CHAPTER IX--A PLACE WHERE CONVICTIONS ARE IN PROCESS OF FORMATION

  He advanced a pace, closed the door mechanically behind him, andremained standing, contemplating what he saw.

  It was a vast and badly lighted apartment, now full of uproar, now fullof silence, where all the apparatus of a criminal case, with its pettyand mournful gravity in the midst of the throng, was in process ofdevelopment.

  At the one end of the hall, the one where he was, were judges, withabstracted air, in threadbare robes, who were gnawing their nails orclosing their eyelids; at the other end, a ragged crowd; lawyers inall sorts of attitudes; soldiers with hard but honest faces; ancient,spotted woodwork, a dirty ceiling, tables covered with serge that wasyellow rather than green; doors blackened by handmarks; tap-roomlamps which emitted more smoke than light, suspended from nails inthe wainscot; on the tables candles in brass candlesticks; darkness,ugliness, sadness; and from all this there was disengaged an austere andaugust impression, for one there felt that grand human thing which iscalled the law, and that grand divine thing which is called justice.

  No one in all that throng paid any attention to him; all glances weredirected towards a single point, a wooden bench placed against a smalldoor, 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, asthough they had known beforehand where that figure was.

  He thought he was looking at himself, grown old; not absolutely the samein face, of course, but exactly similar in attitude and aspect, with hisbristling hair, with that wild and uneasy eye, with that blouse, just asit was on the day when he entered D----, full of hatred, concealinghis soul in that hideous mass of frightful thoughts which he had spentnineteen years in collecting on the floor of the prison.

  He said to himself with a shudder, "Good God! shall I become like thatagain?"

  This creature seemed to be at least sixty; there was somethingindescribably coarse, stupid, and frightened about him.

  At the sound made by the opening door, people had drawn aside to makeway for him; the President had turned his head, and, understanding thatthe personage who had just entered was the mayor of M. sur M., he hadbowed 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 wasthe victim of a sort of hallucination; he was watching.

  Judges, clerks, gendarmes, a throng of cruelly curious heads, all thesehe had already beheld once, in days gone by, twenty-seven years before;he had encountered those fatal things once more; there they were; theymoved; they existed; it was no longer an effort of his memory, a mirageof his thought; they were real gendarmes and real judges, a realcrowd, and real men of flesh and blood: it was all over; he beheld themonstrous aspects of his past reappear and live once more around him,with all that there is formidable in reality.

  All this was yawning before him.

  He was horrified by it; he shut his eyes, and exclaimed in the deepestrecesses of his soul, "Never!"

  And by a tragic play of destiny which made all his ideas tremble, andrendered him nearly mad, it was another self of his that was there! allcalled that man who was being tried Jean Valjean.

  Under his very eyes, unheard-of vision, he had a sort of representationof the most horrible moment of his life, enacted by his spectre.

  Everything was there; the apparatus was the same, the hour of the night,the faces of the judges, of soldiers, and of spectators; all were thesame, only above the President's head there hung a crucifix, somethingwhich the courts had lacked at the time of his condemnation: God hadbeen absent when he had been judged.

  There was a chair behind him; he dropped into it, terrified at thethought that he might be seen; when he was seated, he took advantage ofa pile of cardboard boxes, which stood on the judge's desk, to concealhis face from the whole room; he could now see without being seen; hehad fully regained consciousness of the reality of things; gradually herecovered; he attained that phase of composure where it is possible tolisten.

  M. Bamatabois was one of the jurors.

  He looked for Javert, but did not see him; the seat of the witnesses washidden from him by the clerk's table, and then, as we have just said,the hall was sparely lighted.

  At the moment of this entrance, the defendant's lawyer had just finishedhis plea.

  The attention of all was excited to the highest pitch; the affair hadlasted for three hours: for three hours that crowd had been watching astrange man, a miserable specimen of humanity, either profoundly stupidor profoundly subtle, gradually bending beneath the weight of a terriblelikeness. This man, as the reader already knows, was a vagabond who hadbeen found in a field carrying a branch laden with ripe apples, brokenin the orchard of a neighbor, called the Pierron orchard. Who was thisman? an examination had been made; witnesses had been heard, and theywere unanimous; light had abounded throughout the entire debate; theaccusation said: "We have in our grasp not only a marauder, a stealerof fruit; we have here, in our hands, a bandit, an old offender whohas broken his ban, an ex-convict, a miscreant of the most dangerousdescription, a malefactor named Jean Valjean, whom justice has long beenin search of, and who, eight years ago, on emerging from the galleysat Toulon, committed a highway robbery, accompanied by violence, on theperson of a child, a Savoyard named Little Gervais; a crime providedfor by article 383 of the Penal Code, the right to try him for whichwe reserve hereafter, when his identity shall have been judiciallyestablished. He has just committed a fresh theft; it is a case of asecond offence; condemn him for the fresh deed; later on he will bejudged for the old crime." In the face of this accusation, in the faceof the unanimity of the witnesses, the accused appeared to be astonishedmore than anything else; he made signs and gestures which were meant toconvey No, or else he stared at the ceiling: he spoke with difficulty,replied with embarrassment, but his whole person, from head to foot, wasa denial; he was an idiot in the presence of all these minds ranged inorder of battle around him, and like a stranger in the midst of thissociety which was seizing fast upon him; nevertheless, it was a questionof the most menacing future for him; the likeness increased everymoment, and the entire crowd surveyed, with more anxiety than he didhimself, that sentence freighted with calamity, which descendedever closer over his head; there was even a glimpse of a possibilityafforded; besides the galleys, a possible death penalty, in case hisidentity were established, and the affair of Little Gervais were to endthereafter in condemnation. Who was this man? what was the nature of hisapathy? was it imbecility or craft? Did he understand too well, or didhe not understand at all? these were questions which divided the crowd,and seemed to divide the jury; there was something both terrible andpuzzling in this case: the drama was not only melancholy; it was alsoobscure.

  The counsel for the defence had spoken tolerably well, in thatprovincial tongue which has long constituted the eloquence of the bar,and which was formerly employed by all advocates, at Paris as well as atRomorantin or at Montbrison, and which to-day, having become classic, isno longer spoken except by the official orators of magistracy, to whomit is suited on account of its grave sonorousness and its majesticstride; a tongue in which a husband is called _a consort_, and a woman_a spouse_; Paris, _the centre of art and civilization_; the king,_the monarch_; Monseigneur the Bishop, _a sainted pontiff_; thedistrict-attorney, _the eloquent interpreter of public prosecution_;the arguments, _the accents which we have just listened to_; the age ofLouis XIV., _the grand age_; a theatre, _the temple of Melpomene_; thereigning family, _the august blood of our kings_; a concert, _a musicalsolemnity_; the General Commandant of the province, _the illustriouswarrior, who, etc._; the pupils in the seminary, _these tenderlevities_; errors imputed to newspapers, _the imposture which distillsits venom through the columns of those organs_; etc. The lawyerhad, accordingly, begun with an explanation as to the theft of theapples,--an awkward matter couched in fine style; but Bénigne Bossuethimself was obliged to allude to a chicken in the midst of a funeraloration, and he extricated himself from the situation in statelyfashion. The lawyer established the fact that the theft of the appleshad not been circumstantially proved. His client, whom he, in hischaracter of counsel, persisted in calling Champmathieu, had not beenseen scaling that wall nor breaking that branch by any one. He had beentaken with that branch (which the lawyer preferred to call a _bough_) inhis possession; but he said that he had found it broken off and lyingon the ground, and had picked it up. Where was there any proof to thecontrary? No doubt that branch had been broken off and concealed afterthe scaling of the wall, then thrown away by the alarmed marauder; therewas no doubt that there had been a thief in the case. But what proofwas there that that thief had been Champmathieu? One thing only. Hischaracter as an ex-convict. The lawyer did not deny that that characterappeared to be, unhappily, well attested; the accused had resided atFaverolles; the accused had exercised the calling of a tree-prunerthere; the name of Champmathieu might well have had its origin inJean Mathieu; all that was true,--in short, four witnesses recognizeChampmathieu, positively and without hesitation, as that convict, JeanValjean; to these signs, to this testimony, the counsel could opposenothing but the denial of his client, the denial of an interested party;but supposing that he was the convict Jean Valjean, did that prove thathe was the thief of the apples? that was a presumption at the most, nota proof. The prisoner, it was true, and his counsel, "in good faith,"was obliged to admit it, had adopted "a bad system of defence." Heobstinately denied everything, the theft and his character of convict.An admission upon this last point would certainly have been better, andwould have won for him the indulgence of his judges; the counselhad advised him to do this; but the accused had obstinately refused,thinking, no doubt, that he would save everything by admitting nothing.It was an error; but ought not the paucity of this intelligence to betaken into consideration? This man was visibly stupid. Long-continuedwretchedness in the galleys, long misery outside the galleys, hadbrutalized him, etc. He defended himself badly; was that a reason forcondemning him? As for the affair with Little Gervais, the counsel neednot discuss it; it did not enter into the case. The lawyer wound upby beseeching the jury and the court, if the identity of Jean Valjeanappeared to them to be evident, to apply to him the police penaltieswhich are provided for a criminal who has broken his ban, and not thefrightful chastisement which descends upon the convict guilty of asecond offence.

  The district-attorney answered the counsel for the defence. He wasviolent and florid, as district-attorneys usually are.

  He congratulated the counsel for the defence on his "loyalty," andskilfully took advantage of this loyalty. He reached the accused throughall the concessions made by his lawyer. The advocate had seemed to admitthat the prisoner was Jean Valjean. He took note of this. So this manwas Jean Valjean. This point had been conceded to the accusation andcould no longer be disputed. Here, by means of a cleverautonomasia which went back to the sources and causes of crime, thedistrict-attorney thundered against the immorality of the romanticschool, then dawning under the name of _the Satanic school_, whichhad been bestowed upon it by the critics of the _Quotidienne_ andthe _Oriflamme_; he attributed, not without some probability, to theinfluence of this perverse literature the crime of Champmathieu, orrather, to speak more correctly, of Jean Valjean. Having exhausted theseconsiderations, he passed on to Jean Valjean himself. Who was this JeanValjean? Description of Jean Valjean: a monster spewed forth, etc.The model for this sort of description is contained in the tale ofThéramène, which is not useful to tragedy, but which every day rendersgreat services to judicial eloquence. The audience and the jury"shuddered." The description finished, the district-attorney resumedwith an oratorical turn calculated to raise the enthusiasm of thejournal of the prefecture to the highest pitch on the following day: Andit is such a man, etc., etc., etc., vagabond, beggar, without means ofexistence, etc., etc., inured by his past life to culpable deeds, andbut little reformed by his sojourn in the galleys, as was proved by thecrime committed against Little Gervais, etc., etc.; it is such a man,caught upon the highway in the very act of theft, a few paces from awall that had been scaled, still holding in his hand the objectstolen, who denies the crime, the theft, the climbing the wall; denieseverything; denies even his own identity! In addition to a hundredother proofs, to which we will not recur, four witnesses recognizehim--Javert, the upright inspector of police; Javert, and three ofhis former companions in infamy, the convicts Brevet, Chenildieu, andCochepaille. What does he offer in opposition to this overwhelmingunanimity? His denial. What obduracy! You will do justice, gentlemenof the jury, etc., etc. While the district-attorney was speaking, theaccused listened to him open-mouthed, with a sort of amazement in whichsome admiration was assuredly blended. He was evidently surprised thata man could talk like that. From time to time, at those "energetic"moments of the prosecutor's speech, when eloquence which cannot containitself overflows in a flood of withering epithets and envelops theaccused like a storm, he moved his head slowly from right to left andfrom left to right in the sort of mute and melancholy protest with whichhe had contented himself since the beginning of the argument. Two orthree times the spectators who were nearest to him heard him say ina low voice, "That is what comes of not having asked M. Baloup." Thedistrict-attorney directed the attention of the jury to this stupidattitude, evidently deliberate, which denoted not imbecility, but craft,skill, a habit of deceiving justice, and which set forth in all itsnakedness the "profound perversity" of this man. He ended by makinghis reserves on the affair of Little Gervais and demanding a severesentence.

  At that time, as the reader will remember, it was penal servitude forlife.

  The counsel for the defence rose, began by complimenting Monsieurl'Avocat-General on his "admirable speech," then replied as best hecould; but he weakened; the ground was evidently slipping away fromunder his feet.