The obscurity was such that he did not fear to accost the first lawyer whom he met.
"What stage have they reached, sir?" he asked.
"It is finished," said the lawyer.
"Finished!"
This word was repeated in such accents that the lawyer turned round.
"Excuse me sir; perhaps you are a relative?"
"No; I know no one here.
Has judgment been pronounced?"
"Of course.
Nothing else was possible."
"To penal servitude?"
"For life."
He continued, in a voice so weak that it was barely audible:--
"Then his identity was established?"
"What identity?" replied the lawyer.
"There was no identity to be established.
The matter was very simple.
The woman had murdered her child; the infanticide was proved; the jury threw out the question of premeditation, and she was condemned for life."
"So it was a woman?" said he.
"Why, certainly.
The Limosin woman.
Of what are you speaking?"
"Nothing.
But since it is all over, how comes it that the hall is still lighted?"
"For another case, which was begun about two hours ago.
"What other case?"
"Oh! this one is a clear case also.
It is about a sort of blackguard; a man arrested for a second offence; a convict who has been guilty of theft.
I don't know his name exactly.
There's a bandit's phiz for you!
I'd send him to the galleys on the strength of his face alone."
"Is there any way of getting into the court-room, sir?" said he.
"I really think that there is not.
There is a great crowd. However, the hearing has been suspended.
Some people have gone out, and when the hearing is resumed, you might make an effort."
"Where is the entrance?"
"Through yonder large door."
The lawyer left him.
In the course of a few moments he had experienced, almost simultaneously, almost intermingled with each other, all possible emotions.
The words of this indifferent spectator had, in turn, pierced his heart like needles of ice and like blades of fire. When he saw that nothing was settled, he breathed freely once more; but he could not have told whether what he felt was pain or pleasure.
He drew near to many groups and listened to what they were saying. The docket of the session was very heavy; the president had appointed for the same day two short and simple cases.
They had begun with the infanticide, and now they had reached the convict, the old offender, the "return horse."
This man had stolen apples, but that did not appear to be entirely proved; what had been proved was, that he had already been in the galleys at Toulon. It was that which lent a bad aspect to his case.
However, the man's examination and the depositions of the witnesses had been completed, but the lawyer's plea, and the speech of the public prosecutor were still to come; it could not be finished before midnight.
The man would probably be condemned; the attorney-general was very clever, and never missed his culprits; he was a brilliant fellow who wrote verses.
An usher stood at the door communicating with the hall of the Assizes. He inquired of this usher:--
"Will the door be opened soon, sir?"
"It will not be opened at all," replied the usher.
"What!
It will not be opened when the hearing is resumed? Is not the hearing suspended?"
"The hearing has just been begun again," replied the usher, "but the door will not be opened again."
"Why?"
"Because the hall is full."
"What!
There is not room for one more?"
"Not another one.
The door is closed.
No one can enter now."
The usher added after a pause:
"There are, to tell the truth, two or three extra places behind Monsieur le President, but Monsieur le President only admits public functionaries to them."
So saying, the usher turned his back.
He retired with bowed head, traversed the antechamber, and slowly descended the stairs, as though hesitating at every step. It is probable that he was holding counsel with himself. The violent conflict which had been going on within him since the preceding evening was not yet ended; and every moment he encountered some new phase of it.
On reaching the landing-place, he leaned his back against the balusters and folded his arms.
All at once he opened his coat, drew out his pocket-book, took from it a pencil, tore out a leaf, and upon that leaf he wrote rapidly, by the light of the street lantern, this line:
M. Madeleine, Mayor of M. sur M.; then he ascended the stairs once more with great strides, made his way through the crowd, walked straight up to the usher, handed him the paper, and said in an authoritative manner:--
"Take this to Monsieur le President."
The usher took the paper, cast a glance upon it, and obeyed.
BOOK SEVENTH.--THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR
CHAPTER VIII
AN ENTRANCE BY FAVOR
Although he did not suspect the fact, the mayor of M. sur M. enjoyed a sort of celebrity.
For the space of seven years his reputation for virtue had filled the whole of Bas Boulonnais; it had eventually passed the confines of a small district and had been spread abroad through two or three neighboring departments.
Besides the service which he had rendered to the chief town by resuscitating the black jet industry, there was not one out of the hundred and forty communes of the arrondissement of M. sur M. which was not indebted to him for some benefit.
He had even at need contrived to aid and multiply the industries of other arrondissements.
It was thus that he had, when occasion offered, supported with his credit and his funds the linen factory at Boulogne, the flax-spinning industry at Frevent, and the hydraulic manufacture of cloth at Boubers-sur-Canche. Everywhere the name of M. Madeleine was pronounced with veneration. Arras and Douai envied the happy little town of M. sur M. its mayor.
The Councillor of the Royal Court of Douai, who was presiding over this session of the Assizes at Arras, was acquainted, in common with the rest of the world, with this name which was so profoundly and universally honored.
When the usher, discreetly opening the door which connected the council-chamber with the court-room, bent over the back of the President's arm-chair and handed him the paper on which was inscribed the line which we have just perused, adding:
"The gentleman desires to be present at the trial," the President, with a quick and deferential movement, seized a pen and wrote a few words at the bottom of the paper and returned it to the usher, saying, "Admit him."
The unhappy man whose history we are relating had remained near the door of the hall, in the same place and the same attitude in which the usher had left him.
In the midst of his revery he heard some one saying to him, "Will Monsieur do me the honor to follow me?" It was the same usher who had turned his back upon him but a moment previously, and who was now bowing to the earth before him. At the same time, the usher handed him the paper.
He unfolded it, and as he chanced to be near the light, he could read it.
"The President of the Court of Assizes presents his respects to M. Madeleine."
He crushed the paper in his hand as though those words contained for him a strange and bitter aftertaste.
He followed the usher.
A few minutes later he found himself alone in a sort of wainscoted cabinet of severe aspect, lighted by two wax candles, placed upon a table with a green cloth.
The last words of the usher who had just quitted him still rang in his ears:
"Monsieur, you are now in the council-chamber; you have only to turn the copper handle of yonder door, and you will find yourself in the court-room, behind the President's chair." These words were mingled in his thoughts with a vague memory of narrow corridors and dark staircases which he had recently traversed.
The usher had left him alone.
The supreme moment had arrived. He sought to collect his faculties, but could not.
It is chiefly at the moment when there is the greatest need for attaching them to the painful realities of life, that the threads of thought snap within the brain.
He was in the very place where the judges deliberated and condemned.
With stupid tranquillity he surveyed this peaceful and terrible apartment, where so many lives had been broken, which was soon to ring with his name, and which his fate was at that moment traversing.
He stared at the wall, then he looked at himself, wondering that it should be that chamber and that it should be he.
He had eaten nothing for four and twenty hours; he was worn out by the jolts of the cart, but he was not conscious of it. It seemed to him that he felt nothing.
He approached a black frame which was suspended on the wall, and which contained, under glass, an ancient autograph letter of Jean Nicolas Pache, mayor of Paris and minister, and dated, through an error, no doubt, the 9th of June, of the year II., and in which Pache forwarded to the commune the list of ministers and deputies held in arrest by them.
Any spectator who had chanced to see him at that moment, and who had watched him, would have imagined, doubtless, that this letter struck him as very curious, for he did not take his eyes from it, and he read it two or three times. He read it without paying any attention to it, and unconsciously. He was thinking of Fantine and Cosette.
As he dreamed, he turned round, and his eyes fell upon the brass knob of the door which separated him from the Court of Assizes. He had almost forgotten that door.
His glance, calm at first, paused there, remained fixed on that brass handle, then grew terrified, and little by little became impregnated with fear.
Beads of perspiration burst forth among his hair and trickled down upon his temples.
At a certain moment he made that indescribable gesture of a sort of authority mingled with rebellion, which is intended to convey, and which does so well convey, "Pardieu! who compels me to this?" Then he wheeled briskly round, caught sight of the door through which he had entered in front of him, went to it, opened it, and passed out. He was no longer in that chamber; he was outside in a corridor, a long, narrow corridor, broken by steps and gratings, making all sorts of angles, lighted here and there by lanterns similar to the night taper of invalids, the corridor through which he had approached. He breathed, he listened; not a sound in front, not a sound behind him, and he fled as though pursued.
When he had turned many angles in this corridor, he still listened. The same silence reigned, and there was the same darkness around him. He was out of breath; he staggered; he leaned against the wall. The stone was cold; the perspiration lay ice-cold on his brow; he straightened himself up with a shiver.
Then, there alone in the darkness, trembling with cold and with something else, too, perchance, he meditated.
He had meditated all night long; he had meditated all the day: he heard within him but one voice, which said, "Alas!"
A quarter of an hour passed thus.
At length he bowed his head, sighed with agony, dropped his arms, and retraced his steps. He walked slowly, and as though crushed.
It seemed as though some one had overtaken him in his flight and was leading him back.
He re-entered the council-chamber. The first thing he caught sight of was the knob of the door.
This knob, which was round and of polished brass, shone like a terrible star for him. He gazed at it as a lamb might gaze into the eye of a tiger.
He could not take his eyes from it.
From time to time he advanced a step and approached the door.
Had he listened, he would have heard the sound of the adjoining hall like a sort of confused murmur; but he did not listen, and he did not hear.
Suddenly, without himself knowing how it happened, he found himself near the door; he grasped the knob convulsively; the door opened.
He was in the court-room.
BOOK SEVENTH.--THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR
CHAPTER IX
A PLACE WHERE CONVICTIONS ARE IN PROCESS OF FORMATION
He advanced a pace, closed the door mechanically behind him, and remained standing, contemplating what he saw.
It was a vast and badly lighted apartment, now full of uproar, now full of silence, where all the apparatus of a criminal case, with its petty and mournful gravity in the midst of the throng, was in process of development.
At the one end of the hall, the one where he was, were judges, with abstracted air, in threadbare robes, who were gnawing their nails or closing their eyelids; at the other end, a ragged crowd; lawyers in all sorts of attitudes; soldiers with hard but honest faces; ancient, spotted woodwork, a dirty ceiling, tables covered with serge that was yellow rather than green; doors blackened by handmarks; tap-room lamps which emitted more smoke than light, suspended from nails in the wainscot; on the tables candles in brass candlesticks; darkness, ugliness, sadness; and from all this there was disengaged an austere and august impression, for one there felt that grand human thing which is called the law, and that grand divine thing which is called justice.
No one in all that throng paid any attention to him; all glances were directed towards a single point, a wooden bench placed against a small door, in the stretch of wall on the President's left; on this bench, illuminated by several candles, sat a man between two gendarmes.
This man was the man.
He did not seek him; he saw him; his eyes went thither naturally, as though they had known beforehand where that figure was.
He thought he was looking at himself, grown old; not absolutely the same in face, of course, but exactly similar in attitude and aspect, with his bristling hair, with that wild and uneasy eye, with that blouse, just as it was on the day when he entered D----, full of hatred, concealing his soul in that hideous mass of frightful thoughts which he had spent nineteen years in collecting on the floor of the prison.
He said to himself with a shudder, "Good God! shall I become like that again?"
This creature seemed to be at least sixty; there was something indescribably coarse, stupid, and frightened about him.
At the sound made by the opening door, people had drawn aside to make way for him; the President had turned his head, and, understanding that the personage who had just entered was the mayor of M. sur M., he had bowed to him; the attorney-general, who had seen M. Madeleine at M. sur M., whither the duties of his office had called him more than once, recognized him and saluted him also:
