Chapter 22 Six Jean Valjean

In the middle of the night Jean Valjean awoke. Jean Valjean was born in a poor peasant family in Brie.He was illiterate in childhood.When he was an adult, he worked as a tree trimmer in Favirolles. His mother's name was Jean Madi, and his father's name was Jean Valjean, or Jean Valjean, which is roughly a nickname, and it is also "Agen is here." Jane tone. Jean Valjean was born to use his mind, but he was not depressed, which is the characteristic of emotional people.But there was something groggy and insignificant about him, at least on the surface.He lost his parents at a young age.His mother died of mastitis due to improper diagnosis and treatment.His father, like himself, was a tree trimmer who fell from a tree and died.Jean Valjean had only one older sister, who was a widow and had seven children.It was this sister who had brought up Jean Valjean.As long as her husband was alive, she was always responsible for the board and lodging of her little brother.Husband died.The eldest of seven children is eight years old and the youngest is one.Jean Valjean was just twenty-five years old. He acted as a father, helped his sister, and repaid her for her upbringing.It was a natural thing, like a calling, and Jean Valjean even went too far.That was how his youth was spent in hard, poorly paid work.People in his hometown have never heard of him having a "girlfriend".He has no time to think about love issues.

He came home in the dark, exhausted, without a word, and ate his vegetable soup.When he ate, his sister asked his mother to take from his soup ladle some of the best of his food, a piece of lean meat, a piece of fat meat, a heart of cabbage, and give it to one of her children.As for him, he was leaning over the table, his head almost immersed in the soup, his hair hanging by the side of the ladle, covering his eyes, just eating, as if he didn't see anything, and let others take it. In the little street of Favirolles, diagonally opposite Agen's hut, there lived a peasant woman named Marie-Claude. The children of the Agen family were often hungry, and they sometimes pretended to be their mothers. In the name of Marie-Claude, borrow a spoonful of milk from Marie-Claude, drink it from behind a fence or on a road corner, and everyone grabs the milk jug, making those little girls nervous and splashed on their bodies and necks It's all milk.If the mother knew of this fraud, she would definitely punish these little liars severely.Jean Valjean, angry and nagging, paid Marie-Claude the money for the milk without telling the mother of the children, so that they were not beaten.

During the pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day, after which he worked as a wheat-cutter, a laborer, a cowherd, and a drudgery.He does what he can.His older sister also works, but what if he has seven children behind him?It was a group of distressed people, and poverty gradually surrounded them.One winter, Jean Valjean could not find a job.There is no bread in the house.Absolutely no bread, but seven children. The baker, Mouber Yichabo, who lived on the cathedral square in Favelolès, was about to go to bed one Sunday night when he heard someone knock hard on the barbed wire glass window of his shop. .He came just in time to see a hand slip through a hole broken by a fist in the wire and glass, and grab a loaf of bread.Yi Chabo ran after him, and the thief also ran away desperately. Yi Chabo chased after him and caught him.He lost his bread, but his arms were still bleeding.That was Jean Valjean.

That was in 1795.Jean Valjean was charged with "destroying an inhabited house and burglary at night" and sent to the court at that time.He had a gun, he could shoot better than any gunslinger in the world, and sometimes he liked to hunt privately, which was not good for him.There has long been a legitimate prejudice against the private hunter.A hunter is like a smuggler, not far from a bandit.But, incidentally, that kind of person is always a world away from the vile murderers of the city.Those who hunt without permission live in the forest, and those who smuggle live in the mountains or on the sea.The city can be brutal because it corrupts.Mountains, seas, and forests make man wild.They only develop this wildness without destroying humanity.

Jean Valjean is convicted.The letter of the law is rigid.There are many chilling moments in our civilization, and that is when the criminal law is desperate.What a sad day it is for a thinking creature to be ostracized from society, irretrievably abandoned!Jean Valjean was sentenced to five years of hard labor. On April 22, 1796, Paris was cheering the commander-in-chief of the Italian front (the commander-in-chief called "Buonaparte" in the message of the ruling cabinet to the Council of Five Hundred on the second flower month of the fourth year of the republic) at Mantai The victory won by Notai.On the same day, a long chain was fastened in Bisset Prison.Jean Valjean was one of the chains.An imprisoned man then, now in his late nineties, remembers very well the day when the poor fellow was chained at the end of the fourth chain in the north corner of the yard.He sat on the ground like the rest of the prisoners.He seemed utterly bewildered except that he knew his terrible position.Perhaps in his muddled notions of the ignorant poor, he somehow still felt that something was going too far in this matter.He wept bitterly as the tacks on his shackles were hammered into the back of his head with a sledgehammer.Tears choked him, sobbing choked up.He could only say intermittently: "I'm a Favellore tree trimmer." After that, crying bitterly, he stretched out his right hand and pressed it down slowly, doing this seven times in total, as if he He stroked the tops of the seven uneven heads.We can guess from his actions that everything he does is for the food and clothing of the seven children.

He set off for Toulon.He rode in a cart with chains around his neck, and arrived there after a journey of twenty-seven days.In Toulon, he dons a red prison uniform.Everything in his life was wiped out, even his name.He was no longer Jean Valjean, but 24601.How is my sister?What happened to the seven children?Who takes care of them?What happens to a handful of young leaves of a young tree that has been sawed off by the roots? That's the same story, those poor living beings, God's creations, who have no support, no guidance, nowhere to live, just drifting here and there according to chance, who can know?Or they are separated, gradually sinking into the mist of death and desolation of the poor, and once they enter the ranks of human misery, they disappear one by one like those unfortunate heads of Guizhou.They left their homes.The bell-towers of their villages forgot them, the border-stones of their fields forgot them, and Jean Valjean himself, after a few years in prison, forgot them.In his heart, there was a wound before, and then there was only a scar left, that's all.About his sister, he heard only once in Toulon from the beginning to the end.It seemed to be at the end of his fourth year in prison.I can no longer recall where he got the news.A countryman who was acquainted with them had seen his sister and said she had gone to Paris.She lived in Chandel Street, a poor street near St. Sulpice's Church.She had only one child with her, her youngest boy.Where did the other six go?Maybe she didn't even know it herself.Every morning she went to No. 3 Rue Clogs, a printing factory where she worked as a bookbinder.She gets to the factory at six o'clock in the morning, which is still early in the winter in winter.There was a small school in the printing factory, and she led the seven-year-old child to study in the school every day.It's just that she arrived at the factory at six o'clock, and the school didn't open until seven o'clock, so the child had to wait in the yard for an hour, waiting for the school to open.In winter, that hour was spent in the dark and in the open air.They wouldn't let the boy in through the printing house because they said he was in the way.When the workers passed by there early in the morning, they always saw the little trick sitting on the gravel road, and often in a dark corner, he squatted on the ground, fell asleep on his basket.When it was raining, the old lady who watched the gate felt sorry for her, so she led him to her shabby house. There was only a shabby bed, a spinning wheel, and two wooden chairs in the room, and the child slept in the corner. , holding a cat tightly, can be less cold.At seven o'clock, the school opened, and he ran in.These were the words Jean Valjean heard.When people told him the news that day, it was only for a very short moment, as if a window was suddenly opened, allowing him to see the fate of his beloved relatives, and then everything was cut off again.He had never heard of them again since, never had any other news of them, never saw them again, never met them, and it was in the second half of this sad story, We won't see them again either.

At the end of the fourth year, Jean Valjean had the opportunity to escape from prison.His accomplices helped him escape, as is often the case with people in the same predicament.He escaped and wandered freely in the fields for two days, if the word freedom means something like this: surrounded, always looking back, startled at the slightest sound, afraid of everything, afraid of smoking roofs , pedestrians passing by, dogs barking, horses running, bells ringing, day with sight, night with sight, road, path, grove, sleep.On the second night, he was caught again.For thirty-six hours he had neither eaten nor slept.For this negligence, the Harbor Court sentenced him to extend his detention for three years, making a total of eight years.In the sixth year he had another chance to escape, and he wanted to take advantage of it, but he couldn't.He was not present at the roll call.Police guns were fired, and at night, night watchmen found him in the keel of a ship under construction. He resisted arrest, but was arrested.Escaping from prison and resisting arrest, the kind of thing foreseen by a special code, was punished with a five-year ban.In the five years, you have to be chained for two years.A total of thirteen years.In the tenth year, he had another chance to escape from prison, and he wanted to take the opportunity to try again, but he still failed.That new attempt was followed by a further three years in prison.A total of sixteen years.At last, in the thirteenth year, I think, he tried one last time, only to be arrested four hours later.Those four hours got three years in prison.A total of nineteen years.By October 1815 he was released.He was imprisoned in 1796, and took a piece of bread in order to break a piece of glass.

Let me say something off topic here.This is the second time that the author of this book has encountered such a case of stealing a piece of bread and causing a lifelong tragedy in his research on criminal law issues and legal adjudication.Claude Guy stole a loaf, Jean Valjean also stole a loaf.A British statistician says that out of five burglaries in London, four are directly caused by hunger. Jean Valjean wept and trembled when he entered the prison, but he was indifferent when he came out; he was sad and disappointed when he went in, and he was old when he came out. How has this person's heart fluctuated?