by Victor Hugo
After a few minutes, he sprang convulsively towards the coin, seized it, and, rising, looked away over the plain, straining his eyes towards all points of the horizon, standing and trembling like a wild beast which is seeking a place of refuge.
He saw nothing. Night was falling, the plain was cold and bare, thick purple mists were rising in the glimmering twilight.
He said: “Oh!” and began to walk rapidly in the direction in which the child had gone. After some thirty steps, he stopped, looked about, and saw nothing.
Then he called with all his might “Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais!”
And then he listened.
There was no answer.
The countryside was desolate and gloomy. On all sides was space. There was nothing about him but a shadow in which his gaze was lost, and a silence in which his voice was lost.
A biting norther was blowing, which gave a kind of dismal life to everything about him. The bushes shook their little thin arms with an incredible fury. One would have said that they were threatening and pursuing somebody. s
He began to walk again, then quickened his pace to a run, and from time to time stopped and called out in that solitude, in a most desolate and terrible voice:
“Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais!”
Surely, if the child had heard him, he would have been frightened, and would have hid himself. But doubtless the boy was already far away.
He met a priest on horseback. He went up to him and said:
“Monsieur cure, have you seen a child go by?”
“No,” said the priest.
“Petit Gervais was his name?”
“I have seen nobody.”
He took two five-franc coins from his bag, and gave them to the priest.
“Monsieur cure, this is for your poor. Monsieur cure, he is a little fellow, about ten years old, with a cherrywood box, I think, and a hurdygurdy. He went this way. One of these Savoyards, you know?”
“I have not seen him.”
“Petit Gervais? is his village near here? can you tell me?”
“If it be as you say, my friend, the little fellow is a foreigner. They roam about this country. Nobody knows them.”
Jean Valjean hastily took out two more five-franc coins, and gave them to the priest.
“For your poor,” said he.
Then he added wildly:
“Monsieur abbé, have me arrested. I am a robber.”
The priest put spurs to his horse, and fled in great fear.
Jean Valjean began to run again in the direction which he had first taken.
He went on in this wise for a considerable distance, looking around, calling and shouting, but met nobody else. Two or three times he left the path to look at what seemed to be somebody lying down or crouching; it was only low bushes or rocks. Finally, at a place where three paths met, he stopped. The moon had risen. He strained his eyes in the distance, and called out once more “Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais!” His cries died away into the mist, without even awakening an echo. Again he murmured: “Petit Gervais!” but with a feeble, and almost inarticulate voice. That was his last effort; his knees suddenly bent under him, as if an invisible power overwhelmed him at a blow, with the weight of his bad conscience; he fell exhausted upon a great stone, his hands clenched in his hair, and his face on his knees, and exclaimed: “What a wretch I am!”
Then his heart swelled, and he burst into tears. It was the first time he had wept for nineteen years.
When Jean Valjean left the bishop’s house, as we have seen, his mood was one that he had never known before. He could understand nothing of what was going on within him. He set himself stubbornly in opposition to the angelic deeds and the gentle words of the old man, “you have promised me to become an honest man. I am purchasing your soul, I withdraw it from the spirit of perversity and I give it to God Almighty.” This came back to him incessantly. To this celestial tenderness, he opposed pride, which is the fortress of evil in man. He felt dimly that the pardon of this priest was the hardest assault, and the most formidable attack which he had yet sustained; that his hardness of heart would be complete, if it resisted this kindness; that if he yielded, he must renounce that hatred with which the acts of other men had for so many years filled his soul, and in which he found satisfaction; that, this time, he must conquer or be conquered, and that the struggle, a gigantic and decisive struggle, had begun between his own wickedness, and the goodness of this man.
Confronted with all these revelations, he staggered like a drunken man. While thus walking on with haggard look, had he a distinct perception of what the result of his adventure at D—might mean? Did he hear those mysterious murmurs which warn or entreat the spirit at certain moments of life? Did a voice whisper in his ear that he had just passed through the decisive hour of his destiny, that there was no longer a middle course for him, that if, thereafter, he should not be the best of men, he would be the worst, that he must now, so to speak, mount higher than the bishop, or fall lower than the galley slave; that, if he would become good, he must become an angel; that, if he would remain wicked, he must become a monster?
One thing was certain, nor did he himself doubt it, that he was no longer the same man, that all was changed in him, that it was no longer in his power to prevent the bishop from having talked to him and having moved him.
In this frame of mind, he had met Petit Gervais, and stolen his forty sous. Why? He could not have explained it, surely; was it the final effect, the final effort of the evil thoughts he had brought from the galleys, a remnant of impulse, a result of what is called in physics momentum? It was that, and it was also perhaps even less than that. We will say plainly, it was not he who had stolen, it was not the man, it was the beast which, from habit and instinct, had stupidly set its foot upon that money, while the intellect was struggling in the midst of so many new and unknown influences. When the intellect awoke and saw this act of the brute, Jean Valjean recoiled in anguish and uttered a cry of horror.
It was a strange phenomenon, possible only in the condition in which he then was, but the fact is, that in stealing this money from that child, he had done a thing of which he was no longer capable.
However that may be, this last misdeed had a decisive effect upon him; it rushed across the chaos of his intellect and dissipated it, set the light on one side and the dark clouds on the other, and acted upon his soul, in the condition it was in, as certain chemical reagents act upon a turbid mixture, by precipitating one element and producing a clear solution of the other.
At first, even before self-examination and reflection, distractedly, like one who seeks to escape, he endeavoured to find the boy to give him back his money; then, when he found that that was useless and impossible, he stopped in despair. At the very moment when he exclaimed: “What a wretch I am!” he saw himself as he was, and was already so far separated from himself that it seemed to him that he was only a phantom, and that he had there before him, in flesh and bone with his stick in his hand, his smock on his back, his knapsack filled with stolen articles on his shoulders, with his stern and gloomy face, and his thoughts full of abominable projects, the hideous galley slave, Jean Valjean.
Excess of misfortune, we have remarked, had made him, in some sort, a visionary. This then was like a vision. He veritably saw this Jean Valjean, this ominous face, before him. He was on the point of asking himself who that man was, and he was horror-stricken by it.
His brain was in one of those violent, and yet frightfully calm, conditions where reverie is so profound that it swallows up reality. We no longer see the objects that are before us, but we see, as if outside of ourselves, the forms that we have in our minds.
He beheld himself then, so to speak, face to face, and at the same time, through that hallucination, he saw, at a mysterious distance, a sort of light which he took at first to be a torch. Examining more attentively this light which dawned upon his conscience, he recognised that it had a human form, and that this torch was the
bishop.
His conscience weighed in turn these two men thus placed before it, the bishop and Jean Valjean. Anything less than the first would have failed to soften the second. By one of those singular effects which are peculiar to this kind of ecstasy, as his reverie continued, the bishop grew grander and more resplendent in his eyes, Jean Valjean shrank and faded away. At one moment he was but a shadow. Suddenly he disappeared. The bishop alone remained.
He filled the whole soul of this wretched man with a magnificent radiance.
Jean Valjean wept long. He shed hot tears, he wept bitterly, with more weakness than a woman, with more terror than a child.
While he wept, the light grew brighter and brighter in his mind—an extraordinary light, a light at once ravishing and terrible. His past life, his first offence, his long expiation, his brutal exterior, his hardened interior, his release made glad by so many schemes of vengeance, what had happened to him at the bishop‘s, his last action, this theft of forty sous from a child, a crime meaner and the more monstrous that it came after the bishop’s pardon, all this returned and appeared to him, clearly, but in a light that he had never seen before. He beheld his life, and it seemed to him horrible; his soul, and it seemed to him frightful. There was, however, a softened light upon that life and upon that soul. It seemed to him that he was looking upon Satan by the light of Paradise.t
How long did he weep thus? What did he do after weeping? Where did he go? Nobody ever knew. It is known simply that, on that very night, the stage-driver who drove at that time on the Grenoble route, and arrived at D—about three o‘clock in the morning, saw, as he passed through the bishop’s street, a man in the attitude of prayer, kneeling upon the pavement in the shadow, before the door of Monseigneur Bienvenu.
BOOK THREE
IN THE YEAR 1817
1
THE YEAR 1817
With dozens of examples from current events and popular culture, Hugo characterizes the mediocrity, frivolity, and superficiality of the early Restoration years. Exhausted by twenty-five years of war, France wishes only to relax. The dark side of these attitudes, a callous disregard for the poor and for social justice, will be exemplified by Tholomyes abandoning his lover Fantine without taking any responsibility for supporting their child.
2
DOUBLE FOURSOME
IN THIS YEAR, 1817, four young Parisians played “a good joke.” These Parisians were, one from Toulouse, another from Limoges, the third from Cahors, and the fourth from Montauban; but they were students, and to say student is to say Parisian; to study in Paris is to be born in Paris.
These young men were unremarkable; everybody has seen such persons, the four first comers will serve as samples; neither good nor bad, neither learned nor ignorant, neither talented nor stupid; handsome in that charming April of life which we call twenty. They were four run-of-the-mill Oscars; for at this time, Arthurs were not yet in existence. Burn the perfumes of Arabia in his honour, exclaims the romance. Oscar approaches! Oscar, I am about to see him! Ossian was in fashion, elegance was Scandinavian and Caledonian; the pure English style did not prevail till later, and the first of the Arthurs, Wellington, had but just won the victory of Waterloo.
The first of these Oscars was called Félix Tholomyès, of Toulouse; the second, Listolier, of Cahors; the third, Fameuil, of Limoges; and the last, Blacheville, of Montauban. Of course each had his mistress. Blacheville loved Favourite, so called, because she had been in England; Listolier adored Dahlia, who had taken the name of a flower as her nom de guerre, Fameuil idolised Zéphine, the diminutive of Josephine, and Tholomyès had Fantine, called the Blonde, on account of her beautiful hair, the colour of the sun. Favourite, Dahlia, Zéphine, and Fantine were four enchanting girls, perfumed and sparkling, something of workwomen still, since they had not wholly given up the needle, agitated by love-affairs, yet preserving on their countenances a remnant of the serenity of labour, and in their souls that flower of purity, which in woman survives the first fall. One of the four was called the child, because she was the youngest; and another was called the old one—the Old One was twenty-three. To conceal nothing, the three first were more experienced, more heedless, and better versed in the ways of the world than Fantine, the Blonde, who was still in her first illusion.
The young men were comrades, the young girls were friends. Such loves are always accompanied by such friendships.
Wisdom and philosophy are two things; a proof of which is that, with all necessary reservations for these little, irregular households, Favourite, Zéphine, and Dahlia, were philosophical, and Fantine was wise.
“Wise!” you will say, and Tholomyès? Solomon would answer that love is a part of wisdom. We content ourselves with saying that the love of Fantine was a first, an only, a faithful love.
She was the only one of the four who had been addressed as “tu” by but one.u
Fantine was one of those beings which are brought forth from the heart of the people. Sprung from the most unfathomable depths of social darkness, she bore on her brow the mark of the anonymous and unknown. She was born at M—on M—. Who were her parents? None could tell, she had never known either father or mother. She was called Fantine—why so? because she had never been known by any other name. At the time of her birth, the Directory was still in existence.v She could have no family name, for she had no family; she could have no baptismal name, for then there was no church. She was named at the pleasure of the first passer-by who found her, a mere infant, straying barefoot in the streets. She received a name as she received the water from the clouds on her head when it rained. She was called little Fantine. Nobody knew anything more of her. Such was the manner in which this human being had come into life. At the age of ten, Fantine left the city and went to work among the tenant farmers of the suburbs. At fifteen, she came to Paris, to “seek her fortune.” Fantine was beautiful and remained pure as long as she could. She was a pretty blonde with fine teeth. She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but the gold was on her head and the pearls in her mouth.
She worked to live; then, also to live, for the heart too has its hunger, she loved.
She loved Tholomyès.
To him, it was a fling; to her a passion. The streets of the Latin Quarter, which swarm with students and grisettes, saw the beginning of this dream.w Fantine, in those labyrinths of the hill of the Pantheon, where so many affairs are knotted and unloosed, long fled from Tholomyès, but in such a way as always to meet him again. There is a way of avoiding a person which resembles a search. In short, the eclogue took place.x
Blacheville, Listolier, and Fameuil formed a sort of group of which Tholomyès was the head. He was the wit of the company.
Tholomyès was an old student of the old style; he was rich, having an income of four thousand francs—a splendid scandal on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. He was a good liver, thirty years old and ill preserved. He was wrinkled, his teeth were broken, and he was beginning to show signs of baldness, of which he said, gaily: “The head at thirty, the knees at forty.” His digestion was not good, and he had a weeping eye. But in proportion as his youth died out, his gaiety increased; he replaced his teeth by jests, his hair by joy, his health by irony, and his weeping eye was always laughing. He was dilapidated, but covered with flowers. His youth, decamping long before its time, was beating a retreat in good order, bursting with laughter and everyone was fooled. He had had a play refused by the Vaudeville; he wrote poems now and then on any subject; moreover, he expressed skepticism about everything with a superior air—a great strength in the eyes of the weak. So, being bald and ironical, he was the leader. Can the word iron be the root from which irony is derived?‡
One day, Tholomyès took the other three aside, and said to them with an oracular gesture:
“For nearly a year, Fantine, Dahlia, Zéphine, and Favourite have been asking us to give them a surprise; we have solemnly promised them one. They are constantly reminding us of it, me especially. Just as the old women at Naples cry to Sain
t January, ‘Faccia gialluta, fa o miracolo, yellow face, do your miracle,’ our pretty ones are always saying: ‘Tholomyès, when are you going to give birth to your surprise?’ At the same time, our parents are asking us to come visit. It’s a bore on both sides. It seems to me the time has come. Let us talk it over.”
Upon this, Tholomyès lowered his voice, and mysteriously articulated something so ludicrous that a prolonged and enthusiastic sniggering arose from the four throats at once, and Blacheville exclaimed: “What an idea!”
An ale-house, filled with smoke, was before them; they entered and the rest of their conference was lost in its shadows.
The result of this mystery was a brilliant pleasure party, which took place on the following Sunday, the four young men inviting the four young girls.
3
FOUR TO FOUR
IT IS DIFFICULT to picture to oneself, today, a country outing of students and grisettes as it was forty-five years ago. Paris has no longer the same environs; the aspect of what we might call circum-Parisian life has completely changed in half a century; in place of the crude, one-horse chaise, we have now the railroad car; in place of the sloop, we have now the steamboat; we say Fécamp to-day, as we then said Saint Cloud. The Paris of 1862 is a city which has France for its suburbs.6
The four couples scrupulously accomplished all the country follies then possible. It was in the beginning of the holidays, and a hot, clear summer’s day. The night before, Favourite, the only one who knew how to write, had written to Tholomyès in the name of the four: “It is lucky to go out early.” For this reason, they rose at five in the morning. Then they went to Saint Cloud by the coach, looked at the dry waterfall and exclaimed: “How beautiful it must be when there is any water!” breakfasted at the Tête Noire, where Castaing had not yet passed by, amused themselves with a game of ringtoss at the quincunx of the great basin, ascended to Diogenes’ lantern, wagered macaroons at the roulette game on the Sèvres bridge, gathered bouquets at Puteaux, bought reed pipes at Neuilly, ate apple puffs everywhere, and were perfectly happy.