XI. CHRISTUS NOS LIBERAVIT
What is this story of Fantine all about? It is about society buying itself a slave.
Who from? From destitution.
From hunger, from cold, from loneliness, from abandonment, from dire poverty. A painful bargain. A soul for a bit of bread. Destitution makes an offer, society gives the nod.
The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it has not yet managed to permeate it. They say slavery has vanished from European civilization. That is wrong. It still exists, but it now preys only on women, and it goes by the name of prostitution.
It preys on women, meaning on grace, on weakness, on beauty, on the maternal. It is not the least of man’s shameful secrets.
At the point we have reached in this doleful drama, there is nothing left of the Fantine of the past. In becoming trash she turned to marble. Whoever touches her feels cold. She wafts into view, she goes along with you yet knows nothing about you; she is the face of dishonor and severity. Life and the social order have had their final say. All that can happen has happened to her. She has felt everything, accepted everything, experienced everything, suffered everything, lost everything, cried over everything. She is resigned with a resignation that resembles indifference just as death resembles sleep. Nothing is too awful for her now. She fears nothing. Let the sky fall on her head, let the whole ocean crash over her! What does she care? She is a sponge already completely soaked.
That, at least, is what she believes, but it is a mistake to imagine that you can exhaust fate or that you ever hit rock bottom—in anything.
Alas! What are all these lives driven willy-nilly? Where are they going? Why are they like this?
He who knows the answer to that, sees the darkness as a whole.
He is alone. His name is God.
XII. THE IDLENESS OF MONSIEUR BAMATABOIS
In all small towns, and in Montreuil-sur-mer in particular, there is a class of young men who eat into their fifteen hundred livres in provincial income with the same cavalier attitude with which their peers in Paris devour two hundred thousand francs a year. These are beings from the great neutered species; geldings, parasites, nonentities, who have a bit of land, a bit of giddiness, and a bit of wit, who would be hicks in a salon and think themselves gentlemen in a barroom, who talk about “my acreage, my woods, my peasants,” hiss and boo actresses at the theater to prove they are men of taste, pick fights with officers of the garrison to show they are men of war, hunt, smoke, yawn, drink, sniff tobacco, play billiards, ogle travelers alighting from the coach, live at the café, dine at the inn, have a dog who gobbles up the bones under the table and a mistress who slaps down dishes on top of it, hang on to their loose change for dear life, go overboard for whatever is in fashion, admire tragedy, despise women, wear out their old boots, ape London via Paris and Paris via Pont-à-Mousson, lose their marbles with age, never lift a finger to work, don’t do any good and don’t do much harm, either.
Monsieur Félix Tholomyès, if he had remained in his neck of the woods and never seen Paris, would have been such a man.
Any richer and you’d call them dandies; any poorer and you’d call them layabouts. They are quite simply the idle. Among the idle, there are those who are bores, those who are bored, daydreamers, and a few jokers.
In those days, a dandy was put together with a big collar, a big cravat, a watch dangling charms, three different colored waistcoats worn one on top of the other, with the red and blue on the inside, and then an olive-colored short-waisted jacket with tails and with a double row of silver buttons tightly buttoned right up to the shoulder, and lighter olive trousers, decorated at both seams with ribs of a random, but always odd, number, ranging from one to eleven, that limit never being exceeded. Add to that little boots with little iron caps on the heels, a narrow-brimmed top hat, hair worn in a tuft, an enormous cane, and conversation spiced with the puns of Potier. Crowning all, spurs and a mustache. In those days, a mustache was the mark of a man about town and spurs signified a pedestrian.
The provincial dandy wore longer spurs and a friskier mustache.
Those were the days of the struggle of the South American republics against the king of Spain, of Bolívar against Morillo.1 Narrow-brimmed hats were worn by royalists and were known as morillos; the liberals wore wide-brimmed hats called bolivars.
And so, eight or ten months after what was narrated in the previous pages, around about the first days of January 1823, on a night of snow, one of these dandies, one of these idlers—obviously a true conformist, for he wore a morillo, and was snugly wrapped up in one of those huge greatcoats that then completed the cold-weather fashion plate—was getting his kicks harassing a creature on the prowl in front of the window of the officers’ café in a very low-cut ball gown and with flowers wreathed around her head. The dandy was smoking, for smoking was very much in vogue.
Every time the woman passed in front of him, along with a puff of smoke from his cigar, he would toss her a bunch of insults that he found terribly witty and amusing, like: “God, you’re ugly!” or, “Go and crawl under a rock!” or, “You’ve got no teeth!” and so on. This gentleman’s name was Monsieur Bamatabois. The woman, a sad bejeweled specter in a dress, kept walking backward and forward in the snow and did not answer him, did not even glance at him, but continued pacing in silence and with a dismal regularity that brought her back within range of his sarcasm every five minutes, like the condemned soldier going back for the birch. Not making any impression doubtless stung the fop into action and so, taking advantage of a moment when the woman’s back was turned, he snuck up behind her as stealthily as a wolf and, choking back a laugh, swooped down to the ground, scooped up a handful of snow, and swiftly thrust it down her back between her naked shoulder blades. The girl let out a howl of rage, spun round, and, springing like a panther, hurled herself at the man, digging her nails into his face as she swore like a trooper in the foulest language that ever spilled into the gutter from some backroom brawl. These obscenities, spewing out in a voice made husky by eau-de-vie, were truly hideous coming from a mouth in which the two front teeth were, indeed, missing. It was Fantine.
The racket brought all the officers running out of the café; passersby gathered, and a great circle, laughing, jeering, and clapping, formed around this whirlwind composed of two beings hard to recognize as a man and a woman, the man thrashing around, his hat on the ground, the woman kicking and punching and screaming, bareheaded, toothless and hairless and livid with rage, truly horrible.
Suddenly a tall man darted out of the crowd, seized the woman by her mud-spattered satin bodice, and barked: “Follow me!”
The woman looked up; her furious voice died at once. Her eyes glazed over, from being merely pale, she turned white and began shaking with terror. She had recognized Javert.
The dandy took advantage of the incident to sneak away.
XIII. THE ANSWER TO SOME OF THE MUNICIPAL POLICE’S QUESTIONS
Javert broke up the circle, moved the bystanders along, and began to stride off forcefully toward the police station, which is at the far end of the square, dragging the wretched woman along after him. She let herself be dragged like a rag doll. Neither he nor she uttered a word. The swarm of onlookers, jumping for joy, followed behind, slinging taunts. Unmitigated wretchedess being a great source of obscene jokes.
They arrived at the police station, which was a low-ceilinged room heated by a potbellied stove and guarded by a sentinel; it had a door with a wire mesh window giving onto the street. Javert pulled the door open, entered with Fantine in tow, and shut the door behind him, to the great disappointment of the gawking horde who stood on tiptoe, craning their necks at the grimy guardroom window in an effort to get an eyeful. Curiosity is a form of greed. To see is to devour.
Fantine went in and flopped in a heap in a corner, motionless and mute, cowering like a frightened dog.
The desk sergeant brought over a burning candle and put it on the table. Javert sat down, took a sheet of stamped paper1 from his pocket, and began to write.
This class of women is placed by our laws completely at the mercy of the police’s discretion. The police do what they like with them, punish them however they see fit, and confiscate at will those pathetic things they call their industry and liberty. Javert was imperturbable; his grave face betrayed no emotion. And yet he was seriously and profoundly troubled. This was one of those moments when he exercised without restraint, but with all the scruples of a strict conscience, his formidable discretionary power. In that instant, he knew, his policeman’s stool was a court bench. He was conducting a trial. He was conducting a trial and handing down a sentence. He summoned all the notions his mind could contain to come to the aid of the mighty thing he was doing. The more he examined the conduct of this girl, the more he was revolted. It was clear he had just witnessed a crime. He had just seen, out there in the street, society, represented by a property owner and voter,2 physically and verbally abused and vilified by a creature who was beyond the pale, an outcast. A prostitute had assaulted an upright citizen. He, Javert, had seen it. He wrote in silence.
When he had finished, he signed the letter, folded it, and said to the desk sergeant as he handed it to him: “Take three men and put this girl in the lockup.” Then he turned to Fantine and said: “You’re up for six months.”
The poor woman shuddered.
“Six months! Six months’ jail!” she wailed. “Six months making seven sous a day! But what will happen to Cosette? What about my daughter! My daughter! God, I still owe the Thénardiers over a hundred francs, Monsieur l’inspecteur, you know that?”
She dragged herself across the flagstones, wet from the muddy boots of all those men, without getting up, joining her hands together, taking great steps on her knees.
“Monsieur Javert,” she said, “I beg your mercy. I swear to you I was not in the wrong. If you’d been there when it started you would have seen! I swear to you by the Lord above that I was not in the wrong. It was that swell, whoever he is, who shoved snow down my back. Do they have the right to shove snow down our backs when we’re just going past like that, minding our own business, not causing anyone any harm? I saw red. I’m not very well, as you can see! And then, he’d been goading me for some time already. ‘God, you’re ugly! You’ve got no teeth!’ I know very well I haven’t got my teeth anymore. I did nothing, I didn’t. I said: ‘He’s just a gentleman out for a bit of fun.’ I was straight with him, I didn’t say boo. And that was when he put snow on me. Monsieur Javert, my good Monsieur l’inspecteur! Isn’t there anyone here who saw what happened and can tell you that it’s perfectly true? Maybe I was wrong to get annoyed. You know, in the heat of the moment, you lose your head. You get a bit carried away. And then, when someone puts something so cold down your back when you’re not expecting it! I was wrong to wreck the gentleman’s hat. Why did he run off? I’d beg his pardon. Oh, my God! It wouldn’t cost me anything to beg his pardon. Let me off just this once, Monsieur Javert. Listen, you don’t know this, but in prison they only let you earn seven sous a day, and, just think, I’ve got to pay a hundred francs—otherwise they’ll send back my little girl. Oh, good God! I can’t have her with me. What I do is so vile! Oh, my Cosette, oh, my little angel sent by the good Holy Virgin, what will happen to her, poor little bunny! Let me tell you. It’s the Thénardiers, they’re innkeepers, peasants, you can’t reason with them. They want money. Don’t put me in jail! You see, she’s just a little girl and they’ll dump her on the highway; you’re on your own, then, in the middle of winter; you must have pity on her, good Monsieur Javert. If she was older, she could earn her own living, but she can’t, not at that age. I’m not a bad woman at heart. It’s not being lazy or greedy that’s made me what I am. I’ve drunk eau-de-vie, but only out of misery. I don’t like it, but it makes you light in the head. In better days, you’d only have had to look in my cupboards and you’d have seen for yourself that I wasn’t some slut living in a pigsty. I had linen, lots of linen. Have pity on me, Monsieur Javert!”
On and on she went, broken in two, racked by sobs, blinded by tears, her throat bare, wringing her hands, coughing with a short dry cough, and babbling so very softly in the voice of agony. Great pain is a divine and terrible ray of light that transforms the wretched. At that moment, Fantine was beautiful once more. Every so often, she paused and tenderly kissed the hem of the spook’s frock coat. She would have caused a heart of stone to melt; but there is no melting a heart of wood.
“That’s enough!” said Javert. “I’ve heard you out. Haven’t you said everything you can say? Now get going! You’ve got your six months. The Eternal Father himself could do nothing more.”
At those solemn words, “the Eternal Father himself could do nothing more,” she realized the sentence had been handed down. She slumped in a heap, murmuring: “Mercy!”
Javert turned his back on her.
The soldiers grabbed her by the arms.
A few minutes before this, a man had come in unnoticed. He had shut the door behind him and stood with his back against it and had listened to Fantine’s desperate pleas.
The moment the soldiers laid hands on the poor woman, who refused to get up, he stepped out of the shadows and said: “Just a moment, please!”
Javert looked up and recognized Monsieur Madeleine. He took off his hat and greeted him with a sort of exasperated awkwardness: “Pardon me, Monsieur le maire—”
Those words, monsieur le maire, had a strange effect on Fantine. She shot to her feet like a ghost clambering out of the grave, shoved the soldiers aside with both hands, walked straight up to Monsieur Madeleine before anyone could hold her back, and staring at him with wild eyes, cried:
“Ah! So you’re the man they call Monsieur le maire!”
Then she burst into a cackle and spat in his face.
Monsieur Madeleine wiped his face and said: “Inspector Javert, let this woman go.”
Javert felt his mind was about to snap. At that instant, he experienced the most violent emotions he had ever felt in his life, one after the other and almost all at once, in a jumble. To see a streetwalker spit in the face of a mayor, well, that was something so monstrous that he would never have imagined such a thing possible, not in his wildest dreams. On the other hand, at the back of his mind, he made a confused and hideous connection between what this woman was and what the mayor might be and then he glimpsed with horror something unutterably simple in this prodigious assault. But when he saw the mayor, this magistrate, calmly wipe his face and say “Let this woman go,” he was thunderstruck; thought and speech both failed him; his capacity for amazement had been exceeded. He remained speechless, utterly lost for words.
Those words had also struck Fantine just as strangely. She lifted a bare arm and clung to the damper handle of the stove as though feeling not too steady on her feet. Yet her eyes danced all around her and she began to speak in a barely audible voice as though talking to herself: “Set me free! Let me go! Don’t make me go to jail for six months! Who said that? It isn’t possible that someone said that. I must have heard wrong. It couldn’t have been that bastard of a mayor! Was it you, my good Monsieur Javert, who said to let me go? Oh, listen! I’ll tell you and then you’ll set me free. That bastard of a mayor, that mongrel of a mayor, he’s the cause of all this. Can you imagine, Monsieur Javert, he sent me packing, because of a pack of old harlots who tell tales and stab you in the back in the workshop. If that isn’t vile, I don’t know what is! To turn away a poor girl who’s just doing her job honestly! So then, I couldn’t earn enough and that’s when all the bad luck started happening. The first thing these gentlemen from the police could do to improve things is to see to it that the prison contractors don’t cripple poor people. I’ll tell you how it works, listen. Say you make twelve sous in shirts; if that drops to nine sous, you can’t live. So you have to do what you can. Me, I had my little Cosette, I was forced to become a bad woman. So now you know it was that swine of a mayor who did all the damage. After that, I trampled on the hat of that respectable gent outside the officers’ café. But him, he’d wrecked my whole dress with his snow. The likes of us, we only have one silk dress, for evening. You know, I never meant to do anything wrong. I really didn’t, Monsieur Javert. Everywhere I look I see women much worse than me and they’re much better off. Oh, Monsieur Javert, you’re the one who said to let me go, aren’t you? You ask around, talk to my landlord, I pay the rent on time now, they’ll tell you I’m straight down the line. Oh, my God! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize—I knocked the damper of the stove and now it’s smoking.”
Monsieur Madeleine listened in rapt attention. While the woman was talking, he fumbled in his jacket, pulled out his wallet and opened it. It was empty. He put it back in his pocket. He said to Fantine: “How much did you say you owed?”
Fantine, who had not taken her eyes off Javert, wheeled around: “Did I say anything to you?!”
Then, addressing the soldiers: “So, you lot, tell me, did you see how I spat in his face for him? Ah, you wicked old pig of a mayor, you came here to frighten me, but I’m not frightened of you. I’m frightened of Monsieur Javert. I’m frightened of my good Monsieur Javert!”
As she said this she turned back to the inspector: “Now you know all that, you know, Monsieur l’inspecteur, you’ve got to be just. I know you’re just, Monsieur l’inspecteur. In fact, it’s very simple: a man has a bit of fun shoving snow down a woman’s back, that gives them a laugh—the officers, they’ve got to have some fun somehow; the likes of me, we’re just there to keep them happy, of course we are! And then, you, you come along, you have to keep the peace, you cart off the woman in the wrong, but now you’ve thought about it, being good as you are, you say to let me go; it’s for the little one, because six months in jail, that would stop me being able to feed my little girl. Only, don’t ever come back again, you tart! Oh, I won’t come back again, Monsieur Javert! Let them do what they like with me, I won’t raise a finger. Only, today, you know, I made a racket because it hurt, I just wasn’t expecting that snow that man had; and then, like I told you, I’m not very well, I’ve got a cough, it’s like I’ve got a ball in my chest that burns me, and the doctor told me to look after myself. Here, feel that, give me your hand, don’t be frightened, there it is.”
She was no longer crying, her voice was caressing, she pressed Javert’s big hairy hand over her delicate white bosom and watched him with a smile on her lips.
Suddenly she rearranged her clothes, smoothed out the wrinkles in her dress, which was hitched up almost to her knees as she crawled across the floor, and walked to the door, saying in a whisper to the soldiers with a friendly nod of the head:
“Boys, Monsieur l’inspecteur said to release me, so I’m off.”
She placed her hand on the door handle. One more step and she’d be in the street.
Until that moment, Javert had stood stock-still, his eye boring a hole in the ground, all wrong in the middle of this scene like a misplaced statue waiting to be put in the right spot.
The noise of the door jolted him. He raised his head with an expression of sovereign authority, an expression always all the more frightening, the lower down power is vested, ferocious in a wild beast, atrocious in a nobody.
“Sergeant!” he shouted. “Can’t you see this hussy is making off! Who told you to let her go?”
“I did,” said Madeleine.
At the sound of Javert’s voice, Fantine had flinched and let go of the door handle the same way a thief caught in the act drops the stolen object. At the sound of Madeleine’s voice, she spun round, and from that moment, without saying a word, without even daring to breathe freely, her eyes flitted in turn from Madeleine to Javert and from Javert to Madeleine, whoever happened to be speaking.
It was obvious that Javert had been “knocked for a loop,” as they say, to have allowed himself to say what he did to the sergeant after the mayor’s invitation to set Fantine free. Had he actually reached the point of forgetting the mayor’s very presence? Had he wound up telling himself that it was not possible for any person of authority to have given such an order and that Monsieur le maire must certainly have said one thing when he meant another altogether? Or else, confronted by the outrageous things he had witnessed for the last two hours, did he tell himself that it was necessary to resort to extreme measures, that it was time for the little man to assert himself, time that the informer turned into a magistrate, that the policeman became a man of the law, and that, in this dire extremity, law and order, morality, governance, society as a whole, were personified in himself, Javert?
Whatever the case, when Monsieur Madeleine let out that “I did” we heard a moment ago, the inspector of police was seen to turn toward Monsieur le maire, pale, cold, his lips blue, his eyes desperate, his whole body shaking with a barely perceptible tremor, and he was heard to say something unprecedented: “Monsieur le maire, that can’t be done.”
“How’s that?” said Monsieur Madeleine.
“This wretched woman insulted a gentleman.”
“Inspector Javert,” Monsieur Madeleine replied in a calm, conciliatory tone, “listen. You are an honest man, so I don’t mind spelling things out clearly for you. It’s like this. I happened to be crossing the square as you were carting this woman away. There were still people milling around, I asked a few questions and I found out the truth: it is the gentleman who was in the wrong, and if the police were doing their job, he should have been arrested.”
Javert could not stop himself: “This miserable creature just insulted Monsieur le maire.”
“That’s my business,” said Monsieur Madeleine. “My insult is mine, if you like. I can do what I like with it.”
“I beg Monsieur le maire’s pardon. The insult is not his, it belongs to the system of justice.”
“Inspector Javert,” replied Monsieur Madeleine, “the highest form of justice is one’s conscience. I’ve heard the woman out. I know what I’m doing.”
“And I, Monsieur le maire, don’t know what I am seeing.”
“Then make do with obeying.”
“I’m obeying my duty. My duty tells me that this woman should do six months behind bars.”
Monsieur Madeleine responded gently: “Listen to me carefully. She will not do a single day.”
At those decisive words, Javert risked a glare at the mayor and said to him, though in a tone of voice that was still scrupulously respectful: “It causes me despair to go against Monsieur le maire; this is the first time in my life, but he will deign to permit me to observe to him that I am within the bounds of my responsibilities. I will confine myself, since Monsieur le maire wishes it, to the case of the citizen in question. I was there. This girl threw herself at Monsieur Bamatabois, who is a voter and the owner of the magnificent house with a balcony on the corner of the esplanade, three stories, all in hewn stone. At the end of the day, some things count for something in this world! Anyhow, Monsieur le maire, this matter is a case for the street patrol and so it concerns me, and I am holding this woman, Fantine.”
At these words, Monsieur Madeleine folded his arms and said in a harsh voice that no one in the town had ever yet heard: “The case you are talking about is a matter for the municipal police. By the terms of articles nine, fifteen, and sixty-six of the code of criminal law, I am the judge of it. I order this woman to be set free.”
Javert struggled to make one last stand.
“But, Monsieur le maire—”
“Let me refer you to article eighty-one of the law of December 13, 1799, on arbitrary detention.”
“Monsieur le maire, allow—”
“Not another word.”
“But—”
“Get out,” said Monsieur Madeleine.
Javert took the blow standing, full on and bang in the chest like a Russian soldier. He bowed practically to the ground to Monsieur le maire and left.
Fantine moved away from the door and watched in stupefaction as he went past her.
Yet she too was in the grip of a strange upheaval. She had just watched herself being in a way argued over by two opposing forces. She had seen before her very eyes the battle between two men who held in their hands her liberty, her life, her soul, her child; one of the men pulled her into the darkness, the other lifted her back into the light. In this struggle, glimpsed through the magnifying glass of terror, the two men seemed to her like giants; one spoke like her demon, the other spoke like her good angel. The angel had triumphed over the demon, and, something that made her shiver from head to toe, this angel, this liberator, was precisely the man she abhorred, this mayor that she had so long considered the author of all her ills, this Madeleine! And at the very moment when she had just insulted him in the most heinous way, he had saved her! So, had she got it all wrong? Did she therefore need to transform her whole soul?… She did not know, she was trembling. She listened, bewildered, she watched, alarmed, and at each word that Monsieur Madeleine uttered, she felt the awful blackness of hate dissolving and evaporating inside her and she felt something indescribably warm and wonderful well up in her heart; it was joy, trust, and love.
When Javert had gone, Monsieur Madeleine turned to her, and said in a careful voice, struggling to sound as though he were in control and not on the verge of breaking down: “I have heard you. It’s all news to me. I believe it’s true and I feel it’s true. I didn’t even know you had left my workshop. Why didn’t you come and see me in person? But here’s how it will be: I will pay your debts, I will have your child come to you, or you will go to her. You will live here, or in Paris, or wherever you like. I will look after your child and you. You will never have to work again, if you don’t want to. I will give you all the money you need. You will go back to being an honest woman by being happy again. And, listen, I tell you here and now, if all is as you say, and I don’t doubt it for a second, you have never stopped being virtuous and holy in the eyes of God. Oh, you poor, poor woman!”
This was more than poor Fantine could bear. To be with Cosette again! To leave this ignoble life behind! To live free, rich, happy, honest, with Cosette! To suddenly see blossoming in the middle of all her misery the fruits of paradise! She gazed, stunned, at the man speaking to her and could only let out two or three sobs: oh! oh! oh! Her legs gave way, she fell on her knees before Monsieur Madeleine, and before he could stop her, he felt her take his hand and press it to her lips.
Then she fainted.