To grasp the huge extent of the components constituting a ship-of-the-line we need only to visit one of the covered dockyards, six storeys high, in Brest or Toulon, where the ship in process of building is displayed to us, as it were, under glass. That huge beam of wood is a spar, and the seemingly endless column of timber lying on the dockside is the mainmast. From its bedding in the hull to its top in the clouds it is sixty fathoms high, and three feet thick at its base. An English mainmast rises two hundred and seventeen feet above the ship’s water-line. The navy of our fore fathers used rope hawsers for its anchor, but today we use chains, and the coiled chain of a single anchor is four feet high and twenty feet wide. As for the amount of timber needed – the ship is a floating forest.
And all this, be it noted, refers to the man-of-war of forty years ago, a sailing-ship. Steam, which was then in its infancy, has brought added marvels. In these days the ship combining sail and screw is propelled by three thousand square metres of canvas and an engine of two thousand five hundred horsepower. But, setting aside these modern wonders, the old ships sailed by Christopher Columbus and de Ruyter were among the greatest masterpieces of man, inexhaustible in power as the heavens are in breath, purposeful amid the vast confusion of waves over which they moved and which they dominated.
Nevertheless it can happen that a sixty-foot spar or towering mast may be snapped like a twig by the violence of a squall, that huge anchors may be twisted like fish-hooks, that even the roar of the great guns may be lost in the howl of the tempest, and all that strength and majesty forced to submit to powers that are greater still. That so much splendour can be reduced to impotence is awe-inspiring to the minds of men, and so it happens that every seaport contains a crowd of idlers come to gaze at those marvellous contrivances for war and seafaring, without clearly knowing why. And so it was that every day and all day the quays and jetties of Toulon swarmed with onlookers having no other business than to contemplate the ship Orion.
The Orion had been a sick ship for some time. In the course of a long spell at sea her lower hull had become so fouled with barnacles as to rob her of half her speed. She had been dry-docked for scraping the previous year, and had then gone to sea again. But the scraping had weakened her timber-fastenings, eventually causing planks to start so that she began to make water, and a violent equinoctial gale in the latitude of the Balearics had further damaged her hull on the port side. She had accordingly returned to Toulon.
She was moored near the Arsenal, being still in commission and under repair. Her hull was not damaged on the starboard side but a few upper strakes had been removed, as the custom was, to let the air in.
One morning the crowd of onlookers witnessed an accident.
The crew were taking the sails off her. The man loosening the starboard peak of the main-topsail suddenly lost his balance. A cry of alarm rose from the watching crowd as they saw him reel and slip, clutching the foot-rope as he fell, first with one hand and then with both; and there he hung, with the sea a hideous distance below him. The shock had set the foot-rope wildly swinging and he dangled from it like a stone in a sling.
To go to his help would be to run an appalling risk. No member of the crew, which consisted of local fishermen recently pressed into service, was disposed to attempt it. Meanwhile the man was becoming exhausted. His agonized face could not be seen, but the writhings of his body, the arms horribly stretched, clearly showed it. His efforts to hoist himself up served only to increase the swinging of the rope. He uttered no sound, seeking to conserve his strength. The crowd waited, expecting nothing except the moment when he would relax his hold, and heads were turned away in order not to see. There are occasions when a length of rope, a pole, or the branch of a tree is life itself, and it is a terrible thing to see a living being lose his grip and fall like a ripe fruit.
But suddenly a man was seen climbing the rigging with the agility of a wildcat. He wore a red smock, which meant that he was a convict, and a green cap, which meant that he was serving a life sentence. As he reached the topsail-yard a gust of wind carried his cap away, revealing a head of white hair; he was not a young man.
It was learned later that the man was one of a labour gang brought in from the prison. At the first alarm, and seeing the reluctance of the crew to risk their lives, he had gone to the officer of the watch and asked permission to try to save the luckless seaman. When this was granted he had broken the chain welded to the manacle round his ankle with a single blow of a hammer, and then, snatching up a coil of rope, had started up the shrouds. No one had been struck at the time by the remarkable ease with which the chain had been broken. This was only remembered after the event.
In a remarkably short time he had reached the topsail-yard. Here he paused for a moment, evidently reviewing the situation, and those few seconds were to the spectators like an eternity. Then a sigh went up as he was seen to run along the yard. Making the rope fast to its further end, he swarmed down it, and the spectators suffered the agony of seeing two men suspended over the void instead of one. It was like watching a spider grapple with a fly, except that here the spider was bringing life, not death. Not a sound was to be heard; the watchers held their breath as though fearing to add the least impulse to the breeze that was buffeting the two men.
The convict at length drew level with the seaman, only just in time, for in another minute he must have relaxed his grip. Hanging on with one hand, the convict used the other to lash the bight of the rope securely round the man’s waist. Having done so he climbed back on to the yard and hauled the seaman up after him. He held him there for a moment to allow him to recover. Then, taking him in his arms, he walked with him along the yard to the masthead, whence he lowered him down to the cross-trees, where another member of the crew took charge of him.
And now the crowd burst into applause. Hardened prison-officers wept, women on the dockside embraced one another, and a cry of frenzied acclamation arose – ‘That man must be set free!’
The man, meanwhile, was making it a point of duty to return promptly to his labours. In order to do so the more rapidly he slid down the rigging and ran along one of the lower yards, while all eyes were fixed upon him. And then, for one terrible moment, he was seen to hesitate and stagger, overtaken, perhaps, by the giddiness of exhaustion. A great cry went up from the crowd as he was seen to fall into the sea.
It was a perilous fall. The frigate Algeciras was moored close to the Orion and he had fallen into the gap between them. There was a danger that he might be trapped beneath one of the two hulls. Four men at once put out in a boat to rescue him, while the crowd cheered. But he did not come to the surface. He had vanished into the sea making scarcely a ripple, as though he had plunged into a vat of oil. The boat’s crew sounded and dived in vain. The search continued until nightfall, but they did not even find his body.
Next day the local news-sheet contained the following item:
17 November 1823. Yesterday a convict working aboard the Orion fell into the sea and was drowned after rescuing a member of the crew. The body has not been recovered. It is assumed that it was caught in the piles under the Arsenal jetty. The man’s prison registration-number was 9430 and his name was Jean Valjean.
Book Three
Fulfilment of a Promise
I
The water situation at Montfermeil
MONTFERMEIL is situated between Livry and Chelles, on the southern slopes of the high plateau separating the river Ourcq from the Marne. In these days it is a fair-sized town ornamented with stucco villas all the year round and with prosperous inhabitants on Sundays. In 1823 there were fewer villas and fewer contented citizens. It was then nothing but a woodland village with here and there a country house dating from the last century and distinguished by an air of opulence, wrought-iron balconies and tall windows whose small panes reflected different shades of green against the white of closed shutters. But Montfermeil itself remained a village still undiscovered by retired linen drapers and university professors, a
peaceful and charming spot on a road that led nowhere. Life there was inexpensive and comfortable. The only problem, due to the height of the plateau on which it stood, was that of water.
Water had to be brought some distance. The end of the village nearest Gagny drew its supply from the beautiful pools in that part of the forest; but the other end, towards Chelles, which included the church, could only draw water from a small spring halfway down the slope near the Chelles road, about a quarter of an hour’s walk from the village.
So the water supply was a matter of some concern to the households at that end of the village. The larger houses, the aristocracy, and the Thénardier tavern, all contributed a trifling daily sum towards the payment of a water-carrier, who by this means earned about eight sous a day. But he worked only until seven o’clock in the evening in summer and five o’clock in winter. After that, when darkness had fallen and the ground-floor shutters were closed, anyone who had run short must fetch water for himself or go without.
This was the nightmare of the little girl already known to the reader as Cosette. It will be recalled that Cosette was useful to the Thénardiers in two respects, as a means of extorting money from her mother and as a household drudge in her own person. That is why they kept her after the mother’s payments had entirely ceased. She was still useful as an unpaid servant, and it was she who was sent to fetch water when it was needed. Being terrified of going to the spring after dark, she took great care to see that the house was always well supplied.
Christmas 1823 was especially brilliant at Montfermeil. The beginning of the winter had been mild, without frost or snow. Parties of strolling players from Paris had been given leave by the mayor to set up their booths in the village street, and by permission of the same authority the stalls of travelling hucksters had been erected in the Place de l’Église and in the Ruelle du Boulanger, the lane in which, we may recall, the Thénardier tavern was situated. All this brought custom to the innkeepers of the town and a note of gaiety and excitement to its normally quiet life. We may add, in our capacity of faithful historian, that among the sights was a menagerie, attended by a band of ragged showmen come from Lord knows where, which included a hideous, red-crested vulture from Brazil, of a kind which was not acquired by the royal museum until 1845. The species is known to naturalists, I believe, as Caracara polyborus. Veterans of Napoleon’s armies came to gaze at it with veneration, and the showmen claimed that its red cockade was a unique phenomenon devised by God for the sole benefit of their menagerie.
On Christmas Eve a group of men, carters and carriers, sat drinking in the low-ceilinged general room, lighted by four or five candles, of the Thénardier tavern. It was like any other tavern-room with its tables, pewter mugs, bottles, drinkers, smokers – little light and plenty of noise. But an indication of the year 1823 was afforded by the presence, on one of the tables, of two articles which were then fashionable in middle-class homes, a kaleidoscope and a magic-lantern. Mme Thénardier was attending to the joint which was roasting over a clear fire while her husband drank and talked politics with the customers.
Apart from politics, of which the main subjects were the war in Spain and the Duc d’Angoulême, there was local gossip of which the following is a sample:
‘They’ve had a big wine harvest round Nanterre and Suresnes, a dozen casks where they only reckoned ten, the grapes were very juicy’ … ‘But they can’t have been ripe?’ … ‘You don’t wait for the grapes to ripen in those parts. If you do the wine ferments by the spring’ … ‘So it’s a very light wine?’ … ‘Lighter than ours. You have to harvest it green’ … And so on.
Or else it was a miller complaining.
‘Can we be held responsible for what comes along in the sacks? You get all kinds of small seed which we haven’t time to sift, so we just put it through the mill – charnel, fennel, hemp, fox-tail and God knows what besides, to say nothing of the grit you get in some corn, particularly from Brittany. I don’t like milling that Breton stuff any more than a carpenter likes sawing a wooden beam with nails in it. The dust it makes! And then people complain about the flour, but it isn’t our fault.’
In a window-seat a day-labourer and a farmer were fixing a price for hay-mowing in the spring.
‘It doesn’t matter about grass being damp,’ the labourer was saying. ‘It cuts all the better with the dew on it. But this grass of yours is difficult, monsieur. It’s new-seeded and tender, which means it’ll bend under the scythe.’
And so on.
Cosette was in her usual place, seated on the cross-bar under the kitchen table near the hearth. Clad in rags, her bare feet in wooden clogs, she was knitting woollen stockings for the Thénardier children by the light of the fire. A kitten was playing under the chairs and two fresh childish voices could be heard laughing and chattering in the next room, those of Éponine and Azelma. A leather strap hung from a nail in the wall near the hearth.
Occasionally the cry of a younger child, coming from somewhere in the house, made itself heard amid the hubbub of the tavern. This was the son born to Mme Thénardier during a previous winter – ‘No knowing why,’ she said. ‘The cold weather, no doubt’ – and whose age was now a little over three. His mother had nursed him but did not love him. ‘Your son’s squawking,’ Thénardier said, when the noise became more persistent. ‘Better go and see what he wants.’ But the lady simply replied, ‘He’s a nuisance,’ and he was left to go on screaming in the dark.
II
Completion of two portraits
Thus far this book has contained only an outline sketch of the Thénardiers. We must now look at them more closely.
Thénardier was now just over fifty and Mme Thénardier was nearly forty, which in a woman is the equivalent of fifty: so husband and wife may be said to have been of the same age. The reader will perhaps have some recollection of Mme Thénardier as she was first described – tall, fair-haired, red-faced, fleshy, broad-shouldered, huge and active, resembling those monstrous women who parade themselves on fair grounds with paving-stones suspended from their hair. She did all the work of the house, beds, rooms, washing and cooking; she was the climate of the place, its fine and foul weather; she was the very devil; and her only assistant was Cosette, who was like a mouse in the service of an elephant. Everything trembled at the sound of her voice, window-panes, furniture, people. Her broad face was scattered with freckles like the holes in a cream-skimmer, and she had a slight beard. In short, a market-porter clad in women’s clothes. She swore splendidly and boasted that she could crack a walnut with a blow of her fist. Had it not been for the romantic tales she read, which now and then caused the coy female to emerge surprisingly from the ogress, no one would ever have thought of her as a woman. She was like a drab grafted on to a fishwife. She talked like a gendarme, drank like a coachman, and treated Cosette like a gaoler. A single tooth protruded from her mouth when in repose.
Thénardier was a small, skinny, sallow-faced man, bony, angular and puny, who looked ill but enjoyed excellent health – that was where his deceptiveness began. He smiled constantly as a matter of precaution and was polite to all comers, even to the beggar whom he turned away from his door. He had the sharp stare of a weasel and the general aspect of a man of letters, in which he greatly resembled the portraits of the Abbé Delille. It pleased him to drink with his customers, but nobody had ever succeeded in getting him drunk. He smoked a large pipe and wore an apron over an old black jacket. He had literary pretensions and professed to follow the materialist philosophy, supporting his arguments with such names as Voltaire, Raynal, Parny and, oddly enough, St Augustine. He had, he said, a ‘system’. For the rest, he was thoroughly crooked, a sanctimonious knave. The type is not unknown. It will be recalled that he claimed to have served in the army, and he took pleasure in describing how at Waterloo, being then a sergeant in the 6th or the 9th or some such regiment, he had defied single-handed a squadron of the Death’s Head hussars and protected with his body a ‘dangerously wounded general’.
This was the reason for the garish inn-sign which had caused his establishment to be known locally as ‘the tavern of the Waterloo sergeant’. He was a liberal, both traditional and Bonapartist, and had subscribed to the settlement established in Texas for liberal and Bonapartist refugees which was known as the ‘champ d’Asile’. It was said in the village that he had studied for the priesthood.
Our own belief is that he had merely studied in Holland to be an innkeeper. In all probability he was a mongrel – a Fleming in Flanders, a Frenchman in Paris, a Belgian in Brussels – ready to wear whatever coat the occasion called for. We know what really happened at Waterloo. He was, as we see, given to exaggeration. A life of ebb and flow, without scruple and always with an eye to the main chance, these were the waters he swam in, and it is likely enough that in that troubled month of June 1815 he had been one of that tribe of sutlers and camp-followers of which we have already given some account, travelling in a ramshackle covered cart with wife and children, pilfering in one place and selling in another, and always intent on coming out on the winning side. At the end of that campaign, having, as he said, ‘put a little something aside’, he had set up in business in Montfermeil; but the ‘something’, which consisted of purses, watches, gold rings, and silver crosses harvested in the furrows of that corpse-strewn field, had not amounted to very much or got him very far.
There was a kind of stiffness in Thénardier’s movements which recalled the barrack square when they were accompanied by an oath, and the seminary when accompanied by the sign of the cross. He was a smooth talker and liked to be considered erudite, but the schoolmaster had noted that he made ‘howlers’, and the bills which he presented to travellers, while elegantly penned, sometimes contained spelling mistakes. He was cunning, rapacious, indolent and shrewd, and by no means indifferent to maidservants, which was why his wife no longer kept any. She was a jealous giantess, believing the lean, yellow-faced little man to be infinitely desirable. Above all, Thénardier was wary and self-controlled, a cool-headed knave, which is the worst kind, since it contains so large an element of hypocrisy.
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