Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [109]
This voice, at first quite feeble, and which was raised from the most obscure depths of his conscience, had become by degrees loud and formidable, and he heard it now at his ear. It seemed to him that it had emerged from himself, and that it was speaking now from without. He thought he heard the last words so distinctly that he looked about the room with a kind of terror.
“Is there anybody here?” asked he, aloud and in a startled voice.
Then he continued with a laugh, which was like the laugh of an idiot:
“What a fool I am! there cannot be anybody here.”
There was One; but He who was there was not of such as the human eye can see.
He put the candlesticks on the mantel.
Alas! all his irresolutions were again upon him. He was no further advanced than when he began.
So struggled beneath its anguish this unhappy soul. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious being, in whom are aggregated all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity, He also, while the olive trees were shivering in the fierce breath of the Infinite, had long put away from his hand the fearful chalice that appeared before him, dripping with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths.
3 (4)
FORMS ASSUMED BY SUFFERING DURING SLEEP9
THE CLOCK struck three. For five hours he had been walking thus, almost without interruption, when he dropped into his chair.
Exhausted by emotional suffering, Jean Valjean falls asleep and has a nightmare, which he later writes down. He is walking with his long-lost brother in a barren field. They come to an abandoned city filled with motionless, silent men. Without knowing why, he thinks it is “Romainville” (probably through association with the vanished empire of Napoleon, which aped the Roman Empire, and his own industrial empire which conscience forces him to abandon). He realizes he is dead.
He awoke. He was chilly. A wind as cold as the morning wind made the sashes of the still-open window swing on their hinges. The fire had gone out. The candle was low in the holder. The night was yet dark.
He arose and went to the window. There were still no stars in the sky.
From his window he could look into the court-yard and into the street. A harsh, rattling noise that suddenly resounded from the ground made him look down.
He saw below him two red stars, whose rays danced back and forth grotesquely in the shadow.
His mind was still half buried in the mist of his reverie: “Yes!” thought he, “there are none in the sky. They are on the earth now.”
This confusion, however, faded away; a second noise like the first awakened him completely; he looked, and he saw that these two stars were the lamps of a carriage. By the light which they emitted, he could distinguish the form of a carriage. It was a tilbury drawn by a small white horse. The noise which he had heard was the sound of the horse’s hoofs upon the pavement.
“What carriage is that?” said he to himself. “Who is it that comes so early?”
At that moment there was a low rap at the door of his room.
He shuddered from head to foot and cried in a terrible voice:
“Who is there?”
Some one answered:
“I, Monsieur Mayor.”
He recognised the voice of the old woman, his portress.
“Well,” said he, “what is it?”
“Monsieur Mayor, it is just five o‘clock.”
“What is that to me?”
“Monsieur Mayor, it is the chaise.”
“What chaise?”
“The tilbury.”
“What tilbury?”
“Did not Monsieur the Mayor order a tilbury?”
“No,” said he.
“The driver says that he has come for Monsieur the Mayor.”
“What driver?”
“Monsieur Scaufflaire’s driver.”
“Monsieur Scaufflaire?”
That name startled him as if a flash had passed before his face.
“Oh yes!” he said, “Monsieur Scauffiaire!”
Could the old woman have seen him at that moment she would have been frightened.
There was a long silence. He examined the flame of the