The Interior of Despair — Les Misérables

Let us try to say it, Hugo writes, because society creates these things and should look at them. Valjean is ignorant, not a fool. Unhappiness has its own daylight. Beneath the cudgel and the chain he withdraws into himself and constitutes a tribunal. He begins by putting himself on trial. He is not an innocent man unjustly punished. The loaf would probably have been given if he had asked. Hunger is rarely death. Patience would have been better for the children. Theft is a poor door out of misery, and infamy enters by it. He was in the wrong.

Then he asks whether he was the only one in fault. A labourer out of work lacked bread. Once the fault was confessed, was the chastisement ferocious and out of proportion? Did the overweight of the penalty reverse the situation, convert the guilty man into the victim, and range the law on the side of the man who had violated it? Successive aggravations for escape became, in his mind, a crime of society against the individual, renewed every day for nineteen years. He judges society and condemns it to his hatred. The punishment was not unjust. It was iniquitous. He has never seen of society anything but the angry face it calls Justice. Men have only touched him to bruise him. Life is a war, and he is the conquered. Hate is the weapon he will whet and carry out. At forty he goes to the convict school and learns to read, write, and cipher, because to fortify intelligence is to fortify hate. Then he judges Providence, which made society, and condemns that too. Light enters on one side; darkness on the other. He arrived still good. He feels himself becoming wicked, then impious.

Hugo will not say the first spark can be wholly extinguished. A physiologist at Toulon, watching the silent man on a capstan with the chain in his pocket, would have effaced hope. Valjean himself does not see the whole map. He hates in the shadows, in advance of himself. Flashes come; the night closes. Escape is the wolf finding the cage open: instinct says flee; reason would have said remain. Recapture only makes him wilder. He is worth four men at a capstan. They nickname him Jean the Jack-screw. He holds a loosening caryatid with his shoulder. He can climb a third story on an angle of wall. He speaks little, laughs almost never. Civilization is a pyramid walking over his head: sergeant, gendarme, mitred archbishop, the Emperor like a sun. The arrival of all his thought is hatred of human law, which if not arrested becomes hatred of the race and a desire to harm some living being, no matter whom. The yellow passport was not wrong to call him dangerous. The soul dried with fatal sureness. When the heart is dry, the eye is dry. On his departure it had been nineteen years since he had shed a tear.