by Victor Hugo
The portress had come up, and was looking through the half-open door. The physician motioned her away, but he could not prevent that good, zealous woman from crying to the dying man before she went:
“Do you want a priest?”
“I have one,” answered Jean Valjean.
And, with his finger, he seemed to designate a point above his head, where, you would have said, he saw some one.
It is probable that the Bishop was indeed a witness of this death-agony.
Cosette slipped a pillow under his back gently.
Jean Valjean resumed:
“Monsieur Pontmercy, have no fear, I conjure you. The six hundred thousand francs are really Cosette’s. I shall have lost my life if you do not enjoy it! We succeeded very well in making glasswork. We rivalled what is called Berlin jewellery. Indeed, the German black glass cannot be compared with it. A gross, which contains twelve hundred grains very well cut, costs only three francs.”
When a being who is dear to us is about to die, we look at him with a look which clings to him, and which would hold him back. Both, dumb with anguish, knowing not what to say to death, despairing and trembling, they stood before him, Marius holding Cosette’s hand.
From moment to moment, Jean Valjean grew weaker. He was sinking; he was approaching the dark horizon. His breath had become intermittent; it was interrupted by a slight rattle. He had difficulty in moving his wrist, his feet had lost all motion, and, at the same time that the distress of the limbs and the exhaustion of the body increased, all the majesty of the soul rose and displayed itself upon his forehead. The light of the unknown world was already visible in his eye.
His face grew pale, and at the same time smiled. Life was no longer present, there was something else. His breath died away, his look grew grand. It was a corpse on which you felt wings.
He motioned to Cosette to approach, then to Marius; it was evidently the last minute of the last hour, and he began to speak to them in a voice so faint it seemed to come from afar, and you would have said that there was already a wall between them and him.
“Come closer, come closer, both of you. I love you dearly. Oh! it is good to die so! You too, you love me, my Cosette. I knew very well that you still had some affection for your old goodman. How kind you are to put this cushion under my back! You will weep for me a little, will you not? Not too much. I do not wish you to have any deep grief. You must amuse yourselves a great deal, my children. I forgot to tell you that on buckles without tongues still more is made than on anything else. A gross, twelve dozen, costs ten francs, and sells for sixty. That is really a good business. So you need not be astonished at the six hundred thousand francs, Monsieur Pontmercy. It is honest money. You can be rich without concern. You must have a carriage, from time to time a box at the theatres, beautiful ball dresses, my Cosette, and then give good dinners to your friends, be very happy. I was writing just now to Cosette. She will find my letter. To her I bequeath the two candlesticks which are on the mantel. They are silver; but to me they are gold, they are diamond; they change the candles which are put into them, into consecrated tapers. I do not know whether he who gave them to me is satisfied with me in heaven. I have done what I could. My children, you will not forget that I am a poor man, you will have me buried in the most convenient piece of ground under a stone to mark the spot. That is my wish. No name on the stone. If Cosette will come for a little while sometimes, it will give me a pleasure. You too, Monsieur Pontmercy. I must confess to you that I have not always loved you; I ask your pardon. Now, she and you are but one to me. I am very grateful to you. I feel that you make Cosette happy. If you knew, Monsieur Pontmercy, her beautiful rosy cheeks were my joy; when I saw her a little pale, I was sad. There is a five hundred franc bill in the bureau. I have not touched it. It is for the poor. Cosette, do you see your little dress, there on the bed? do you recognise it? Yet it was only ten years ago. How time passes! We have been very happy. It is over. My children, do not weep, I am not going very far, I shall see you from there. You will only have to look when it is night, you will see me smile. Cosette, do you remember Montfermeil? You were in the wood, you were very much frightened; do you remember when I took the handle of the water-bucket? That was the first time I touched your poor little hand. It was so cold! Ah! you had red hands in those days, mademoiselle, your hands are very white now. And the great doll! do you remember? you called her Catharine. You regretted that you did not carry her to the convent. How you made me laugh sometimes, my sweet angel! When it had rained you launched spears of straw in the gutters, and you watched them. One day, I gave you a willow battledore, and a shuttlecock with yellow, blue, and green feathers. You have forgotten it. You were so cunning when you were little! You played. You put cherries in your ears. Those are things of the past. The forests through which we have passed with our child, the trees under which we have walked, the convents in which we have hidden, the games, the free laughter of childhood, all is in shadow. I imagined that all that belonged to me. There was my folly. Those Thénardiers were wicked. We must forgive them. Cosette, the time has come to tell you the name of your mother. Her name was Fantine. Remember that name: Fantine. Fall on your knees whenever you pronounce it. She suffered much. And loved you much. Her measure of unhappiness was as full as yours of happiness. Such are the distributions of God. He is on high, he sees us all, and he knows what he does in the midst of his great stars. So I am going away, my children. Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another. You will think sometimes of the poor old man who died here. O my Cosette! it is not my fault, indeed, if I have not seen you all this time, it broke my heart; I went as far as the corner of the street, I must have seemed strange to the people who saw me pass, I looked like a crazy man, once I went out with no hat. My children, I do not see very clearly now, I had some more things to say, but it makes no difference. Think of me a little. You are blessed creatures. I do not know what is the matter with me, I see a light. Come nearer. I die happy. Let me put my hands upon your dear beloved heads.”
Cosette and Marius fell on their knees, overwhelmed, choked with tears, each grasping one of Jean Valjean’s hands. Those august hands moved no more.
He had fallen backwards, the light from the candlesticks fell upon him; his white face looked up towards heaven, he let Cosette and Marius cover his hands with kisses; he was dead.
The night was starless and very dark. Without doubt, in the gloom some mighty angel was standing, with outstretched wings, awaiting the soul.
ENDNOTES
Part I: Fantine
Book One: An Upright Man
1 (p. 14) a senator of the empire... wrote to M. Bigot de Préameneu: The Senator who complains of Myriel’s asking 3,000 francs annually for “carriage expenses” had been rewarded with a rich estate for supporting Napoléon’s quasi-legal coup d‘état of the dix-huit Brumaire (May 18,1804), by means of which he became Emperor. The name of the Minister of Public Worship, Bigot, means a narrow-mindedly, excessively religious person.
2 (p. 21) Some admire it, like Le Maistre; others execrate it, like Beccaria: Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), a far-right Ultramontanist, advo cated for restoring supreme authority in all church matters to the Pope. He was the leading polemicist against the French Revolution, characterizing its disorders as Evil being forced by God to cleanse itself with its own hands (through the deaths of rival revolutionary leaders during the Reign of Terror in 1793). He believed that constitutions and all human institutions derive from God. The English writer Edmund Burke was his Anglo-Saxon counterpart. Cesare de Beccaria (1738-1794), an economist and criminologist, wrote the influential Traité des délits et des peines (A Treatise on Felonies and Their Punishment), which had great influence on eliminating the death penalty in certain places, and in securing a more humane treatment for prisoners. Hugo greatly admired his work.
3 (p. 26) This man . . . had been a member of the National Convention: The Convention Nationale, a r
evolutionary legislative body, ruled France from September 21, 1792, till October 6,1795. It proclaimed the First French Republic, defended France against royalist insurrections in the Vendée (the Loire valley and Brittany) and the South, forced the coalition of European monarchs to sign a peace treaty, and condemned the King to death for treason after he tried to flee France secretly to join these Allied Powers. The old conventionist whom Myriel goes to visit had served in this assembly. He did not vote for the death of the king, but royalists considered every member of the Convention to be a bloodthirsty regicide.
4 (p. 32) “What do you think of Bossuet chanting the Te Deum over the dragonnades?”: Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), Bishop of Meaux and the most influential French cleric during the Classical Age, supported and blessed the Dragonnades, the systematic persecution of Protestants (then called Huguenots or Réformés) by royal troops, in several regions of France before and after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed religious tolerance (1681-1685). Most of the Protestants fled abroad. Today we would call these Catholic actions “ethnic cleansing.”
Book Two: The Fall
5 (pp. 37-38) the stone bench which General Drouot mounted on the fourth of March, to read... the proclamation of the Golfe Juan: General Antoine Drouot (1774-1847), one of Napoléon’s most loyal supporters, followed him into exile on the island of Elba. When the Emperor escaped to France, he landed at the Mediterranean beach resort le Golfe-Juan, near Vallauris, and proclaimed his return to power. The statement was read aloud in various towns along his route north.
Book Three: In the Year 1817
6 (p. 76) Paris has no longer the same environs.... a city which has France for its suburbs: Fécamp is an Atlantic beach resort near Le Havre, about 170 miles from Paris; Saint-Cloud is a park on the Seine near Versailles, about 14 miles from Paris. Hugo means that mechanized rapid transport—steamboats and railways—shrinks space by a factor of 12, and that Paris becomes an ever-more-dominant center as a result.
7 (p. 78) Love is a fault; be it so. Fantine was innocence floating upon the surface of this fault: Despite his frequent use of the symbolism of light and darkness to connote good and evil, respectively, Hugo’s moral portraits are always complex and subtle. Until near the end of his life, the virtuous Jean Valjean must struggle against impulses to resentment and selfishness; the vile Thénardier in other circumstances might have become a decent if not a virtuous man rather than a monster; and Fantine, the “fallen woman” condemned by her hypocritical society, becomes an unwed mother through innocent devotion. Later she prostitutes herself only to save her child.
Book Five: The Descent
8 (p. 112) It is a mournful task to break the sombre attachments of the past: The word “sombre” has special meanings in Hugo’s cosmology. It refers not to a dark (evil) but to a provisionally darkened state, to the human condition in which moral insight has been obscured by what the Cabalists called “occultation.” In order to preserve human free will and the resulting opportunities for meritorious and redemptive choices, God “withdraws” the fullness of His essence from the material world. If God revealed Himself fully, we would have no choice but to do His will. The stars are the masks of God. Once reincarnated as animals, plants, or inanimate objects, however, souls see God clearly and suffer redemptively from their distance from Him. See the poems “Pleurs dans la nuit” and “Spes” in Hugo’s poetry collection Les Contemplations (VI, 6 and 21).
Book Seven: The Champmathieu Case
9 (p. 155) Forms Assumed by Suffering during Sleep: Like other romantics, but more richly than most, Hugo depicts “second states” of consciousness-supernatural visions, dreams, madness, and hallucinations caused by insomnia, terror, starvation, or illness—to represent his characters’ intuitions of a spiritual super-reality.
10 (p. 156) Obstacles: The repeated breakdowns of Jean Valjean’s carriage, and the delays occasioned by various obstacles on the road tempt him to abandon his plan to exonerate the innocent Champmathieu and to condemn himself to life in prison instead. These delays exemplify the tentatio probationis (temptation as an ordeal) that tests and refines one’s faith—as opposed to the tentatio subver sionis (temptation to submit to evil). For an example of the latter, on an outwardly similar, difficult journey, see Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772), with Satan as a luscious, amorous woman seeking sex before marriage to the hero.
11 (p. 172) When he was tried, God was not there: During Jean Valjean’s original trial, “God was not there” both literally (the image was gone) and spiritually (mercy and forgiveness were unavailable to the prisoner). Compare the last paragraph of “Fantine”: “Happily, God knows where to find the soul.”
Book Eight: Counter-stroke
12 (p.193) Without a wrinkle in his duty or his uniform: This phrase is an example of the daring rhetorical figure called hendiadys (“one from two”). When criticized by classicists for using this device in his poetry (for example, vêtu de candeur et de lin blanc—“clothed in candor and in white linen”), Hugo triumphantly produced many examples from classical Greek and Roman literature, which he knew far better than did his detractors.
13 (p. 197) she distinctly saw an ineffable smile beam on those pale lips ... full of the wonder of the tomb: Suggested strongly here by the dead Fantine’s smile, Hugo’s faith in the Afterlife will be expressly articulated by Eponine as she dies at the end of chapter 4 (6), book fourteen, part IV (“We do meet again, don’t we? ... Promise to kiss me on the forehead when I am dead. I shall feel it.”), and once again by the author, when Jean Valjean dies: “Without doubt, in the gloom some mighty angel was standing, with outstretched wings, awaiting the soul.”
Part II: Cosette
Book Two: The Convict Ship Orion
1 (p. 214) Some of the newspapers... held up this commutation as a triumph of the clerical party: Moved by blind partisanship, some left-wing commentators inaccurately see the commutation of Jean Valjean’s death sentence as undue interference by the Church in secular affairs. “The clerical party” refers to the Congrégation, which throughout the 1820s was feared to be a Catholic secret society controlled by the Pope, seeking to end the “Gallican liberties” that allowed French rulers rather than the Pope to make many decisions regarding the French Catholic Church, and to dominate European politics. For a fully developed dramatization of this supposed international Jesuit conspiracy, see Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830).
Book Three: Keeping the Promise to the Dead Woman
2 (p. 252) “Monsieur owes twenty-six sous”: After preparing a padded bill for Jean Valjean’s room and supper, for twenty times the proper amount (which he can implicitly blame on his wife, because Jean Valjean did not see who drew up the bill), Thénardier suddenly reverses his strategy. He realizes that Jean Valjean badly wants to take Cosette with him. He quickly adjusts. By now telling his guest what he truly owes, Thénardier lays the groundwork for portraying himself as a scrupulous person, who could not possibly hand over a child in his care to a stranger... without receiving a substantial bribe.
Book Four: The Old Gorbeau House
3 (p. 268) as he was fifty-five: Ten years later, at the conclusion, Jean Valjean is described as being eighty. To salvage chronological coherence, we must assume that Hugo means his emotional sufferings had suddenly aged him so that he looked like eighty.There are autobiographical elements in Hugo’s characterization of Jean Valjean’s relationship with Cosette. The author loved his grand-children deeply, and devoted a volume of poetry to them, called L‘Art d’être grand-père (1877).
Book Five: A Sinister Hunt Requires a Silent Pack
4 (p. 277) The sufferings of the first six years of her life had introduced something of the passive into her nature: The critic Nicole Savy severely criticized Cosette as a nonentity (see “For Further Reading”). She is correct, but at this juncture, Hugo clearly explains why this is so. To be sure, Hugo’s female characters often lack substance—but the masterful depiction o
f the monstrous Mme Thénardier, for example, proves him capable of imagining a woman with a forceful personality.
Part III: Marius
Book Three: The Grandfather and the Grandson
1 (p. 359) the God-man: Commonplace in English, but usually unid iomatic in French, this combination of two nouns modifying each other is Hugo’s métaphore maxima, which is typically associated with moments of religious revelation; he used it frequently in his visionary poetry from Les Contemplations (1856) on. It blurs two familiar categories into a new, unprecedented one.
Book Four
2 (p. 367) the first of these two places of rendezvous was near the working-men, the second near the students: Left-wing alliances of workers with students, usually no more than a distant dream in the United States, have been much more common in France, in part because nearly free access to higher education in France narrows the financial gap between the two groups, while militantly Socialist or Communist labor unions narrow the ideological gap with some intellectuals. “Les Événements” of 1968 provide a prime example.
3 (p. 370) You cannot pick the mark out of a nation as you can out of a handkerchief: Feuilly’s respect for national sovereignty means that he, like all the other members of “Les Amis de l‘ABC,” opposes Napoléon’s politics of conquest. One can readily predict a confrontation with Marius, who has come to idealize his Napoleonic father. This evolution, and Marius’s later move toward democratic ideals, echoes Hugo’s own political trajectory in his youth, as Marius’s passionate love for Cosette echoes Hugo’s love for Adèle Foucher before her betrayal.