LES MISÉRABLES.
BY
VICTOR HUGO.
PART FIFTH.
JEAN VALJEAN.
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY LAWRENCE WRAXALL.
BOSTON:
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
1887
[Illustration: The Death of Jean Valjean]
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
JEAN VALJEAN.
BOOK I.
THE WAR WITHIN FOUR WALLS.
I. THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG ST. ANTOINE AND
THE SCYLLA OF THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE
II. NOTHING TO DO IN THE ABYSS BUT TALK.
III. CLEARING AND CLOUDING
IV. FIVE LESS AND ONE MORE
V. THE HORIZON ONE SEES FROM THE BARRICADE'S SUMMIT
VI. MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC
VII. THE SITUATION BECOMES AGGRAVATED
VIII. THE ARTILLERY SETS TO WORK IN EARNEST
IX. EMPLOYMENT OF THE POACHER'S OLD SKILL
AND HIS UNERRING SHOT, WHICH HAD AN
INFLUENCE ON THE CONDEMNATION IN 1796
X. DAWN
XI. THE SHOT WHICH DOES NOT MISS AND WHICH KILLS NOBODY
XII. DISORDER THE PARTISAN OF ORDER
XIII. GLEAMS WHICH FADE
XIV. IN WHICH WE READ THE NAME OF THE MISTRESS OF ENJOLRAS
XV. GAVROCHE OUTSIDE
XVI. HOW A BROTHER BECOMES A FATHER
XVII. MORTUUS PATER FILIUM MORITURUM EXPECTAT
XVIII. THE VULTURE BECOMES PREY
XIX. JEAN VALJEAN REVENGES HIMSELF
XX. THE DEAD ARE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT WRONG
XXI. THE HEROES
XXII. STEP BY STEP
XXIII. ORESTES SOBER AND PYLADES DRUNK
XXIV. PRISONER!
BOOK II.
THE INTESTINE OF LEVIATHAN.
I. THE EARTH IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA
II. THE OLD HISTORY OF THE SEWER
III. BRUNESEAU
IV. CONCEALED DETAILS
V. PRESENT PROGRESS
VI. FUTURE PROGRESS
BOOK III.
MUD, BUT SOUL.
I. THE CLOACA AND ITS SURPRISES
II. EXPLANATION
III. THE TRACKED MAN
IV. HE TOO BEARS HIS CROSS
V. SAND, LIKE WOMAN, HAS A FINENESS THAT IS PERFIDIOUS
VI. THE FONTIS
VII. SOMETIMES ONE IS STRANDED WHERE HE THINKS TO LAND
VIII. THE TOM COAT-SKIRT
IX. MARIUS APPEARS DEAD TO A CONNOISSEUR
X. RETURN OF THE SON PRODIGAL OF HIS LIFE
XI. A SHAKING IN THE ABSOLUTE
XII. THE GRANDFATHER
BOOK IV.
JAVERT DERAILED
BOOK V.
GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER.
I. WHERE WE AGAIN MEET THE TREE WITH THE ZINC PATCH
II. MARIUS, LEAVING CIVIL WAR, PREPARES FOR A DOMESTIC WAR
III. MARIUS ATTACKS
IV. MLLE. GILLENORMAND HAS NO OBJECTIONS TO THE MATCH
V. DEPOSIT YOUR MONEY IN A FOREST RATHER THAN WITH A NOTARY
VI. THE TWO OLD MEN, EACH IN HIS FASHION,
DO EVERYTHING FOR COSETTE'S HAPPINESS
VII. THE EFFECTS OF DREAMING BLENDED WITH HAPPINESS
VIII. TWO MEN IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND
BOOK VI.
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT.
I. FEBRUARY 16, 1833
II. JEAN VALJEAN STILL HAS HIS ARM IN A SLING
III. THE INSEPARABLE
IV. IMMORTALE JECUR
BOOK VII.
THE LAST DROP IN THE BITTER CUP.
I. THE SEVENTH CIRCLE AND THE EIGHTH HEAVEN
II. THE OBSCURITY WHICH A REVELATION MAY CONTAIN
BOOK VIII.
TWILIGHT DECLINES.
I. THE GROUND-FLOOR ROOM
II. OTHER BACKWARD STEPS
III. THEY REMEMBER THE GARDEN IN THE RUE PLUMET
IV. ATTRACTION AND EXTINCTION
BOOK IX.
SUPREME DARKNESS, SUPREME DAWN.
I. PITY THE UNHAPPY, BUT BE INDULGENT TO THE HAPPY
II. THE LAST FLUTTERINGS OF THE LAMP WITHOUT OIL
III. A PEN IS TOO HEAVY FOR THE MAN WHO
LIFTED FAUCHELEVENT'S CART
IV. A BOTTLE OF INK WHICH ONLY WHITENS
V. A NIGHT BEHIND WHICH IS DAY
VI. THE GRASS HIDES, AND THE RAIN EFFACES
ILLUSTRATIONS.
THE DEATH OF JEAN VALJEAN Vol. V. Frontispiece
Drawn by G. Jeanniot.
THE DEATH OF GAVROCHE
Drawn by G. Jeanniot.
JEAN VALJEAN.
BOOK I.
THE WAR WITHIN FOUR WALLS.
CHAPTER I.
THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG ST. ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF THE
FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE.
The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social diseases
can mention do not belong to the period in which the action of this
book is laid. These two barricades, both symbols under different
aspects of a formidable situation, emerged from the earth during the
fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest street-war which history
has seen. It happens sometimes that the canaille, that great despairing
crowd, contrary to principles, even contrary to liberty, equality, and
fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote, the government of all
by all, protests, in the depths of its agony, its discouragement, its
destitution, its fevers, its distresses, its miasmas, its ignorance,
and its darkness, and the populace offers battle to the people. The
beggars attack the common right, the ochlocracy rises in insurrection
against the demos. Those are mournful days; for there is always a
certain amount of right even in this mania, there is suicide in this
duel, and these words, intended to be insults, such as beggars,
canaille, ochlocracy, and populace, prove, alas! rather the fault
of those who reign than the fault of those who suffer; rather the
fault of the privileged than the fault of the disinherited. For our
part, we never pronounce these words without grief and respect, for
when philosophy probes the facts with which they correspond it often
finds much grandeur by the side of misery. Athens was an ochlocracy;
the beggars produced Holland; the populace more than once saved
Rome; and the canaille followed the Saviour. There is no thinker who
has not at times contemplated the magnificence below. Saint Jerome
doubtless thought of this canaille, of all these poor people, all these
vagabonds, and all the wretches whence the apostles and martyrs issued,
when he uttered the mysterious words,--"Fex urbis, lux orbis."
The exasperations of this mob, which suffers and which bleeds, its
unwilling violence against the principles which are its life, its
assaults upon the right, are popular coups d'état, and must be
repressed. The just man devotes himself, and through love for this
very mob, combats it. But how excusable he finds it while resisting
it; how he venerates it, even while opposing it! It is one of those
rare moments in which a man while doing his duty feels something that
disconcerts him, and almost dissuades him from going further; he
persists, and must do so, but the satisfied conscience is sad, and
the accomplishment of the duty is complicated by a contraction of the
heart. June, 1848, was, let us hasten to say, a separate fact, and
almost impossible to classify in the philosophy of history. All the
words we have uttered must be laid aside when we have to deal with
this extraordinary riot, in which the holy anxiety of labor claiming
its right was felt. It must be combated, and it was a duty to do so,
for it attacked the Republic; but, in reality, what was June, 1848?
A revolt of the people against itself. When the subject is not left
out of sight there is no digression, and hence we may be permitted to
concentrate the reader's attention momentarily upon the two absolutely
unique barricades to which we have alluded, and which characterized
this insurrection. The one blocked up the entrance to the Faubourg St.
Antoine, the other defended the approaches to the Faubourg du Temple;
those before whom these two frightful masterpieces of civil war were
raised in the dazzling June sun will never forget them.
The St. Antoine barricade was monstrous; it was three stories high and
seven hundred feet in width. It barred from one corner to the other the
vast mouth of the faubourg, that is to say, three streets; ravined,
slashed, serrated, surmounted by an immense jagged line, supported
by masses which were themselves bastions, pushing out capes here and
there, and powerfully reinforced by the two great promontories of the
houses of the faubourg, it rose like a Cyclopean wall at the back of
the formidable square which had seen July 14. There were nineteen
barricades erected in the streets behind the mother barricade; but, on
seeing it, you felt in the faubourg the immense agonizing suffering
which had reached that extreme stage in which misery desires to come
to a catastrophe. Of what was this barricade made? Of the tumbling in
of three six-storied houses demolished on purpose, say some; of the
prodigy of all the passions, say others. It possessed the lamentable
aspect of all the buildings of hatred, ruin. You might ask who
built this, and you might also ask who destroyed this. It was the
improvisation of the ebullition. Here with that door, that grating,
that awning, that chimney, that broken stove, that cracked stewpan!
Give us anything! Throw everything in! Push, roll, pick, dismantle,
overthrow, and pull down everything! It was a collaboration of the
pavement-stones, beams, iron bars, planks, broken windows, unseated
chairs, cabbage-stalks, rags, tatters, and curses. It was great and it
was little; it was the abyss parodied on the square by the hurly-burly.
It was the mass side by side with the atom, a pulled-down wall and a
broken pipkin, a menacing fraternization of all fragments, into which
Sisyphus had cast his rock and Job his potsherds. Altogether it was
terrible,--it was the acropolis of the barefooted. Overturned carts
studded the slope; an immense wagon spread out across it, with its
wheels to the sky, and looked like a scar on this tumultuous façade; an
omnibus gayly hoisted by strength of arm to the very top of the pile,
as if the architects of this savage edifice had wished to add mockery
to the horror, offered its bare pole to the horses of the air. This
gigantic mound, the alluvium of the riot, represented to the mind an
Ossa upon Pelion of all revolutions,--'93 upon '89, the 9th Thermidor
upon the 10th August, the 18th Brumaire upon January 21st, Vendémiaire
upon Prairial, 1848 upon 1830. The place was worth the trouble, and
this barricade was worthy of appearing upon the very spot whence the
Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dykes it would build them
in this way, and the fury of the tide was stamped on this shapeless
encumbrance. What tide? The multitude. You fancied that you saw a
petrified riot, and heard the enormous dark bees of violent progress
humming about this barricade as if they had their hive there. Was it a
thicket? Was it a Bacchanalian feast? Was it a fortress? Vertigo seemed
to have built it with the flapping of its wings! There was a sewer in
this redoubt, and something Olympian in this mass. You saw there in a
confused heap, full of desperation, gables of roofs, pieces of garrets
with their painted paper, window-frames with all their panes planted
in the rubbish and awaiting the cannon, pulled-down mantelpieces,
chests of drawers, tables, benches, a howling topsy-turvy, and those
thousand wretched things cast away even by a beggar which contain at
once fury and nothingness. It may be said that it was the rags of a
people, rags of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone; that the Faubourg
St. Antoine had swept them to their door with a gigantic broom, and
made a barricade of their misery. Logs resembling executioners' blocks,
disjointed chains, anvil-frames of the shape of gallows, horizontal
wheels emerging from the heap, produced on this edifice of anarchy the
representation of the old punishment suffered by the people. The St.
Antoine barricade made a weapon of everything. All that civil war can
throw at the head of society came from it; it was not a fight but a
paroxysm: the muskets which defended this redoubt, among which were
several blunderbusses, discharged stones, bones, coat-buttons, and even
the casters of night-commodes, very dangerous owing to the copper.
This barricade was furious; it hurled an indescribable clamor into the
clouds; at certain moments when challenging the army it was covered
with a crowd and a tempest; it had a prickly crest of guns, sabres,
sticks, axes, pikes, and bayonets; a mighty red flag fluttered upon
it in the breeze, and the cries of command, the songs of attack, the
rolling of the drum, the sobs of women, and the sardonic laughter of
men dying of starvation could be heard there. It was immeasurable and
living, and a flash of lightning issued from it as from the back of an
electric animal. The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this
summit, where that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God
was growling, and a strange majesty was disengaged from this Titanic
mass of stones. It was a dungheap, and it was Sinai.
As we said above, it attacked in the name of the revolution--what?
The revolution. It, this barricade, an accident, a disorder, a
misunderstanding, an unknown thing, had, facing it, the constituent
assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage,
the nation, the republic: and it was the Carmagnole defying the
Marseillaise. A mad defiance, but heroic, for this old faubourg is a
hero. The faubourg and its redoubt supported each other; the faubourg
rested on the redoubt, and the redoubt backed against the faubourg.
The vast barricade was like a cliff against which the strategy of the
African generals was broken. Its caverns, its excrescences, its warts,
its humps, made grimaces, if we may employ the expression, and grinned
behind the smoke. The grape-shot vanished in the shapeless heap; shells
buried themselves in it and were swallowed up; cannon-balls only
succeeded in forming holes, for of what use is it bombarding chaos? And
the regiments, accustomed to the sternest visions of war, gazed with
anxious eye at this species of wild-beast redoubt, which was a boar
through its bristling and a mountain through its enormity.
A quarter of a league farther on, at the corner of the Rue du Temple,
which debouches on the boulevard near the Chateau d'Eau, if you boldly
advanced your head beyond the point formed by the projection of the
magazine Dallemagne, you could see in the distance across the canal,
and at the highest point of the ascent to Belleville, a strange wall
rising to the second floor and forming a sort of connecting link
between the houses on the right and those on the left, as if the
street had folded back its highest wall in order to close itself up.
This was built of paving-stones; it was tall, straight, correct, cold,
perpendicular, and levelled with the plumb-line and the square; of
course there was no cement, but, as in some Roman walls, this in no
way disturbed its rigid architecture. From its height, its thickness
could be guessed, for the entablature was mathematically parallel
to the basement At regular distances almost invisible loopholes,
resembling black threads, could be distinguished in the gray wall,
separated from each other by equal intervals. This street was deserted
throughout its length, and all the windows and doors were closed. In
the background rose this bar, which converted the street into a blind
alley; it was a motionless and tranquil wall; no one was seen, nothing
was heard, not a cry, nor a sound, nor a breath. It was a sepulchre.
The dazzling June sun inundated this terrible thing with light,--it
was the barricade of the Faubourg du Temple. So soon as you reached
the ground and perceived it, it was impossible even for the boldest
not to become pensive in the presence of this mysterious apparition.
It was adjusted, clamped, imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical, and
funereal; science and darkness were there. You felt that the chief of
this barricade was a geometrician or a spectre, and as you gazed you
spoke in a whisper. From time to time if any one--private, officer,
or representative of the people--ventured to cross the solitary road,
a shrill faint whistling was heard, and the passer-by fell wounded or
dead; or, if he escaped, a bullet could be seen to bury itself in some
shutter, or the stucco of the wall. Sometimes it was a grape-shot,
for the man of the barricade had made out of gas-pipes, stopped up
at one end with tow and clay, two small cannon. There was no useless
expenditure of gunpowder, and nearly every shot told. There were a
few corpses here and there, and patches of blood on the pavement. I
remember a white butterfly that fluttered up and down the street;
summer does not abdicate. All the gateways in the vicinity were crowded
with corpses, and you felt in this street that you were covered by
some one you could not see, and that the whole street was under the
marksman's aim.
The soldiers of the attacking column, massed behind the species of
ridge which the canal bridge forms at the entrance of the Faubourg du
Temple, watched gravely and thoughtfully this mournful redoubt, this
immobility, this impassiveness, from which death issued. Some crawled
on their stomachs to the top of the pitch of the bridge, while careful
not to let their shakos pass beyond it. Brave Colonel Monteynard
admired this barricade with a tremor. "How it is built," he said to a
representative; "not a single paving-stone projects beyond the other.
It is made of porcelain." At this moment a bullet smashed the cross
on his chest and he fell. "The cowards!" the troops shouted, "Why do
they not show themselves? They dare not! They hide!" The barricade of
the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men and attacked by ten
thousand, held out for three days, and on the fourth day the troops
acted as they had done at Zaatcha and Constantine,--they broke through
houses, passed along roofs, and the barricade was taken. Not one of the
eighty cowards dreamed of flying; all were killed with the exception of
Barthélemy, the chief, to whom we shall allude directly. The barricade
of St. Antoine was the tumult of the thunder; the barricade of the
Temple was the silence. There was between the two barricades the same
difference as exists between the formidable and the sinister. The one
seemed a throat, the other a mask. Admitting that the gigantic and dark
insurrection of June was composed of a fury and an enigma, the dragon
was seen in the first barricade and the sphinx behind the second.
These two fortresses were built by two men, Cournet and Barthélemy:
Cournet made the St. Antoine barricade, Barthélemy the Temple
barricade, and each of them was the image of the man who built it.
Cournet was a man of tall stature; he had wide shoulders, a red face, a
smashing fist, a brave heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible eye.
He was intrepid, energetic, irascible, and stormy; the most cordial
of men, and the most formidable of combatants. War, contest, medley
were the air he breathed, and put him in good temper. He had been an
officer in the navy, and from his gestures and his voice it could be
divined that he issued from the ocean and came from the tempest; he
continued the hurricane in battle. Omitting the genius, there was in
Cournet something of Danton, as, omitting the divinity, there was
in Danton something of Hercules. Barthélemy, thin, weak, pale, and
taciturn, was a species of tragical gamin, who, having been struck by
a policeman, watched for him, waited for him, and killed him, and at
the age of seventeen was sent to the galleys. He came out and built
this barricade. At a later date, when both were exiles in London,
Barthélemy killed Cournet: it was a melancholy duel. Some time after
that, Barthélemy, caught in the cog-wheels of one of those mysterious
adventures in which passion is mingled, catastrophes in which French
justice sees extenuating circumstances and English justice only sees
death, was hanged. The gloomy social edifice is so built that, owing to
maternal denudation and moral darkness, this wretched being, who had
had an intellect, certainly firm and possibly great, began with the
galleys in France and ended with the gibbet in England. Barthélemy only
hoisted one flag,--it was the black one.