The cathedral clock strikes two in the morning, and Jean Valjean wakes.
The bed is too good; that is what has woken him. He has not slept in a bed for nineteen years, so even lying there in his clothes the feeling is too strange for sleep to hold. He has slept more than four hours, and his tiredness is gone.
He shuts his eyes to sleep again, but sleep does not come back. Old memories and new ones rise and sink in a muddle, and among them one thought keeps returning and pushing the others aside: the six silver place settings and the big ladle Madame Magloire had laid on the table.
An iron candlestick
The silver is right there, in the little cupboard at the head of the bed in the next room, the room he walked through to get here. He took good note of that cupboard, on the right as you come in from the dining room.
It is solid old silver. With the ladle it would fetch at least two hundred francs, twice what he earned in nineteen years. He would have earned more, he thinks, if the authorities had not taken their cut.
For a whole hour his mind swings back and forth. Three o’clock strikes.
He sits up abruptly and feels for the pack he threw into the corner. Then he takes off his shoes, sets them quietly on the mat by the bed, and sits motionless again. For no reason at all, he keeps thinking of a convict he knew in prison called Brevet, and the knitted cotton brace that held up his trousers, with its pattern of checks.
The clock strikes once more, a quarter or a half, he cannot tell, and the sound seems to say: go.
He goes to the window. Clouds driven by the wind run across a full moon, so the room darkens and brightens by turns. The window has no bars and is held shut by a small catch, and the white wall round the garden is low and easy to climb.
He shoulders his pack, pulls his cap down, stands his stick by the window, and takes something out of the pack in his right hand. It is a short iron bar, pointed at one end. It is a miner’s candlestick of the kind the convicts at Toulon used when they were set to break rock; the end is sharp so that it can be driven into stone.
Holding his breath, he goes to the door of the next room. It is the bishop’s room.
The bishop has not shut it, and the door stands a little open.
A dry hinge
When he pushes with his fingertips, the door opens a little further without a sound. He pushes again, but a small table right beside the door leaves too narrow a gap to pass.
He pushes a third time, harder, and a dry hinge gives a long, hoarse cry in the dark.
He freezes. The pulse in his temples beats like a smith’s hammer. The old man will get up, the two women will scream, in a quarter of an hour the whole town will be roused and the gendarmes will come. It is over, he thinks.
Minutes pass, and nothing in the room moves. The door is wide open now, and no one has woken.
Even when he thought it was over, he did not draw back. Now all he wants is to finish quickly.
He steps into the room.
A face in the moonlight
From the far side of the room comes the bishop’s quiet, even breathing. He picks his way among the furniture so as not to knock against anything, and reaches the bed sooner than he expected.
Just then a great cloud that has covered the sky for nearly half an hour breaks apart, and moonlight through the tall window falls on the bishop’s face.
The bishop is asleep. Because the Alpine nights are cold he has gone to bed in a brown woollen garment, his head is tipped back on the pillow, and one hand, with the bishop’s ring on it, hangs over the side of the bed. His face is at peace.
Jean Valjean stands in the shadow, the iron bar in his right hand and, in his left, the cap he has somehow taken off. He cannot take his eyes off the old man.
Above the fireplace the crucifix shows faintly in the moonlight, as if it were holding out its arms to them both.
Suddenly Jean Valjean puts his cap back on.
Without looking at the bishop, he walks quickly along the bed to the cupboard at its head. He raises the iron bar to force the lock, but the key is in it. He opens the cupboard, and the first thing he sees is the basket of silver.
He picks up the basket and, no longer caring about noise, crosses the room and goes back to the alcove. He opens the window, grabs his stick and climbs over the sill. He tips the silver into his pack, throws the empty basket away, runs across the garden, leaps the wall and is gone.
Breakfast with wooden spoons
The next morning at sunrise the bishop is walking in his garden when Madame Magloire comes running out in a state.
Monseigneur, do you know where the silver basket is?
I do, the bishop answers, and holds out the empty basket he has just picked up from a flower bed. He was bending over a plant it had broken when it fell, and sighing.
Seeing the silver gone, she cries out that the man from last night has stolen it, that he went over that wall.
The bishop is silent a moment, then raises his serious eyes and asks gently.
Was that silver ever really ours to begin with?
Madame Magloire is struck dumb, and the bishop goes on.
It was not something I should have held on to so long. It belongs to the poor, and that man was poor.
She says it is not herself or Mademoiselle she is worried about, it is him. What will Monseigneur eat with now? Pewter smells, she grumbles, and iron leaves a taste.
Then wooden spoons, says the bishop.
A little later he is breakfasting at the very table where Jean Valjean sat the evening before. To dip bread in a cup of milk, he remarks cheerfully, you hardly need a spoon at all, wooden or otherwise. Madame Magloire bustles back and forth muttering to herself. Letting a man like that in, and putting him in the very next room! It’s a mercy all he did was steal.
Brother and sister are just getting up from the table when there is a knock at the door.
Come in, says the bishop.
Why did you leave the candlesticks?
The door opens and a strange group stands on the threshold. Three gendarmes are holding a man by the collar, and the man is Jean Valjean.
The corporal leading them comes in and salutes. Monseigneur.
Jean Valjean, who had been hanging his head, looks up at that word in astonishment. So he was not a priest, but a bishop.
The bishop comes toward them as fast as his age allows.
Ah, there you are, I’m glad to see you again! But my friend, I gave you the candlesticks too. They’re silver like the rest and will fetch two hundred francs, so why didn’t you take them with the plates?
Jean Valjean opens his eyes wide and looks at the old man. There are no words for the look on his face.
The corporal asks: So what this man told us was true? We met him on the road walking like someone leaving town, stopped him to see, and found the silver. He said an old priest he’d stayed the night with had given it to him.
The bishop smiles. Of course he did, and so you brought him back here. It’s a misunderstanding.
Then we can let him go?
Certainly.
The gendarmes release him and Jean Valjean backs away. Is it true, they’re letting me go? he mumbles, as if talking in his sleep.
The bishop goes to the fireplace, takes the two silver candlesticks and brings them to him. Before you go, take your candlesticks.
The two women watch without a word, without a gesture, without a single look that might get in the bishop’s way. Jean Valjean, trembling all over, takes the candlesticks with a dazed face.
Now go in peace, says the bishop. And next time you come, there’s no need to go through the garden. Use the door to the street. It is only ever on the latch, day and night.
The gendarmes withdraw.
Jean Valjean looks ready to faint. The bishop comes close and speaks low.
Don’t forget it, ever: you promised me you would use this silver to become an honest man.
Jean Valjean, who has no memory of promising, is speechless. The bishop has leaned on the words, and now he goes on solemnly.
“Jean Valjean, mon frère, vous n’appartenez plus au mal, mais au bien.” Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil but to good. (Part 1, Book 2, Chapter 12)
It is your soul I have bought, the bishop adds. I take it back from dark thoughts and give it to God.
Forty sous under his foot
Jean Valjean leaves the town like a man escaping. He walks the lanes and paths at random and keeps coming back on his tracks. He has eaten nothing all morning and does not feel hungry.
An anger rises in him, though he cannot say at whom. He cannot tell whether he has been moved or humiliated. Now and then a strange softening comes over him, and he pushes it back with the hardness of nineteen years. He almost wishes the gendarmes had taken him to prison; it would have shaken him less.
As the sun goes down he is sitting behind a bush in an empty red plain, some three leagues from Digne. There is nothing on the horizon but the Alps.
Then he hears singing. Along the path comes a Savoyard boy of about ten, a hurdy-gurdy at his hip and a box with a marmot in it strapped to his back. He is one of the children who wander from village to village.
As he walks the boy tosses a few coins and catches them on the back of his hand. Among them is a forty-sou piece, probably everything he owns. By the bush he tosses them up, and the forty-sou piece slips off his hand and rolls toward Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean puts his foot on it.
The boy has followed the coin with his eyes and has seen. Not at all surprised, he walks straight up to the man.
Monsieur, my coin, please.
What’s your name? asks Jean Valjean. Petit-Gervais, monsieur.
Clear off.
The boy asks again for his coin. Jean Valjean keeps his head down and does not answer. The boy grabs the collar of his smock and shakes him, and tries to shift the big hobnailed shoe, and cries. My coin, my silver piece, my forty sous!
Jean Valjean raises his head, looks at the boy with dazed eyes, then grips his stick and shouts in a terrible voice: Who’s there?
It’s me, Petit-Gervais! Please take your foot off!
Jean Valjean springs to his feet, his foot still on the coin, and shouts: You still here? Get out of it!
The boy stares at him, begins to shake from head to foot, and then runs with all his might, without looking back and without a sound. When he stops for breath some way off, Jean Valjean can hear him sobbing. Then he is out of sight.
The man kneeling at the door
The sun sets. Jean Valjean has stood in the same position since the boy ran away. He has eaten nothing all day and is probably feverish. The chill of the evening wind makes him shiver and brings him to himself.
As he bends to pick up his stick, he sees the forty-sou piece, half pressed into the earth by his foot, shining among the pebbles.
He jumps back three steps as if it had burned him, then lunges, snatches up the coin and stares out across the plain in every direction.
There is no one.
He runs a hundred paces the way the boy went, stops, and calls with all his strength. Petit-Gervais! Petit-Gervais!
No answer.
He runs, stops to call, runs again. Meeting a priest on horseback, he asks whether he has seen a Savoyard boy of about ten. When the priest says no, he presses two five-franc pieces into his hand for his poor. He asks again, and gives him two more.
Then, with a wild look, he tells the priest he is a thief and begs to be arrested.
The priest, terrified, spurs his horse and rides off.
Jean Valjean goes on running and calling. Two or three times he runs toward something that looks like a child lying down, but it is a bush or a rock. Where three paths meet, the moon rises. He calls the name three times, a last time. There is not even an echo.
His legs give way. He falls on a large stone, his fists in his hair and his face in his knees, and cries out.
I’m a wretch!
And he weeps. It is the first time he has wept in nineteen years.
How many hours he wept that night, what he did afterward, where he went, no one has ever known. It is said only that, at about three the next morning, the coach driver on the Grenoble road coming into Digne passed along the street of the bishop’s house and saw, in the dark, a man kneeling on the pavement in front of the bishop’s door.
Today, a cost shared out
In this chapter four hundred francs’ worth of silver left the bishop’s house: two hundred in plates, two hundred in candlesticks.
From that morning on, Madame Magloire lays the table with wooden spoons.
And that same evening, in a field, a forty-sou coin left the hand of a ten-year-old boy. The coin stayed in Jean Valjean’s hand, and the boy did not come back.
That morning the bishop told Jean Valjean not to come through the garden next time but by the street door. That door is still only ever on the latch.
Have you ever found out that someone had left a door open for you, and become more careful because of it?