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Towards the middle of the
night Jean Valjean woke.
Jean Valjean came from a poor peasant family
of Brie.
He had not
learned to read in childhood.
When he reached man's estate, be became a
tree pruner..
His mother was named Jeanne Mathieu; his father was
called Jean Valjean or Vlajean, probably a sobriquet, and a contraction of
viola Jean, "here's Jean."
Jean Valjean was of that
thoughtful but not gloomy disposition which constitutes the peculiarity of
affectionate natures.
On the whole there was something decidedly
sluggish and insignificant about Jean Valjean in appearance.
Jean
Valjean had lost his father and mother early.
His mother died of a milk
fever, not properly attended.
His father, a tree pruner, had been killed
by a fall.
All that remained to Jean Valjean was a sister older than
himself, a widow with
seven children, boys and girls.
This sister had brought up Jean Valjean,
and so long as she had a husband she lodged and fed her young
brother.
The husband died.
The eldest of the seven children was
eight years old.
The youngest, one.
Jean Valjean had just
attained his twenty-fifth year.
He took the father's place, and, in his
turn, supported the sister who had brought him up.
This was done simply
as a duty and even a little churlishly on the part of Jean Valjean.
Thus his youth had been spent in rude and ill-paid
toil.
Jean Valjean had never known
a "passionate woman".
Jean Valjean
had not had time for romance.
Jean
Valjean returned at night weary, and ate his broth without uttering a word.
His sister, Jeanne, often took the best part of his repast from his
bowl while he was eating, a bit of meat, a slice of bacon, the heart of the
cabbage, to give to one of her children.
As he went on eating, with his
head bent over the table and almost into his soup, his long hair falling about
his bowl and concealing his eyes, he had the air of perceiving nothing.
Not far from the Valjean
thatched cottage, on the other side of the
lane, was a farmer's cow named Marie-Claude.
The Valjean children,
habitually famished, sometimes went to borrow from Marie-Claude a pint of milk,
in their mother's name, which they drank behind a hedge or in some alley
corner, snatching the jug from each other so hastily that the little girls
spilled it on their aprons and down their necks.
If their mother had
known of this marauding, she would have punished the delinquents severely.
Jean Valjean gruffly and grumblingly paid Marie-Claude for the pint of
milk behind their mother's back, and the children were not punished.
In
pruning season Jean Valjean earned eighteen sous a day; then he hired out as a
hay maker, as laborer, as neat herd on a farm, as a drudge.
Jean
Valjean did whatever he could.
His sister worked also but what could
she do with seven little children?
It was a sad group enveloped in
misery, slowly starving.
A
very hard winter came.
Jean Valjean had no
work.
The
family had no bread.
No
bread literally. Seven children!
One Sunday evening, Maubert Isabeau,
the Baker on the Church Square, was preparing to go to bed, when he heard a
violent blow on the grated front of his shop.
He arrived to see an arm
pass through a hole made by a blow from a fist, through the grating and the
glass.
The arm seized a
loaf of bread and carried it off.
Isabeau ran out in haste; the
robber fled at the full speed.
Isabeau ran after him and stopped him.
The thief flung away the loaf, but his arm was still bleeding.
It was Jean Valjean. This took place in 1795.
Jean Valjean was taken before the tribunals for
theft, breaking and
entering an inhabited house at night.
He had a gun which he used better than
any one else on Earth, he was a bit of a poacher, and this injured his
case.
There exists a legitimate
prejudice against poachers.
A poacher, as a smuggler, smacks
strongly of a brigand.
Nevertheless, we will remark cursorily, there is
still an abyss between this race of
men and the hideous
assassin.
The poacher lives in the
forest, the smuggler lives in the mountains or on the sea.
Cities make ferocious men as they make
corrupt them.
The mountain, the sea, the
forest, make savage men;
they develop a fierce side
without destroying the humane side.
Jean Valjean was
pronounced guilty.
The terms of the Code were explicit.
There occur formidable hours in our
civilization; there are
moments when the penal laws
decree a shipwreck.
In ominous minute society draws
back and consummates the irreparable abandonment of a sentient being!
Jean Valjean was condemned to five years in the galleys.
On the 22d of April, 1796, the
victory of Montenotte, won by General of the French army Napoleon Bonaparte was
announced in Paris; on that same day a great gang of
galley-slaves was put in
chains at Bicetre.
Jean Valjean formed a part of that gang.
An
old turnkey of the prison, who is now nearly eighty years old,
still recalls perfectly that
unfortunate wretch who was chained to the end of the fourth line, in the
north angle of the courtyard.
He was seated on the ground like the
others.
Jean Valjean did not seem to
comprehend his
position, except that it was horrible.
It is
probable the
vague ideas of an ignorant man concerning his
plight created a dissociated
state.
While the bolt of his iron collar was being riveted behind
his head with heavy blows from the hammer, his
tears stifled impeded his
speech; he only managed to say from time to time, "I was a tree pruner at
Faverolles."
Then still sobbing, he raised his
right hand and lowered
it gradually seven times, as though he were touching in succession seven heads
of unequal heights, and from this gesture it was divined that the thing which
he had done, whatever it was, he had done for the sake of clothing and
nourishing seven little children.
Victor Hugo, Les
Miserables |
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