Toward the middle of the night Jean Valjean woke. Hugo leaves the alcove and goes back to Brie. A poor peasant family. He did not learn to read as a child. Tree-pruner at Faverolles. His mother, Jeanne Mathieu, died of a milk fever; his father was killed by a fall from a tree. A sister older than himself, a widow with seven children, brought him up. When the husband dies he is twenty-five. He takes the father's place, simply as a duty and a little churlishly. He has never had time to fall in love. At night he eats broth without a word while mother Jeanne takes the best bit from his bowl for a child. He has the air of perceiving nothing. The children borrow milk from Marie-Claude and drink it behind a hedge; he pays, grumbling, so they are not punished.
A very hard winter. No work. No bread, literally. Seven children. One Sunday evening in 1795, Maubert Isabeau the baker hears a blow on his grating. An arm through glass seizes a loaf. Isabeau runs him down. The loaf is flung away; the arm still bleeds. It is Jean Valjean. Theft and breaking an inhabited house at night. He is a bit of a poacher, and that injures his case. The terms of the Code are explicit. Five years in the galleys. On the 22nd of April 1796, the day Montenotte is announced in Paris, a gang is chained at Bicêtre. An old turnkey still sees the man at the end of the fourth line. While the collar is riveted he weeps: I was a tree-pruner at Faverolles. He lowers his right hand seven times, as if touching seven heads of unequal heights.
He arrives at Toulon after twenty-seven days on a cart. Red cassock. Number 24,601. What became of the sister and the seven children? Who troubled himself about that? They wander into the mist. After a few years he himself forgets them. In that heart, where there had been a wound, there was a scar. Only once, toward the fourth year, news: she is in Paris, Rue du Gindre, one little boy left, a folder at a printing office. The child waits an hour in a winter courtyard because he is in the way. Then the window closes. He never hears of them again. Four escapes add three, five, three, and three years. Nineteen years. In October 1815 he is released for having broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf. Claude Gaux had stolen a loaf too. Four thefts out of five in London have hunger for their cause. He entered sobbing; he emerged impassive. He entered in despair; he emerged gloomy. What had taken place in that soul?
Coming Up in Chapter 21
Let us try to say it. Society should look at these things, because it creates them. Beneath the chain he constitutes himself the tribunal, puts himself on trial for the loaf, then asks whether he was the only one in fault.
