I’m
finally getting back to reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. As I’ve
mentioned in past years, I’m treating each Volume of the opus as a novel. There are five volumes and I’m up to the
fourth, titled, “Eponine.” Most readers
here have heard of the Les Misérables
story line, either from the Broadway play, the various movies, or from the
novel itself. So I won’t summarize in
any way. In Volume Four, Jean Valjean has
taken Cossette out of her education with the Nuns and secretly moved to a
remote part of Paris. Cossette is now
nearly an adult and Valjean has aged.
They do go on walks together, and on an early morning walk the two come
upon a chain gang being driven through.
Recall that Jean Valjean was once a criminal himself and part of this
very chain gang many years before when he was a very young man. Hugo’s writing here is spellbinding. I’m going to quote the entire chapter, Chapter
VIII (“The Chain Gang”) of Book III.
Jean Valjean was the more
unhappy of the two. Youth, even in its sorrows, always possesses its own
peculiar radiance.
At times, Jean Valjean
suffered so greatly that he became puerile. It is the property of grief to
cause the childish side of man to reappear. He had an unconquerable conviction
that Cosette was escaping from him. He would have liked to resist, to retain her,
to arouse her enthusiasm by some external and brilliant matter. These ideas,
puerile, as we have just said, and at the same time senile, conveyed to him, by
their very childishness, a tolerably just notion of the influence of gold lace
on the imaginations of young girls. He once chanced to see a general on
horseback, in full uniform, pass along the street, Comte Coutard, the
commandant of Paris. He envied that gilded man; what happiness it would be, he
said to himself, if he could put on that suit which was an incontestable thing;
and if Cosette could behold him thus, she would be dazzled, and when he had
Cosette on his arm and passed the gates of the Tuileries, the guard would
present arms to him, and that would suffice for Cosette, and would dispel her idea
of looking at young men.
An unforeseen shock was
added to these sad reflections.
In the isolated life
which they led, and since they had come to dwell in the Rue Plumet, they had
contracted one habit. They sometimes took a pleasure trip to see the sun rise,
a mild species of enjoyment which befits those who are entering life and those
who are quitting it.
For those who love
solitude, a walk in the early morning is equivalent to a stroll by night, with
the cheerfulness of nature added. The streets are deserted and the birds are
singing. Cosette, a bird herself, liked to rise early. These matutinal
excursions were planned on the preceding evening. He proposed, and she agreed.
It was arranged like a plot, they set out before daybreak, and these trips were
so many small delights for Cosette. These innocent eccentricities please young
people.
Jean Valjean's
inclination led him, as we have seen, to the least frequented spots, to
solitary nooks, to forgotten places. There then existed, in the vicinity of the
barriers of Paris, a sort of poor meadows, which were almost confounded with
the city, where grew in summer sickly grain, and which, in autumn, after the
harvest had been gathered, presented the appearance, not of having been reaped,
but peeled. Jean Valjean loved to haunt these fields. Cosette was not bored
there. It meant solitude to him and liberty to her. There, she became a little
girl once more, she could run and almost play; she took off her hat, laid it on
Jean Valjean's knees, and gathered bunches of flowers. She gazed at the
butterflies on the flowers, but did not catch them; gentleness and tenderness
are born with love, and the young girl who cherishes within her breast a
trembling and fragile ideal has mercy on the wing of a butterfly. She wove garlands
of poppies, which she placed on her head, and which, crossed and penetrated
with sunlight, glowing until they flamed, formed for her rosy face a crown of
burning embers.
Even after their life had
grown sad, they kept up their custom of early strolls.
One morning in October,
therefore, tempted by the serene perfection of the autumn of 1831, they set
out, and found themselves at break of day near the Barriere du Maine. It was
not dawn, it was daybreak; a delightful and stern moment. A few constellations
here and there in the deep, pale azure, the earth all black, the heavens all
white, a quiver amid the blades of grass, everywhere the mysterious chill of
twilight. A lark, which seemed mingled with the stars, was carolling at a
prodigious height, and one would have declared that that hymn of pettiness
calmed immensity. In the East, the Valde-Grace projected its dark mass on the
clear horizon with the sharpness of steel; Venus dazzlingly brilliant was
rising behind that dome and had the air of a soul making its escape from a
gloomy edifice.
All was peace and
silence; there was no one on the road; a few stray laborers, of whom they
caught barely a glimpse, were on their way to their work along the side-paths.
Jean Valjean was sitting
in a cross-walk on some planks deposited at the gate of a timber-yard. His face
was turned towards the highway, his back towards the light; he had forgotten
the sun which was on the point of rising; he had sunk into one of those profound
absorptions in which the mind becomes concentrated, which imprison even the
eye, and which are equivalent to four walls. There are meditations which may be
called vertical; when one is at the bottom of them, time is required to return
to earth. Jean Valjean had plunged into one of these reveries. He was thinking
of Cosette, of the happiness that was possible if nothing came between him and
her, of the light with which she filled his life, a light which was but the
emanation of her soul. He was almost happy in his revery. Cosette, who was
standing beside him, was gazing at the clouds as they turned rosy.
All at once Cosette
exclaimed: "Father, I should think some one was coming yonder." Jean
Valjean raised his eyes.
Cosette was right. The
causeway which leads to the ancient Barriere du Maine is a prolongation, as the
reader knows, of the Rue de Sevres, and is cut at right angles by the inner
boulevard. At the elbow of the causeway and the boulevard, at the spot where it
branches, they heard a noise which it was difficult to account for at that
hour, and a sort of confused pile made its appearance. Some shapeless thing
which was coming from the boulevard was turning into the road.
It grew larger, it seemed
to move in an orderly manner, though it was bristling and quivering; it seemed
to be a vehicle, but its load could not be distinctly made out. There were
horses, wheels, shouts; whips were cracking. By degrees the outlines became
fixed, although bathed in shadows. It was a vehicle, in fact, which had just
turned from the boulevard into the highway, and which was directing its course
towards the barrier near which sat Jean Valjean; a second, of the same aspect,
followed, then a third, then a fourth; seven chariots made their appearance in
succession, the heads of the horses touching the rear of the wagon in front.
Figures were moving on these vehicles, flashes were visible through the dusk as
though there were naked swords there, a clanking became audible which resembled
the rattling of chains, and as this something advanced, the sound of voices
waxed louder, and it turned into a terrible thing such as emerges from the cave
of dreams.
As it drew nearer, it
assumed a form, and was outlined behind the trees with the pallid hue of an
apparition; the mass grew white; the day, which was slowly dawning, cast a wan
light on this swarming heap which was at once both sepulchral and living, the
heads of the figures turned into the faces of corpses, and this is what it
proved to be:--
Seven wagons were driving
in a file along the road. The first six were singularly constructed. They
resembled coopers' drays; they consisted of long ladders placed on two wheels
and forming barrows at their rear extremities. Each dray, or rather let us say,
each ladder, was attached to four horses harnessed tandem. On these ladders
strange clusters of men were being drawn. In the faint light, these men were to
be divined rather than seen. Twenty-four on each vehicle, twelve on a side,
back to back, facing the passers-by, their legs dangling in the air,--this was
the manner in which these men were travelling, and behind their backs they had
something which clanked, and which was a chain, and on their necks something
which shone, and which was an iron collar. Each man had his collar, but the
chain was for all; so that if these four and twenty men had occasion to alight
from the dray and walk, they were seized with a sort of inexorable unity, and
were obliged to wind over the ground with the chain for a backbone, somewhat
after the fashion of millepeds. In the back and front of each vehicle, two men
armed with muskets stood erect, each holding one end of the chain under his
foot. The iron necklets were square. The seventh vehicle, a huge rack-sided
baggage wagon, without a hood, had four wheels and six horses, and carried a
sonorous pile of iron boilers, cast-iron pots, braziers, and chains, among
which were mingled several men who were pinioned and stretched at full length,
and who seemed to be ill. This wagon, all lattice-work, was garnished with
dilapidated hurdles which appeared to have served for former punishments. These
vehicles kept to the middle of the road. On each side marched a double hedge of
guards of infamous aspect, wearing three-cornered hats, like the soldiers under
the Directory, shabby, covered with spots and holes, muffled in uniforms of
veterans and the trousers of undertakers' men, half gray, half blue, which were
almost hanging in rags, with red epaulets, yellow shoulder belts, short sabres,
muskets, and cudgels; they were a species of soldier-blackguards. These
myrmidons seemed composed of the abjectness of the beggar and the authority of
the executioner. The one who appeared to be their chief held a postilion's whip
in his hand. All these details, blurred by the dimness of dawn, became more and
more clearly outlined as the light increased. At the head and in the rear of
the convoy rode mounted gendarmes, serious and with sword in fist.
This procession was so
long that when the first vehicle reached the barrier, the last was barely
debauching from the boulevard. A throng, sprung, it is impossible to say
whence, and formed in a twinkling, as is frequently the case in Paris, pressed
forward from both sides of the road and looked on. In the neighboring lanes the
shouts of people calling to each other and the wooden shoes of market-gardeners
hastening up to gaze were audible.
The men massed upon the
drays allowed themselves to be jolted along in silence. They were livid with
the chill of morning. They all wore linen trousers, and their bare feet were
thrust into wooden shoes. The rest of their costume was a fantasy of
wretchedness. Their accoutrements were horribly incongruous; nothing is more
funereal than the harlequin in rags. Battered felt hats, tarpaulin caps,
hideous woollen nightcaps, and, side by side with a short blouse, a black coat
broken at the elbow; many wore women's headgear, others had baskets on their
heads; hairy breasts were visible, and through the rent in their garments
tattooed designs could be descried; temples of Love, flaming hearts, Cupids;
eruptions and unhealthy red blotches could also be seen. Two or three had a
straw rope attached to the cross-bar of the dray, and suspended under them like
a stirrup, which supported their feet. One of them held in his hand and raised
to his mouth something which had the appearance of a black stone and which he
seemed to be gnawing; it was bread which he was eating. There were no eyes
there which were not either dry, dulled, or flaming with an evil light. The
escort troop cursed, the men in chains did not utter a syllable; from time to
time the sound of a blow became audible as the cudgels descended on
shoulder-blades or skulls; some of these men were yawning; their rags were
terrible; their feet hung down, their shoulders oscillated, their heads clashed
together, their fetters clanked, their eyes glared ferociously, their fists
clenched or fell open inertly like the hands of corpses; in the rear of the
convoy ran a band of children screaming with laughter.
This file of vehicles,
whatever its nature was, was mournful. It was evident that to-morrow, that an
hour hence, a pouring rain might descend, that it might be followed by another
and another, and that their dilapidated garments would be drenched, that once
soaked, these men would not get dry again, that once chilled, they would not
again get warm, that their linen trousers would be glued to their bones by the
downpour, that the water would fill their shoes, that no lashes from the whips
would be able to prevent their jaws from chattering, that the chain would
continue to bind them by the neck, that their legs would continue to dangle,
and it was impossible not to shudder at the sight of these human beings thus
bound and passive beneath the cold clouds of autumn, and delivered over to the
rain, to the blast, to all the furies of the air, like trees and stones.
Blows from the cudgel
were not omitted even in the case of the sick men, who lay there knotted with
ropes and motionless on the seventh wagon, and who appeared to have been tossed
there like sacks filled with misery.
Suddenly, the sun made
its appearance; the immense light of the Orient burst forth, and one would have
said that it had set fire to all those ferocious heads. Their tongues were
unloosed; a conflagration of grins, oaths, and songs exploded. The broad
horizontal sheet of light severed the file in two parts, illuminating heads and
bodies, leaving feet and wheels in the obscurity. Thoughts made their
appearance on these faces; it was a terrible moment; visible demons with their
masks removed, fierce souls laid bare. Though lighted up, this wild throng
remained in gloom. Some, who were gay, had in their mouths quills through which
they blew vermin over the crowd, picking out the women; the dawn accentuated these
lamentable profiles with the blackness of its shadows; there was not one of
these creatures who was not deformed by reason of wretchedness; and the whole
was so monstrous that one would have said that the sun's brilliancy had been
changed into the glare of the lightning. The wagon-load which headed the line
had struck up a song, and were shouting at the top of their voices with a
haggard joviality, a potpourri by Desaugiers, then famous, called The Vestal;
the trees shivered mournfully; in the cross-lanes, countenances of bourgeois
listened in an idiotic delight to these coarse strains droned by spectres.
All sorts of distress met
in this procession as in chaos; here were to be found the facial angles of
every sort of beast, old men, youths, bald heads, gray beards, cynical
monstrosities, sour resignation, savage grins, senseless attitudes, snouts
surmounted by caps, heads like those of young girls with corkscrew curls on the
temples, infantile visages, and by reason of that, horrible thin skeleton faces,
to which death alone was lacking. On the first cart was a negro, who had been a
slave, in all probability, and who could make a comparison of his chains. The
frightful leveller from below, shame, had passed over these brows; at that
degree of abasement, the last transformations were suffered by all in their
extremest depths, and ignorance, converted into dulness, was the equal of
intelligence converted into despair. There was no choice possible between these
men who appeared to the eye as the flower of the mud. It was evident that the
person who had had the ordering of that unclean procession had not classified
them. These beings had been fettered and coupled pell-mell, in alphabetical
disorder, probably, and loaded hap-hazard on those carts. Nevertheless,
horrors, when grouped together, always end by evolving a result; all additions
of wretched men give a sum total, each chain exhaled a common soul, and each
dray-load had its own physiognomy. By the side of the one where they were
singing, there was one where they were howling; a third where they were
begging; one could be seen in which they were gnashing their teeth; another
load menaced the spectators, another blasphemed God; the last was as silent as
the tomb. Dante would have thought that he beheld his seven circles of hell on
the march. The march of the damned to their tortures, performed in sinister
wise, not on the formidable and flaming chariot of the Apocalypse, but, what
was more mournful than that, on the gibbet cart.
One of the guards, who
had a hook on the end of his cudgel, made a pretence from time to time, of
stirring up this mass of human filth. An old woman in the crowd pointed them
out to her little boy five years old, and said to him: "Rascal, let that
be a warning to you!"
As the songs and
blasphemies increased, the man who appeared to be the captain of the escort
cracked his whip, and at that signal a fearful dull and blind flogging, which
produced the sound of hail, fell upon the seven dray-loads; many roared and
foamed at the mouth; which redoubled the delight of the street urchins who had
hastened up, a swarm of flies on these wounds.
Jean Valjean's eyes had
assumed a frightful expression. They were no longer eyes; they were those deep
and glassy objects which replace the glance in the case of certain wretched
men, which seem unconscious of reality, and in which flames the reflection of
terrors and of catastrophes. He was not looking at a spectacle, he was seeing a
vision. He tried to rise, to flee, to make his escape; he could not move his
feet. Sometimes, the things that you see seize upon you and hold you fast. He
remained nailed to the spot, petrified, stupid, asking himself, athwart
confused and inexpressible anguish, what this sepulchral persecution signified,
and whence had come that pandemonium which was pursuing him. All at once, he
raised his hand to his brow, a gesture habitual to those whose memory suddenly
returns; he remembered that this was, in fact, the usual itinerary, that it was
customary to make this detour in order to avoid all possibility of encountering
royalty on the road to Fontainebleau, and that, five and thirty years before,
he had himself passed through that barrier.
Cosette was no less
terrified, but in a different way. She did not understand; what she beheld did
not seem to her to be possible; at length she cried:--
"Father! What are
those men in those carts?"
Jean Valjean replied:
"Convicts."
"Whither are they going?"
"To the
galleys."
At that moment, the
cudgelling, multiplied by a hundred hands, became zealous, blows with the flat
of the sword were mingled with it, it was a perfect storm of whips and clubs;
the convicts bent before it, a hideous obedience was evoked by the torture, and
all held their peace, darting glances like chained wolves.
Cosette trembled in every
limb; she resumed:--
"Father, are they
still men?"
"Sometimes,"
answered the unhappy man.
It was the chain-gang, in
fact, which had set out before daybreak from Bicetre, and had taken the road to
Mans in order to avoid Fontainebleau, where the King then was. This caused the
horrible journey to last three or four days longer; but torture may surely be
prolonged with the object of sparing the royal personage a sight of it.
Jean Valjean returned
home utterly overwhelmed. Such encounters are shocks, and the memory that they
leave behind them resembles a thorough shaking up.
Nevertheless, Jean
Valjean did not observe that, on his way back to the Rue de Babylone with
Cosette, the latter was plying him with other questions on the subject of what
they had just seen; perhaps he was too much absorbed in his own dejection to
notice her words and reply to them. But when Cosette was leaving him in the evening,
to betake herself to bed, he heard her say in a low voice, and as though
talking to herself: "It seems to me, that if I were to find one of those
men in my pathway, oh, my God, I should die merely from the sight of him close
at hand."
Fortunately, chance
ordained that on the morrow of that tragic day, there was some official
solemnity apropos of I know not what,-- fetes in Paris, a review in the Champ
de Mars, jousts on the Seine, theatrical performances in the Champs-Elysees,
fireworks at the Arc de l'Etoile, illuminations everywhere. Jean Valjean did
violence to his habits, and took Cosette to see these rejoicings, for the
purpose of diverting her from the memory of the day before, and of effacing,
beneath the smiling tumult of all Paris, the abominable thing which had passed
before her. The review with which the festival was spiced made the presence of
uniforms perfectly natural; Jean Valjean donned his uniform of a national guard
with the vague inward feeling of a man who is betaking himself to shelter.
However, this trip seemed to attain its object. Cosette, who made it her law to
please her father, and to whom, moreover, all spectacles were a novelty,
accepted this diversion with the light and easy good grace of youth, and did
not pout too disdainfully at that flutter of enjoyment called a public fete; so
that Jean Valjean was able to believe that he had succeeded, and that no trace
of that hideous vision remained.
Some days later, one
morning, when the sun was shining brightly, and they were both on the steps
leading to the garden, another infraction of the rules which Jean Valjean
seemed to have imposed upon himself, and to the custom of remaining in her
chamber which melancholy had caused Cosette to adopt, Cosette, in a wrapper,
was standing erect in that negligent attire of early morning which envelops
young girls in an adorable way and which produces the effect of a cloud drawn
over a star; and, with her head bathed in light, rosy after a good sleep,
submitting to the gentle glances of the tender old man, she was picking a daisy
to pieces. Cosette did not know the delightful legend, I love a little,
passionately, etc.--who was there who could have taught her? She was handling
the flower instinctively, innocently, without a suspicion that to pluck a daisy
apart is to do the same by a heart. If there were a fourth, and smiling Grace
called Melancholy, she would have worn the air of that Grace. Jean Valjean was
fascinated by the contemplation of those tiny fingers on that flower, and
forgetful of everything in the radiance emitted by that child. A red-breast was
warbling in the thicket, on one side. White cloudlets floated across the sky,
so gayly, that one would have said that they had just been set at liberty.
Cosette went on attentively tearing the leaves from her flower; she seemed to
be thinking about something; but whatever it was, it must be something
charming; all at once she turned her head over her shoulder with the delicate
languor of a swan, and said to Jean Valjean: "Father, what are the galleys
like?"
