Fantine (Part One)

In 1815, Monseigneur Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne, a small town in the south of France. He was an old man of about seventy-five. When he came to Digne he found that the bishop's palace was a vast, handsome house, while the hospital next to it was small and crowded with sick people; so he gave the palace to the hospital and moved into the hospital's narrow house himself. He gave away nearly all his salary to the poor. He kept only two things of value from his former life: six silver plates and forks and a soup ladle, and two silver candlesticks. His door was never locked. The poor of the town called him "Monseigneur Bienvenu" — "My Lord Welcome."

Before the convict comes, Hugo shows the bishop at length. Once he walked many miles into the mountains to visit an old man whom everyone in Digne shunned: a former member of the revolutionary Convention, who had voted in the trial of King Louis XVI, and who now lay dying alone. The bishop came to reproach him; the old man defended the Revolution, and spoke of the poor, and of the children of the people who had suffered for centuries; and when he had finished, the bishop knelt and asked for his blessing. He came home thoughtful, and more gentle than ever.

At the beginning of October 1815, about an hour before sunset, a man travelling on foot entered Digne. He was of medium height, stout and strong, in the prime of life, perhaps forty-six or forty-eight; a cap with a leather visor hid part of his sunburnt face; he wore a yellow shirt, open at the neck, rough trousers worn white at the knees, an old grey blouse; he carried a knapsack, and a huge knotted stick; his head was shaved, and his beard was long. He went to the inn and asked for food and a bed; the innkeeper, who had been to the town hall, said there was no room. He went to a tavern; they turned him out. He knocked at a house; they shut the door. He lay down in a dog's kennel, and the dog drove him out. Everyone knew what his yellow passport said: that he was a released convict, and a dangerous man. At last a kind woman told him: "Have you knocked at that door?" — and pointed to the bishop's house.

He knocked. "Come in," said the bishop.

The man came in, and said at once, in a loud voice: "My name is Jean Valjean. I am a convict. I have spent nineteen years in the galleys. I was set free four days ago. Here is my passport — yellow, as you see. It says: 'Jean Valjean, released convict, has served nineteen years: five years for burglary; fourteen years for having attempted four times to escape. This man is very dangerous.' Everyone has driven me out. Will you give me something to eat, and let me sleep in your stable?"

"Madame Magloire," said the bishop, "you will put a clean pair of sheets on the bed in the alcove." And he told his housekeeper to set another place, and to put the silver forks and the candlesticks on the table. "Monsieur," he said to the man, "sit down and warm yourself. We shall have supper in a moment, and your bed will be made while you are eating." The man could not believe it. "You call me monsieur?" The bishop said: "This is not my house; it is the house of Jesus Christ. This door does not ask any man who enters whether he has a name, but whether he has a grief. You are suffering; you are hungry and thirsty; you are welcome."

Jean Valjean had been a pruner of trees at Faverolles, a poor peasant, who supported his widowed sister and her seven children. One winter, when there was no work and no bread, he broke a baker's window and stole a loaf. He was sent to the galleys for five years. He tried to escape, again and again, and each time his sentence was lengthened. He had gone in, nineteen years before, a sobbing and trembling man; he came out hardened, full of hatred for the society that had crushed him.

In the night he woke. He thought of the silver. He got up, took the silver plates from the cupboard in the bishop's room, while the old man slept with a look of perfect peace, and climbed over the garden wall and fled.

In the morning the gendarmes brought him back. They had found the silver in his bag. The bishop came out to meet them. "Ah! there you are!" he said to Jean Valjean. "I am glad to see you. But I gave you the candlesticks too, which are silver like the rest, and would bring you two hundred francs. Why did you not take them with your forks and spoons?" The gendarmes let him go. And the bishop, giving him the candlesticks, said to him in a low voice:

"Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man. Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God."

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of having promised anything, stood dumb. He went out of the town as if fleeing. He was shaken to the depths; he did not understand what had happened to him. On a deserted plain, in the evening, a little Savoyard boy, Petit-Gervais, came by, singing, tossing a forty-sou coin in the air; the coin rolled to Jean Valjean's feet, and he put his foot on it, and would not give it back, and the boy ran away crying. Then Jean Valjean looked down at the coin, and understood what he had done, and ran after the boy, calling "Petit-Gervais! Petit-Gervais!" — but the boy was gone. And Jean Valjean sat down on a rock and wept, for the first time in nineteen years. He wept like a woman, like a child. And as he wept, a light grew in his mind, and he saw his own life, and his soul, as they were. That night a carter saw a man kneeling in the street before the bishop's door, in the darkness, as if in prayer.

Fantine. Fantine was a girl of the people, a working girl in Paris, beautiful, with lovely teeth and golden hair; she fell in love with a rich student, Félix Tholomyès, who amused himself with her for a year and then left her, with a letter, and a child, Cosette. She went home to her native town, Montreuil-sur-Mer, to find work; and on the way, at Montfermeil, near Paris, she saw two little girls playing on a swing outside an inn, and their mother watching them; and she asked the woman to take care of her daughter for money. The innkeepers were the Thénardiers, a mean, greedy, cruel pair; they took the child, and from then on wrote to Fantine continually for more money — for clothes, for medicine, for illnesses that did not exist; and they dressed Cosette in rags and made her their servant, while their own daughters, Éponine and Azelma, played.

There had been four young couples, students and working girls, who went out together into the country one summer Sunday, to Saint-Cloud, laughing and eating and boating; and at the end of the day the four young men, led by Tholomyès, left the girls at a restaurant with a surprise: a letter. "Our parents want us back," it said, more or less. "We are going home to be sensible. Do not grieve. Good-bye." The other girls laughed. Fantine laughed with them, and then went home and wept; for she had loved him, and she was pregnant.

In Montreuil-sur-Mer, a stranger had arrived some years before, one December evening, at the moment when the town hall was on fire, and had saved two children from the flames; and so nobody asked him for his passport. He was called Father Madeleine. He had invented a new and cheaper way of making the black glass beads for which the town was known, and had grown rich, and made the whole town prosperous; he built a factory, schools, a hospital; he gave work to anyone who needed it, on one condition: the men must be honest, and the women good. He was made mayor, against his will. He lived simply, alone, and went out walking in the country, and read; and on his mantelpiece stood two silver candlesticks.

Only one man watched him with suspicion: Javert, the police inspector — a tall man, born in a prison, the son of a fortune-teller whose husband was in the galleys, who had become a policeman out of a kind of rage against the class he came from; a man with two feelings only, respect for authority and hatred of rebellion; an honest, rigid, merciless man. He thought he had seen Madeleine before. And one day an old carter, Father Fauchelevent, was caught under his overturned cart, which was slowly crushing him; no one could lift it; and Monsieur Madeleine, before the crowd, lay down under the cart and raised it on his back. Javert, watching, said quietly: "I have known only one man who could do what you have just done. He was a convict at Toulon."

Fantine worked in M. Madeleine's factory. But the women there learned that she had a child and no husband; a gossip wrote to Montfermeil and found out; and the forewoman dismissed her, in the mayor's name, without his knowledge. Fantine sewed shirts for a few sous; the Thénardiers wrote that Cosette was ill and needed medicine. She sold her hair. They wrote that the child had no skirt for the winter; she sold her two front teeth to a travelling dentist. And at last, with nothing left, she became a prostitute. "Let us sell the rest," she said.

One winter night, in the street, a young dandy named Bamatabois, to amuse himself, pushed a handful of snow down her back; she flew at him like a wild beast. Javert arrested her — six months in prison. She begged; Cosette would die. And Monsieur Madeleine, who had followed the crowd, came in and ordered her released. Fantine spat in his face: it was he, she thought, who had had her dismissed. Madeleine wiped his face and said: "Inspector Javert, set this woman at liberty." And when she understood, she fainted. He took her to his hospital; she was ill with consumption; he promised her that he would bring her child to her.

Then Javert came to Madeleine and asked to be dismissed. He had denounced him to the Prefecture in Paris as the escaped convict Jean Valjean; and he had been wrong — for Jean Valjean had been arrested, under another name, Champmathieu, in another part of the country; he was to be tried at Arras the next day for stealing apples, and would be sent back to the galleys for life as a repeat offender. "I have been wanting in respect to you, sir," said Javert, "and I must be dismissed." Madeleine refused.

That night Madeleine — Jean Valjean — did not sleep. It was a tempest in a skull. If he kept silent, an innocent man, a poor old fool, would go to the galleys in his place; and he, Madeleine, would remain mayor, honoured, rich, doing good to a whole town, to hundreds of workers, to Fantine and her child. If he spoke, he would go back to the galleys himself, and everything he had built would fall. He paced; he argued with himself; he burned the old clothes and the stick he had kept from his convict days; he saw the candlesticks and nearly threw them into the fire too. And a voice within him said: "Jean Valjean! Jean Valjean!" At dawn he hired a carriage and drove to Arras.

He reached the courtroom at night, after a wild journey, with a broken wheel. The trial was ending. Three convicts from the galleys had sworn that Champmathieu was Jean Valjean. Then the mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer stood up and said: "Gentlemen of the jury, set the accused at liberty. I am the man you are seeking. I am Jean Valjean." No one would believe him. He proved it to the three convicts, by telling them things only Jean Valjean could know. "You see clearly," he said, "that I am Jean Valjean." Then he walked out of the court, and no one stopped him. "I do not wish to disturb the court further," he said. "I am going, since I am not arrested. I have many things to do. The district attorney knows who I am; he knows where I am going; he will have me arrested when he likes."

He looked at the accused man — an old, stupid, bewildered labourer, who did not understand what was happening to him and kept talking about his apples and the hedge — and at the three convicts, Brevet, Chenildieu and Cochepaille, who swore that this was Jean Valjean. Then he stood up. To prove who he was, he reminded Brevet of the checked knitted braces he had worn at Toulon; Chenildieu of the burn on his shoulder, where he had tried to erase his brand; Cochepaille of the blue date tattooed on his arm, the landing of the Emperor at Cannes. Each one, astonished, admitted it.

He went back to Fantine's bedside. She was dying; she asked for her child. And Javert came in, and seized Jean Valjean by the collar. Fantine saw it, and understood that Monsieur Madeleine was a convict, and that Cosette would never come; she sat up, and fell back, dead. Jean Valjean went to her, and bent over her, and whispered something in her ear, and closed her eyes.

He was arrested; he escaped from the prison of Montreuil-sur-Mer that night, went to his house, took the candlesticks, and disappeared. He was recaptured a few days later on the road to Paris, and sent back to the galleys for life. The town of Montreuil-sur-Mer fell back into poverty. And Fantine was buried in the common pit.