes lifted and sustained enormousweights on his back; and when the occasion demanded it, he replacedthat implement which is called a jack-screw, and was formerly called_orgueil_ [pride], whence, we may remark in passing, is derived thename of the Rue Montorgueil, near the Halles [Fishmarket] in Paris. Hiscomrades had nicknamed him Jean the Jack-screw. Once, when they wererepairing the balcony of the town-hall at Toulon, one of those admirablecaryatids of Puget, which support the balcony, became loosened, and wason the point of falling. Jean Valjean, who was present, supported thecaryatid with his shoulder, and gave the workmen time to arrive.
His suppleness even exceeded his strength. Certain convicts who wereforever dreaming of escape, ended by making a veritable science of forceand skill combined. It is the science of muscles. An entire system ofmysterious statics is daily practised by prisoners, men who are foreverenvious of the flies and birds. To climb a vertical surface, and to findpoints of support where hardly a projection was visible, was play toJean Valjean. An angle of the wall being given, with the tension of hisback and legs, with his elbows and his heels fitted into the unevennessof the stone, he raised himself as if by magic to the third story. Hesometimes mounted thus even to the roof of the galley prison.
He spoke but little. He laughed not at all. An excessive emotion wasrequired to wring from him, once or twice a year, that lugubrious laughof the convict, which is like the echo of the laugh of a demon. To allappearance, he seemed to be occupied in the constant contemplation ofsomething terrible.
He was absorbed, in fact.
Athwart the unhealthy perceptions of an incomplete nature and a crushedintelligence, he was confusedly conscious that some monstrous thing wasresting on him. In that obscure and wan shadow within which he crawled,each time that he turned his neck and essayed to raise his glance,he perceived with terror, mingled with rage, a sort of frightfulaccumulation of things, collecting and mounting above him, beyond therange of his vision,--laws, prejudices, men, and deeds,--whose outlinesescaped him, whose mass terrified him, and which was nothing else thanthat prodigious pyramid which we call civilization. He distinguished,here and there in that swarming and formless mass, now near him, nowafar off and on inaccessible table-lands, some group, some detail,vividly illuminated; here the galley-sergeant and his cudgel; there thegendarme and his sword; yonder the mitred archbishop; away at the top,like a sort of sun, the Emperor, crowned and dazzling. It seemed to himthat these distant splendors, far from dissipating his night, renderedit more funereal and more black. All this--laws, prejudices, deeds, men,things--went and came above him, over his head, in accordance with thecomplicated and mysterious movement which God imparts to civilization,walking over him and crushing him with I know not what peacefulnessin its cruelty and inexorability in its indifference. Souls which havefallen to the bottom of all possible misfortune, unhappy men lost in thelowest of those limbos at which no one any longer looks, the reproved ofthe law, feel the whole weight of this human society, so formidable forhim who is without, so frightful for him who is beneath, resting upontheir heads.
In this situation Jean Valjean meditated; and what could be the natureof his meditation?
If the grain of millet beneath the millstone had thoughts, it would,doubtless, think that same thing which Jean Valjean thought.
All these things, realities full of spectres, phantasmagories full ofrealities, had eventually created for him a sort of interior state whichis almost indescribable.
At times, amid his convict toil, he paused. He fell to thinking. Hisreason, at one and the same time riper and more troubled than of yore,rose in revolt. Everything which had happened to him seemed to himabsurd; everything that surrounded him seemed to him impossible. He saidto himself, "It is a dream." He gazed at the galley-sergeant standing afew paces from him; the galley-sergeant seemed a phantom to him. All ofa sudden the phantom dealt him a blow with his cudgel.
Visible nature hardly existed for him. It would almost be true to saythat there existed for Jean Valjean neither sun, nor fine summer days,nor radiant sky, nor fresh April dawns. I know not what vent-holedaylight habitually illumined his soul.
To sum up, in conclusion, that which can be summed up and translatedinto positive results in all that we have just pointed out, we willconfine ourselves to the statement that, in the course of nineteenyears, Jean Valjean, the inoffensive tree-pruner of Faverolles, theformidable convict of Toulon, had become capable, thanks to the mannerin which the galleys had moulded him, of two sorts of evil action:firstly, of evil action which was rapid, unpremeditated, dashing,entirely instinctive, in the nature of reprisals for the evil whichhe had undergone; secondly, of evil action which was serious, grave,consciously argued out and premeditated, with the false ideas whichsuch a misfortune can furnish. His deliberate deeds passed throughthree successive phases, which natures of a certain stamp can alonetraverse,--reasoning, will, perseverance. He had for moving causes hishabitual wrath, bitterness of soul, a profound sense of indignitiessuffered, the reaction even against the good, the innocent, and thejust, if there are any such. The point of departure, like the pointof arrival, for all his thoughts, was hatred of human law; that hatredwhich, if it be not arrested in its development by some providentialincident, becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, thenthe hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation, and whichmanifests itself by a vague, incessant, and brutal desire to do harm tosome living being, no matter whom. It will be perceived that it was notwithout reason that Jean Valjean's passport described him as _a verydangerous man_.
From year to year this soul had dried away slowly, but with fatalsureness. When the heart is dry, the eye is dry. On his departure fromthe galleys it had been nineteen years since he had shed a tear.
