CHAPTER VI--JEAN VALJEAN

  Towards the middle of the night Jean Valjean woke.

  Jean Valjean came from a poor peasant family of Brie. He had not learnedto read in his childhood. When he reached man's estate, he became atree-pruner at Faverolles. His mother was named Jeanne Mathieu; hisfather was called Jean Valjean or Vlajean, probably a sobriquet, and acontraction of _voilà_ Jean, "here's Jean."

  Jean Valjean was of that thoughtful but not gloomy disposition whichconstitutes the peculiarity of affectionate natures. On the whole,however, there was something decidedly sluggish and insignificant aboutJean Valjean in appearance, at least. He had lost his father and motherat a very early age. His mother had died of a milk fever, which had notbeen properly attended to. His father, a tree-pruner, like himself, hadbeen killed by a fall from a tree. All that remained to Jean Valjeanwas a sister older than himself,--a widow with seven children, boys andgirls. This sister had brought up Jean Valjean, and so long as she had ahusband she lodged and fed her young brother.

  The husband died. The eldest of the seven children was eight years old.The youngest, one.

  Jean Valjean had just attained his twenty-fifth year. He took thefather's place, and, in his turn, supported the sister who had broughthim up. This was done simply as a duty and even a little churlishlyon the part of Jean Valjean. Thus his youth had been spent in rude andill-paid toil. He had never known a "kind woman friend" in his nativeparts. He had not had the time to fall in love.

  He returned at night weary, and ate his broth without uttering a word.His sister, mother Jeanne, often took the best part of his repast fromhis bowl while he was eating,--a bit of meat, a slice of bacon, theheart of the cabbage,--to give to one of her children. As he went oneating, with his head bent over the table and almost into his soup, hislong hair falling about his bowl and concealing his eyes, he had the airof perceiving nothing and allowing it. There was at Faverolles, notfar from the Valjean thatched cottage, on the other side of the lane,a farmer's wife named Marie-Claude; the Valjean children, habituallyfamished, sometimes went to borrow from Marie-Claude a pint of milk, intheir mother's name, which they drank behind a hedge or in some alleycorner, snatching the jug from each other so hastily that the littlegirls spilled it on their aprons and down their necks. If their motherhad known of this marauding, she would have punished the delinquentsseverely. Jean Valjean gruffly and grumblingly paid Marie-Claude forthe pint of milk behind their mother's back, and the children were notpunished.

  In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he hired out asa hay-maker, as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm, as a drudge. He didwhatever he could. His sister worked also but what could she do withseven little children? It was a sad group enveloped in misery, which wasbeing gradually annihilated. A very hard winter came. Jean had no work.The family had no bread. No bread literally. Seven children!

  One Sunday evening, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the Church Square atFaverolles, was preparing to go to bed, when he heard a violent blow onthe grated front of his shop. He arrived in time to see an arm passedthrough a hole made by a blow from a fist, through the grating and theglass. The arm seized a loaf of bread and carried it off. Isabeau ranout in haste; the robber fled at the full speed of his legs. Isabeau ranafter him and stopped him. The thief had flung away the loaf, but hisarm was still bleeding. It was Jean Valjean.

  This took place in 1795. Jean Valjean was taken before the tribunalsof the time for theft and breaking and entering an inhabited house atnight. He had a gun which he used better than any one else in the world,he was a bit of a poacher, and this injured his case. There exists alegitimate prejudice against poachers. The poacher, like the smuggler,smacks too strongly of the brigand. Nevertheless, we will remarkcursorily, there is still an abyss between these races of men and thehideous assassin of the towns. The poacher lives in the forest, thesmuggler lives in the mountains or on the sea. The cities make ferociousmen because they make corrupt men. The mountain, the sea, the forest,make savage men; they develop the fierce side, but often withoutdestroying the humane side.

  Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty. The terms of the Code were explicit.There occur formidable hours in our civilization; there are moments whenthe penal laws decree a shipwreck. What an ominous minute is that inwhich society draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonmentof a sentient being! Jean Valjean was condemned to five years in thegalleys.

  On the 22d of April, 1796, the victory of Montenotte, won by thegeneral-in-chief of the army of Italy, whom the message of the Directoryto the Five Hundred, of the 2d of Floréal, year IV., calls Buona-Parte,was announced in Paris; on that same day a great gang of galley-slaveswas put in chains at Bicêtre. Jean Valjean formed a part of that gang.An old turnkey of the prison, who is now nearly eighty years old, stillrecalls perfectly that unfortunate wretch who was chained to the end ofthe fourth line, in the north angle of the courtyard. He was seated onthe ground like the others. He did not seem to comprehend his position,except that it was horrible. It is probable that he, also, wasdisentangling from amid the vague ideas of a poor man, ignorant ofeverything, something excessive. While the bolt of his iron collar wasbeing riveted behind his head with heavy blows from the hammer, he wept,his tears stifled him, they impeded his speech; he only managed tosay from time to time, "I was a tree-pruner at Faverolles." Then stillsobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered it gradually seven times,as though he were touching in succession seven heads of unequal heights,and from this gesture it was divined that the thing which he had done,whatever it was, he had done for the sake of clothing and nourishingseven little children.

  He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of twenty-sevendays, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon he was clothed inthe red cassock. All that had constituted his life, even to his name,was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601.What became of his sister? What became of the seven children? Whotroubled himself about that? What becomes of the handful of leaves fromthe young tree which is sawed off at the root?

  It is always the same story. These poor living beings, these creaturesof God, henceforth without support, without guide, without refuge,wandered away at random,--who even knows?--each in his own directionperhaps, and little by little buried themselves in that cold mist whichengulfs solitary destinies; gloomy shades, into which disappear insuccession so many unlucky heads, in the sombre march of the human race.They quitted the country. The clock-tower of what had been their villageforgot them; the boundary line of what had been their field forgot them;after a few years' residence in the galleys, Jean Valjean himself forgotthem. In that heart, where there had been a wound, there was a scar.That is all. Only once, during all the time which he spent at Toulon,did he hear his sister mentioned. This happened, I think, towardsthe end of the fourth year of his captivity. I know not through whatchannels the news reached him. Some one who had known them in theirown country had seen his sister. She was in Paris. She lived in a poorstreet near Saint-Sulpice, in the Rue du Gindre. She had with her onlyone child, a little boy, the youngest. Where were the other six? Perhapsshe did not know herself. Every morning she went to a printing office,No. 3 Rue du Sabot, where she was a folder and stitcher. She was obligedto be there at six o'clock in the morning--long before daylight inwinter. In the same building with the printing office there was aschool, and to this school she took her little boy, who was seven yearsold. But as she entered the printing office at six, and the school onlyopened at seven, the child had to wait in the courtyard, for the schoolto open, for an hour--one hour of a winter night in the open air! Theywould not allow the child to come into the printing office, because hewas in the way, they said. When the workmen passed in the morning, theybeheld this poor little being seated on the pavement, overcome withdrowsiness, and often fast asleep in the shadow, crouched down anddoubled up over his basket. When it rained, an old woman, the portress,took pity on him; she took him into her den, where there was a pallet, aspinning-wheel, and two wooden chairs, and the little one slumbered in acorner, pressing himself close to the cat that he might suffer less fromcold. At seven o'clock the school opened, and he entered. That is whatwas told to Jean Valjean.

  They talked to him about it for one day; it was a moment, a flash,as though a window had suddenly been opened upon the destiny of thosethings whom he had loved; then all closed again. He heard nothing moreforever. Nothing from them ever reached him again; he never beheldthem; he never met them again; and in the continuation of this mournfulhistory they will not be met with any more.

  Towards the end of this fourth year Jean Valjean's turn to escapearrived. His comrades assisted him, as is the custom in that sad place.He escaped. He wandered for two days in the fields at liberty, if beingat liberty is to be hunted, to turn the head every instant, to quake atthe slightest noise, to be afraid of everything,--of a smoking roof,of a passing man, of a barking dog, of a galloping horse, of a strikingclock, of the day because one can see, of the night because one cannotsee, of the highway, of the path, of a bush, of sleep. On the eveningof the second day he was captured. He had neither eaten nor slept forthirty-six hours. The maritime tribunal condemned him, for this crime,to a prolongation of his term for three years, which made eight years.In the sixth year his turn to escape occurred again; he availed himselfof it, but could not accomplish his flight fully. He was missing atroll-call. The cannon were fired, and at night the patrol found himhidden under the keel of a vessel in process of construction; heresisted the galley guards who seized him. Escape and rebellion. Thiscase, provided for by a special code, was punished by an addition offive years, two of them in the double chain. Thirteen years. In thetenth year his turn came round again; he again profited by it; hesucceeded no better. Three years for this fresh attempt. Sixteen years.Finally, I think it was during his thirteenth year, he made a lastattempt, and only succeeded in getting retaken at the end of fourhours of absence. Three years for those four hours. Nineteen years. InOctober, 1815, he was released; he had entered there in 1796, for havingbroken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread.

  Room for a brief parenthesis. This is the second time, during hisstudies on the penal question and damnation by law, that the author ofthis book has come across the theft of a loaf of bread as the point ofdeparture for the disaster of a destiny. Claude Gaux had stolen a loaf;Jean Valjean had stolen a loaf. English statistics prove the fact thatfour thefts out of five in London have hunger for their immediate cause.

  Jean Valjean had entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering; he emergedimpassive. He had entered in despair; he emerged gloomy.

  What had taken place in that soul?