The gentleness and melancholy of his voice was such as no words can convey. He turned to the three convicts.
‘I recognize you, Brevet. Do you remember –’ he paused for an instant, ‘– do you remember the braces you used to wear, with a check pattern?’
Brevet gave a start of surprise and stared at him wide-eyed. He went on:
‘And you, Chenildieu. They called you “Godless” – it was the name you gave yourself. You have a bad scar on your right shoulder. You held it against a hot stove, trying to burn away the letters T.F.P. which were branded on it, but they are still visible. Is that not so?’
‘It’s the truth,’ said Chenildieu.
He turned to Cochepaille.
‘At the bend of your left arm, Cochepaille, there’s a date in blue lettering tattooed with gunpowder. It is the date of the Emperor’s landing at Cannes – 1 March 1815. Pull up your sleeve.’
Cochepaille did so, and a gendarme held a lantern so that its light fell on his bare arm. The date was there.
Madeleine then turned to face the court with a smile that still wrings the hearts of those who remember it, a smile of triumph and of utter despair.
‘Now do you believe that I am Jean Valjean?’
There were no longer judges, lawyers, or gendarmes in the place, but only intent eyes and deeply troubled hearts. No man considered the part he might be called upon to play. The prosecutor forgot that he was there to prosecute, the presiding judge that he was there to pass sentence, the defender that he was there to defend. And, most strikingly, no question was raised, no legal authority invoked. It is the quality of awesome events that they seize upon the soul and make all men participants. Perhaps no one in that place was fully conscious of his own feelings, and certainly no one said to himself that he was witnessing the splendour of a great light; but all were dazzled by it.
That this was Jean Valjean could no longer be doubted. The truth was manifest. His pathetic appearance in itself sufficed to explain what seemed inexplicable a few minutes before. Without the need of further enlightenment every person in that assembly, as though by an electric impulse, instantly perceived the simple nobility of this action on the part of a man who was surrendering himself in order that another might not suffer in his place. Before this overwhelming fact all lesser questions were set aside. It was an impulse that soon passed but for the moment it was irresistible.
‘I will trouble the Court no further,’ said Jean Valjean. ‘If I am not to be arrested at once I will leave. I have things to attend to. The Court knows who I am and where I am going, and can send for me when it chooses.’
He turned towards the door. No voice was raised, no arm outstretched to stay him. They stood aside to let him pass. He was invested at that moment with the hint of the divine which causes crowds to fall back in homage. He walked slowly. No one could say afterwards who had opened the door for him, but certainly it was open when he reached it. He turned and said to the prosecutor:
‘Monsieur, I am at your disposal.’
Then he said to the assembly as a whole:
‘You who are here present, you find me deserving of pity, do you not? For myself, when I consider what I came so near to doing, I think I am to be envied. But still I wish that none of this had happened.’
He went out and the door closed behind him as unobtrusively as it had opened.
It took the jury a very short time to acquit the man Champmathieu of the charge against him, and being at once released he went off in a state of total stupefaction, thinking all men mad and understanding nothing of what had transpired.
Book Eight
Counter-Stroke
I
In which mirror Monsieur Madeleine examines his hair
DAY WAS beginning to break. Fantine, after a restless night, but one filled with happy anticipation, had at length fallen asleep, and Sister Simplice had taken advantage of the fact to leave her bedside in order to prepare a new draught of quinine. She was bent over the array of bottles in the dispensary, obliged to peer closely at them in the misty dawn light, when suddenly she turned and uttered an exclamation. Monsieur Madeleine had silently entered the room.
‘Monsieur le maire!’
He said in a low voice: ‘How is she?’
‘She seems better at the moment, but we’ve been very worried about her.’
Sister Simplice went on to tell him that Fantine had seemed to be sinking the day before but had recovered when she came to believe that he had gone to Montfermeil to fetch her child. She did not venture to question the mayor, but she saw from his expression that this was not the case.
‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘You were right not to undeceive her.’
‘Perhaps so,’ said the sister. ‘But what are we to say to her now that you have come back without the child?’
He stood considering. ‘God will guide me,’ he said.
The light was growing and his face was more plainly visible. She looked at him suddenly and exclaimed:
‘Merciful Heaven! Monsieur le maire, what has happened to you? Your hair is quite white.’
‘White?’
She had no glass of her own. She searched in a case of instruments for the small hand-mirror which the doctor used to confirm that the dead had ceased to breathe. He took it and inspected himself and said, ‘So!’, but absently, as though he were thinking of other things. The sister’s heart was chilled with the apprehension of events unknown to her.
He asked: ‘May I see her?’
‘Is Monsieur le maire not going to have her child brought here?’ the sister asked, scarcely daring to put the question.
‘Of course. But it will take two or three days.’
‘If she does not see you until then she will imagine that you are still away. We can persuade her to be patient. And when the child is here she will naturally suppose that you have brought her. We shall not have to tell a lie.’
Again Monsieur Madeleine paused for thought, but then he said in his calm, firm voice:
‘No, sister, I must see her now. I may perhaps have very little time.’
The sister seemed not to notice the word ‘perhaps’, which lent an enigmatic quality to this reply. She lowered her eyes and said respectfully:
‘In that case, although she is resting, Monsieur le maire may go in.’
He said something about a door that closed badly, making a noise that might disturb her, and then, going into Fantine’s room, drew back the bed-curtains. She was asleep, her breath coming in those painful gasps that are a part of her malady and rend the heart of a mother watching at the bedside of a dying child. But the laboured act of breathing scarcely troubled the serenity that had transformed her countenance, even in sleep. Her livid pallor was turned to a more gentle whiteness and there was a lustre on her cheeks. Her long, fair eyelashes, the one beauty that remained of her youth and innocence, fluttered slightly although her eyes were closed. Her whole being quivered as though at the unfolding of invisible wings making ready to spread and bear her upward. No one, seeing her, could have supposed that this was a case of desperate illness. She was more like a being about to take flight than one about to die.
When we reach out to pluck a flower the stem trembles, seeming both to shrink and to offer itself. The human body has something of this tremor at the moment when the mysterious hand of death reaches out to pluck a soul.
For some time Monsieur Madeleine stayed motionless at the bedside, looking from the sick woman to the crucifix above her head, as he had done two months before when he had come to visit her for the first time. They were in the same postures, she sleeping and he in prayer; but now her hair was grey and his was white.
The sister had not come in with him. He stood with a finger to his lips, as though there were someone present who must be enjoined to silence. And presently she opened her eyes, looked up at him, and said tranquilly, with a smile:
‘And Cosette?’
II
Fantine is happy
; She had made no gesture of surprise or delight; she was delight itself. The simple question had been uttered in a tone of such absolute trust and certainty, so complete an absence of misgiving, that he was at a loss. She went on:
‘I knew you were here. I could see you even in my sleep. I have been seeing you for a long time, watching you all through the night. You were in a kind of radiance and there were heavenly figures hovering over you.’
He looked up at the crucifix.
‘But where is Cosette? Why did you not sit her on my bed, ready for when I woke up?’
He murmured something in reply and afterwards could not remember what he had said. Fortunately the doctor had been summoned and now came to his rescue.
‘You must keep calm, my child,’ he said. ‘Your little girl is here.’
Fantine’s eyes shone with a brilliance that lighted all her face. She clasped her hands in a gesture expressing all that is most passionate and most humble in the act of prayer.
‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘won’t someone bring her in?’
With the touching self-deception of a mother she still thought of Cosette as a babe-in-arms.
‘Not yet,’ said the doctor. ‘Not for the present. You’re still feverish and the excitement would be bad for you. First you must get well.’
‘But I am well! I’m perfectly well! How can you be so foolish? I want to see my baby!’
‘You see how quickly you become agitated,’ the doctor said. ‘So long as you are in this state I cannot let you have your child. It is not enough to see her, you have to live for her. When you are calmer I will bring her to you myself.’
She hung her head. ‘I beg your pardon, Monsieur le médicin. At one time I wouldn’t have spoken like that, but so many bad things have happened to me that now I don’t always know what I’m saying. I can understand that you don’t want me to get over-excited, and I will wait if you say I must, but I swear to you that it would do me no harm to see my little girl I can see her already, I’ve been seeing her all night. If you were to bring her to me now I would simply talk quietly to her, nothing more. It is not surprising, is it, that I should want to see her, now that she has been brought all the way from Montfermeil. But I’m not angry. I know I’m going to be happy. All through the night I saw brightness and smiling faces. You will bring Cosette to me when you think it right. I’m not feverish any more, I’m getting better and I feel sure that there is nothing seriously wrong with me: but I’ll pretend to be ill and keep quite still to please the ladies here, and when they see how calm I am they’ll say, “Now she can have her child.”’
Madeleine had seated himself on a chair by the bed. She turned towards him, making a palpable effort to appear calm – ‘to be good’, as she termed it in the weakness of her sick state, which is like a return to childhood – so that they would make no difficulty about bringing Cosette to her. But she could not restrain herself from pouring out a flood of questions.
‘Did you have a good journey, Monsieur le maire? It was so wonderfully kind of you to go for her. At least you can tell me how she is. Did she find the journey very tiring? She won’t recognize me, alas; she’ll have forgotten me after all this time. Children have short memories. They’re like birds, living from one day to the next. Were her clothes in good order? Have the Thénardiers taken good care of her? Has she been properly fed? If you only knew how I worried about those things, the suffering they caused me at the time when I was penniless. But now all that is over and I’m happy. I so long to see her. Did you think her pretty, Monsieur le maire? She’s beautiful, isn’t she? You must have been very cold in the coach. Can she not be brought to me just for a moment, and then you can take her away at once. You’re the mayor. Won’t you do this for me?’
He took her hand. ‘Cosette is beautiful,’ he said. ‘She’s well and you will soon see her. But now you must rest. You’ve been talking too much, and you keep taking your arms out from under the bedclothes, which makes you cough.’
Her speech had indeed been constantly interrupted by bursts of coughing. She made no further protest, fearing that her over-eager entreaty had already weakened the confidence she was trying to inspire. She went on more quietly:
‘Montfermeil is a pretty place, isn’t it? Visitors go there in the summer. Are the Thénardiers doing well? There aren’t many people in those parts, and their tavern is a humble one.’
Monsieur Madeleine was still holding her hand while he gazed anxiously at her. There were things he had intended to say, but now he hesitated. The doctor had left and only Sister Simplice remained with them.
The silence that ensued was broken suddenly by a cry from Fantine.
‘I can hear her! My darling, I can hear her!’
A child was playing in the yard, the daughter, perhaps, of one of the women who worked there. It was purely an accident, one of those chance happenings that are so often a part of the mysterious stage-management of scenes of tragedy. A little girl running up and down to keep warm, and laughing and singing as she ran. Children’s games … Alas, is there any human occasion into which they do not enter?
‘It’s Cosette!’ cried Fantine. ‘I recognize her voice.’
The child ran off as casually as she had come, and her voice died away. Fantine lay for a time listening; then her expression darkened and Madeleine heard her murmur, ‘How cruel of that doctor not to let me see her. But he has a cruel face.’
Presently, however, more hopeful thoughts returned and she lay talking to herself with her head relaxed on the pillow.
‘We’re going to be so happy. For one thing, we shall have a little garden, Monsieur Madeleine has promised, and that is where she’ll play. She must have learnt her letters by now, and I’ll teach her to spell. I’ll watch while she skips across the grass chasing the butterflies. And presently she’ll have her first communion. Now, when will that be?’ She began to count on her fingers. ‘One, two, three, four … She’s seven now, so it will be in five years. She’ll wear a white veil and openwork stockings, like a grown-up young lady … Oh, sister, I’m being so foolish, I’m thinking of my daughter’s first communion!’ And she laughed.
Madeleine had let go her hand and with eyes downcast was listening to her as one listens to the stir of wind in the trees, immersed in his own unfathomable thoughts. But suddenly she broke off, and her abrupt silence caused him to look at her. Her aspect was alarming.
She seemed scarcely to breathe. She had raised herself on her elbows, with one thin shoulder emerging from her nightgown. Her face, which a minute before had been radiant, was now white and she was staring with wide, startled eyes at some terrifying sight that, it seemed, had just appeared at the far end of the room.
‘What is it, Fantine?’ he asked. ‘What’s the matter?’
She did not answer but, still staring, touched him on the arm while with her other hand she pointed behind him.
He turned and saw Javert.
III
Javert is content
This is what had happened.
The clock had struck the half hour after midnight when Monsieur Madeleine left the assize court in Arras. He returned to the inn just in time to catch the mail, on which, we may recall, he had reserved a seat. His first act, upon reaching Montreuil-sur-mer at six in the morning was to post the letter he had written to M. Lafitte, the banker, after which he went to the infirmary to see Fantine.
Meanwhile, shortly after he left the assizes, the prosecutor, who was the first person in court to recover from the universal dismay, had risen to deplore this rash act on the part of the mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer, to declare that his own convictions were in no way altered by an incident which doubtless time would explain, and to demand the conviction of Champmathieu, who was unquestionably the real Jean Valjean. In this he was running counter to the general feeling of the public, the bench, and the jury. The defence lawyer had had little difficulty in showing that Madeleine’s testimony completely demolished the case for the prosecution, to which he had adde
d certain cogent, but not novel, observations on the subject of judicial error. The presiding judge supported him in his summing-up and within a few minutes Champmathieu was acquitted.
But the law needed a Jean Valjean, and if Champmathieu was not the man then it must be Madeleine. Directly the court adjourned the prosecutor closeted himself with the presiding judge and they conferred together ‘of the necessity of seizing the person of the mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer’. The sentence, with its many ‘ofs’, is taken from the report written in his own hand to the office of the Public Prosecutor. The judge, now in a calmer frame of mind, made little objection. Justice had to take its course. It may be added that, although he was a good-hearted and reasonably intelligent man, the judge was a sturdy and indeed ardent royalist. It had shocked him to hear the mayor, referring to the landing at Cannes, use the word ‘emperor’ instead of ‘Buonaparte’.
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