There was again a knock on the door and the doctor entered.
‘Good day and good-bye, doctor,’ said Valjean. ‘These are my two children.’
Marius went up to him and spoke a single word – ‘Monsieur? …’ – but the the tone in which he said it made it an enutire question. The doctor replied with a meaningful glance.
‘Because things do not always please us,’ said Valjean, ‘that is no reason for reproaching God.’
There was a pause in which all were oppressed. Jean Valjean turned to Cosette as though he wished to carry her image with him into eternity. Even amid the shadows into which he had now sunk the sight of her could still raise him to ecstasy. The glow of her sweet face was reflected in his own. Even in the act of death there may be enchantment.
The doctor was feeling his pulse. ‘You were what he needed,’ he said to Cosette and Marius; and then in a whispered aside to Marius: ‘Too late, I fear.’
Scarcely taking his eyes off Cosette, Valjean glanced serenely at Marius and the doctor. A low murmur escaped his lips.
‘To the is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.’
Suddenly he stood up. These returns of strength are sometimes a sign of the final death-throes. He walked steadily to the wall, brushing aside Marius and the doctor, who sought to help him, and took down the little copper crucifix which was hanging there. Then he returned to his chair, moving like a man in the fullness of health, and, putting the crucifix on the table, said in a clear voice:
‘He is the great martyr.’
Then his head fell forward while his fingers clutched at the stuff of his trousers over his knees. Cosette ran sobbing to hold him up, murmuring distractedly, ‘Father, father, have we found you only to lose you?’
One may say of dying that it goes by fits and starts, now moving towards the grave and now turning back towards life. After that half-seizure Valjean regained strength, passed a hand over his forehead as though to brush away the shadows, and was almost entirely lucid. He seized a fold of Cosette’s sleeve and kissed it.
‘He’s reviving!’ cried Marius. ‘Doctor, he’s reviving!’
‘You are both so good,’ said Jean Valjean. ‘I will tell you what has grieved me. What has grieved me, Monsieur Pontmercy, is that you have made no use of the money. It is truly your wife’s money. Let me explain it to you, my children. I am glad you are here, if only for that reason. Black jade comes from England and white jade comes from Norway. It’s all in this letter here. And I invented a new kind of fastening for bracelets which is prettier, better and cheaper. It made a great deal of money. Cosette’s fortune is really and truly hers. I tell you this to put your minds at rest.’
The concierge had come upstairs and was looking through the half-open door. The doctor told her to go away, but he could not prevent the zealous woman from calling to the dying man:
‘Do you want a priest?’
‘I have one,’ Jean Valjean replied; and he pointed upwards as though there were some other being present whom he alone could see. Indeed it is not improbable that the bishop was present in those last moments of his life. Cosette slipped a pillow behind his back. Valjean said:
‘I beseech you, Monsieur Pontmercy, to have no misgivings. My life will have been wasted if you do not make use of the money that is truly Cosette’s. I can assure you that our products were very good, rivalling what are known as the jewels of Berlin.’
When a person dear to us is about to the we fix him with an intent gaze that seeks to hold him back. They stood beside him in silent anguish, having no words to speak, Cosette clasping Marius by the hand.
Jean Valjean was visibly declining, sinking down towards that dark horizon. His breath was coming in gasps, punctured by slight groans. He had difficulty in moving his arms, and his feet were now quite motionless. But as the weakness of his body increased so his spirit grew in splendour, and the light of the unknown world was already visible in his eyes. His face became paler as he smiled. There was something other than life in it. His breath failed but his gaze grew deeper. He was a dead body which seemed to possess wings.
He signed to Cosette to come closer to him, then signed to Marius. It was the last moment of the last hour, and when he spoke it was in a voice so faint that it seemed to come from a long way off, as though there were a wall between them.
‘Come close to me, both of you. I love you dearly. How sweet it is to die like this. And you love me too, dear Cosette. You’ll weep for me a little, but not too much, I want you to have no great sorrows. You must enjoy life, my children. A thing I forgot to mention is that the buckles without tongues are more profitable than any other kind. They cost ten francs the gross to manufacture and sell at sixty. Excellent business, as you see, so there is really no reason, Monsieur Pontmercy, why you should be astonished at that sum of six hundred thousand francs. It is honest money. You can be rich with an easy mind. You must have a carriage and now and then a box at the theatre, and you, Cosette, must have beautiful dresses to dance in, and when you invite your friends to dinner. You must be happy. I am leaving the two candlesticks on the mantelpiece to Cosette. They are made of silver, but to me they are pure gold. I don’t know whether the person who gave them to me is pleased as he looks down on me from above. I have done my best. You must not forget, my children, that I am one of the poor. You must bury me in any plot of ground that comes handy and put a stone to mark the spot. That is my wish. No name on the stone. If Cosette cares to visit it sometimes I shall be glad. And you too, Monsieur Pontmercy. I must confess that I have not always liked you, and I ask your forgiveness. She and you are now one person to me and I am very grateful. I know you are making Cosette happy. The greatest joy in my life has been to see her with rosy cheeks, and I have been grieved when she has looked pale. You will find in the chest of drawers a five-hundred-franc note. I haven’t touched it. It is for the poor. Cosette, do you see your little dress there on the bed? Do you remember it? That was ten years ago. How time passes! We have been happy together. Now it is over. You must not weep, dear children, I shall not be far away. I shall watch over you from where I am. You need only to look when night has fallen and you will see me smile. Do you remember Montfermeil, Cosette? You were in the woods, and you were frightened. I helped you carry the bucket, do you remember? That was the first time I touched your poor hand. It was so cold! Your hands were red in those days, Mademoiselle, and now they are white. And do you remember that big doll? You called her Catherine, and you wished you could have taken her with you to the convent. You made me laugh at times, angel that you were. When it rained you floated straws in the gutter and watched to see which would win. Once I gave you a battledore of willow and a shuttlecock with yellow, blue and green feathers. I expect you have forgotten that. You were so enchanting when you were small. You hung cherries over your ears. All those things are in the past – the woods we walked through, the convent where we took refuge, your child’s eyes and laughter, all shadows now. I believed that it all belonged to me, and that is where I was foolish. Those Thénardiers were wicked people, but we must forgive them. Cosette, the time has come for me to tell you your mother’s name. It was Fantine. You must not forget it, Fantine, and you must bow your head whenever you speak it. She loved you greatly and she suffered greatly. She was as rich in sorrow as you are in happiness. That is how God evens things out. He watches us all from above and knows what he is doing amid his splendid stars. And now I must leave you, my children. Love one another always. There is nothing else that matters in this world except love. You will think sometimes of the old man who died in this place. Dearest Cosette, it was not my fault if lately I have not come to see you. It wrung my heart. I used to go to the end of your street. I must have looked a strange sight to the people who saw me. They must have thought me mad. One day I went without my hat … Children, my sight is failing. I had more to say, but no matter. Think of me sometimes. You are fortunate. I don’t know what is happening to me, I can see a light. Come closer. I die ha
ppy. Bow your dear heads so that I may lay my hands on them.’
Cosette and Marius fell on their knees on either side of him, stifling their tears. His hands rested on their heads, and did not move again. He lay back with his head turned to the sky, and the light from the two candlesticks fell upon his face.
VI
The hidden grave
In the cemetery of Père Lachaise, not far from the communal grave and remote from the elegant quarter of that city of sepulchres which parades in the presence of eternity the hideous fashions of death, is a deserted corner near an old wall, and here, beneath a big yew tree, surrounded by mosses and dandelions, there is a stone. It is black and green, no more exempt than other stones from the encroachment of time, lichen and bird-droppings. There is no path near it, and people are reluctant to go that way because the grass is long and they are sure to get their feet wet. In sunny weather lizards visit it, there is a stir of grasses all around it and birds sing in the tree.
The stone is quite unadorned. It was carved strictly to serve its purpose, long enough and wide enough to cover a man. It bears no name.
But many years ago someone chalked four lines of verse on it which became gradually illegible under the influence of wind and weather and have now, no doubt, vanished entirely.
He sleeps. Although so much he was denied,
He lived; and when his dear love left him, died.
It happened of itself, in the calm way
That in the evening night-time follows day.
Appendix A
Part two: Book seven:
A Parenthesis
I
The convent as an abstract idea
THIS BOOK is a drama in which the leading character is the Infinite. Mankind takes second place.
That being so, since a convent lay upon our path we were obliged to enter it. Why? Because the convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.
This is not the place to pursue at unreasonable length certain lines of thought; nevertheless, while wholly reserving our own views, our reservations and even our resentments, we are bound to assert that whenever we encounter the Infinite in man, however imperfectly understood, we treat it with respect. Whether in the synagogue, the mosque, the pagoda, or the wigwam, there is a hideous aspect which we execrate and a sublime aspect which we venerate. So great a subject for spiritual contemplation, such measureless dreaming – the echo of God on the human wall!
II
The convent as historical fact
In the eyes of history, reason, and truth, monasticism stands condemned. Monasteries, when they are numerous in a country, are clots in its circulatory system; they are encumbrances, centres of indolence where there should be centres of labour. Monastic communities are to the social community as a whole what mistletoe is to the oak or a verruca to the human body. Their prosperity and well-being are the country’s impoverishment. The monkish regime, which was of value in the early stages of civilization, useful in replacing brutality by spirituality, is harmful to the virility of a nation. Moreover, when the discipline relaxes and enters upon its stage of disorder, since it still sets an example it becomes harmful for all the reasons that in its pure stage made it salutary.
Close confinement has had its day. The cloisters, useful for the early education of modern civilization, have hindered its growth and delayed its development. Considered as an institution and a means of education, the monasteries, which were good in the tenth century and of questionable value in the fifteenth, are deplorable in the nineteenth. The leprosy of monasticism has over the centuries devoured two great nations almost to the bone, Italy and Spain, one the light of Europe and the other its splendour, and at the present time those illustrious peoples are only beginning to recover, thanks to the sane and vigorous purification of 1789.
The convent, and in particular the ancient women’s convent such as still existed at the beginning of the present century in Italy, Austria, and Spain, was one of the most sombre creations of the Middle Ages. Cloisters of that kind were the meeting-place of terrors. The Catholic convent, in the strict sense, was filled with the dark light of death.
The Spanish convent is especially funereal. Tower-like altars, high as cathedrals, rise up under gloomy vaults and domes scarcely visible in the shadowed light; huge white crucifixes hang on chains; ivory Christs stretch naked against ebony, bleeding rather than bloodstained, hideous and magnificent, elbows and knee-caps thrusting through the skin and flesh protruding from open wounds, figures crowned with thorns of silver and nailed with nails of gold, with drops of blood that are rubies on their foreheads and tears that are diamonds in their eyes. The diamonds and rubies seem to be liquid and cause weeping in the veiled forms in the darkness below, their bodies ravaged by sackcloth and the whip, their breasts crushed in wicker corsets, their knees bruised with prayer. They are women who believe themselves to be wives; ghosts who think themselves seraphim. Do they think, these women? Do they desire or love or live? No. Their nerves have turned to bone, and their bones to rock. Their veils are woven night, and the breath within them is like the breathing of death. The abbess, a spectral figure, both sanctifies and terrifies them. Immaculacy resides there, purity gone mad. Such are the old Spanish convents, haunts of a terrifying devotion, refuges of virgins, places without pity.
Catholic Spain was more Roman than Rome herself, and the Spanish convent was the Catholic convent par excellence. The archbishop, the chief eunuch of Heaven, imprisoned and spied upon that seraglio of souls set apart for God. The nun was the odalisque, the priest the eunuch. The rapt adōrers were selected in dreams and possessed by Christ, the beautiful youth who came down from the cross at night and filled the cell with ecstasy. High walls protected from all distractions the mystical Sultana whose Sultan had been crucified. Even a glance beyond the walls was an act of infidelity. The in pace replaced the leather sack. What in the East was flung into the sea, in the West was buried in the earth. The women on both sides wrung their hands, these destined for the waves, those for the grave; one lot was drowned, the other buried – a monstrous parallelism.
Worshippers of the past in the present day, being unable to deny these things, elect to smile at them. A strange and comfortable fashion has sprung up of obliterating the revelations of history, disparaging the commentaries of philosophy and evading all awkward facts and disturbing questions. ‘Mere propaganda,’ the wise men say, and the fools repeat it after them. Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, all were propagandists. I do not know who it was who recently discovered that Tacitus was a propagandist and Nero his victim, greatly to be pitied.
But facts are not so easily disposed of. The author of these lines has with his own eyes seen a relic of the Middle Ages some eight leagues from Brussels, easily visited by anyone: this is the entrance to the oubliettes of the Abbaye de Villers in the middle of a lawn which was the courtyard of the Abbey, and, at the edge of the river Dyle, four stone cells half in and half out of the water. They were in pace cells, each with the remains of an iron door, a latrine and a barred window, two feet above the level of the river on the outside and six feet above ground level inside. The river beyond the wall is four feet deep. The earth is always wet, and this wet earth was the in pace victim’s bed. In one of these dungeons there is part of an iron collar fixed to the wall; in another there is a sort of square box composed of four slabs of granite, too short for anyone to lie down in it and too low for him to stand upright. The victim was put in it with a slab of stone on top. This thing exists. It can be seen and touched. But all this, the iron door, the barred window, the collar, the stone box, the flowing river, all is merely propaganda!
III
Conditions under which the past may be respected
Monasticism, as it existed in Spain and still exists in Tibet, is a wasting disease of civilization. It puts a stop
to life. Quite simply, it depopulates. Claustration is castration. It has been the scourge of Europe. Add to this the violence so often inflicted on the conscience, the enforced vocations, feudalism depending on the monastery for its support, the older generation getting rid of surplus progeny in the cloister; and the savagery of which we have spoken, the in pace, the closed mouths and minds, so much intelligence condemned to the imprisonment of vows for life, the burial of living souls. No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention.
Nevertheless there are still places where, in spite of philosophy and progress, the cloistral spirit persists even in the nineteenth century, and a weird recrudescence of asceticism is even now astonishing the civilized world. This obstinate determination of old institutions to perpetuate themselves resembles the rancid scent which clings to your hair, the rotten fish which demands to be eaten, the tyranny of children’s garments presuming to clothe a grown man, or the tenderness of corpses returning to embrace the living.
‘Ingrate!’ says the garment. ‘I protected you in bad weather. Why do you now discard me?’ …’ I come from the open sea,’ says the fish … ‘I was once a rose,’ says the scent … ‘I loved you,’ says the corpse … ‘I civilized you,’ says the monastery. And to all this there is only one reply – ‘Once upon a time.’
It seems strange that anyone should dream of the indefinite prolongation of institutions that have outlived their usefulness, of restoring dogmas now grown hollow, refurbishing shrines, restoring monasteries, reviving old superstitions and fanaticisms – in a word, of reviving monasticism and militarism, saving society by the multiplication of parasites and imposing the past on the present. Nevertheless there are those who advocate such procedures. These theorists, among them persons of intelligence, have a simple method: they cover the past with a veneer which they term social order, divine right, morality, the family, ancestral respect, ancient authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, and religion; and this they ask honest men to accept. It is an argument well known to the ancients. They covered a black sacrificial heifer with chalk and called it white – Bos cretatus.
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