Kitabı oku: «Les Misérables, v. 5», sayfa 14
However this might be, one fact to which he constantly returned, and which ruled everything else, was that he had just committed a frightful infraction of the law. He had closed his eyes to a relapsed convict who had broken his ban; he had set a galley-slave at liberty. He had stolen from the laws a man who belonged to them. He had done this, and no longer understood himself. He was not certain of being himself. The very reasons of his deed escaped him, and he only felt the dizziness it produced. He had lived up to this moment in that blind faith which engenders a dark probity; and this faith was leaving him, this probity had failed him. All that he had believed was dissipated, and truths which he did not desire inexorably besieged him. He must henceforth be another man, and he suffered the strange pain of a conscience suddenly operated on for cataract. He saw what it was repulsive to him to see, and felt himself spent, useless, dislocated from his past life, discharged and dissolved. Authority was dead within him, and he no longer had a reason for living. Terrible situation! to be moved. To be made of granite, and doubt! To be the statue of punishment cast all of one piece in the mould of the law, and suddenly to perceive that you have under your bronze bosom something absurd and disobedient, which almost resembles a heart! To have requited good for good, though you have said to yourself up to this day that such good is evil! To be the watch-dog, and fawn! To be ice, and melt! To be a pair of pincers, and become a hand! suddenly to feel your fingers opening! To lose your hold. Oh, what a frightful thing! The man projectile, no longer knowing his road, and recoiling! To be obliged to confess this: infallibility is not infallible; there may be an error in the dogma; all is not said when a code has spoken, society is not perfect, authority is complicated with vacillation, a crack in the immutable is possible, judges are men, the law may be deceived, the courts may make a mistake! To see a flaw in the immense blue window-glass of the firmament.
What was taking place in Javert was the Fampoux of a rectilinear conscience, the overthrow of a mind, the crushing of a probity irresistibly hurled in a straight line and breaking itself against God. It was certainly strange that the fireman of order, the engineer of authority, mounted on the blind iron horse, could be unsaddled by a beam of light! That the incommutable, the direct, the correct, the geometrical, the passive, the perfect, could bend; that there should be for the locomotive a road to Damascus! God, ever within man, and Himself the true conscience, refractory to the false conscience; the spark forbidden to expire, the ray ordered to remember the sun, the mind enjoined to recognize the true absolute when it confronts itself with the fictitious absolute, a humanity that cannot be lost; the human heart inadmissible, – did Javert comprehend this splendid phenomenon, the most glorious, perhaps, of our internal prodigies? Did he penetrate it? Did he explain it to himself? Evidently no. But under the pressure of this incomprehensible incontestability he felt his brain cracking. He was less transfigured than the victim of this prodigy: he endured it with exasperation, and only saw in all this an immense difficulty of living. It seemed to him as if henceforth his breathing was eternally impeded. He was not accustomed to have anything unknown over his head; hitherto everything he had above him had been to his eye a clear, simple, limpid surface; there was nothing unknown or obscure, – nothing but what was definite, co-ordinated, enchained, precise, exact, circumscribed, limited, and closed. Everything foreseen, authority was a flat surface; there was no fall in it or dizziness before it. Javert had never seen anything unknown except below him. Irregularity, unexpected things, the disorderly opening of the chaos, and a possible fall over a precipice, – all this was the doing of the lower regions, of the rebels, the wicked and the wretched. How Javert threw himself back, and was suddenly startled by this extraordinary apparition, – a gulf above him!
What then! the world was dismantled from top to bottom and absolutely disconcerted! In what could men trust, when what they felt convinced of was crumbling away! What! the flaw in the cuirass of society could be formed by a magnanimous scoundrel! What! an honest servant of the law could find himself caught between two crimes, – the crime of letting a man escape and the crime of arresting him! All was not certain, then, in the orders given by the State to the official! There could be blind alleys in duty! What then? all this was real! Was it true that an ex-bandit, bowed under condemnations, could draw himself up, and end by being in the right? Was this credible? Were there, then, cases in which the law must retire before transfigured crime, and stammer its apologies? Yes, it was so! and Javert saw it, and Javert touched it! And not only could he not deny it, but he had a share in it. These were realities, and it was abominable that real facts could attain such a deformity. If facts did their duty they would restrict themselves to bring proofs of the law, for facts are sent by God. Was, then, anarchy about to descend from on high? Thus, both in the exaggeration of agony and the optical illusion of consternation, everything which might have restricted and corrected his impression faded away, and society, the human race, and the universe henceforth were contained for his eyes in a simple and hideous outline. Punishment, the thing tried, the strength due to the legislature, the decrees of sovereign courts, the magistracy, the government, prevention and repression, official wisdom, legal infallibility, the principle of authority, all the dogmas on which political and civil security, the sovereignty, justice, logic flowing from the code and public truth, were a heap of ruins, chaos. He himself, Javert, the watcher of order, incorruptibility in the service of the police, the trusty mastiff of society, conquered and hurled to the ground; and on the summit of all this ruin stood a man in a green cap, and with a glory round his brow, – such was the state of overthrow he had reached, such the frightful vision which he had in his mind. Was this endurable? No, it was a violent state, were there ever one, and there were only two ways of escaping from it: one was to go resolutely to Jean Valjean and restore to the dungeon the man of the galleys; the other —
Javert left the parapet, and with head erect this time walked firmly toward the guard-room indicated by a lantern at one of the corners of the Place du Châtelet. On reaching it he saw through the window a policeman, and went in. The police recognize each other merely by the way in which they push open the door of a guard-room. Javert mentioned his name, showed his card to the sergeant, and sat down at the table on which a candle was burning. There were also on the table a pen, a leaden inkstand, and paper, ready for contingent reports and the records of the night patrols. This table, always completed by a straw chair, is an institution; it exists in all police offices; it is always adorned with a boxwood saucer full of sawdust, and a box of red wafers, and it is the lower stage of the official style. It is here that the State literature commences. Javert took the pen and a sheet of paper and began writing. This is what he wrote: —
"A FEW REMARKS FOR THE GOOD OF THE SERVICE.
"1. I beg M. le Préfet to cast his eyes on this.
"2. Prisoners when they return from examination at the magistrate's office take off their shoes and remain barefoot on the slabs while they are being searched. Some cough on re-entering prison. This entails infirmary expenses.
"3. Tracking is good, with relays of agents at regular distances; but on important occasions two agents at the least should not let each other out of sight, because if for any reason one agent were to fail in his duty, the other would watch him and take his place.
"4. There is no explanation why the special rules of the prison of the Madelonnettes prohibit a prisoner from having a chair, even if he pay for it.
"5. At the Madelonnettes there are only two gratings to the canteen, which allows the canteen woman to let the prisoners touch her hand.
"6. The prisoners called 'barkers,' who call the other prisoners to the visitors' room, demand two sous from each prisoner for crying his name distinctly. This is a robbery.
"7. Ten sous are kept back from the pay of a prisoner working in the weaving room for a running thread: this is an abuse on the part of the manager, as the cloth is not the less good.
"8. It is annoying that visitors to La Force are obliged to pass through the boys court in proceeding to the speaking-room of Sainte Marie Égyptienne.
"9. It is certain that gendarmes are daily heard repeating, in the court-yard of the Préfecture, the examination of prisoners by the magistrates. For a gendarme, who ought to be consecrated, to repeat what he has heard in the examination room is a serious breach of duty.
"10. Madame Henry is an honest woman, her canteen is very clean; but it is wrong for a woman to hold the key of the secret cells. This is not worthy of the Conciergerie of a great civilization."
Javert wrote these lines in his calmest and most correct handwriting, not omitting to cross a t, and making the paper creak firmly beneath his pen. Under the last line he signed, —
"JAVERT, Inspector of the first class."At the post of the Place du Châtelet, about one in the morning, June 7, 1832."
Javert dried the ink on the paper, folded it like a letter, sealed it, wrote on the back, "Note for the Administration," left it on the table, and quitted the guard-room. The glass door fell back after him. He again diagonally crossed the Place du Châtelet, reached the quay again, and went back with automatic precision to the same spot which he had left a quarter of an hour previously; he bent down and found himself again in the same attitude on the same parapet slab; it seemed as if he had not stirred. The darkness was complete, for it was the sepulchral moment which follows midnight; a ceiling of clouds hid the stars; the houses in the Cité did not display a single light, no one passed, all the streets and quays that could be seen were deserted, and Nôtre Dame and the towers of the Palace of Justice appeared lineaments of the night. A lamp reddened the edge of the quay, and the shadows of the bridges looked ghostly one behind the other. Rains had swelled the river. The spot where Javert was leaning was, it will be remembered, precisely above the rapids of the Seine and that formidable whirlpool which unrolls itself and rolls itself up again like an endless screw. Javert stooped down and looked; all was dark, and nothing could be distinguished. A sound of spray was audible, but the river was invisible. At moments in this dizzy depth a flash appeared and undulated, for water has the power, even on the darkest night, of obtaining light, no one knows whence, and changing itself into a lizard. The glimmer vanished and all became indistinct again. Immensity seemed open there, and what was beneath was not water, but the gulf. The quay-wall, abrupt, confused, mingled with the vapor, hidden immediately, produced the effect of a precipice of infinitude.
Nothing could be seen but the hostile coldness of the water, and the sickly smell of the damp stones could be felt. A ferocious breath rose from this abyss; and the swelling of the river, divined rather than perceived, the tragic muttering of the water, the mournful immensity of the bridge arches, a possible fall into this gloomy vacuum, – all this shadow was full of horror. Javert remained for some moments motionless, gazing at this opening of the darkness, and considered the invisible with an intentness which resembled attention. All at once he took off his hat and placed it on the brink of the quay. A moment after a tall black figure, which any belated passer-by might have taken at a distance for a ghost, appeared standing on the parapet, stooped toward the Seine, then drew itself up, and fell straight into the darkness. There was a dull plash, and the shadows alone were in the secret of this obscure form which had disappeared beneath the waters.
BOOK V
GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER
CHAPTER I
WHERE WE AGAIN MEET THE TREE WITH THE ZINC PATCH
Some time after the events which we have just recorded, the Sieur Boulatruelle had a lively emotion. The Sieur Boulatruelle is the road-mender of Montfermeil of whom we have already caught a glimpse in the dark portions of this book. Boulatruelle, it will possibly be remembered, was a man occupied with troubled and various things. He broke stones and plundered travellers on the highway. Road-mender and robber, he had a dream: he believed in the treasures buried in the forest of Montfermeil. He hoped some day to find money in the ground at the foot of a tree, and in the mean while willingly fished for it in the pockets of passers-by. Still, for the present he was prudent, for he had just had a narrow escape. He was, as we know, picked up with the other ruffians in Jondrette's garret. There is some usefulness in a vice, for his drunkenness saved him, and it never could be cleared up whether he were there as a robber or as a robbed man. He was set at liberty on account of his proved intoxication on the night of the attack, and returned to the woods. He went back to his road from Gagny to Lagny, to break stones for the State, under surveillance, with hanging head and very thoughtful, slightly chilled by the robbery which had almost ruined him, but turning with all the more tenderness to the wine which had saved him.
As for the lively emotion which he had a short time after his return beneath the turf-roof of his road-mender's cabin, it was this: One morning Boulatruelle, while going as usual to work and to his lurking-place, possibly a little before daybreak, perceived among the branches a man whose back he could alone see, but whose shape, so he fancied, through the mist and darkness, was not entirely unknown to him. Boulatruelle, though a drunkard, had a correct and lucid memory, an indispensable defensive weapon for any man who is at all on bad terms with legal order.
"Where the devil have I seen some one like that man?" he asked.
But he could give himself no reply, save that he resembled somebody of whom he had a confused recollection. Boulatruelle, however, made his comparisons and calculations, though he was unable to settle the identity. This man did not belong to those parts, and bad come there evidently afoot, as no public vehicle passed through Montfermeil at that hour. He must have been walking all night Where did he come from? No great distance, for he had neither haversack nor bundle. Doubtless from Paris. Why was he in this wood? Why was lie there at such an hour? What did he want there? Boulatruelle thought of the treasure. By dint of racking his memory he vaguely remembered having had, several years previously, a similar alarm on the subject of a man who might very well be this man. While meditating he had, under the very weight of his meditation, hung his head, a natural but not clever thing. When he raised it again the man had disappeared in the forest and the mist.
"By the deuce!" said Boulatruelle, "I will find him again, and discover to what parish that parishioner belongs. This walker of Patron-Minette has a motive, and I will know it. No one must have a secret in my forest without my being mixed up in it."
He took up his pick, which was very sharp. "Here's something," he growled, "to search the ground and a man."
And as one thread is attached to another thread, covering the steps as well as he could in the direction which the man must have pursued, he began marching through the coppice. When he had gone about a hundred yards, day, which was beginning to break, aided him. Footsteps on the sand here and there, trampled grass, broken heather, young branches bent into the shrubs and rising with a graceful slowness, like the arms of a pretty woman who stretches herself on waking, gave him a species of trail. He followed it and then lost it, and time slipped away; he got deeper into the wood and reached a species of eminence. An early sportsman passing at a distance along a path, and whistling the air of Guillery, gave him the idea of climbing up a tree, and though old, he was active. There was on the mound a very large beech, worthy of Tityrus and Boulatruelle, and he climbed up the tree as high as he could. The idea was a good one; for while exploring the solitude on the side where the wood is most entangled, Boulatruelle suddenly perceived the man, but had no sooner seen him than he lost him out of sight again. The man entered, or rather glided, into a rather distant clearing, masked by large trees, but which Boulatruelle knew very well, because he had noticed near a large heap of stones a sick chestnut-tree bandaged with a zinc plate nailed upon it. This clearing is what was formerly called the Blaru-bottom, and the pile of stones, intended no one knows for what purpose, which could be seen there thirty years ago, is doubtless there still. Nothing equals the longevity of a heap of stones, except that of a plank paling. It is there temporarily; what a reason for lasting!
Boulatruelle, with the rapidity of joy, tumbled off the tree rather than came down it. The lair was found, and now he had only to seize the animal. The famous treasure he had dreamed of was probably there. It was no small undertaking to reach the clearing by beaten paths which make a thousand annoying windings; it would take a good quarter of an hour. In a straight line through the wood, which is at that spot singularly dense, very thorny, and most aggressive, it would take half an hour at least This is what Boulatruelle was wrong in not understanding; he believed in the straight line, – a respectable optical illusion which has ruined many men. The wood, bristling though it was, appeared to him the right road.
"Let us go by the Rue de Rivoli of the wolves," he said.
Boulatruelle, accustomed to crooked paths, this time committed the error of going straight, and resolutely cast himself among the shrubs. He had to contend with holly, nettles, hawthorns, eglantines, thistles, and most irascible roots, and was fearfully scratched. At the bottom of the ravine he came to a stream which he was obliged to cross, and at last reached the Blaru clearing after forty minutes, perspiring, wet through, blowing, and ferocious. There was no one in the clearing. Boulatruelle hurried to the heap of stones; it was still in its place, and had not been carried off. As for the man, he had vanished in the forest. He had escaped. Where? In which direction? Into which clump of trees? It were impossible to guess. And, most crushing thing of all, there was behind the heap of stones and in front of the zinc-banded tree a pick, forgotten or abandoned, and a hole; but the hole was empty.
"Robber!" Boulatruelle cried, shaking his fists at heaven.
CHAPTER II
MARIUS LEAVING CIVIL WAR PREPARES FOR A DOMESTIC WAR
Marius was for a long time neither dead nor alive. He had for several weeks a fever accompanied by delirium, and very serious brain symptoms caused by the shocks of the wounds in the head rather than the wounds themselves. He repeated Cosette's name for whole nights with the lugubrious loquacity of fever and the gloomy obstinacy of agony. The width of certain wounds was a serious danger, for the suppuration of wide wounds may always be absorbed into the system, and consequently kill the patient under certain atmospheric influences; and at each change in the weather, at the slightest storm, the physician became anxious. "Mind that the patient suffers from no emotion," he repeated. The dressings were complicated and difficult, for the fixing of bandages and lint by the sparadrap had not been imagined at that period. Nicolette expended in lint a sheet "as large as a ceiling," she said; and it was not without difficulty that the chloruretted lotions and nitrate of silver reached the end of the gangrene. So long as there was danger, M. Gillenormand, broken-hearted by the bedside of his grandson, was like Marius, neither dead nor alive.
Every day, and sometimes twice a day, a white-haired and well-dressed gentleman, – such was the description given by the porter, – came to inquire after the wounded man, and left a large parcel of lint for the dressings. At length, on September 7th, four months, day by day, from the painful night on which he had been brought home dying to his grandfather, the physician declared that he could answer for him, and that convalescence was setting in. Marius, however, would be obliged to lie for two months longer on a couch, owing to the accidents produced by the fracture of the collar-bone. There is always a last wound like that which will not close, and eternizes the dressings, to the great annoyance of the patient. This long illness and lengthened convalescence, however, saved him from prosecution: in France there is no anger, even public, which six months do not extinguish. Riots, in the present state of society, are so much everybody's fault, that they are followed by a certain necessity of closing the eyes. Let us add that Gisquet's unjustifiable decree which ordered physicians to denounce their patients having out-raged opinion, and not merely opinion, but the king first of all, the wounded were covered and protected by this indignation, and, with the exception of those taken prisoners in the act of fighting, the courts-martial did not dare to molest any one. Hence Marius was left undisturbed.
M. Gillenormand first passed through every form of agony, and then through every form of ecstasy. Much difficulty was found in keeping him from passing the whole night by Marius's side; he had his large easy-chair brought to the bed, and he insisted on his daughter taking the finest linen in the house to make compresses and bandages. Mademoiselle Gillenormand, as a sensible and elderly lady, managed to save the fine linen, while making her father believe that he was obeyed. M. Gillenormand would not listen to any explanation, that for the purpose of making lint fine linen is not so good as coarse, or new so good as worn. He was present at all the dressings, from which Mademoiselle Gillenormand modestly absented herself. When the dead flesh was cut away with scissors he said, "Aïe, aïe!" Nothing was so touching as to see him hand the wounded man a cup of broth with his gentle senile trembling. He overwhelmed the surgeon with questions, and did not perceive that he constantly repeated the same. On the day when the physician informed him that Marius was out of danger he was beside himself. He gave his porter three louis d'or, and at night, when he went to his bed-room, danced a gavotte, making castagnettes of his thumb and forefinger, and sang a song something like this: —
"Jeanne est née à Fougère,
Vrai nid d'une bergère;
J'adore son jupon
Fripon.
"Amour, tu vis en elle;
Car c'est dans sa prunelle
Que tu mets ton carquois,
Narquois!
"Moi, je la chante, et j'aime,
Plus que Diane même,
Jeanne et ses dure tetons
Bretons."
Then he knelt on a chair, and Basque, who was watching him through the crack of the door, felt certain that he was praying. Up to that day he had never believed in God. At each new phase in the improvement of the patient, which went on steadily, the grandfather was extravagant. He performed a multitude of mechanical actions full of delight: he went up and down stairs without knowing why. A neighbor's wife, who was very pretty, by the way, was stupefied at receiving one morning a large bouquet: it was M. Gillenormand who sent it to her, and her husband got up a jealous scene. M. Gillenormand tried to draw Nicolette on his knees: he called Marius Monsieur le Baron, and shouted, "Long live the Republic!" Every moment he asked the medical man, "There is no danger now, is there?" He looked at Marius with a grandmother's eyes, and gloated over him when he slept. He no longer knew himself, no longer took himself into account. Marius was the master of the house; there was abdication in his joy, and he was the grandson of his grandson. In his present state of merriment he was the most venerable of children: through fear of wearying or annoying the convalescent he would place himself behind him in order to smile upon him. He was satisfied, joyous, ravished, charming and young, and his white hair added a gentle majesty to the gay light which he had on his face. When grace is mingled with wrinkles it is adorable; and there is a peculiar dawn in expansive old age.
As for Marius, while letting himself be nursed and petted, he had one fixed idea, – Cosette. Since the fever and delirium had left him he no longer pronounced this name, and it might be supposed that he had forgotten it; but he was silent precisely because his soul was there. He knew not what had become of Cosette: the whole affair of the Rue de la Chanvrerie was like a cloud in his memory; shadows almost indistinct floated through his spirit. Éponine, Gavroche, Mabœuf, the Thénardiers, and all his friends mournfully mingled with the smoke of the barricade; the strange passage of M. Fauchelevent through that blood-stained adventure produced upon him the effect of an enigma in a tempest: he understood nothing of his own life, he knew not how or by whom he had been saved, and no one about knew it either: all they were able to tell him was that he had been brought there at night in a hackney coach. Past, present, future, – all this was to him like the mist of a vague idea; but there was in this mist one immovable point, a clear and precise lineament, something made of granite, a resolution, a will, – to find Cosette again. For him the idea of life was not distinct from the idea of Cosette: he had decreed in his heart that he would not receive one without the other, and he unalterably determined to demand of his grandfather, of destiny, of fate, of Hades itself, the restitution of his lost Eden.
He did not conceal the obstacles from himself. Here let us underline one fact: he was not won or greatly affected by all the anxiety and all the tenderness of his grandfather. In the first place he was not in the secret of them all, and next, in his sick man's reveries, which were perhaps still feverish, he distrusted this gentleness as a strange and new thing intended to subdue him. He remained cold to it, and the poor grandfather lavished his smiles in pure loss. Marius said to himself that it was all very well so long as he did not speak and let matters rest; but when he came to Cosette, he should find another face, and his grandfathers real attitude would be unmasked. Then he would be rough; a warming up of family questions, a comparison of positions, every possible sarcasm and objection at once. Fauchelevent, Coupelevent, fortune, poverty, wretchedness, the stone on the neck, the future a violent resistance, and the conclusion – a refusal. Marius stiffened himself against it beforehand. And then, in proportion as he regained life, his old wrongs reappeared, the old ulcers of his memory reopened, he thought again of the past. Colonel Pontmercy placed himself once more between M. Gillenormand and him, Marius, and he said to himself that he had no real kindness to hope for from a man who had been so unjust and harsh to his father. And with health came back a sort of bitterness against his grandfather, from which the old man gently suffered. M. Gillenormand, without letting it be seen, noticed that Marius, since he had been brought home and regained consciousness, had never once called him father. He did not say Sir, it is true, but he managed to say neither one nor the other, by a certain way of turning his sentences.
A crisis was evidently approaching, and, as nearly always happens in such cases, Marius, in order to try himself, skirmished before offering battle; this is called feeling the ground. One morning it happened that M. Gillenormand, alluding to a newspaper which he had come across, spoke lightly of the Convention, and darted a Royalist epigram at Danton, St. Just, and Robespierre. "The men of '93 were giants," Marius said sternly; the old man was silent, and did not utter another syllable all the day. Marius, who had the inflexible grandfather of his early years ever present to his mind, saw in this silence a profound concentration of anger, augured from it an obstinate struggle, and augmented his preparations for the contest in the most hidden corners of his mind. He determined that in case of refusal he would tear off his bandages, dislocate his collar-bone, expose all the wounds still unhealed, and refuse all food. His wounds were his ammunition; he must have Cosette or die. He awaited the favorable moment with the crafty patience of sick persons, and the moment arrived.
