Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [53]
Claude Gueux stole a loaf of bread, Jean Valjean stole a loaf of bread; English statistics show that in London starvation is the immediate cause of four thefts out of five.
Jean Valjean entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering: he went out hardened; he entered in despair: he went out sullen.
What had happened within this soul?
6 (7)
THE DEPTHS OF DESPAIR
LET US endeavour to tell.
It is an imperative necessity that society should look into these things: they are its own work.
He was, as we have said, ignorant, but he was not an imbecile. The natural light of reason was enkindled in him. Misfortune, which has also its illumination, added to the few rays that he had in his mind. Under the club, under the chain, in the cell, in fatigue, under the burning sun of the galleys, upon the convict’s bed of plank, he turned to his own conscience, and he reflected.
He constituted himself a tribunal.
He began by arraigning himself.
He recognised, that he was not an innocent man, unjustly punished. He acknowledged that he had committed an extreme and a blamable action; that the loaf perhaps would not have been refused him, had he asked for it; that at all events it would have been better to wait, either for pity, or for work; that it is not altogether an unanswerable reply to say: “could I wait when I was hungry?” that, in the first place, it is very rare that any one dies of actual hunger; and that, fortunately or unfortunately, man is so made that he can suffer long and much, morally and physically, without dying; that he should, therefore, have had patience; that that would have been better even for those poor little ones; that it was an act of folly in him, poor, worthless man, to seize society in all its strength, forcibly by the collar, and imagine that he could escape from misery by theft; that that was, at all events, a bad door for getting out of misery by which one entered into infamy; in short, that he had done wrong.
Then he asked himself:
If he were the only one who had done wrong in the course of his fatal history? If, in the first place, it were not a grievous thing that he, a workman, should have been in want of work; that he, an industrious man, should have lacked bread. If, moreover, the fault having been committed and avowed, the punishment had not been savage and excessive. If there were not a greater abuse, on the part of the law, in the penalty, than there had been, on the part of the guilty, in the crime. If there were not an excess of weight in one of the scales of the balance—on the side of the expiation. If the excessiveness of the penalty did not erase the crime; and if the result were not to reverse the situation, to replace the wrong of the delinquent by the wrong of the repression, to make a victim of the guilty, and a creditor of the debtor, and actually to put the right on the side of him who had violated it. If that penalty, taken in connection with its successive extensions for his attempts to escape, had not at last come to be a sort of outrage of the stronger on the weaker, a crime of society towards the individual, a crime which was committed afresh every day, a crime which had endured for nineteen years.
He asked whether human society could have the right alike to crush its members, in the one case by its unreasonable carelessness, and in the other by its pitiless care; and to keep a poor man for ever between a lack and an excess, a lack of work, an excess of punishment.
If it were not outrageous that society should treat with such rigid precision those of its members who were most poorly endowed in the distribution or wealth that chance had made, and who were, therefore, most worthy of indulgence.
These questions asked and decided, he condemned society and sentenced it.
He sentenced it to his hatred.
He made it responsible for the fate which he had undergone,