Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [119]
No man in this multitude paid any attention to him. All eyes converged on a single point, a wooden bench placed against a little door, along the wall at the left hand of the judge. Upon this bench, which was lighted by several candles, was a man between two gendarmes.
This was the man.
He did not look for him, he saw him. His eyes went towards him naturally, as if they had known in advance where he was.
He thought he saw himself, older, doubtless, not precisely the same in features, but alike in attitude and appearance, with that bristling hair, with those wild and restless eyeballs, with that smock—just as he was on the day he entered D——, full of hatred, and concealing in his soul that hideous hoard of frightful thoughts which he had spent nineteen years in gathering upon the floor of the galleys.
He said to himself, with a shudder: “Great God! shall I again come to this?”
This being appeared at least sixty years old. There was something indescribably rough, stupid, and terrified in his appearance.
At the sound of the door, people had stood aside to make room. The judge had turned his head, and supposing the person who entered to be the mayor of M——sur M——, greeted him with a bow. The prosecuting attorney, who had seen Madeleine at M—sur M——, whither he had been called more than once by the duties of his office, recognised him and bowed likewise. He scarcely perceived them. He gazed about him, a prey to a sort of hallucination.
Judges, clerk, gendarmes, a throng of heads, cruelly curious—he had seen all these once before, twenty-seven years ago. He had fallen again upon these fearful things; they were before him, they moved, they had being; it was no longer an effort of his memory, a mirage of his fancy, but real gendarmes and real judges, a real throng, and real men of flesh and bone. It was done; he saw reappearing and living again around him, with all the frightfulness of reality, the monstrous visions of the past.
All this was yawning before him.
Stricken with horror, he closed his eyes, and exclaimed from the depths of his soul: “Never!”
And by a tragic sport of destiny, which was agitating all his ideas and rendering him almost insane, it was another self before him. This man on trial was called by all around him, Jean Valjean!
He had before his eyes an unheard-of vision, a sort of representation of the most horrible moment of his life, played by his shadow.
All, everything was there—the same paraphernalia, the same hour of the night—almost the same faces, judge and assistant judges, soldiers and spectators. But above the head of the judge was a crucifix, a thing which did not appear in court-rooms at the time of his sentence. When he was tried, God was not there.11
A chair was behind him; he sank into it, terrified at the idea that he might be observed. When seated, he took advantage of a pile of papers on the judges’ desk to hide his face from the whole room. He could now see without being seen. He entered fully into the spirit of the reality; by degrees he recovered his composure, and arrived at that degree of calmness at which it is possible to listen.
Monsieur Bamatabois was one of the jurors.
He looked for Javert, but did not see him. The witnesses’ seat was hidden from him by the clerk’s table. And then, as we have just said, the hall was very dimly lighted.
At the moment of his entrance, the counsel for the prisoner was finishing his plea. The attention of all was excited to the highest degree; the trial had been in progress for three hours. During these three hours, the spectators had seen a man, an unknown, wretched being, thoroughly stupid or thoroughly artful, gradually