And with his growing serenity the thought of Cosette, his constant preoccupation, returned to him. Not that he was troubled by her headache, which he regarded as nothing but a trifling crise de nerfs, a girlish sulk that would wear off in a day or two; but he was thinking of her future, and, as always, with affectionate concern. After all, there seemed to be no reason why their happy life should not continue. There are times when all things look impossible, and times when all things look easy. For Valjean this was one of the latter occasions. As a rule they follow bad times as day follows night, by that law of succession and contrast which is at the heart of Nature, and which superficial minds call antithesis. In the placid street where he had taken refuge, Valjean shrugged off all the anxieties which for some time had been troubling him. From the very fact of having seen so many dark clouds, he now had glimpses of a clearer sky. To have left the Rue Plumet without difficulty or any untoward incident was in itself a gain.
It might well be prudent to leave France, if only for a few months and go to London. Well then, that was what they would do. What did it matter where they were provided they were together? Cosette was his only country, all that he needed for his happiness. The thought that perhaps he might not be all that Cosette needed for happiness, which at one time had caused him sleepless nights, did not now enter his mind. He was rid of all past troubles, in a state of brimming optimism. Cosette, being near him, seemed part of him – an optical illusion which everyone has experienced. He mentally planned their journey to England, endowing it with every imaginable comfort, and, in his day-dream, saw his happiness reborn no matter where they were.
But as he paced slowly up and down the room something suddenly caught his eye. He came face to face with the mirror hanging at an inclined angle over the sideboard, and, reflected in it, he read the following lines:
My dearest,
Alas, father insists that we must leave here at once. We go tonight to No. 7, Rue de l’Homme-Armé, and in a week we shall be in England.
Cosette 4th June.
Jean Valjean stood aghast.
Cosette when they arrived had put her blotting-book on the dresser, and in her distress had forgotten to remove it, leaving it open at the page on which she had blotted her letter to Marius, and the mirror, reflecting the reversed handwriting, had made it clearly legible. It was simple and it was devastating.
Valjean moved closer to the mirror. He re-read the lines without believing in their existence. They were like something seen in a lightning-flash, a hallucination. The thing was impossible; it could not be true.
Slowly his wits returned to him. He examined the blotter with a renewed sense of reality, studying the blotted lines which, in their reversed state, were a meaningless scrawl. He thought, ‘But there’s no sense in this, it’s not handwriting,’ and drew a deep breath of irrational relief. Which of us has not known these aberrations in moments of intense shock? The spirit does not give way to despair until it has exhausted every possibility of self-deception.
He stood staring stupidly at the blotter in his hand, almost ready to laugh at the hallucination which had so nearly deceived him. But then he looked again in the mirror and saw the words reflected in remorseless clarity. This was no illusion. The reflection of a fact is in itself a fact. This was Cosette’s handwriting. He saw it all.
He trembled and, putting down the blotter, sank into the armchair by the sideboard, to sit there with his head lolling, his eyes dulled in utter dismay. He said to himself that there was no escape, the light of his world had gone out, since Cosette had written this to someone other than himself. But then he heard his own spirit, become again terrible, roar sullenly in the darkness. Try to rob a lion of its cub!
What is strange and sad is that at that time Marius had not received the letter. Fate had treacherously delivered it into Valjean’s hands before Marius had seen it.
Until that moment no trial had been too much for Jean Valjean. He had endured hideous ordeals; no extremity of ill-fortune had been spared him; every utmost hardship, every vindictiveness and all the spite of which society was capable had been visited upon him. He had stood his ground unflinching, accepting, when he had to, the bitterest blows. He had sacrificed the inviolability he had gained as a man restored to life, surrendered his freedom, risked his neck, lost everything and suffered everything, and had remained tolerant and stoical to the point that at moments he seemed to have achieved the self-abnegation of a martyr. His conscience, fortified by so many battles with a malignant fate, had seemed unassailable. But anyone able to see into his heart would have been forced to admit that now he weakened.
Of all the torments he had suffered in his long trial by adversity, this was the worst. Never had the rack and thumbscrew been more shrewdly applied. He felt the stirring of forgotten sensibilities, the quiver of deep-buried nerves. Alas, the supreme ordeal – indeed, the one true ordeal – is the loss of the beloved.
It is true that the poor, ageing man loved Cosette only as a father; but, as we have already said, the emptiness of his life had caused this paternal love to embrace all others. He loved Cosette as his daughter, his mother, his sister; and since he had had neither mistress nor wife, since human nature is a creditor who accepts no compromise, that kind of love, too, was mingled with the others, confused and unrealized, pure with the purity of blindness, innocent, unconscious and sublime, less an emotion than an instinct, and less an instinct than a bond, impalpable, indefinable, but real. The true essence of love was threaded through his immense tenderness for Cosette like the seam of gold hidden unsullied beneath the mountainside.
We must recall the relationship between them that we have already described. No marriage between them was possible, not even a marriage of souls, and yet their destinies were assuredly joined. Except Cosette – that is to say, except a child – Jean Valjean had known nothing of the things that men love. No succession of loves and passions had coloured his life with those changing shades of green, fresh green followed by dark green, which we see in trees that have lived through a winter and men who have lived for more than fifty years. In short, as we have more than once emphasized, that inner fusion, that whole of which the sum was a lofty virtue, had resulted in making Jean Valjean a father to Cosette. A strange father compounded of the parent, son, brother and husband who all existed within him; a father in whom there was even something of the mother; a father who loved and worshipped Cosette, for whom she was light and dwelling-place, family, country, paradise.
So that now, when he realized that this was positively ended, that she was escaping from him, slipping through his fingers like water, like a mist; when he was confronted by the crushing evidence that another possessed her heart and was the end and purpose of her life, and that he was no more than the father, someone who no longer existed; when he could no longer doubt this, but was forced to say, ‘She is going to leave me’, the intensity of his pain was past enduring. To have done so much for it to end like this; to be no one, of no account! He was shaken throughout his being by a tempest of revolt, and he felt to the very roots of his hair an overweening rebirth of egotism – self bellowed from the depths of his emptiness.
There is such a thing as spiritual collapse. The thrust of a desperate certainty into a man cannot occur without the disruption of certain profound elements which are sometimes the man himself. Anguish, when it has reached this stage, becomes a panic-flight of all the powers of conscience. There are mortal crises from which few of us emerge in our right mind, with our sense of duty still intact. When the limit of suffering is overpassed the most impregnable virtue is plunged in disarray. Jean Valjean picked up the blotter again, and again convinced himself. As though turned to stone, he stood with eyes intent on those irrefutable lines, and such a darkness filled his mind as to make it seem that all his soul had crumbled.
He studied the revelation, and the exaggerations which his own imagination supplied, with an appearance of calm that in itself was frightening, for it is a dreadful thing when
the calm of a man becomes the coldness of a statue. He measured this change effected by a remorseless destiny of which he had been quite unaware, recalling his fears of the summer, so lightly dismissed. It was the same precipice, it had not changed; but now he was not standing at the edge, he was at the bottom. And, which was of all things most bitter and outrageous, he had fallen without knowing. The light of his life had vanished while he thought that the sun still shone.
His instinct spared him nothing. He recalled incidents, dates, certain flushes and pallors on Cosette’s cheek, and he thought, ‘That was he!’ The lucid percipience of despair is like an arrow that never fails to find its target. His thoughts flew instantly to Marius. He did not know the name, but he promptly placed the man. He clearly saw, in the implacable revival of memory, the youthful stranger in the Luxembourg, the contemptible chaser of girls, the love-lorn idler, the fool, the cheat – for it is treachery to make eyes at a girl with a loving parent at her side.
Having decided in his mind that this young man was at the bottom of it all, Jean Valjean, the man who had redeemed himself, who had mastered his soul and with such painful effort resolved all life, hardship and suffering in love, turned his inward vision upon himself: and a ghost rose before his eyes – hatred.
Great suffering brings great weakness; it undermines the will to live. In youth it is perilous, but later it may be disastrous. For if despair is terrible when the blood is hot, the hair dark, the head still held high like the flame of a torch; when the thread of destiny has still to be unreeled and the heart may still beat faster with a worthy love; when there are still women and laughter and the whole wide world; when the force of life is undiminished – if despair even then is terrible, what must it be in age, when the years rush past with a growing pallor and through the dusk we begin to see the stars of eternity?
While he sat brooding Toussaint entered the room. Valjean turned to her and asked:
‘Where is it happening? Do you know?’
She stared at him in bewilderment.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Didn’t you say there was fighting going on somewhere?’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Toussaint. ‘It’s near Saint-Merry.’
There are actions which arise, without our knowing it, from the depths of our thought. No doubt it was owing to an impulse of this kind, of which he was scarcely conscious, that a few minutes later Valjean was out in the street. He was seated, bareheaded, on the kerbstone outside the house. He seemed to be listening.
Darkness had fallen.
II
A boy at war with street-lamps
How long did he stay there? What was the ebb and flow of his tragic meditation? Did he seek to recover himself? Was he so bowed down as to be broken, or could he still stand upright, finding within himself something still solid on which to set his feet? Probably he himself did not know.
The street was empty. The occasional apprehensive inhabitant, hurriedly returning home, scarcely noticed him. In times of peril it is every man for himself. The lamplighter, on his accustomed round, lit the lamp, which was just opposite the door of No. 7, and went his way. To anyone pausing to examine him in the half-light, Jean Valjean would not have seemed a living man. Seated on the kerbstone outside his door he was like a figure carved in ice. There is a frozen aspect of despair. Vague sounds of distant tumult, tocsins and fanfares, were to be heard, and mingled with these the clock of the Église de Saint-Paul, gravely and without haste striking the hour of eleven: for the tocsin is man, but the hour is God. The passing of time made no impression on Valjean; he did not move. But at about that time a sudden burst of firing sounded from the direction of the market, followed by a second, even more violent. Probably this was the attack on the Rue de Chanvrerie barricade which, as we know, Marius repulsed. The two volleys, their savagery seeming heightened by the outraged stillness of the night, caused Valjean to get to his feet and stand facing the direction from which the din had come: but then he sat down again, and, crossing his arms, let his chin sink slowly on to his chest while he resumed his inward debate.
The sound of footsteps caused him to raise his head. By the light of the street-lamp he saw a youthful figure approaching, pale-faced but glowing with life. Gavroche had arrived in the Ruedel’Homme-Armé.
He was gazing at the housefronts, apparently in search of a number. Although he could see Valjean he paid no attention to him. He stared up and then down, and, rising on tip-toe, rapped on doors and ground-floor windows. All were locked and barred. After trying five or six houses in vain he shrugged his shoulders and commented on the situation as follows:
‘Well, blow me!’
Jean Valjean, who in his present state of mind would not have addressed or answered any other person, was irresistibly moved to question this lively small boy.
‘Well, youngster, what are you up to?’
‘What I’m after is that I’m hungry,’ said Gavroche crisply; and he added, ‘Youngster yourself.’
Valjean felt in his pocket and produced a five-franc piece. But Gavroche, skipping from one subject to another like the sparrow he was, had become aware of the street-lamp. He picked up a stone.
‘You’ve still got lights burning in these parts,’ he said. ‘That’s not right, mate. No discipline. I’ll have to smash it.’
He flung the stone, and the lamp-glass fell with a clatter which caused the occupants of the near-by houses, huddled behind their curtains, to exclaim, ‘It’s ’93 all over again!’
‘There you are, you old street,’ said Gavroche. ‘Now you’ve got your nightcap on.’ He turned to Valjean. ‘What’s that monstrous great building at the end of the street? The Archives, isn’t it? You ought to pull down some of those pillars and make them into a barricade.’
Jean Valjean went towards him.
‘Poor little chap,’ he muttered. ‘He’s half-starved.’ And he pressed the five-franc piece into his hand.
Startled by the size of the offering, Gavroche stared at the coin, charmed by its whiteness as it glimmered faintly in his hand. He had heard of five-franc pieces, he knew them by reputation, and he was delighted to see one at close quarters. Something worth looking at, he thought, and did so for some moments with pleasure. But then he held out the coin to Valjean, saying in a lordly fashion:
‘Thank you, guv’nor, but I’d sooner smash street-lamps. Take back your bribe. It doesn’t work with me.’
‘Have you a mother?’ Valjean asked.
‘More than you have perhaps.’
‘Then keep it and give it to her.’
Gavroche was melted by this. Besides, the man was hatless, and this predisposed him in his favour.
‘You mean I can have it?’ he said. ‘It’s not just to stop me smashing lamps?’
‘Smash as many as you like.’
‘You’re all right,’ said Gavroche. He put the coin in one of his pockets, and with a growing assurance, asked: ‘Do you live in this street?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Would you mind telling me which is Number Seven?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
Gavroche was brought up short, feeling that he had already said too much. He ran a hand through his hair and said cryptically:
‘Because.’
A thought occurred to Jean Valjean. Acute distress has these moments of lucidity. He asked:
‘Have you brought me the letter I’ve been waiting for?’
‘You?’ said Gavroche. ‘But you’re not a woman.’
‘A letter addressed to Mademoiselle Cosette.’
‘Cosette,’ muttered Gavroche. ‘I think that’s a rummy name.’
‘Well then, I’m to give it to her. May I have it?’
‘I take it you know that I’ve come from the barricades.’
‘Of course…’ said Valjean.
Gavroche fished in another pocket and got out the folded sheet of paper. He then gave a military salute.
‘Confidential dispatch,’ he said
, ‘from the Provisional Government.’
‘Let me have it,’ said Valjean.
Gavroche held the missive above his head.
‘Don’t go getting the idea that this is just a billet doux. It’s addressed to a woman, but it’s for the people. Our lot, we may be rebels, but we respect the weaker sex. We aren’t like the fine world where it’s all wolves chasing after geese.’
‘Give it to me.’
‘I’m bound to say,’ said Gavroche, ‘you look to me like a decent cove.’
‘Quickly, please.’
‘Well, here you are.’ Gavroche handed over the letter. ‘And hurry it up, Monsieur Chose. You mustn’t keep Mamselle Chosette waiting.’ He was pleased with this happy play on words.
‘One thing,’ said Jean Valjean. ‘Should I take the reply to Saint-Merry?’
‘If you did you’d be making what’s called a floater,’ said Gavroche. ‘That letter comes from the barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, to which I am now returning. Good night, citizen.’
Whereupon Gavroche departed – or, better, returned like a homing pigeon to its nest. He sped away into the night with the swift certainty of a bullet, and the narrow Rue de l’Homme-Armé was again plunged in empty silence. In the twinkling of an eye the strange little boy, that creature of darkness and fantasy, had disappeared into the gloom amid the tall rows of houses, vanishing like a puff of smoke; and one might have thought that he had vanished for ever if, a minute after his departure, the indignant dwellers in the Rue du Chaume had not been startled by the crash of another street-lamp.
III
While Cosette and Toussaint sleep
Jean Valjean went back into the house with Marius’s letter. As grateful for the darkness as an owl clutching its prey, he groped his way upstairs, gently opened his door and closed it behind him, and stood listening until he was assured that Cosette and Toussaint were asleep. Then, so greatly was his hand shaking, he made several vain attempts before extracting a spark from the Fumade tinder-box. His every action was like that of a thief in the night. Finally, with his candle lighted, he sat down at the table and unfolded the letter.
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