CHAPTER XIII.
LITTLE GERVAIS.
Jean Valjean left the town as if running away; he walked hastilyacross the fields, taking the roads and paths that offered themselves,without perceiving that he was going round and round. He wandered thusthe entire morning, and though he had eaten nothing, he did not feelhungry. He was attacked by a multitude of novel sensations; he felt asort of passion, but he did not know with whom. He could not have saidwhether he was affected or humiliated; at times a strange softeningcame over him, against which he strove, and to which he opposed thehardening of the last twenty years. This condition offended him, andhe saw with alarm that the species of frightful calmness, which theinjustice of his misfortune had produced, was shaken within him.He asked himself what would take its place; at times he would havepreferred being in prison and with the gendarmes, and that things hadnot happened thus; for that would have agitated him less. Although theseason was advanced, there were still here and there in the hedges afew laggard flowers, whose smell recalled childhood's memories as hepassed them. These recollections were almost unendurable, for it was solong since they had recurred to him.
Indescribable thoughts were thus congregated within him the whole daythrough. When the sun was setting, and lengthening on the ground theshadow of the smallest pebble, Jean Valjean was sitting behind a bushin a large tawny and utterly-deserted plain. There were only the Alpson the horizon, there was not even the steeple of a distant village.Jean Valjean might be about three leagues from D----, and a path thatcrossed the plain ran a few paces from the bushes. In the midst of thismeditation, which would have contributed no little in rendering hisrags startling to any one who saw him, he heard a sound of mirth. Heturned his head and saw a little Savoyard about ten years of age comingalong the path, with his hurdy-gurdy at his side and his dormouse-boxon his back. He was one of those gentle, merry lads who go about fromplace to place, displaying their knees through the holes in theirtrousers.
While singing the lad stopped every now and then to play at pitchand toss with some coins he held in his hand, which were probablyhis entire fortune. Among these coins was a two-franc piece. The ladstopped by the side of the bushes without seeing Jean Valjean, andthrew up the handful of sous, all of which he had hitherto alwayscaught on the back of his hand. This time the two-franc piece fell, androlled up to Jean Valjean, who placed his foot upon it. But the boy hadlooked after the coin, and seen him do it; he did not seem surprised,but walked straight up to the man. It was an utterly deserted spot;as far as eye could extend there was no one on the plain or the path.Nothing was audible, save the faint cries of a swarm of birds ofpassage passing through the sky, at an immense height. The boy had hisback turned to the sun, which wove golden threads in his hair, andsuffused Jean Valjean's face with a purpled, blood-red hue.
"Sir," the little Savoyard said, with that childish confidence which iscomposed of ignorance and innocence, "my coin?"
"What is your name?" Jean Valjean said.
"Little Gervais, sir."
"Be off," said Jean Valjean.
"Give me my coin, if you please, sir."
Jean Valjean hung his head, but said nothing.
The boy began again,--
"My two-franc piece, sir."
Jean Valjean's eye remained fixed on the ground.
"My coin," the boy cried, "my silver piece, my money."
It seemed as if Jean Valjean did not hear him, for the boy seized thecollar of his blouse and shook him, and at the same time made an effortto remove the iron-shod shoe placed on his coin.
"I want my money, my forty-sous piece."
The boy began crying, and Jean Valjean raised his head. He was stillsitting on the ground, and his eyes were misty. He looked at the ladwith a sort of amazement, then stretched forth his hand to his stick,and shouted in a terrible voice, "Who is there?"
"I, sir," the boy replied. "Little Gervais; give me back my two francs,if you please. Take away your foot, sir, if you please." Then he grewirritated, though so little, and almost threatening.
"Come, will you lift your foot? Lift it, I say!"
"Ah, it is you still," said Jean Valjean, and springing up, with hisfoot still held on the coin, he added, "Will you be off or not?"
The startled boy looked at him, then began trembling from head to foot,and after a few moments of stupor ran off at full speed, without daringto look back or utter a cry. Still, when he had got a certain distance,want of breath forced him to stop, and Jean Valjean could hear himsobbing. In a few minutes the boy had disappeared. The sun had set, anddarkness collected around Jean Valjean. He had eaten nothing all day,and was probably in a fever. He had remained standing and not changedhis attitude since the boy ran off. His breath heaved his chest at longand unequal intervals, his eye, fixed ten or twelve yards ahead, seemedto be studying with profound attention the shape of an old fragment ofblue earthenware which had fallen in the grass. Suddenly he started,for he felt the night chill; he pulled his cap over his forehead,mechanically tried to cross and button his blouse, made a step, andstooped to pick up his stick.
At this moment he perceived the two-franc piece, which his foot hadhalf buried in the turf, and which glistened among the pebbles. It hadthe effect of a galvanic shock upon him. "What is this?" he muttered.He fell back three paces, then stopped, unable to take his eye from thespot his foot had trodden a moment before, as if the thing glisteningthere in the darkness had an open eye fixed upon him. In a few momentshe dashed convulsively at the coin, picked it up, and began looking outinto the plain, while shuddering like a straying wild beast which isseeking shelter.
He saw nothing, night was falling, the plain was cold and indistinct,and heavy purple mists rose in the twilight. He set out rapidly in acertain direction, the one in which the lad had gone. After going somethirty yards he stopped, looked and saw nothing; then he shouted withall his strength, "little Gervais, Little Gervais!" He was silent, andwaited, but there was no response. The country was deserted and gloomy,and he was surrounded by space. There was nothing but a gloom in whichhis gaze was lost, and a stillness in which his voice was lost. An icybreeze was blowing, and imparted to things around a sort of mournfullife. The bushes shook their little thin arms with incredible fury;they seemed to be threatening and pursuing some one.
He walked onwards and then began running, but from time to time hestopped, and shouted in the solitude with a voice the most formidableand agonizing that can be imagined: "Little Gervais, Little Gervais!"Assuredly, if the boy had heard him, he would have felt frightened, andnot have shown himself; but the lad was doubtless a long way off bythis time. The convict met a priest on horseback, to whom he went upand said,--
"Monsieur le Cur?, have you seen a lad pass?"
"No," the priest replied.
"A lad of the name of 'Little Gervais?'"
"I have seen nobody."
The convict took two five-franc pieces from his pouch and handed themto the Priest.
"Monsieur le Cur?, this is for your poor. He was a boy of about tenyears of age, with a dormouse, I think, and a hurdy-gurdy,--a Savoyard,you know."
"I did not see him."
"Can you tell me if there is any one of the name of Little Gervais inthe villages about here?"
"If it is as you say, my good fellow, the lad is a stranger. Many ofthem pass this way."
Jean Valjean violently took out two other five-franc pieces, which hegave the priest.
"For your poor," he said; then added wildly, "Monsieur l'Abb?, have mearrested: I am a robber."
The priest urged on his horse, and rode away in great alarm, whileJean Valjean set off running in the direction he had first taken. Hewent on for a long distance, looking, calling, and shouting, but hemet no one else. Twice or thrice he ran across the plain to somethingthat appeared to him to be a person lying or sitting down; but he onlyfound heather, or rocks level with the ground. At last he stopped ata spot where three paths met; the moon had risen; he gazed afar, andcalled out for the last tim
e, "Little Gervais, Little Gervais, LittleGervais!" His shout died away in the mist, without even awakeningan echo. He muttered again, "Little Gervais," in a weak and almostinarticulate voice, but it was his last effort. His knees suddenly gaveway under him as if an invisible power were crushing him beneath theweight of a bad conscience. He fell exhausted on a large stone, withhis hand tearing his hair, his face between his knees, and shrieked: "Iam a scoundrel!" Then his heart melted, and he began to weep; it wasthe first time for nineteen years.
When Jean Valjean quitted the Bishop's house he was lifted out of hisformer thoughts, and could not account for what was going on withinhim. He stiffened himself against the angelic deeds and gentle words ofthe old man: "You have promised me to become an honest man. I purchaseyour soul; I withdraw it from the spirit of perverseness and give itto God." This incessantly recurred to him, and he opposed to thiscelestial indulgence that pride which is within us as the fortressof evil. He felt indistinctly that this priest's forgiveness was thegreatest and most formidable assault by which he had yet been shaken;that his hardening would be permanent if he resisted this clemency;that if he yielded he must renounce that hatred with which the actionsof other men had filled his soul during so many years, and whichpleased him; that this time he must either conquer or be vanquished,and that the struggle, a colossal and final struggle, had begun betweenhis wickedness and that man's goodness.
In the presence of all these gleams he walked on like a drunken man.While he went on thus with haggard eye, had he any distinct perceptionof what the result of his adventure at D---- might be? Did he hear allthat mysterious buzzing which warns or disturbs the mind at certainmoments of life? Did a voice whisper in his ear that he had just gonethrough the solemn hour of his destiny, that no middle way was now lefthim, and that if he were not henceforth the best of men he would be theworst; that he must now ascend higher than the bishop, or sink lowerthan the galley-slave; that if he wished to be good he must become anangel, and if he wished to remain wicked that he must become a monster?
Here we must ask again the question we previously asked, Did heconfusedly receive any shadow of all this into his mind? Assuredly,as we said, misfortune educates the intellect, still it is doubtfulwhether Jean Valjean was in a state to draw the conclusions we haveformed. If these ideas reached him, he had a glimpse of them ratherthan saw them, and they only succeeded in throwing him into anindescribable and almost painful trouble. On leaving that shapelessblack thing which is called the bagne the Bishop had hurt his soul,in the same way as a too brilliant light would have hurt his eyes oncoming out of darkness. The future life, the possible life, whichpresented itself to him, all pure and radiant, filled him with tremorand anxiety, and he really no longer knew how matters were. Like an owlthat suddenly witnessed a sunrise the convict had been dazzled and, asit were, blinded by virtue.
One thing which he did not suspect is certain, however, that he was nolonger the same man; all was changed in him, and it was no longer inhis power to get rid of the fact that the Bishop had spoken to him andtaken his hand. While in this mental condition he met Little Gervais,and robbed him of his two francs: why did he so? Assuredly he could notexplain it. Was it a final, and as it were supreme, effort of the evilthought he had brought from the bagne, a remainder of impulse, a resultof what is called in Statics "acquired force"? It was so, and wasperhaps also even less than that. Let us say it simply, it was not hewho robbed, it was not the man, but the brute beast that through habitand instinct stupidly placed its foot on the coin, while the intellectwas struggling with such novel and extraordinary sensations. When theintellect woke again and saw this brutish action, Jean Valjean recoiledwith agony and uttered a cry of horror. It was a curious phenomenon,and one only possible in his situation, that, in robbing the boy ofthat money, he committed a deed of which he was no longer capable.
However this may be, this last bad action had a decisive effect uponhim: it suddenly darted through the chaos which filled his mind anddissipated it, placed on one side the dark mists, on the other thelight, and acted on his soul, in its present condition, as certainchemical re-agents act upon a troubled mixture, by precipitatingone element and clarifying another. At first, before even examininghimself or reflecting, he wildly strove to find the boy again andreturn him his money; then, when he perceived that this was useless andimpossible, he stopped in despair. At the moment when he exclaimed, "Iam a scoundrel!" he had seen himself as he really was, and was alreadyso separated from himself that he fancied himself merely a phantom, andthat he had there before him, in flesh and blood, his blouse fastenedround his hips, his knapsack full of stolen objects on his back, withhis resolute and gloomy face and his mind full of hideous schemes, thefrightful galley-slave, Jean Valjean.
As we have remarked, excessive misfortune had made him to some extenta visionary, and this therefore was a species of vision. He really sawthat Jean Valjean with his sinister face before him, and almost askedhimself who this man who so horrified him was. His brain was in thatviolent and yet frightfully calm stage when the reverie is so deep thatit absorbs reality. He contemplated himself, so to speak, face to face,and at the same time he saw through this hallucination a species oflight which he at first took for a torch. On looking more attentivelyat this light which appeared to his conscience, he perceived that ithad a human shape and was the Bishop. His conscience examined in turnthe two men standing before him, the Bishop and Jean Valjean. By oneof those singular effects peculiar to an ecstasy of this nature, themore his reverie was prolonged, the taller and more brilliant theBishop appeared, while Jean Valjean grew less and faded out of sight.At length he disappeared and the Bishop alone remained, who filled thewretched man's soul with a magnificent radiance.
Jean Valjean wept for a long time, and sobbed with more weakness than awoman, more terror than a child. While he wept the light grew brighterin his brain,--an extraordinary light, at once ravishing and terrible.His past life, his first fault, his long expiation, his externalbrutalization, his internal hardening, his liberation, accompanied byso many plans of vengeance, what had happened at the Bishop's, the lastthing he had done, the robbery of the boy, a crime the more cowardlyand monstrous because it took place after the Bishop's forgiveness,--all this recurred to him, but in a light which he had never beforeseen. He looked at his life, and it appeared to him horrible; at hissoul, and it appeared to him frightful. Still a soft light was shedover both, and he fancied that he saw Satan by the light of Paradise.
How many hours did he weep thus? what did he do afterwards? whitherdid he go? No one ever knew. It was stated, however, that on this verynight the mail carrier from Grenoble, who arrived at D---- at aboutthree o'clock in the morning, while passing through the street wherethe Bishop's Palace stood, saw a man kneeling on the pavement in theattitude of prayer in front of Monseigneur Welcome's door.
BOOK III
IN THE YEAR 1817.