CHAPTER VIII.
THE CHAIN-GANG.
The more unhappy of the two was Jean Valjean; for youth, even inits sorrow, has always a brilliancy of its own. At certain momentsJean Valjean suffered so intensely that he became childish, for itis the peculiarity of grief to bring out a man's childish side. Hefelt invincibly that Cosette was slipping from him; and he would haveliked to struggle, hold her back, and excite her by some external andbrilliant achievement. These ideas, childish, as we said, but at thesame time senile, gave him through their very childishness a very fairnotion of the influence of gold lace upon the imagination of girls.One day Count Coutard, Commandant of Paris, passed along the street onhorseback, and in full-dress uniform. He envied this gilded man, andsaid to himself: What a happiness it would be to be able to put on thatcoat, which was an undeniable thing; that if Cosette saw him in it itwould dazzle her, and when he passed before the Tuileries gates thesentinels would present arms to him, and that would be sufficient forCosette, and prevent her looking at young men.
An unexpected shock was mingled with his sad thoughts. In the isolatedlife they led, and since they had gone to reside in the Rue Plumet,they had one habit. They sometimes had the pleasure of going to see thesun rise, a species of sweet joy, which is agreeable to those who areentering life and those who are leaving it. To walk about at daybreakis equivalent, with the man who loves solitude, to walking about atnight with the gayety of nature added. The streets are deserted andthe birds sing. Cosette, herself a bird, generally woke at an earlyhour. These morning excursions were arranged on the previous evening;he proposed and she accepted. This was arranged like a plot; they wentout before day, and it was a delight for Cosette, as these innocenteccentricities please youth. Jean Valjean had, as we know, a liking togo to but little frequented places,--to solitary nooks, and forgottenspots. There were at that time, in the vicinity of the gates of Paris,poor fields, almost forming part of the city, where sickly wheat grewin summer, and which in autumn, after the harvest was got in, didnot look as if they had been reaped, but skinned. Jean Valjean had apredilection for these fields, and Cosette did not feel wearied there;it was solitude for him and liberty for her. There she became a littlegirl again; she ran about and almost played; she took off her bonnet,laid it on Jean Valjean's knees, and plucked flowers. She watched thebutterflies, but did not catch them; for humanity and tenderness springup with love, and the maiden who has in her heart a trembling andfragile ideal feels pity for the butterfly's wing. She twined poppiesinto wreaths, which she placed on her head, and when the sun pouredits beams on them and rendered them almost purple, they formed a fierycrown for her fresh pink face.
Even after their life had grown saddened they kept up their habit ofearly walks. One October morning, then, tempted by the perfect serenityof the autumn of 1831, they went out, and found themselves just beforedaybreak near the Barrière du Maine. It was not quite morning yet, butit was dawn, a ravishing and wild minute. There were a few stars inthe pale azure sky, the earth was all black, the heavens all white, ashiver ran along the grass, and all around displayed the mysteriousinfluence of twilight. A lark, which seemed mingled with the stars,was singing at a prodigious height, and it seemed as if this hymn oflittleness to infinitude calmed the immensity. In the east the darkmass of Val de Grâce stood out against the bright steel-blue horizon,and glittering Venus rose behind the dome and looked like a soulescaping from a gloomy edifice. All was peace and silence, there was noone in the highway; and a few workmen, going to their daily toil, couldbe indistinctly seen in the distance.
Jean Valjean was seated on some planks deposited at the gate of atimber-yard; his face was turned to the road, and his back to thelight. He forgot all about the sunrise, for he had fallen into oneof those profound reveries in which the mind is concentrated, whichimprison even the glance and are equivalent to four walls. Thereare meditations which may be called wells, and when you are at thebottom it takes some time to reach the ground again. Jean Valjean haddescended into one of these reveries; he was thinking of Cosette, ofthe possible happiness if nothing came betwixt him and her, of thatlight with which she filled his life, and which was the breath of hissoul. He was almost happy in this reverie; and Cosette, standing by hisside, was watching the clouds turn pink. All at once Cosette exclaimed,"Father, there is something coming down there!" Jean Valjean raised hiseyes; Cosette was correct. The road which leads to the old Barrière duMaine is a prolongation of the Rue de Sèvres, and is intersected atright angles by the inner boulevard. At the spot where the roads cross,a sound difficult to explain at such an hour could be heard, and asort of confused mass appeared. Some shapeless thing coming along theboulevard was turning into the main road. It grew larger, and seemed tobe moving in an orderly way; although it shook and heaved, it seemedto be a vehicle, but its load could not be distinguished. There werehorses, wheels, shouts, and the cracking of whips. By degrees thelineaments became fixed, though drowned in darkness. It was really avehicle coming toward the barrière near which Jean Valjean was seated;a second resembling it followed, then a third, then a fourth; sevencarts debouched in turn, the heads of the horses touching the back ofthe vehicles. Figures moved on these carts; sparks could be seen in thegloom, looking like bare sabres, and a clang could be heard resemblingchains being shaken. All this advanced, the voices became louder, andit was a formidable thing, such as issues from the cavern of dreams.
On drawing nearer, this thing assumed a shape, and stood out behind thetrees with the lividness of an apparition. The mass grew whiter, andthe gradually dawning day threw a ghastly gleam over this mass, whichwas at once sepulchral and alive,--the heads of the shadows became thefaces of corpses, and this is what it was. Seven vehicles were movingin file along the road, and the first six had a singular shape; theyresembled brewers' drays, and consisted of long ladders laid upontwo wheels, and forming a shaft at the front end. Each dray, or, tospeak more correctly, each ladder, was drawn by a team of four horses,and strange clusters of men were dragged along upon these ladders.In the faint light these men could not be seen, so much as divined.Twenty-four on each ladder, twelve on either side, leaning against eachother, had their faces turned to the passers-by, and their legs hangingdown; and they had behind their back something which rang and was achain, and something that glistened, which was a collar. Each man hadhis collar, but the chain was for all; so that these twenty-four men,if obliged to get down from the dray and walk, were seized by a speciesof inexorable unity, and were obliged to wind on the ground with thechain as backbone, very nearly like centipedes. At the front and backof each cart stood two men armed with guns, who stood with their feeton the end of the chain. The seventh vehicle, a vast fourgon withrack sides but no hood, had four wheels and six horses, and carrieda resounding mass of coppers, boilers, chafing-dishes, and chains,among which were mingled a few bound men lying their full length, whoseemed to be ill. This fourgon, which was quite open, was lined withbroken-down hurdles, which seemed to have been used for old punishments.
These vehicles held the crown of the causeway; and on eitherside marched a double file of infamous-looking guards, wearingthree-cornered hats, like the soldiers of the Directory, and dirty,torn, stained uniforms, half gray and blue, a coat of the Invalides andthe trousers of the undertaker's men, red epaulettes and yellow belts,and were armed with short sabres, muskets, and sticks. These sbirriseemed compounded of the abjectness of the beggar and the authority ofthe hangman; and the one who appeared their leader held a postilion'swhip in his hands. All these details grew more and more distinct inthe advancing daylight; and at the head and rear of the train marchedmounted gendarmes with drawn sabres. The train was so long that at themoment when the first vehicle reached the barrière the last had scarceturned out of the boulevard. A crowd, which came no one knew whence andformed in a second, as is so common in Paris, lined both sides of theroad, and looked. In the side-lanes could be heard the shouts of peoplecalling to each other, and the wooden shoes of the kitchen-gardenersrunning up to
have a peep.
The men piled up on the drays allowed themselves to be jolted insilence, and were livid with the morning chill. They all wore canvastrousers, and their naked feet were thrust into wooden shoes; but therest of their attire was left to the fancy of wretchedness. Theiraccoutrements were hideously disaccordant, for nothing is more mournfulthan the harlequin garb of rags. There were crushed hats, oilskincaps, frightful woollen night-caps, and side by side with the blouse,an out-at-elbow black coat Some wore women's bonnets, and others hadbaskets, as head-gear; hairy chests were visible, and through the rentsof the clothes tattooing could be distinguished,--temples of love,burning hearts, and cupids,--but ringworm and other unhealthy red spotsmight also be noticed. Two or three had passed a straw rope through theside rail of the dray, which hung down like a stirrup and supportedtheir feet; while one of them held in his hand and raised to his mouthsomething like a black stone, which he seemed to be gnawing,--it wasbread he was eating. All the eyes were dry, and either dull or luminouswith a wicked light. The escort cursed, but the chained men did notbreathe a syllable; from time to time the sound of a blow dealt witha stick on shoulder-blades or heads could be heard. Some of these menyawned; the rags were terrible; their feet hung down, their shouldersoscillated, their heads struck against each other, their irons rattled,their eyeballs flashed ferociously, their fists clenched or openedinertly like the hands of death, and in the rear of the chain a band ofchildren burst into a laugh.
This file of vehicles, whatever their nature might be, was lugubrious.It was plain that within an hour a shower might fall, that it might befollowed by another, and then another, that the ragged clothing wouldbe drenched; and that once wet through, these men would not dry again,and once chilled, would never grow warm any more; that their canvastrousers would be glued to their bones by the rain, that water wouldfill their wooden shoes, that lashes could not prevent the chatteringof teeth, that the chain would continue to hold them by the neck, andtheir feet would continue to hang; and it was impossible not to shudderon seeing these human creatures thus bound and passive beneath the coldautumnal clouds, and surrendered to the rain, the breezes, and all thefuries of the atmosphere, like trees and stones. The blows were noteven spared the sick who lay bound with ropes and motionless in theseventh vehicle, and who seemed to have been thrown down there likesacks filled with wretchedness.
All at once the sun appeared, the immense beam of the east flashedforth; and it seemed as if it set fire to all these ferocious heads.Tongues became untied, and a storm of furies, oaths, and songsexploded. The wide horizontal light cut the whole file in two,illumining the heads and bodies, and leaving the feet and wheels inobscurity. Thoughts appeared on faces, and it was a fearful thing tosee demons with their masks thrown away, and ferocious souls laid bare.Some of the merrier ones had in their mouths quills, through whichthey blew vermin on the crowd, selecting women. The dawn caused theirlamentable faces to stand out in the darkness of the shadows. Not oneof these beings but was misshapen through wretchedness; and it wasso monstrous that it seemed to change the light of the sun into thegleam of a lightning flash. The first cart-load had struck up, andwere droning out at the top of their voices, with a haggard joviality,a pot-pourri of Desaugiers, at that time famous under the title of_La Vestale_. The trees shook mournfully, while in the side-walksbourgeois faces were listening with an idiotic beatitude to thesecomic songs chanted by spectres. All destinies could be found in thisgang, like a chaos; there were there the facial angles of all animals,old men, youths, naked skulls, gray beards, cynical monstrosities,sulky resignation, savage grins, wild attitudes, youth, girlishheads with corkscrew curls on the temples, infantine, and for thatreason horrible, faces, and then countenances of skeletons which onlylacked death. On the first dray could be seen a negro, who had been aslave probably, and was enabled to compare the chains. The frightfulleveller, shame, had passed over all these foreheads. At this stage ofabasement the last transformations were undergone by all in the lowestdepths; and ignorance, changed into dulness, was the equal of intellectchanged into despair. No choice was possible among these men, whoappeared to be the pick of the mud; and it was clear that the arrangerof this unclean procession had not attempted to classify them. Thesebeings had been bound and coupled pell-mell, probably in alphabeticaldisorder, and loaded haphazard on the vehicles. Still, horrors, whengrouped, always end by disengaging a resultant. Every addition ofwretched men produces a total; a common soul issued from each chain,and each dray-load had its physiognomy. By the side of the man who sangwas one who yelled; a third begged; another could be seen gnashinghis teeth; another threatened the passers-by; another blasphemed God,and the last was silent as the tomb. Dante would have fancied that hesaw the seven circles of the Inferno in motion. It was the march ofthe damned to the torture, performed in a sinister way, not upon theformidable flashing car of the Apocalypse, but, more gloomy still, inthe hangman's cart.
One of the keepers, who had a hook at the end of his stick, fromtime to time attempted to stir up this heap of human ordure. An oldwoman in the crowd pointed them to a little boy of five years of age,and said to him, "You scamp, that will teach you!" As the songs andblasphemy grew louder, the man who seemed the captain of the escortcracked his whip; and at this signal a blind, indiscriminate bastinadofell with the sound of hail upon the seven cart-loads. Many yelledand foamed at the lips, which redoubled the joy of the gamins who hadcome up like a cloud of flies settling upon wounds. Jean Valjean's eyehad become frightful; it was no longer an eyeball, but that profoundglass bulb which takes the place of the eye in some unfortunate men,which seems unconscious of reality, and in which the reflection ofhorrors and catastrophes flashes. He was not looking at a spectacle,but going through a vision; he had to rise, fly, escape, but couldnot move his foot. At times things which you see seize you and rootyou in the ground. He remained petrified and stupid, asking himselfthrough a confused and inexpressible agony what was the meaning of thissepulchral persecution, and whence came this Pandemonium that pursuedhim. All at once he raised his hand to his forehead,--the usual gestureof those to whom memory suddenly returns; he remembered that thiswas substantially the road, that this détour was usual to avoid anymeeting with royalty,--which was always possible on the Fontainebleauroad,--and that five-and-thirty years before he had passed through thatbarrière. Cosette was not the less horrified, though in a differentway; she did not understand, her breath failed her, and what she sawdid not appear to her possible. At length she exclaimed,--
"Father! what is there in those vehicles?"
Jean Valjean answered,--
"Convicts."
"Where are they going?"
"To the galleys."
At this moment the bastinado, multiplied by a hundred hands, becametremendous; strokes of the flat of the sabre were mingled with it, andit resembled a tornado of whips and sticks. The galley-slaves bowedtheir heads; a hideous obedience was produced by the punishment, andall were silent, with the looks of chained wolves. Cosette, tremblingin all her limbs, continued,--
"Father, are they still men?"
"Sometimes," the miserable man replied.
It was, in fact, the Chain, which, leaving Bicêtre before daybreak,was taking the Mans road, to avoid Fontainebleau, where the king thenwas. This détour made the fearful journey last three or four dayslonger; but it surely may be prolonged to save a royal personagethe sight of a punishment! Jean Valjean went home crushed; for suchencounters are blows, and the recollections they leave behind resemblea concussion. While walking along the Rue de Babylone, Jean Valjeandid not notice that Cosette asked him other questions about what theyhad just seen; perhaps he was himself too absorbed in his despondencyto notice her remarks and answer them. At night, however, when Cosetteleft him to go to bed, he heard her say in a low voice, and as ifspeaking to herself: "I feel that if I were to meet one of those men inthe street, I should die only from being so close to him."
Luckily, the next day after this tragic interlude, there were festi
valsin Paris on account of some official solemnity which I have forgotten,a review at the Champ de Mars, a quintain on the Seine, theatresin the Champs Élysées, fireworks at the Étoile, and illuminationseverywhere. Jean Valjean, breaking through his habits, took Cosetteto these rejoicings in order to make her forget the scene of theprevious day, and efface, beneath the laughing tumult of all Paris,the abominable thing which had passed before her. The review, whichseasoned the fête, rendered uniforms very natural; hence Jean Valjeanput on his National Guard coat, with the vague inner feeling of a manwho is seeking a refuge. However, the object of this jaunt seemed tobe attained; Cosette, who made it a law to please her father, and towhom any festival was a novelty, accepted the distraction with the easyand light good-will of adolescents, and did not make too disdainful apout at the porringer of joy which is called a public holiday. HenceJean Valjean might believe that he had succeeded, and that no trace ofthe hideous vision remained. A few days after, one morning when the sunwas shining, and both were on the garden steps,--another infraction ofthe rules which Jean Valjean seemed to have imposed on himself, andthat habit of remaining in her chamber which sadness had caused Cosetteto assume,--the girl, wearing a combing jacket, was standing in thatmorning négligé which adorably envelops maidens, and looks like a cloudover a star; and with her head in the light, her cheeks pink from agood night's rest, and gazed at softly by the old man, she was pluckingthe petals of a daisy. She did not know the delicious legend of, "Ilove you, a little, passionately," etc.,--for who could have taught itto her? She handled the flower instinctively and innocently, withoutsuspecting that plucking a daisy to pieces is questioning a heart. Ifthere were a fourth Grace called Melancholy, she had the air of thatGrace when smiling. Jean Valjean was fascinated by the contemplationof these little fingers on this flower, forgetting everything in theradiance which surrounded the child. A red-breast was twittering in abush hard by; and while clouds crossed the sky so gayly that you mighthave said that they had just been set at liberty, Cosette continued topluck her flower attentively. She seemed to be thinking of something,but that something must be charming. All at once she turned her head onher shoulder, with the delicate slowness of a swan, and said to JeanValjean, "Tell me, father, what the galleys are."
BOOK IV.
SUCCOR FROM BELOW MAY BE SUCCOR FROM ON HIGH.