Plongez au cœur de l’une des plus grandes œuvres de la littérature française avec **Les Misérables – Tome II: Cosette** de Victor Hugo 🌟. Dans ce second tome, l’histoire s’attarde sur la jeunesse de Cosette, enfant innocente marquée par la misère, recueillie par Jean Valjean qui devient pour elle une figure paternelle et protectrice.
À travers des scènes bouleversantes et des portraits inoubliables, Hugo explore des thèmes universels :
– La rédemption 🙏
– L’amour paternel 💖
– La lutte contre l’injustice ⚖️
– Le poids du destin et de la société 🏛️
Ce récit poignant nous transporte dans un XIXe siècle à la fois dur et lumineux, où chaque personnage lutte pour sa place dans un monde inégal. Entre les ombres de Paris et les élans de tendresse, **Cosette** incarne l’espoir et la possibilité d’un avenir meilleur.
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– Une immersion totale dans la plume magistrale de Victor Hugo
– Une narration claire et captivante
– Un chef-d’œuvre intemporel accessible à tous
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-📖 Les Misérables Tome I : Fantine – Victor Hugo ✨ [https://youtu.be/tYTtwllcF14]
-📖 Les Misérables – Tome II: Cosette ✨ Victor Hugo [https://youtu.be/TXKQ8iRTpsM]
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01:42:47 Chapitre 18.
01:48:00 Chapitre 19.
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04:13:18 Chapitre 33.
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04:28:23 Chapitre 35.
04:31:17 Chapitre 36.
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04:42:52 Chapitre 38.
04:49:05 Chapitre 39.
04:55:44 Chapitre 40.
04:58:29 Chapitre 41.
05:04:30 Chapitre 42.
05:09:11 Chapitre 43.
05:16:12 Chapitre 44.
05:20:34 Chapitre 45.
05:24:16 Chapitre 46.
05:27:35 Chapitre 47.
05:34:01 Chapitre 48.
05:50:49 Chapitre 49.
05:57:56 Chapitre 50.
06:11:27 Chapitre 51.
06:14:18 Chapitre 52.
06:20:32 Chapitre 53.
06:30:36 Chapitre 54.
06:35:42 Chapitre 55.
06:40:10 Chapitre 56.
06:43:33 Chapitre 57.
06:47:25 Chapitre 58.
06:50:36 Chapitre 59.
06:54:09 Chapitre 60.
06:55:08 Chapitre 61.
07:01:02 Chapitre 62.
07:05:37 Chapitre 63.
07:10:40 Chapitre 64.
07:14:52 Chapitre 65.
07:16:12 Chapitre 66.
07:20:13 Chapitre 67.
07:34:46 Chapitre 68.
07:38:59 Chapitre 69.
07:55:46 Chapitre 70.
08:05:42 Chapitre 71.
08:16:39 Chapitre 72.
08:19:46 Chapitre 73.
08:32:35 Chapitre 74.
08:38:24 Chapitre 75.
Let’s dive together into the second volume of Victor Hugo’s unforgettable epic , Les Misérables: Cosette. After the dramas and struggles of the first volume, we find Jean Valjean, marked by his past, but determined to protect the innocence of little Cosette. In this vibrantly emotional tale, human misery mixes with hope, and destinies intersect in a Paris that is both dark and bright. Hugo draws us into a story of redemption, justice, and love, where each page reveals the strength of the human soul in the face of adversity. Chapter 1. What one encounters when coming from Nivelles. Last year (1861), on a beautiful May morning, a passerby, the one telling this story, arrived from Nivelles and was heading towards La Hulpe. He was going on foot. He followed, between two rows of trees, a wide paved road undulating over hills which come one after the other, lifting the road and letting it fall again, and there making like enormous waves. He had passed Lillois and Bois-Seigneur-Isaac. He saw, to the west, the slate bell tower of Braine-l’Alleud which has the shape of an inverted vase. He had just left behind him a wood on a height, and, at the corner of a cross road, next to a kind of worm-eaten gallows bearing the inscription: Ancienne barrière no 4, a tavern with on its facade this sign: Au quatre vents. Échabeau, café de particulier. Half a quarter of a league further than this tavern, he arrived at the bottom of a small valley where there is water which passes under an arch made in the embankment of the road. The clump of trees, sparse but very green, which fills the valley on one side of the road, scatters on the other into the meadows and runs gracefully and as if in disorder towards Braine-l’Alleud. There, on the right, at the edge of the road, was an inn, a four-wheeled cart in front of the door, a large bundle of hop poles, a plow, a pile of dry brushwood near a hedge, lime smoking in a square hole, a ladder alongside an old shed with straw partitions. A young girl was weeding in a field where a large yellow poster, probably from some fairground show, was flying in the wind. At the corner of the inn, next to a pond where a flotilla of ducks was sailing, a poorly paved path plunged into the brushwood. This passerby entered it. After about a hundred paces, after having walked along a fifteenth- century wall surmounted by a pointed gable of contrasting bricks, he found himself in front of a large arched stone door, with a rectilinear impost, in the solemn style of Louis XIV, flanked by two flat medallions. A severe facade dominated this door; a wall perpendicular to the facade came almost to touch the door and flanked it at a sharp right angle. On the meadow in front of the door lay three portcullises through which all the May flowers grew pell-mell. The door was closed. Its enclosure was two decrepit leaves adorned with an old rusty hammer. The sun was charming; the branches had that gentle May rustle which seems to come from nests even more than from the wind. A brave little bird, probably in love, was singing madly in a large tree. The passer-by bent down and looked in the stone to the left, at the bottom of the right jamb of the door, at a fairly large circular excavation resembling the socket of a sphere. At that moment the doors parted and a peasant woman came out. She saw the passer-by and perceived what he was looking at. “It was a French cannonball that did that,” she told him. And she added: “What you see there, higher up, in the door, near a nail, is the hole of a large biscayen. The biscayen did not go through the wood. ” “What is this place called?” asked the passer-by. “Hougomont,” said the peasant woman. The passer-by straightened up. He took a few steps and went to look above the hedges. He saw on the horizon through the trees a kind of mound and on this mound something which, from a distance, looked like a lion. He was on the battlefield of Waterloo. Chapter 2. Hougomont. Hougomont, that was a funereal place, the beginning of the obstacle, the first resistance that this great woodcutter of Europe who was called Napoleon encountered at Waterloo; the first knot under the blow of the axe. It was a castle, it is now only a farm. Hougomont, for the antiquary, is Hugomons. This manor was built by Hugo, Lord of Somerel, the same one who endowed the sixth chaplaincy of the Abbey of Villers. The passer-by pushed open the door, elbowed an old carriage under a porch, and entered the courtyard. The first thing that struck him in this courtyard was a sixteenth-century door that simulates an arcade, everything having fallen around it. The monumental aspect is often born of ruin. Near the arcade, another door with keystones from the time of Henry IV opens in a wall, revealing the trees of an orchard. Beside this door, a dung pit, picks and shovels, a few carts, an old well with its flagstone and iron turnstile, a jumping foal, a turkey showing its tail, a chapel surmounted by a small bell tower, a flowering pear tree in espalier on the wall of the chapel, this is the courtyard whose conquest was Napoleon’s dream. This corner of land, if he could have taken it, would perhaps have given him the world. Hens scatter the dust there with their beaks. We hear a growl; it is a large dog baring its teeth and replacing the English. The English there were admirable. The four companies of Cooke’s guards held out for seven hours against the relentless assault of an army. Hougomont, seen on the map, in geometric plan, buildings and enclosures included, presents a kind of irregular rectangle of which one angle would have been notched. It is at this angle that the southern gate is, guarded by this wall which shoots it at point-blank range. Hougomont has two gates: the southern gate, that of the castle, and the northern gate, that of the farm. Napoleon sent his brother Jérôme against Hougomont ; the divisions of Guilleminot, Foy and Bachelu collided there, almost all of Reille’s corps was employed there and failed, Kellermann’s cannonballs were exhausted on this heroic section of wall. It was not too much of Bauduin’s brigade to force Hougomont to the north, and the Soye brigade could only start at the south, without taking it. The farm buildings border the courtyard to the south. A piece of the northern gate, broken by the French, hangs attached to the wall. These are four planks nailed to two crosspieces, and where one can see the scars of the attack. The northern door, broken down by the French, and to which a piece was added to replace the panel hanging from the wall, is half-open at the end of the courtyard; it is cut squarely into a wall, stone at the bottom, brick at the top, which closes the courtyard to the north. It is a simple cart door like those found in all farms, two wide leaves made of rustic planks; beyond, meadows. The dispute over this entrance was furious. All sorts of bloody handprints were long seen on the doorpost. It was there that Baldwin was killed. The storm of the battle is still in this courtyard; the horror is visible there; the upheaval of the melee is petrified there; it lives, it dies; it was yesterday. The walls are dying, the stones are falling, the breaches are screaming; the holes are wounds; the leaning, shivering trees seem to be making an effort to escape. This courtyard, in 1815, was more built up than it is today. Constructions that have since been pulled down made redans, angles and right angles. The English had barricaded themselves there; the French entered, but could not hold on. Next to the chapel, a wing of the castle, the only debris that remains of the Hougomont manor, stands collapsed, one could say gutted. The castle served as a keep, the chapel served of blockhouse. They exterminated themselves there. The French, arquebuses on all sides, from behind the walls, from the top of the attics, from the bottom of the cellars, through all the windows, through all the vents, through all the cracks in the stones, brought fascines and set fire to the walls and the men; the grapeshot was met with fire. In the ruined wing, through windows fitted with iron bars, one can glimpse the dismantled rooms of a brick main building; the English guards were ambushed in these rooms; the spiral of the staircase, cracked from the ground floor to the roof, appears like the inside of a broken shell. The staircase has two floors; the English, besieged in the staircase, and massed on the upper steps, had cut the lower steps. These are large slabs of blue stone which make a heap in the nettles. About ten steps still hang from the wall; on the first is carved the image of a trident. These inaccessible steps are solid in their sockets. Everything else resembles a toothless jaw. Two old trees are there; one is dead, the other is injured at the foot, and greens again in April. Since 1815, it has begun to grow through the staircase. People have massacred each other in the chapel. The interior, now calm again, is strange. Mass has not been said there since the carnage. Yet the altar remains there, a crude wooden altar set against a rough stone background. Four walls washed with whitewash, a door opposite the altar, two small arched windows, on the door a large wooden crucifix, above the crucifix a square air vent blocked with a bale of hay, in a corner, on the ground, an old broken glass frame, such is this chapel. Near the altar is nailed a wooden statue of Saint Anne, from the fifteenth century; the head of the infant Jesus was carried off by a Biscayan. The French, who had been in control of the chapel for a while, then driven out, set it on fire. The flames filled this hovel; it was a furnace; the door burned, the floor burned, the wooden Christ did not burn. The fire ate away at his feet, of which only the blackened stumps are visible, then stopped. A miracle, according to the locals. The infant Jesus, decapitated, was not as happy as Christ. The walls are covered with inscriptions. Near the feet of Christ one reads this name: Henquinez. Then these others: Conde de Rio Maïor. Marques y Marquesa de Almagro (Habana). There are French names with exclamation points, signs of anger. The wall was re-whitewashed in 1849. Nations insulted each other there. It was at the door of this chapel that a corpse was found holding an axe in its hand. This corpse was Second Lieutenant Legros. We leave the chapel, and to the left, we see a well. There are two in this courtyard. We ask: why is there no bucket and pulley at this one? It is because no one draws water from it anymore. Why does no one draw water from it anymore? Because it is full of skeletons. The last person to draw water from this well was named Guillaume Van Kylsom. He was a peasant who lived in Hougomont and was a gardener there. On June 18, 1815, his family fled and went to hide in the woods. The forest around the Abbey of Villers sheltered all these unfortunate scattered populations for several days and nights. Even today, certain recognizable vestiges, such as old burnt tree trunks, mark the place of these poor, trembling bivouacs deep in the thickets. William Van Kylsom remained at Hougomont to guard the castle and huddled in a cellar. The English discovered him there. He was dragged from his hiding place, and, with the flat of a saber, the combatants had this frightened man serve them. They were thirsty; this William brought them something to drink. It was from this well that he drew water. Many drank their last sip there. This well, from which so many dead drank, was to die too. After the action, there was a hurry to bury the corpses. Death has a her way of harassing victory, and she makes glory follow with plague. Typhus is an annex of triumph. This well was deep, it was made into a sepulchre. Three hundred dead were thrown into it. Perhaps too hastily. Were they all dead? Legend says no. It seems that, the night following the burial, faint voices were heard calling out of the well. This well stands alone in the middle of the courtyard. Three walls, half stone and brick, folded back like the leaves of a screen and simulating a square turret, surround it on three sides. The fourth side is open. This is where water was drawn. The back wall has a shapeless bull’s-eye window, perhaps a shell hole. This turret had a ceiling of which only the beams remain. The supporting ironwork of the right wall forms a cross. We lean forward, and our eyes are lost in a deep cylinder of brick filled with a heap of darkness. All around the well, the lower walls disappear into the nettles. This well does not have the wide blue slab that serves as an apron for all the wells in Belgium. The blue slab is replaced by a crosspiece on which five or six misshapen, knotty, stiff pieces of wood rest, resembling large bones. It no longer has a bucket, chain, or pulley; but it still has the stone basin that served as an overflow. Rainwater collects there, and from time to time a bird from the nearby forests comes to drink and fly away. A house in this ruin, the farmhouse, is still inhabited. The door of this house opens onto the courtyard. Next to a pretty Gothic lock plate, there is an iron handle with trefoils, set at an angle on this door. As the Hanoverian lieutenant Wilda grabbed this handle to take refuge in the farmhouse, a French sapper cut off his hand with an axe. The family who occupies the house has as their grandfather the former gardener Van Kylsom, long dead. A gray-haired woman tells you: I was there. I was three years old. My sister, who was older, was scared and crying. We were taken into the woods. I was in my mother’s arms. We pressed our ears to the ground to listen. I imitated the cannon, and I went boom, boom. A door in the courtyard, on the left, as we have said, opens into the orchard. The orchard is terrible. It is in three parts, one could almost say in three acts. The first part is a garden, the second is the orchard, the third is a wood. These three parts have a common enclosure, on the entrance side the buildings of the castle and the farm, on the left a hedge, on the right a wall, in the background a wall. The right wall is brick, the back wall is stone. We enter the garden first. It is sunken, planted with gooseberry bushes, cluttered with wild vegetation, enclosed by a monumental terrace of cut stone with double-bulged balusters. It was a seigneurial garden in this first French style which preceded Lenôtre; ruin and bramble today. The pilasters are topped with globes which look like stone cannonballs. There are still forty-three balusters on their dice; the others are lying in the grass. Almost all have musketry scratches. A broken baluster is placed on the stem like a broken leg. It was in this garden, lower than the orchard, that six riflemen of the 1st Light Infantry, having entered there and unable to leave, caught and hunted like bears in their pit, accepted combat with two Hanoverian companies, one of which was armed with carbines. The Hanoverians lined these balusters and fired from above. These riflemen, returning fire from below, six against two hundred, intrepid, having only the gooseberry bushes for cover, took a quarter of an hour to die . We climb a few steps , and from the garden we pass into the orchard itself. There, in these few square fathoms, fifteen hundred men fell in less than an hour. The wall seems ready to start again the fight. The thirty-eight loopholes pierced by the English at irregular heights are still there. In front of the sixteenth lie two English granite tombs. There are loopholes only in the south wall; the main attack came from there. This wall is hidden on the outside by a large hedge; the French arrived, believing they were only dealing with the hedge, crossed it, and found this wall, obstacle and ambush, the English guards behind, the thirty-eight loopholes firing at once, a storm of grapeshot and bullets; and the Soye brigade broke through. Waterloo began thus. The orchard, however, was taken. There were no ladders, the French climbed with their nails. There was hand-to-hand fighting under the trees. All this grass was soaked with blood. A battalion from Nassau, seven hundred men, was struck down there. Outside, the wall against which Kellermann’s two batteries were aimed is gnawed by shrapnel. This orchard is as sensitive as any other in May. It has its buttercups and daisies, the grass is tall, plow horses graze there , horsehair ropes where laundry is drying cross the spaces between the trees and make passersby bow their heads, one walks in this wasteland and one’s foot sinks into the mole holes. In the middle of the grass one notices an uprooted trunk, lying green. Major Blackman has leaned against it to expire. Under a large neighboring tree fell the German General Duplat, from a French family who took refuge after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Nearby bends an old, sick apple tree bandaged with a straw and clay bandage. Almost all the apple trees are falling from old age. There is not one that does not have its ball or its biscaian. The skeletons of dead trees abound in this orchard. Crows fly in the branches, at the bottom there is a wood full of violets. Bauduin killed, Foy wounded, the fire, the massacre, the carnage, a stream made of English blood, German blood and French blood, furiously mixed, a well filled with corpses, the Nassau regiment and the Brunswick regiment destroyed, Duplat killed, Blackman killed, the English guards mutilated, twenty French battalions, out of the forty of Reille’s corps, decimated, three thousand men, in this single hovel of Hougomont, sabered, quartered, throats slit, shot, burned; and all this so that today a peasant can say to a traveler: Sir, give me three francs; if you like, I will explain the matter of Waterloo to you! Chapter 3. June 18, 1815. Let us go back in time—it is one of the narrator’s rights—and place ourselves in the year 1815, and even a little before the time when the action recounted in the first part of this book begins. If it had not rained during the night of June 17-18, 1815, the future of Europe would have been changed. A few drops of rain more or less would have swayed Napoleon. For Waterloo to be the end of Austerlitz, providence needed only a little rain, and a cloud crossing the sky against the season was enough for the collapse of a world. The Battle of Waterloo, and this gave Blücher time to arrive, could not have begun until eleven-thirty. Why? Because the ground was wet. It was necessary to wait for a little firming before the artillery could maneuver. Napoleon was an artillery officer, and he felt it. The essence of this prodigious captain was the man who, in the report to the Directory on Aboukir, said: Such and such a one of our cannonballs killed six men. All his battle plans are made for the projectile. Making the artillery converge on a given point was his key to victory. He treated the enemy general’s strategy like a citadel, and he breached it. He overwhelmed the weak point with grapeshot; he tied and untied battles with the cannon. There was shooting in his genius. Breaking through squares, pulverizing regiments, breaking lines, crushing and dispersing masses, everything for him was there, strike, strike, strike ceaselessly, and he entrusted this task to the cannonball. A formidable method, and which, combined with genius, made this sombre athlete of the pugilism of war invincible for fifteen years. On June 18, 1815, he relied all the more on artillery because he had numbers on his side. Wellington had only one hundred and fifty-nine guns ; Napoleon had two hundred and forty. Suppose the ground was dry, the artillery could roll, the action began at six o’clock in the morning. The battle was won and over at two o’clock, three hours before the Prussian incident. How much fault was there on Napoleon’s part in the loss of this battle? Was the shipwreck attributable to the pilot? Was Napoleon’s obvious physical decline complicated at this time by a certain internal decline? Had the twenty years of war worn down the blade as well as the scabbard, the soul as well as the body? Was the veteran making himself uncomfortably felt in the captain? In a word, was this genius, as many notable historians have believed, slipping away? Was he going into a frenzy to disguise his weakening from himself ? Was he beginning to oscillate under the distraction of a breath of adventure? Was he becoming, a serious thing in a general, unconscious of the peril? In that class of great material men who can be called the giants of action, is there an age for the myopia of genius? Old age has no hold on the geniuses of the ideal; for the Dantes and the Michelangelos, to grow old is to grow; for the Hannibals and the Bonapartes, is it to decline? Had Napoleon lost the direct sense of victory? Had he reached the point where he no longer recognized the reef, no longer guessed the trap, no longer discerned the crumbling edge of the abyss? Did he lack the flair for catastrophes? He who once knew all the roads to triumph and who, from the height of his chariot of lightning, indicated them with a sovereign finger, did he now have this sinister bewilderment of leading his tumultuous team of legions to the precipices? Was he seized, at forty-six years of age, by a supreme madness? Was this titanic charioteer of destiny no more than an immense daredevil? We do not think so. His battle plan was, by everyone’s admission, a masterpiece. Go straight to the center of the Allied line, make a hole in the enemy, cut it in two, push the British half on Hal and the Prussian half on Tongeren, make two sections of Wellington and Blücher; take Mont-Saint-Jean, seize Brussels, throw the Germans into the Rhine and the English into the sea. All this, for Napoleon, was in this battle. Then we would see. It goes without saying that we do not claim to be writing the history of Waterloo here; one of the scenes that generated the drama we are recounting is linked to this battle; but this history is not our subject; this history, moreover, is written, and written masterfully, from one point of view by Napoleon, from another point of view by a whole host of historians. As for us, we leave the historians to their own devices; we are only a distant witness, a passer-by on the plain, a researcher bent over this earth kneaded with human flesh, perhaps taking appearances for realities; we do not have the right to stand up, in the name of science, to a set of facts where there is undoubtedly a mirage, we have neither the military practice nor the strategic competence that authorize a system; according to us, a chain of chance dominates the two captains at Waterloo; and when it comes to destiny, that mysterious accused, we judge like the people, that naive judge. Chapter 4. A Those who wish to clearly picture the Battle of Waterloo need only place on the ground in their minds a capital A. The left leg of the A is the road to Nivelles, the right leg is the road to Genappe, the chord of the A is the sunken road from Ohain to Braine-l’Alleud. The summit of the A is Mont-Saint-Jean, there is Wellington; the left point The lower point is Hougomont, there is Reille with Jérôme Bonaparte; the lower right point is the Belle-Alliance, there is Napoleon. A little below the point where the chord of the A meets and cuts the right jamb is the Haie-Sainte. In the middle of this chord is the precise point where the final word of the battle was said. It is there that the lion was placed, an involuntary symbol of the supreme heroism of the Imperial Guard. The triangle included at the summit of the A, between the two jambs and the chord, is the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. The dispute over this plateau was the entire battle. The wings of the two armies extend to the right and left of the two roads of Genappe and Nivelles; d’Erlon facing Picton, Reille facing Hill. Behind the point of the A, behind the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, is the Sonian Forest. As for the plain itself, imagine a vast undulating terrain; each fold dominates the next, and all the undulations rise towards Mont-Saint-Jean, and there end in the forest. Two enemy troops on a battlefield are two wrestlers. It is a tug-of-war. One tries to make the other slide. They cling to everything; a bush is a support point; a corner of a wall is a shoulder; for lack of a shack to lean against, a regiment gives way; a sloping of the plain, a shift in the ground, a convenient transverse path, a wood, a ravine, can stop the heel of this colossus that we call an army and prevent it from retreating. Whoever leaves the field is beaten. Hence, for the responsible leader, the necessity of examining the slightest clump of trees, and of delving into the slightest relief. The two generals had carefully studied the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean, now called the Plain of Waterloo. The previous year, Wellington, with far-sighted sagacity, had examined it as a snack for a great battle. On this terrain and for this duel, on June 18, Wellington had the good side, Napoleon the bad. The English army was above, the French army below. To sketch here the appearance of Napoleon, on horseback, telescope in hand, on the heights of Rossomme, at dawn on June 18, 1815, is almost too much. Before it was shown, everyone saw it. This calm profile under the little hat of the Brienne school, this green uniform, the white lapel hiding the badge, the gray frock coat hiding the epaulettes, the angle of the red cord under the waistcoat, the leather breeches, the white horse with its purple velvet cover having crowned N’s and eagles at the corners, the riding boots over silk stockings, the silver spurs, the sword of Marengo, all this figure of the last Caesar stands in the imaginations, acclaimed by some, severely regarded by others. This figure was for a long time entirely in the light; this was due to a certain legendary obscurity that most heroes exude and which always veils the truth for a more or less long time; but today history and daylight are made. This clarity, history, is pitiless; it has this strange and divine quality that, light as it is, and precisely because it is light, it often puts shadow where one saw rays; of the same man she makes two different phantoms, and one attacks the other, and does justice to him, and the darkness of the despot struggles with the dazzle of the captain. From there a truer measure in the definitive appreciation of the peoples. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome in chains diminishes Caesar; Jerusalem killed diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. It is a misfortune for a man to leave behind him night that has his form. Chapter 5. The quid obscurum of battles. Everyone knows the first phase of this battle; a troubled, uncertain, hesitant beginning, threatening for both armies, but for the English even more than for the French. It had rained all night; the ground was broken up by the downpour; the water had piled up here and there in the hollows of the plain like in basins; at certain points the train crews were up to their axles in it; the harnesses’ belly straps were dripping with liquid mud; if the wheat and rye laid down by this mass of carts had not filled the ruts and made a bed under the wheels, all movement, particularly in the valleys near Papelotte, would have been impossible. The affair began late; Napoleon, as we have explained, was in the habit of holding all the artillery in his hand like a pistol, aiming now at one point, now at another in the battle, and he had wanted to wait until the harnessed batteries could roll and gallop freely; for that to happen, the sun had to appear and dry the ground. But the sun did not appear. This was no longer the rendezvous of Austerlitz. When the first cannon shot was fired, the English general Colville looked at his watch and saw that it was 11:35 . The action began with fury, perhaps more fury than the Emperor had intended, by the French left wing on Hougomont. At the same time Napoleon attacked the center by rushing Quiot’s brigade to La Haie-Sainte, and Ney pushed the French right wing against the English left wing which was leaning on Papelotte. The attack on Hougomont was somewhat simulated: to attract Wellington there, to make him lean to the left, such was the plan. This plan would have succeeded, if the four companies of the English guards and the brave Belgians of Perponcher’s division had not firmly held the position, and Wellington, instead of massing there, was able to limit himself to sending as reinforcements four other companies of guards and a battalion of Brunswick. The attack of the French right wing on Papelotte was in full swing; to overthrow the English left, to cut the road to Brussels, to block the passage of possible Prussians, to force Mont-Saint-Jean, to drive Wellington back to Hougomont, from there to Braine-l’Alleud, from there to Hal, nothing clearer. Apart from a few incidents, this attack succeeded. Papelotte was taken; La Haie-Sainte was taken. A detail to note. There were in the English infantry, particularly in Kempt’s brigade, many recruits. These young soldiers, faced with our formidable infantrymen, were valiant; their inexperience intrepidly extricated itself from the situation; they especially performed excellent service as skirmishers; the soldier as skirmisher, somewhat left to himself, becomes , so to speak, his own general; these recruits showed something of French invention and fury. This novice infantry had verve. This displeased Wellington. After the capture of La Haie-Sainte, the battle faltered. There is in this day, from noon to four o’clock, a dark interval; the middle of this battle is almost indistinct and participates in the darkness of the melee. Twilight falls there. We see vast fluctuations in this mist, a dizzying mirage, the war paraphernalia of the time almost unknown today, the flame-laced colbacks, the floating sabretaches, the crossed buffalo leathers, the grenade cartridge pouches , the hussars’ dolmans, the red boots with a thousand pleats, the heavy shakos garlanded with twists, the almost black infantry of Brunswick mixed with the scarlet infantry of England, the English soldiers having large circular white pads on their armholes for epaulettes, the Hanoverian light cavalry with their oblong leather helmets with copper bands and red horsehair manes, the Scots with bare knees and checkered plaids, the large white gaiters of our grenadiers, paintings, not strategic lines, what Salvator Rosa needs, not what Gribeauval needs. A certain amount of storm is always mixed with a battle. Quid obscurum, quid divinum. Each historian traces a little of the lineament that pleases him in these jumbles. Whatever the combination of generals, the shock of the armed masses has incalculable ebbs; in the action, the two planes of the two leaders enter into one another and are deformed by one another. One point of the battlefield devours more combatants than another, like these more or less spongy grounds which absorb more or less quickly the water that is thrown into them. We are obliged to pour more soldiers there than we would like. Expenses which are the unforeseen. The battle line floats and winds like a thread, the trails of blood flow illogically, the fronts of the armies undulate, the regiments entering or leaving make capes or gulfs, all these reefs continually move before one another; where the infantry was, the artillery arrives; where the artillery was, the cavalry rushes; the battalions are smoke. There was something there , look for it, it has disappeared; the clearings move; the dark folds advance and retreat; a sort of wind from the sepulchre pushes, pushes back, swells and disperses these tragic multitudes. What is a melee? an oscillation. The immobility of a mathematical plane expresses a minute and not a day. To paint a battle, one needs those powerful painters who have chaos in their brush; Rembrandt is better than Van Der Meulen. Van der Meulen, punctual at noon, lies at three o’clock. Geometry deceives; only the hurricane is true. This is what gives Folard the right to contradict Polybius. Let us add that there is always a certain moment when the battle degenerates into combat, becomes particularized, and scatters into innumerable facts of details which, to borrow the expression of Napoleon himself, belong more to the biography of regiments than to the history of the army. The historian, in this case, has the obvious right to summarize. He can only grasp the main contours of the struggle, and it is not given to any narrator, however conscientious , to absolutely fix the shape of this horrible cloud, which is called a battle. This, which is true of all great armed clashes, is particularly applicable to Waterloo. However, in the afternoon, at a certain moment, the battle became clearer. Chapter 6. Four o’clock in the afternoon. Around four o’clock, the situation of the English army was serious. The Prince of Orange commanded the center, Hill the right wing, Picton the left wing. The Prince of Orange, distraught and intrepid, shouted to the Dutch-Belgians: Nassau! Brunswick! Never back! Hill, weakened, came to lean against Wellington, Picton was dead. In the same minute that the English had taken the flag of the 105th Line Regiment from the French, the French had killed General Picton from the English, with a bullet through the head. The battle, for Wellington, had two strongholds, Hougomont and Hale-Sainte; Hougomont still held, but was burning; Hale-Sainte was taken. Of the German battalion that defended it, only forty-two men survived; all the officers, less five, were dead or captured. Three thousand combatants had massacred each other in this barn. A sergeant of the English guards, the first boxer in England, reputed by his companions to be invulnerable, had been killed there by a small French drummer. Baring was dislodged. Alten was sabered. Several flags were lost, including one from Alten’s division, and one from the Lüneburg battalion carried by a prince of the Deux-Ponts family. The Scottish Greys no longer existed; Ponsonby’s big dragoons were chopped down. This valiant cavalry had given way under Bro’s lancers and Travers’ cuirassiers; of twelve hundred horses, six hundred remained; Of the three lieutenant-colonels, two were down, Hamilton wounded, Mater killed. Ponsonby had fallen, pierced by seven lance wounds. Gordon was dead, Marsh was dead. Two divisions, the fifth and the sixth, were destroyed. Hougomont breached, Haie-Sainte taken, there was only one knot left, the center. This knot still held. Wellington reinforced it. He called Hill there who was at Merbe-Braine, he called Chassé there who was at Braine-l’Alleud. The center of the English army, a little concave, very dense and very compact, was strongly located. It occupied the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, with the village behind it and the slope in front of it, quite steep at the time. It leaned against this strong stone house, which was at that time a state property of Nivelles and which marks the intersection of the roads, a sixteenth-century mass so robust that cannonballs ricocheted off it without damaging it. All around the plateau, the English had cut the hedges here and there, made embrasures in the hawthorns, placed a cannon muzzle between two branches, and crenellated the bushes. Their artillery was lying in ambush under the undergrowth. This Punic work, incontestably authorized by the war which admits the trap, was so well done that Haxo, sent by the emperor at nine o’clock in the morning to reconnoiter the enemy batteries, had seen nothing of it, and had returned to tell Napoleon that there was no obstacle, apart from the two barricades blocking the roads to Nivelles and Genappe. It was the time when the harvest was high; on the edge of the plateau, a battalion of Kempt’s brigade, the 951st, armed with carbines, was lying in the tall wheat fields. Thus assured and counter-buttressed, the center of the Anglo-Dutch army was in a good position. The danger of this position was the Sonian Forest, then contiguous to the battlefield and cut by the ponds of Groenendael and Boitsfort. An army could not have retreated there without disbanding; the regiments would have immediately disintegrated there. The artillery would have been lost in the marshes. The retreat, according to the opinion of several men of the profession, contested by others, it is true, would have been a matter of every man for himself. Wellington added to this center a brigade of Chassé, removed from the right wing, and a brigade of Wincke, removed from the left wing, plus Clinton’s division. To his English, to Halkett’s regiments, to Mitchell’s brigade , to Maitland’s guards, he gave as shoulders and buttresses the infantry of Brunswick, the contingent of Nassau, the Hanoverians of Kielmansegge and the Germans of Ompteda. This put twenty-six battalions at his disposal. The right wing, as Charras says, was pulled back behind the center. An enormous battery was masked by earthbags at the place where today is what is called the Waterloo Museum. Wellington also had in a fold of the ground Somerset’s Dragoon Guards, fourteen hundred horses. This was the other half of this English cavalry, so justly famous. Ponsonby destroyed, Somerset remained. The battery, which, if completed, would have been almost a redoubt, was positioned behind a very low garden wall, hastily covered with a layer of sandbags and a wide earthen bank. This work was not finished; there had not been time to palisade it. Wellington, anxious but impassive, was on horseback, and remained there all day in the same attitude, a little in front of the old mill of Mont-Saint-Jean, which still exists, under an elm tree which an Englishman, an enthusiastic vandal, had since bought for two hundred francs, sawed down, and carried off. Wellington was coldly heroic there. The cannonballs rained down. Aide-de- camp Gordon had just fallen beside him. Lord Hill, showing him a bursting shell, said to him: “My lord, what are your instructions, and what orders do you leave us if you are killed?” “To do as I do,” replied Wellington. To Clinton, he said laconically: “Hold here to the last man.” The day was visibly turning bad. Wellington shouted to his former companions from Talavera, Vitoria and Salamanca: “Boys! Can we think of giving up? Think of old England!” Around four o’clock, the English line moved backward. Suddenly, nothing was to be seen on the crest of the plateau but the artillery and the riflemen; the rest disappeared; the regiments, driven out by the French shells and cannonballs, fell back into the valley which is still cut Today, the service path of the Mont-Saint-Jean farm, a retrograde movement occurred, the English battle front gave way, Wellington fell back. – Beginning of retreat! cried Napoleon. Chapter 7. Napoleon in a good mood. The Emperor, although ill and hampered on horseback by a local illness, had never been in such a good mood as that day. Since morning, his impenetrability smiled. On June 18, 1815, this profound soul, masked in marble, radiated blindly. The man who had been gloomy at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest predestined make such nonsense. Our joys are shadows. The supreme smile belongs to God. Ridet Caesar, Pompeius flebit, said the legionaries of the Fulminatrix Legion. Pompey this time should not have cried, but it is certain that Caesar laughed. The night before, at one o’clock, exploring on horseback, in the storm and rain, with Bertrand, the hills surrounding Rossomme, satisfied to see the long line of English fires illuminating the whole horizon from Frischemont to Braine-l’Alleud, it had seemed to him that the destiny, assigned by him on a fixed day on this field of Waterloo, was exact; he had stopped his horse, and remained motionless for some time, watching the lightning, listening to the thunder, and one had heard this fatalist throw into the darkness these mysterious words: We are in agreement. Napoleon was mistaken. They were no longer in agreement. He had not taken a minute of sleep, every moment of that night had been marked for him by joy. He had traversed the whole line of the Grand Guards, stopping here and there to speak to the vedettes. At two-thirty, near the Hougomont woods, he had heard the footsteps of a column on the march; he had thought for a moment that Wellington was retreating. He had said to Bertrand: “It’s the English rearguard moving to decamp. I will take prisoner the six thousand English who have just arrived at Ostend.” He spoke expansively; he had rediscovered the verve of the landing of March 1, when he pointed out to the Grand Marshal the enthusiastic peasant of the Gulf of Juan, exclaiming: “Well, Bertrand, here are some reinforcements already!” On the night of June 17-18, he mocked Wellington. “That little Englishman needs a lesson,” said Napoleon. The rain redoubled, it thundered while the Emperor spoke. At three-thirty in the morning, he had lost an illusion; officers sent on reconnaissance had informed him that the enemy was making no movement. Nothing was stirring; not a bivouac fire was extinguished. The English army was asleep. The silence was profound on the earth; there was no noise except in the sky. At four o’clock, a peasant had been brought to him by the coureurs; this peasant had served as a guide to a brigade of English cavalry, probably the Vivian brigade, which was going to take up position at the village of Ohain, on the extreme left. At five o’clock, two Belgian deserters had reported to him that they had just left their regiment, and that the English army was awaiting battle. So much the better! Napoleon had cried. I would rather overthrow them than drive them back. In the morning, on the bank that forms the corner of the Plancenoit road, he had dismounted in the mud, had had a kitchen table and a peasant chair brought to him from the Rossomme farm, had sat down, with a bale of straw for a carpet, and had spread out on the table the map of the battlefield, saying to Soult: Nice chessboard! Because of the rains of the night, the convoys of supplies, entangled in the broken roads, had not been able to arrive in the morning, the soldier had not slept, was wet, and was fasting; this had not prevented Napoleon from shouting cheerfully to Ney: We have ninety chances in a hundred. At eight o’clock, the Emperor’s luncheon had been brought . He had invited several generals. While lunching, it had been said that Wellington had been at the ball in Brussels the day before, at the Duchess of Richmond’s, and Soult, a rough warrior with the face of an archbishop, had said: The ball is today. The Emperor had joked with Ney who said: Wellington will not be simple enough to wait for Your Majesty. That was his way, moreover. He was fond of banter, said Fleury de Chaboulon. The basis of his character was a playful humor, said Gourgaud. He abounded in jokes, rather bizarre than witty, said Benjamin Constant. These giant jollities are worth dwelling on. It was he who called his grenadiers the grognards; he pinched their ears, he pulled their mustaches. The Emperor was only playing tricks on us; this is a remark from one of them. During the mysterious journey from the island of Elba to France, on February 27, in the open sea, the French war brig Zephyr having encountered the brig Inconstant where Napoleon was hidden and having asked the Inconstant for news of Napoleon, the Emperor, who at that moment still had on his hat the white and amaranth cockade strewn with bees, adopted by him at the island of Elba, had taken the megaphone laughing and answered himself: The Emperor is well. He who laughs like that is familiar with events. Napoleon had several fits of this laughter during the Waterloo luncheon. After lunch he had collected himself for a quarter of an hour, then two generals had sat down on the bale of straw, a pen in his hand, a sheet of paper on his knee, and the Emperor had dictated the order of battle to them. At nine o’clock, at the moment when the French army, echeloned and set in motion in five columns, had deployed, the divisions in two lines, the artillery between the brigades, music at the head, beating in the fields, with the rolls of drums and the blasts of trumpets, powerful, vast, joyful, a sea of helmets, sabres and bayonets on the horizon, the emperor, moved, had cried out twice : Magnificent! Magnificent! From nine to ten-thirty, the entire army, which seems incredible, had taken up position and drawn up in six lines, forming, to repeat the Emperor’s expression, the figure of six Vs. A few moments after the formation of the battle front, in the midst of that profound silence of the beginning of a storm which precedes the mêlées, seeing the three batteries of twelve pass by, detached on his order from the three corps of d’Erlon, Reille and Lobau, and destined to begin the action by beating Mont-Saint-Jean where the roads to Nivelles and Genappe intersect , the Emperor had tapped Haxo on the shoulder and said to him: Here are twenty-four beautiful girls, General. Sure of the outcome, he had encouraged with a smile, as it passed in front of him, the company of sappers of the first corps, designated by him to barricade themselves in Mont-Saint-Jean, as soon as the village was taken. All this serenity had been broken only by a word of haughty pity; seeing on his left, at a place where there is today a large tomb, these admirable gray Scots massed with their superb horses, he had said: It is a pity. Then he mounted his horse, went in front of Rossomme, and chose as his observation post a narrow ridge of grass to the right of the road from Genappe to Brussels, which was his second station during the battle. The third station, that of seven o’clock in the evening, between the Belle-Alliance and the Haie-Sainte, is formidable; it is a fairly high mound which still exists and behind which the guard was massed in a slope of the plain. Around this mound, the cannonballs ricocheted on the pavement of the road as far as Napoleon. As at Brienne, he had over his head the whistling of the bullets and the biscayens. Almost where his horse’s feet had been, they picked up worm-eaten cannonballs, old sabre blades and shapeless, rust-eaten projectiles. Scabra rubigine. A few years ago, a sixty-pounder shell was unearthed there, still loaded, whose fuse had broken at the level of the bomb. It was at this last station that the Emperor said to his guide Lacoste, a hostile, terrified peasant, tied to the saddle of a hussar, turning around at each packet of grapeshot, and trying to hide behind him: “Imbecile! It’s shameful, you’re going to get yourself killed in the back.” The writer of these lines himself found in the friable slope of this mound, while digging the sand, the remains of the neck of a bomb disintegrated by the oxide of forty-six years, and old sections of iron which broke like elder sticks between his fingers. The undulations of the variously inclined plains where the meeting of Napoleon and Wellington took place are no longer, as everyone knows, what they were on June 18, 1815. By taking from this funeral field what was needed to make a monument for it, it was deprived of its real relief, and history, disconcerted, no longer recognizes itself there. To glorify it, it was disfigured. Wellington, two years later, seeing Waterloo again, cried out: They have changed my battlefield. Where the large earth pyramid surmounted by the lion now stands, there was a ridge which, towards the Nivelles road, sloped down into a passable ramp, but which, on the side of the Genappe causeway, was almost an escarpment. The elevation of this escarpment can still be measured today by the height of the two mounds of the two large tombs which enclose the road from Genappe to Brussels; one, the English tomb, on the left; the other, the German tomb, on the right. There is no French tomb. For France, this whole plain is a sepulchre. Thanks to the thousand and thousand cartloads of earth used on the mound 150 feet high and half a mile in circumference, the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean is today accessible by a gentle slope; on the day of the battle, especially from the side of La Haie-Sainte, it was of a rough and steep approach. The slope there was so steep that the English guns could not see below them the farm located at the bottom of the valley, the center of the combat. On June 18, 1815, the rains had further eroded this steepness, the mud complicated the ascent, and not only did one climb, but one got bogged down. Along the crest of the plateau ran a sort of ditch impossible to guess for a distant observer. What was this ditch? Let’s face it. Braine-l’Alleud is a village in Belgium, Ohain is another. These villages, both hidden in curves of the land, are joined by a path about a league and a half long that crosses a plain at an undulating level, and often enters and sinks into hills like a furrow, which means that at various points this road is a ravine. In 1815, as today, this road cut the crest of the Mont-Saint-Jean plateau between the two roads of Genappe and Nivelles; only, today it is at the same level as the plain; it was then a sunken road. Its two embankments were taken for the monument-hill. This road was and still is a trench for the greater part of its course; a hollow trench sometimes a dozen feet deep and whose steep embankments collapsed here and there, especially in winter, in the downpours. Accidents happened there. The road was so narrow at the entrance to Braine-l’Alleud that a passer-by had been crushed there by a cart, as evidenced by a stone cross standing near the cemetery which gives the name of the deceased, Monsieur Bernard Debrye, merchant in Brussels, and the date of the accident, February 1637. It was so deep on the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean that a peasant, Mathieu Nicaise, had been crushed there in 1783 by a landslide from the embankment, as evidenced by another stone cross whose top disappeared in the clearings, but whose overturned pedestal is still visible today on the slope of the lawn to the left of the road between La Haie-Sainte and the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean. On a day of battle, this sunken road, of which nothing warned, bordering the crest of Mont-Saint-Jean, a ditch at the top of the escarpment, a rut hidden in the land, was invisible, that is to say, terrible. Chapter 8. The Emperor asks a question to the guide Lacoste. So, on the morning of Waterloo, Napoleon was happy. He was right; the battle plan he conceived, as we have seen, was indeed admirable. Once the battle was engaged, its very diverse twists and turns, Hougomont’s resistance, the tenacity of La Haie-Sainte, Bauduin killed, Foy put out of action, the unexpected wall where Soye’s brigade had broken, Guilleminot’s fatal blunder in having neither firecrackers nor powder bags, the bogging down of the batteries, the fifteen unescorted guns knocked over by Uxbridge in a sunken road, the little effect of the bombs falling in the English lines, burying themselves in the ground soaked by the rain and only succeeding in making mud volcanoes, so that the grapeshot turned into splashes, the uselessness of Piré’s demonstration on Braine-l’Alleud, all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons, almost nullified, the English right wing badly disturbed, the left wing badly attacked, the strange misunderstanding of Ney massing, instead of echeloning them, the four divisions of the first corps, twenty-seven ranks thick and two hundred men fronts thus delivered to the grapeshot, the frightening hole of the cannonballs in these masses, the attacking columns disunited, the sash battery suddenly unmasked on their flank Bourgeois, Donzelot and Durutte compromised, Quiot pushed back, Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules from the Polytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was breaking down the gate of the Haie-Sainte with his axe under the plunging fire of the English barricade blocking the bend of the road from Genappe to Brussels, Marcognet’s division, caught between the infantry and the cavalry, shot at point-blank range in the wheat by Best and Pack, sabered by Ponsonby, his battery of seven guns nailed, the Prince of Saxe-Weimar holding and keeping, despite the Count d’Erlon, Frischemont and Smohain, the flag of the 105th captured, the flag of the 45th captured, that black Prussian hussar stopped by the runners of the flying column of three hundred chasseurs beating the platform between Wavre and Plancenoit, the disturbing things that this prisoner had said, Grouchy’s delay, the fifteen hundred men killed in less than an hour in the orchard of Hougomont, the eighteen hundred men lying in even less time around the Haie-Sainte, all these stormy incidents, passing like the clouds of battle before Napoleon, had hardly troubled his gaze and had not darkened that imperial face of certainty. Napoleon was accustomed to looking at war fixedly; he never made a poignant addition of the detail figure by figure; the figures mattered little to him, provided they gave this total: victory; that beginnings should go astray, he was not alarmed, he who believed himself master and possessor of the end; he knew how to wait, assuming himself out of the question, and he treated destiny as an equal. He seemed to say to fate: you would not dare. Half light and half shadow, Napoleon felt protected in good and tolerated in evil. He had, or believed he had, a connivance, one could almost say a complicity with events, equivalent to ancient invulnerability. However, when one has behind oneself the Berezina, Leipzig and Fontainebleau, it seems that one could mistrust Waterloo. A mysterious frown becomes visible in the depths of the sky. At the moment when Wellington retrogressed, Napoleon shuddered. He suddenly saw the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean thin out and the front of the English army disappear. It was rallying, but slipping away. The Emperor half-raised himself in his stirrups. The flash of victory flashed in his eyes. Wellington cornered in the Sonian Forest and destroyed, it was the definitive subjugation of England by France; it was Crécy, Poitiers, Malplaquet and Ramillies avenged. The man of Marengo erased Agincourt. The emperor then, meditating on the terrible event, took one last look at all points of the battlefield with his telescope. His guard, weapons at the ready behind him, observed him from below with a sort of religion. He was thinking; he examined the slopes, noted the gradients, scrutinized the clump of trees, the square of rye, the path; he seemed to be counting each bush. He looked with some fixity at the English barricades on the two causeways, two large abatis of trees, that of the Genappe causeway above the Haie-Sainte, armed with two cannons, the only ones of all the English artillery to see the bottom of the battlefield, and that of the Nivelles causeway where the Dutch bayonets of the Chassé brigade gleamed. He noticed near this barricade the old chapel of Saint-Nicolas painted white which is at the angle of the traverse towards Braine-l’Alleud. He leaned over and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste. The guide gave a negative nod, probably perfidious. The Emperor straightened up and collected himself. Wellington had retreated. All that remained was to complete this retreat by crushing him. Napoleon, turning abruptly, sent a dispatch rider to Paris to announce that the battle was won. Napoleon was one of those geniuses from whom thunder comes. He had just found his thunderbolt. He gave the order to Milhaud’s cuirassiers to take the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. Chapter 9. The Unexpected. There were 3,500 of them. They formed a front of a quarter of a league. They were giant men on colossal horses. There were 26 squadrons; and behind them, to support them, they had the division of Lefebvre-Desnouettes, the 106 elite gendarmes, the chasseurs of the guard, 1197 men, and the lancers of the guard, 880 lances. They wore the horsehairless helmet and the wrought iron breastplate, with the pommel pistols in the saddlebags and the long saber-sword. In the morning the whole army had admired them when, at nine o’clock, the bugles sounding, all the bands singing “Let us watch over the salvation of the empire,” they had come, in a thick column, one of their batteries at their flank, the other at their center, to deploy in two ranks between the Genappe causeway and Frischemont, and to take their place of battle in this powerful second line, so skillfully composed by Napoleon, which, having at its left end the cuirassiers of Kellermann and at its right end the cuirassiers of Milhaud, had, so to speak, two iron wings. The aide-de-camp Bernard brought them the order of the emperor. Ney drew his sword and took the lead. The enormous squadrons moved. Then a formidable spectacle was seen. All this cavalry, sabers raised, standards and trumpets flying, formed in column by division, descended, in one movement and as one man, with the precision of a bronze battering ram opening a breach, the hill of Belle-Alliance, sank into the formidable depths where so many men had already fallen, disappeared there in the smoke, then, emerging from this shadow, reappeared on the other side of the valley, still compact and tight, climbing at a full trot, through a cloud of grapeshot bursting upon it, the frightful mud slope of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. They climbed, grave, threatening, imperturbable; in the intervals between the musketry and the artillery, one could hear this colossal trampling. Being two divisions, they were two columns; Wathier’s division had the right, Delord’s division had the left. From afar, one could see two immense steel snakes stretching towards the crest of the plateau. This cut through the battle like a miracle. Nothing like it had been seen since the capture of the great redoubt of the Moskowa by the heavy cavalry; Murat was missing, but Ney was there. It seemed that this mass had become a monster and had only one soul. Each squadron undulated and swelled like a ring of the polyp. They could be seen through a vast smoke torn here and there. A jumble of helmets, shouts, sabers, a stormy leap of the horses’ rumps in the cannon and the fanfare, a disciplined and terrible tumult; above that the cuirasses, like the scales on the hydra. These stories seem from another age. Something similar to this vision doubtless appeared in the old Orphic epics telling of the horse-men, the ancient hippanthropes, those human-faced, equestrian-chested titans whose gallop scaled Olympus, horrible, invulnerable, sublime; gods and beasts. A strange numerical coincidence: twenty-six battalions were to receive these twenty-six squadrons. Behind the crest of the plateau, in the shadow of the masked battery, the English infantry, formed in thirteen squares, two battalions per square, and in two lines, seven on the first, six on the second, butts on their shoulders, aiming at what was coming, calm, silent, motionless, waited. They did not see the cuirassiers and the cuirassiers did not see them. They listened to this tide of men rising. She heard the growing noise of the three thousand horses, the alternating and symmetrical beat of hooves at a full trot, the rustling of cuirasses, the clatter of sabers, and a sort of great fierce blast. There was a terrible silence, then, suddenly, a long line of raised arms brandishing sabers appeared above the crest, and the helmets, and the trumpets, and the standards, and three thousand heads with gray mustaches crying: Long live the Emperor! All this cavalry emerged onto the plateau, and it was like the entry of an earthquake. Suddenly, tragically, to the left of the English, to our right, the head of the column of cuirassiers reared up with a frightful clamor. Having reached the highest point of the crest, frantic, all in their fury and their race of extermination on the squares and the cannons, the cuirassiers had just perceived between them and the English a ditch, a pit. It was the sunken road of Ohain. The moment was dreadful. The ravine was there, unexpected, gaping, sheer beneath the horses ‘ feet, two fathoms deep between its double embankment; the second rank pushed the first into it, and the third pushed the second into it; the horses reared up, threw themselves back, fell on their rumps, slid with all four feet in the air, crushing and upsetting the cavalrymen, there was no way to retreat, the entire column was nothing more than a projectile, the force acquired to crush the English crushed the French, the inexorable ravine could only surrender when filled, cavalrymen and horses rolled pell-mell into it, crushing each other , becoming one flesh in this chasm, and when this pit was full of living men, they marched over it and the rest passed through. Almost a third of Dubois’s brigade collapsed into this abyss. This began the loss of the battle. A local tradition, which obviously exaggerates, says that two thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the sunken road of Ohain. This figure probably includes all the other corpses that were thrown into this ravine the day after the battle. Let us note in passing that it was this Dubois brigade, so fatally affected, which, an hour earlier, charging separately, had removed the flag of the Lüneburg battalion. Napoleon, before ordering this charge of Milhaud’s cuirassiers, had scanned the terrain, but had not been able to see this sunken road which did not even make a ripple in the surface of the plateau. Warned, however, and alerted by the small white chapel which marks its angle on the Nivelles causeway, he had asked the guide Lacoste, probably about the possibility of an obstacle. The guide had answered no. One could almost say that from this peasant’s nod came Napoleon’s catastrophe. Other fatalities were to arise. Was it possible that Napoleon would win this battle? We answer no. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No. Because of God. Bonaparte victorious at Waterloo, this was no longer in the law of the nineteenth century. Another series of events was preparing, in which Napoleon no longer had a place. The ill will of events had been announced for a long time. It was time for this vast man to fall. The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone counted more than the universal group. These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head, the world rising to the brain of a man, this would be fatal to civilization if it continued. The time had come for the incorruptible supreme equity to take notice. Probably the principles and elements, on which regular gravitations depend in the moral order as in the material order, were complaining. The steaming blood, the overflowing cemeteries, the weeping mothers, these are formidable pleas. There are, when the earth suffers from an overload, mysterious groans from the shadows, which the abyss hears. Napoleon had been denounced in infinity, and his fall was decided. He was in God’s way. Waterloo is not a battle; it is the change of front of the universe. Chapter 10. The plateau of Mont Saint-Jean. At the same time as the ravine, the battery had unmasked itself. Sixty cannons and the thirteen squares thundered down the cuirassiers at point-blank range. The intrepid General Delord gave the military salute to the English battery. All the English flying artillery had galloped back into the squares. The cuirassiers did not even pause for a moment. The disaster on the sunken road had decimated them, but not discouraged them. They were men who, diminished in number, grow in spirit. Only the Wathier column had suffered from the disaster; the Delord column, which Ney had swerved to the left, as if he sensed the ambush, had arrived intact. The cuirassiers rushed at the English squares. Belly to the ground, bridles loose, sabers in their teeth, pistols in their hands, such was the attack. There are moments in battle when the soul hardens the man to the point of changing the soldier into a statue, and when all that flesh turns to granite. The English battalions, desperately assailed, did not move. Then it was terrifying. All sides of the English squares were attacked at once. A frenzied whirling enveloped them. This cold infantry remained impassive. The first rank, kneeling, received the cuirassiers on the bayonets, the second rank shot them; behind the second rank the gunners loaded the guns, the front of the square opened, let through an eruption of grapeshot and closed again. The cuirassiers responded by crushing. Their great horses reared, leaped over the ranks, jumped over the bayonets and fell, gigantic, in the middle of these four living walls. The cannonballs made holes in the cuirassiers, the cuirassiers made breaches in the squares. Files of men disappeared, crushed under the horses. The bayonets sank into the bellies of these centaurs. From there a deformity of wounds that has perhaps not been seen elsewhere. The squares, eaten away by this frenzied cavalry, shrank without flinching. Inexhaustible in grapeshot, they exploded in the midst of the assailants. The figure of this combat was monstrous. These squares were no longer battalions, they were craters; these cuirassiers were no longer cavalry, they were a storm. Each square was a volcano attacked by a cloud; the lava fought the lightning. The extreme square on the right, the most exposed of all, being in the air, was almost annihilated at the first shocks. It was formed of the 75th Highland Regiment. The bagpiper in the center, while they were being exterminated around him, lowering in profound inattention his melancholy eye full of the reflection of the forests and lakes, seated on a drum, his pibroch under his arm, played the airs of the mountain. These Scots died thinking of Ben Lothian, like the Greeks remembering Argos. The saber of a cuirassier, striking down the pibroch and the arm that carried it, put an end to the singing by killing the singer. The cuirassiers, relatively few in number, weakened by the catastrophe of the ravine, had there against them almost the entire English army, but they multiplied, each man worth ten. However, some Hanoverian battalions gave way. Wellington saw this and thought of his cavalry. If Napoleon, at that very moment, had thought of his infantry, he would have won the battle. This oversight was his great fatal error. Suddenly the attacking cuirassiers felt themselves assailed. The English cavalry was at their backs. In front of them the squares, behind them Somerset; Somerset was the fourteen hundred dragoon guards. Somerset had Dornberg on his right with the German light horse, and on his left Trip with the Belgian carabinieri; the cuirassiers, attacked in flank and in front, in front and in rear, by the infantry and the cavalry, had to face it from all sides. What did it matter to them? They were a whirlwind. Their bravery became inexpressible. Besides, they had behind them the battery, still thundering. It took that for these men to be wounded in the back. One of their cuirasses, pierced in the left shoulder blade of a Biscayan, is in the collection known as the Waterloo Museum. For such Frenchmen, no less was needed than such Englishmen. It was no longer a mêlée, it was a shadow, a fury, a dizzying outburst of souls and courage, a hurricane of lightning swords. In an instant the fourteen hundred dragoon guards were reduced to only eight hundred; Fuller, their lieutenant-colonel, fell dead. Ney rushed up with the lancers and chasseurs of Lefebvre-Desnouettes. The plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean was taken, retaken, taken again. The cuirassiers left the cavalry to return to the infantry, or, to put it better, this whole formidable mob grappled without one letting go of the other. The squares still held. There were twelve assaults. Ney had four horses killed under him. Half of the cuirassiers remained on the plateau. This fight lasted two hours. The English army was deeply shaken. There is no doubt that, if they had not been weakened in their first shock by the disaster of the sunken road, the cuirassiers would have overturned the center and decided the victory. This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton who had seen Talavera and Badajoz. Wellington, three-quarters defeated, admired heroically. He said in a low voice: sublime! The cuirassiers annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, took or spiked sixty pieces of cannon, and took six flags from the English regiments, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the guard went to carry to the Emperor in front of the farm of Belle-Alliance. Wellington’s situation had worsened. This strange battle was like a duel between two bitterly wounded men who, each on their own side, while still fighting and resisting, lost all their blood. Which of the two would fall first? The battle on the plateau continued. How far the cuirassiers had gone? No one could say. What is certain is that, the day after the battle, a cuirassier and his horse were found dead in the framework of the carriage weighing scale at Mont-Saint-Jean, at the very point where the four roads to Nivelles, Genappe, La Hulpe, and Brussels intersect and meet . This horseman had broken through the English lines. One of The men who raised this corpse still live at Mont-Saint-Jean. His name is Dehaze. He was eighteen years old at the time. Wellington felt himself leaning. The crisis was near. The cuirassiers had not succeeded, in the sense that the center was not broken. Everyone having the plateau, no one had it, and in short, the majority remained with the English. Wellington had the village and the culminating plain; Ney had only the crest and the slope. On both sides, they seemed rooted in this funereal soil. But the weakening of the English seemed irremediable. The hemorrhage of this army was horrible. Kempt, on the left wing, called for reinforcements. – There are none, replied Wellington, let him get himself killed! – Almost at the same moment, a singular rapprochement which depicts the exhaustion of the two armies, Ney asked Napoleon for infantry, and Napoleon cried out: Infantry! Where does he want me to get some? Does he want me to make some? Yet the English army was the sickest. The furious thrusts of these great squadrons with iron breastplates and steel breasts had crushed the infantry. A few men around a flag marked the place of a regiment, such and such a battalion was no longer commanded by more than a captain or a lieutenant; the Alten division, already so badly treated at La Haie-Sainte, was almost destroyed; the intrepid Belgians of the Van Kluze brigade strewn the rye along the road to Nivelles; there was almost nothing left of those Dutch grenadiers who, in 1811, mixed up in our ranks in Spain, fought Wellington, and who, in 1815, rallied to the English, fought Napoleon. The loss of officers was considerable. Lord Uxbridge, who the next day had his leg buried, had a shattered knee. If, on the French side , in this battle of the cuirassiers, Delord, Lhéritier, Colbert, Dnop, Travers and Blancard were out of action, on the English side, Alten was wounded, Barne was wounded, Delancey was killed, Van Merlen was killed, Ompteda was killed, all of Wellington’s staff was decimated, and England had the worst share in this bloody balance. The 2nd Regiment of Foot Guards had lost five lieutenant-colonels, four captains and three ensigns; the first battalion of the 30th Infantry had lost twenty-four officers and one hundred and twelve soldiers; the 79th Mountaineers had twenty-four officers wounded, eighteen officers dead, four hundred and fifty soldiers killed. The Hanoverian Hussars of Cumberland, an entire regiment, led by Colonel Hacke, who was later to be tried and dismissed, had turned back in the face of the melee and were in flight in the Sonian Forest, sowing confusion as far as Brussels. The carts, the extensions, the baggage, the wagons full of wounded, seeing the French gaining ground and approaching the forest, rushed there; the Dutch, sabered by the French cavalry, cried: alarm! From Vert-Coucou to Groenendael, a distance of nearly two leagues in the direction of Brussels, there was, according to witnesses who still exist, a congestion of fugitives. This panic was such that it reached the Prince of Condé at Malines and Louis XVIII at Ghent. With the exception of the weak reserve echeloned behind the ambulance established in the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean and the brigades of Vivian and Vandeleur which flanked the left wing, Wellington no longer had any cavalry. Many batteries lay dismounted. These facts are admitted by Siborne; and Pringle, exaggerating the disaster, goes so far as to say that the Anglo-Dutch army was reduced to thirty-four thousand men. The Iron Duke remained calm, but his lips had turned pale. The Austrian commissioner Vincent, the Spanish commissioner Alava, present at the battle in the English staff, believed the duke lost. At five o’clock, Wellington took out his watch, and was heard to murmur this gloomy word: Blücher, or night! It was around this moment that a distant line of bayonets flashed on the heights near Frischemont. Here is the twist in this gigantic drama. Chapter 11. Bad guide for Napoleon, good guide for Bülow. We know Napoleon’s poignant mistake: Grouchy hoped for, Blücher arriving, death instead of life. Destiny has its twists and turns; we expected the throne of the world; we glimpse Saint Helena. If the little shepherd, who served as guide to Bülow, Blücher’s lieutenant, had advised him to emerge from the forest above Frischemont rather than below Plancenoit, the shape of the nineteenth century might have been different. Napoleon would have won the Battle of Waterloo. By any other route than below Plancenoit, the Prussian army would have reached a ravine impassable to artillery, and Bülow would not have arrived. Now, an hour late, it was the Prussian General Muffling who declared it, and Blücher would no longer have found Wellington standing; the battle was lost. It was time, as we see, for Bülow to arrive. He had, moreover, been very delayed. He had bivouacked at Dion-le-Mont and had left at dawn. But the roads were impassable and his divisions had become bogged down. The ruts reached the hubs of the cannons. In addition, it had been necessary to cross the Dyle on the narrow bridge of Wavre; the street leading to the bridge had been set on fire by the French; the artillery caissons and vans, unable to pass between two rows of burning houses, had to wait until the fire was extinguished. It was noon before Bülow’s advance guard had yet reached Chapelle-Saint-Lambert. The action, begun two hours earlier, would have been over at four o’clock, and Blücher would have stumbled upon the battle won by Napoleon. Such are these immense hazards, proportionate to an infinity that escapes us. At noon, the Emperor, with his telescope, was the first to spot something on the far horizon that caught his attention. He said: “I see over there a cloud that seems to me to be troops.” Then he asked the Duke of Dalmatia: “Soult, what do you see near Chapelle-Saint-Lambert?” The Marshal, aiming his telescope, replied: “Four or five thousand men, Sire. Evidently Grouchy.” However, it remained motionless in the mist. All the telescopes of the staff had studied the cloud signaled by the Emperor. Some had said: “Those are columns halting .” Most had said: They are trees. The truth is that the cloud did not move. The Emperor had detached Domon’s light cavalry division to reconnoiter this obscure point. Bülow, in fact, had not moved. His advance guard was very weak and could do nothing. He had to wait for the main body of the army, and he had orders to concentrate before entering the line; but at five o’clock, seeing Wellington’s peril, Blücher ordered Bülow to attack and said these remarkable words: We must give the English army some breathing space . Shortly after, the divisions of Losthin, Hiller, Hacke, and Ryssel deployed in front of Lobau’s corps, the cavalry of Prince William of Prussia emerged from the Bois de Paris, Plancenoit was in flames, and Prussian cannonballs began to rain down even on the ranks of the guard in reserve behind Napoleon. Chapter 12. The Guard. We know the rest: the irruption of a third army, the dislocated battle, eighty-six guns thundering suddenly, Pirch I arriving with Bülow, Zieten’s cavalry led by Blücher himself , the French driven back, Marcognet swept from the Ohain plateau, Durutte dislodged from Papelotte, Donzelot and Quiot retreating, Lobau taken in the flank, a new battle rushing at nightfall on our disbanded regiments, the whole English line resuming the offensive and pushed forward, the gigantic gap made in the French army, the English grapeshot and Prussian grapeshot helping each other, extermination, disaster at the front, disaster on the flank, the guard entering the line under this terrible collapse. As she felt that she was going to die, she cried: Long live the Emperor! History has nothing more moving than this agony bursting into acclamations. The sky had been overcast all day. Suddenly, at that very moment , it was eight o’clock in the evening, the clouds on the horizon parted and let pass, through the elms of the Nivelles road, the great sinister redness of the setting sun. It had been seen rising at Austerlitz. Each battalion of the guard, for this denouement, was commanded by a general. Friant, Michel, Roguet, Harlet, Mallet, Poret de Morvan, were there. When the high caps of the grenadiers of the guard with the large eagle plate appeared, symmetrical, aligned, calm, superb, in the mist of this melee, the enemy felt the respect of France; they thought they saw twenty victories enter the battlefield, wings outstretched, and those who were victorious, considering themselves vanquished, retreated; but Wellington cried: Up, guards, and aim true! The red regiment of the English guards, lying behind the hedges, rose, a cloud of grapeshot riddled the tricolor flag quivering around our eagles, all rushed, and the supreme carnage began. The Imperial Guard felt in the darkness the army giving way around it, and the vast shock of the rout, it heard the sauve-qui-peut! which had replaced the vive l’empereur! and, with the flight behind her, she continued to advance, more and more struck down and dying more with each step she took. There were no hesitants or timid ones. The soldier in this troop was as much a hero as the general. Not a man failed to commit suicide. Ney, distraught, tall with all the height of accepted death, offered himself to every blow in this storm. There he had his fifth horse killed beneath him. Sweating, with flames in his eyes, foaming at the mouth, his uniform unbuttoned, one of his epaulettes half cut off by the blow of a horse-guard’s saber, his grand-eagle plate dented by a bullet, bloody, muddy, magnificent, a broken sword in his hand, he said: Come see how a Marshal of France dies on the battlefield ! But in vain; he did not die. He was haggard and indignant. He threw this question to Drouet d’Erlon: Aren’t you getting yourself killed? He shouted in the midst of all this artillery crushing a handful of men: – Is there nothing for me? Oh! I wish all these English cannonballs would enter my belly! You were reserved for French bullets, unfortunate man! Chapter 13. The Catastrophe. The rout behind the guard was dismal. The army suddenly gave way on all sides at once, from Hougomont, from La Haie-Sainte, from Papelotte, from Plancenoit. The cry Treason! was followed by the cry Save for yourselves! An army that disbands is a thaw. Everything bends, cracks, creaks, floats, rolls, falls, collides, hurries, rushes. Unheard-of disintegration. Ney borrows a horse, jumps on it, and, without a hat, without a tie, without a sword, places himself across the Brussels road, stopping both the English and the French. He tries to hold back the army, he calls it back, he insults it, he clings to the rout. He is overwhelmed. The soldiers flee him, shouting: Long live Marshal Ney! Two regiments of Durutte come and go, terrified and as if tossed between the sabers of the Uhlans and the fusillade of the brigades of Kempt, Best, Pack and Rylandt; the worst of mêlées is the rout, friends kill each other to flee; squadrons and battalions break and scatter against each other, the enormous foam of battle. Lobau at one end like Reille at the other are rolled in the flood. In vain Napoleon makes walls with what remains of his guard; in vain he expends his service squadrons in a last effort. Quiot retreats before Vivian, Kellermann before Vandeleur, Lobau before Bülow, Morand before Pirch, Domon and Subervic before Prince William of Prussia. Guyot, who led the Emperor’s squadrons to the charge, falls under the feet of the English dragoons. Napoleon gallops alongside the fugitives, harangues them, presses them, threatens them, begs them. All those mouths that cried in the morning “Long live the Emperor” remain gaping; he is hardly known. The Prussian cavalry, freshly arrived, rushes forward, flies, sabers, cuts, axes, kills, exterminates. The teams rush, the cannons flee; the soldiers of the train unhitch the caissons and take the horses to escape; Vans overturned with their four wheels in the air obstruct the road and are occasions for massacre. People crush each other, they crush each other, they walk on the dead and the living. Arms are distraught. A dizzying multitude fills the roads, the paths, the bridges, the plains, the hills, the valleys, the woods, clogged by this escape of forty thousand men. Cries, despair, bags and rifles thrown into the rye, passages cleared with swords, no more comrades, no more officers, no more generals, an inexpressible terror. Zieten sabering France at his leisure. The lions turned into deer. Such was this flight. At Genappe, they tried to turn around, to stand up, to stop. Lobau rallied three hundred men. They barricaded the entrance to the village; but at the first volley of Prussian grapeshot, everyone started to flee again, and Lobau was taken. We can still see today this volley of grapeshot imprinted on the old gable of a brick hovel to the right of the road, a few minutes before entering Genappe. The Prussians rushed into Genappe, furious no doubt at being so little victorious. The pursuit was monstrous. Blücher ordered the extermination. Roguet had given the lugubrious example of threatening with death any French grenadier who brought him a Prussian prisoner. Blücher overtook Roguet.
The general of the Young Guard, Ducesme, cornered at the door of an inn in Genappe, surrendered his sword to a hussar of death who took the sword and killed the prisoner. The victory ended with the assassination of the vanquished. Let us punish, since we are history: old Blücher dishonored himself. This ferocity crowned the disaster. The desperate rout crossed Genappe, crossed Quatre-Bras, crossed Gosselies, crossed Frasnes, crossed Charleroi, crossed Thuin, and stopped only at the border. Alas! and who was fleeing in this way? The great army. This dizziness, this terror, this fall into ruin of the greatest bravery that has ever astonished history, is it without cause? No. The shadow of an enormous right is projected over Waterloo. It is the day of destiny. Strength above man gave rise to that day. Hence the terrified fold of heads; hence all these great souls surrendering their swords. Those who had conquered Europe fell, overcome, having nothing more to say or do, feeling in the shadows a terrible presence. Hoc erat in fatis. That day, the perspective of the human race changed. Waterloo is the hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great man was necessary for the advent of the great century. Someone to whom one does not reply took care of it. The panic of the heroes is understandable. In the battle of Waterloo, there is more than a cloud, there is a meteor. God has passed. At nightfall, in a field near Genappe, Bernard and Bertrand seized by a hem of his frock coat and arrested a haggard, pensive, sinister man, who, carried so far by the current of the rout, had just dismounted, had slipped his horse’s bridle under his arm, and, his eyes lost, was returning alone towards Waterloo. It was Napoleon still trying to go forward, an immense sleepwalker of this dream collapsed. Chapter 14. The Last Square. A few squares of the guard, motionless in the rush of the rout like rocks in flowing water, held out until nightfall . As night came, so did death, they awaited this double shadow, and, unshakeable, allowed themselves to be enveloped by it. Each regiment, isolated from the others and no longer having any connection with the army broken on all sides, died for its own account. They had taken up positions, to carry out this last action, some on the heights of Rossomme, others in the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean. There, abandoned, defeated, terrible, these dark squares were dying tremendously. Ulm, Wagram, Jena, Friedland, were dying within them. At dusk, around nine o’clock in the evening, at the foot of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, one remained. In this fatal valley, at the foot of this slope climbed by the cuirassiers, now flooded by the English masses, under the converging fire of the victorious enemy artillery, under a frightful density of projectiles, this square fought. It was commanded by an obscure officer named Cambronne. With each discharge, the square shrank, and returned fire. It responded to the grapeshot with fusillade, continually shrinking its four walls. From afar the fugitives stopped at times, breathless, listening in the darkness to this dark, diminishing thunder. When this legion was no more than a handful, when their flag was no more than a rag, when their rifles, exhausted of bullets, were no more than sticks, when the pile of corpses was greater than the living group, there was among the victors a sort of sacred terror around these sublime dying men, and the English artillery, catching its breath, fell silent. It was a kind of respite. These combatants had around them a swarm of spectres, silhouettes of men on horseback, the black profile of the cannons, the white sky glimpsed through the wheels and carriages; the colossal death’s head that heroes always glimpse in the smoke at the bottom of the battle, advanced on them and looked at them. They could hear in the twilight shadows that the guns were being loaded, the lit fuses like tiger’s eyes in the night circled around their heads, all the firers of the English batteries approached the cannons, and then, moved, holding the supreme moment suspended above these men, an English general, Colville according to some, Maitland according to others, shouted to them: Brave Frenchmen, surrender! Cambronne replied: Shit! Chapter 15. Cambronne. The French reader wanting to be respected, perhaps the most beautiful words a Frenchman has ever spoken cannot be repeated to him. It is forbidden to deposit the sublime in history. At our own risk, we violate this prohibition. So, among all these giants, there was a titan, Cambronne. To say this word, and then die. What could be greater! For it is to die to want to, and it is not this man’s fault if, machine-gunned, he survived. The man who won the Battle of Waterloo was not Napoleon in retreat, it was not Wellington folding at four o’clock, desperate at five, it was not Blücher who did not fight; the man who won the Battle of Waterloo was Cambronne. To strike down with such a word the thunder that kills you is to conquer. To make this response to the catastrophe, to say this to destiny, to give this basis to the future lion, to throw this reply to the rain of the night, to the treacherous wall of Hougomont, to the sunken road of Ohain, to the delay of Grouchy, to the arrival of Blücher, to be the irony in the sepulchre, to make sure to remain standing after one has fallen, to drown in two syllables the European coalition, to offer to the kings these latrines already known to the Caesars, to make of the last of the words the first by mixing in the flash of France, to insolently close Waterloo with Shrove Tuesday, to complete Leonidas by Rabelais, to sum up this victory in a supreme word impossible to pronounce, to lose the ground and keep history, after this carnage to have the laughers on one’s side, is immense. It is an insult to lightning. It reaches Aeschylian grandeur. Cambronne’s words have the effect of a fracture. It is the fracture of a chest by disdain; it is the overflow of agony that explodes. Who won? Was it Wellington? No. Without Blücher he was lost. Was it Blücher? No. If Wellington had not begun, Blücher could not have finished. This Cambronne, this passer-by of the last hour, this ignored soldier, this infinitely small of the war, feels that there is a lie there , a lie in a catastrophe, doubly poignant, and, at the moment when he bursts with rage, he is offered this derision, life! How can he not jump? They are there, all the kings of Europe, the happy generals, the thundering Jupiters, they have a hundred thousand victorious soldiers, and behind the hundred thousand, a million, their cannons, with lit fuses, are gaping, they have at their heels the imperial guard and the grand army, they have just crushed Napoleon, and there is only Cambronne left ; there is no one left to protest but this earthworm. He will protest. Then he searches for a word as one searches for a sword. Foam comes to him, and this foam is the word. Before this prodigious and mediocre victory, before this victory without a victor, this desperate man rises; he undergoes its enormity, but he notes its nothingness; and he does more than spit on it; and under the oppression of numbers, force, and matter, he finds an expression for the soul, excrement. We repeat. To say this, to do this, to find this, is to be the victor. The spirit of the great days entered this unknown man at that fatal moment. Cambronne finds the word Waterloo as Rouget de l’Isle finds the Marseillaise, by visitation of the breath from on high. An effluvium of the divine hurricane detaches itself and comes to pass through these men, and they shudder, and one sings the supreme song and the other utters the terrible cry. This word of titanic disdain, Cambronne does not only throw at Europe in the name of the empire, that would be little; he throws it into the past in the name of the revolution. We hear it, and we recognize in Cambronne the old soul of the giants. It seems that it is Danton who speaks or Kléber who roars. At Cambronne’s word, the English voice answered: fire! the batteries blazed, the hill trembled, from all these brazen mouths came a last vomit of grapeshot, dreadful, a vast smoke, vaguely whitened by the rising of the moon, rolled, and when the smoke dissipated, there was nothing left. This formidable remnant was annihilated; the guard was dead. The four walls of the living redoubt lay, barely distinguishable here and there a shudder among the corpses; and thus the French legions, larger than the Roman legions, expired at Mont-Saint-Jean on the earth wet with rain and blood, in the dark wheat, at the place where Joseph now passes, at four o’clock in the morning, whistling and gaily whipping his horse, who is doing the service of the Nivelles mail coach. Chapter 16. Quot libras in duce? The battle of Waterloo is an enigma. It is as obscure for those who won it as for those who lost it. For Napoleon, it is a panic. Blücher sees nothing; Wellington understands nothing. Look at the reports. The bulletins are confused, the commentaries are muddled. Some stammer, others stammer. Jomini divides the Battle of Waterloo into four moments; Muffling cuts it into three vicissitudes; Charras, although on some points we have a different appreciation than he, alone grasped with his proud eye the characteristic features of this catastrophe of human genius grappling with divine chance. All other historians have a certain dazzling, and in this dazzling they grope. A dazzling day, indeed, the collapse of the military monarchy which, to the great astonishment of the kings, has dragged down all the kingdoms, the fall of force, the rout of war. In this event, imbued with superhuman necessity, the part of men is nothing. To take Waterloo away from Wellington and Blücher, is that to take something away from England and Germany? No. Neither this illustrious England nor this august Germany are in question in the problem of Waterloo. Thank heavens, peoples are great outside the lugubrious adventures of the sword. Neither Germany, nor England, nor France, can be sheathed. In this age where Waterloo is only a clatter of sabers, above Blücher, Germany to Goethe and above Wellington, England to Byron. A vast rising of ideas is peculiar to our century, and in this dawn England and Germany have their magnificent glow. They are majestic because of what they think. The elevation of level that they bring to civilization is intrinsic to them; it comes from themselves, and not from an accident. What aggrandizement they have in the nineteenth century does not have Waterloo as its source. Only barbarian peoples have sudden floods after a victory. It is the passing vanity of torrents swollen by a storm. Civilized peoples, especially in our time , do not rise or fall by the good or bad fortune of a captain. Their specific weight in the human race results from something more than a fight. Their honor, thank God, their dignity, their light, their genius, are not numbers that heroes and conquerors, those gamblers, can place in the lottery of battles. Often a battle lost, progress won. Less glory, more freedom. The drum falls silent, reason speaks. It’s a game of who loses wins. Let us therefore speak of Waterloo coolly on both sides. Let us give to chance what is chance and to God what is God’s. What is Waterloo? A victory? No. A quine. A quine won by Europe, paid for by France. It wasn’t much use putting a lion there. Waterloo, moreover, is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and Wellington. They are not enemies, they are opposites. Never has God, who delights in antitheses, made a more striking contrast and a more extraordinary confrontation. On the one hand, precision, foresight, geometry, prudence, assured retreat, careful reserves, stubborn composure, imperturbable method, strategy that takes advantage of the terrain, tactics that balance the battalions, carnage drawn to the line, warfare regulated by the clock , nothing voluntarily left to chance, the old classical courage , absolute correctness; on the other, intuition, divination, military strangeness, superhuman instinct, the blazing glance, something that looks like an eagle and strikes like lightning, a prodigious art in a disdainful impetuosity, all the mysteries of a profound soul, the association with destiny, the river, the plain, the forest, the hill, summoned and in some way forced to obey, the despot going so far as to tyrannize the battlefield, faith in the star mixed with strategic science, enlarging it, but troubling it. Wellington was the Barème of war, Napoleon was its Michelangelo; and this time genius was vanquished by calculation. Both sides were waiting for someone. It was the exact calculator who succeeded. Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not come. Wellington was waiting for Blücher; he came. Wellington is classical war taking its revenge. Bonaparte, at its dawn, had encountered it in Italy, and superbly beaten it. The old owl had fled before the young vulture. The old tactic had been not only struck down, but scandalized. What was this twenty-six-year-old Corsican, what did this splendid ignoramus mean who, with everything against him, nothing for him, without food, without ammunition, without cannons, without shoes, almost without an army, with a handful of men against masses, rushed into allied Europe, and absurdly won victories in the impossible? Where did this thunderous madman come from who, almost without taking a breath, and with the same set of fighters in hand, pulverized one after the other the five armies of the Emperor of Germany, toppling Beaulieu over Alvinzi, Wurmser over Beaulieu, Mélas over Wurmser, Mack over Mélas? What was this newcomer to the war with the effrontery of a star? The military academic school excommunicated him as it gave way. Hence an implacable resentment of the old Caesarism against the new, of the correct saber against the flaming sword, and of the chessboard against genius. On June 18, 1815, this resentment had the last word, and below Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Marengo, Arcola, it wrote: Waterloo. Triumph of the mediocre, gentle to the majorities. Fate consented to this irony. In his decline, Napoleon found himself before him again young Wurmser. To have Wurmser indeed, it is enough to whiten Wellington’s hair . Waterloo is a battle of the first order won by a captain of the second. What must be admired in the battle of Waterloo is England, it is English firmness, it is English resolution, it is English blood ; what England had of superb there, with all due respect, is itself. It’s not his captain, it’s his army. Wellington, strangely ungrateful, declares in a letter to Lord Bathurst that his army, the army that fought on June 18, 1815, was a detestable army. What does that dark muddle of bones buried under the furrows of Waterloo think of it? England has been too modest with regard to Wellington. To make Wellington so great is to make England small. Wellington is only a hero like any other. These Grey Scots, these Horseguards, these regiments of Maitland and Mitchell, this infantry of Pack and Kempt, this cavalry of Ponsonby and Somerset, these Highlanders playing the pibroch under grapeshot, these battalions of Rylandt, these fresh recruits who barely knew how to handle the musket standing up to the old bands of Essling and Rivoli, that is what is great. Wellington was tenacious, that was his merit, and we do not deny it, but the least of his infantrymen and cavalrymen was just as solid as he. The iron soldier is worth the iron duke. As for us, all our glorification goes to the English soldier, to the English army , to the English people. If there is a trophy, it is to England that the trophy is due. The Waterloo column would be more just if instead of the figure of a man, it raised in the clouds the statue of a people. But this great England will be irritated by what we say here. She still has, after her 1688 and our 1789, the feudal illusion. She believes in heredity and hierarchy. This people, whom no one surpasses in power and glory, esteems itself as a nation, not as a people. As a people, it willingly subordinates itself and takes a lord for a head. Workman, he lets himself be disdained; soldier, he lets himself be beaten. We remember that at the Battle of Inkermann a sergeant who, it seems, had saved the army, could not be mentioned by Lord Raglan, the English military hierarchy not allowing any hero below the rank of officer to be cited in a report . What we admire above all, in an encounter of the type of Waterloo, is the prodigious skill of chance. Night rain, Hougomont wall, sunken road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the cannon, Napoleon’s guide who deceives him, Bülow’s guide who lights his way; This whole cataclysm is marvelously conducted. In total, let us say, there was more massacre at Waterloo than battle. Of all pitched battles, Waterloo has the shortest front on such a number of combatants. Napoleon, three-quarters of a league, Wellington, half a league; seventy-two thousand combatants on each side. From this depth came the carnage. This calculation has been made and this proportion established: Loss of men: at Austerlitz, French, fourteen percent; Russians, thirty percent, Austrians, forty-four percent. At Wagram, French, thirteen percent ; Austrians, fourteen. At Borodino, French, thirty-seven percent ; Russians, forty-four. At Bautzen, French, thirteen percent; Russians and Prussians, fourteen. At Waterloo, French, fifty-six percent; Allies, thirty-one. Total for Waterloo, forty-one percent. One hundred and forty-four thousand combatants; sixty thousand dead. The field of Waterloo today has the calm that belongs to the earth, impassive support of man, and it resembles all plains. At night, however, a kind of visionary mist emanates from it, and if some traveler walks there, if he looks, if he listens, if he dreams like Virgil before the fatal plains of Philippi, the hallucination of the catastrophe seizes him. The frightening June 18th lives again; the false monumental hill disappears, this nondescript lion dissipates, the battlefield resumes its reality; lines of infantry undulate across the plain, furious gallops cross the horizon! The terrified dreamer sees the flash of sabers, the spark of bayonets, the blaze of bombs, the monstrous crisscrossing of thunder; he hears, like a death rattle in the depths of a tomb, the vague clamor of the phantom battle; these shadows are the grenadiers; these gleams are the cuirassiers; this skeleton is Napoleon; this skeleton is Wellington; all this is no more and still clashes and fights; and the ravines turn purple, and the trees tremble, and there is fury even in the clouds, and, in the darkness, all these fierce heights, Mont-Saint-Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, Plancenoit, appear confusedly crowned with whirlwinds of specters exterminating each other. Chapter 17. Should we find Waterloo good? There exists a very respectable liberal school which does not hate Waterloo. We are not of it. For us, Waterloo is only the stupefied date of liberty. That such an eagle should emerge from such an egg is certainly unexpected. Waterloo, if we take the culminating point of view of the question, is intentionally a counter-revolutionary victory. It is Europe against France, it is Petersburg, Berlin and Vienna against Paris, it is the status quo against the initiative, it is July 14, 1789 attacked through March 20, 1815, it is the commotion of the monarchies against the indomitable French uprising. To finally extinguish this vast people in eruption for twenty-six years, such was the dream. Solidarity of the Brunswicks, the Nassaus, the Romanoffs, the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs, with the Bourbons. Waterloo carries divine right on its back. It is true that, the empire having been despotic, royalty, by the natural reaction of things, had necessarily to be liberal, and that a constitutional order reluctantly emerged from Waterloo, to the great regret of the victors. This is because the revolution cannot be truly defeated, and that being providential and absolutely fatal, it always reappears, before Waterloo, in Bonaparte throwing down the old thrones, after Waterloo, in Louis XVIII granting and submitting to the Charter. Bonaparte puts a postilion on the throne of Naples and a sergeant on the throne of Sweden, using inequality to demonstrate equality; Louis XVIII at Saint-Ouen countersigns the declaration of the rights of man. Do you want to understand what revolution is, call it Progress; and if you want to understand what progress is, call it Tomorrow. Tomorrow irresistibly does its work, and it does it today. It always arrives at its goal, strangely enough. It uses Wellington to make Foy, who was only a soldier, an orator. Foy falls at Hougomont and rises again at the tribune. Thus proceeds progress. No bad tool for this worker. He adapts to his divine work, without being disconcerted, the man who has spanned the Alps, and the good old tottering invalid of Father Élysée. He uses the gout patient as the conqueror; the conqueror without, the gout patient within. Waterloo, by cutting short the demolition of European thrones by the sword, had no other effect than to continue the revolutionary work on another side. The sabreurs have finished, it is the turn of the thinkers. The century that Waterloo wanted to stop marched on it and continued on its way. This sinister victory was vanquished by liberty. In short, and incontestably, what triumphed at Waterloo, what smiled behind Wellington, what brought him all the marshal’s batons of Europe, including, it is said, the marshal’s baton of France, what joyfully rolled the wheelbarrows of earth full of bones to raise the lion’s mound, what triumphantly wrote on this pedestal this date: June 18, 1815, what encouraged Blücher sabringing the rout, what from the top of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean leaned over France as if over prey, was the counter-revolution. It was the counter-revolution that whispered this infamous word: dismemberment. Arriving in Paris, it saw the crater up close, it felt that ash burning its feet, and it changed its mind. She has returned to the stammering of a charter. Let us see in Waterloo only what is in Waterloo. No intentional freedom. The counter-revolution was involuntarily liberal, just as, by a corresponding phenomenon, Napoleon was involuntarily revolutionary. On June 18, 1815, Robespierre was unseated on horseback . Chapter 18. Resurgence of divine right. End of the dictatorship. An entire system of Europe collapsed. The empire sank into a shadow resembling that of the expiring Roman world. We live again from the abyss as in the time of the barbarians. Only the barbarism of 1815, which must be called by its nickname, the counter-revolution, had little breath, ran out of steam quickly, and remained short. The empire, let us admit it, was mourned, and mourned by heroic eyes . If glory is in the sword made scepter, the empire had been glory itself. It had spread over the earth all the light that tyranny can give; dark light. Let us say more: obscure light. Compared to true day, it is night. This disappearance of night had the effect of an eclipse. Louis XVIII returned to Paris. The round dances of July 8 erased the enthusiasms of March 20. The Corsican became the antithesis of the Béarnais. The flag on the dome of the Tuileries was white. Exile reigned. Hartwell’s fir table took its place before Louis XIV’s fleur-de-lis armchair. People spoke of Bouvines and Fontenoy as if they were yesterday, Austerlitz having aged. The altar and the throne fraternized majestically. One of the most undisputed forms of social salvation in the nineteenth century was established in France and on the continent. Europe took the white cockade. Trestaillon was famous. The motto non pluribus impar reappeared in rays of stone representing a sun on the facade of the barracks of the Quai d’Orsay. Where there had been an imperial guard, there was a red house. The Arc du Carrousel, laden with badly worn victories , out of place in these novelties, perhaps a little ashamed of Marengo and Arcole, got out of trouble with the statue of the Duke of Angoulême. The cemetery of the Madeleine, the fearsome common grave of 93, was covered with marble and jasper, the bones of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette being in this dust. In the moat of Vincennes, A sepulchral cippus emerged from the ground, recalling that the Duke of Enghien had died in the very month that Napoleon had been crowned. Pope Pius VII, who had performed this coronation very close to this death, calmly blessed the fall as he had blessed the elevation. There was at Schoenbrunn a little four-year-old shadow whom it was seditious to call the King of Rome. And these things were done, and these kings resumed their thrones, and the master of Europe was put in a cage, and the old regime became the new, and all the shadow and all the light of the earth changed places, because, in the afternoon of a summer day, a shepherd said to a Prussian in a wood: pass this way and not that way! This 1815 was a sort of gloomy April. The old unhealthy and poisonous realities were covered with new appearances. Lies married 1789, divine right masked itself with a charter, fictions became constitutional, prejudices, superstitions and ulterior motives, with Article 14 at their heart, were varnished with liberalism. Change of skin of the serpents. Man had been both enlarged and diminished by Napoleon. The ideal, under this reign of splendid matter, had received the strange name of ideology. Grave imprudence of a great man, to mock the future. The people, however, this cannon fodder so in love with the gunner, sought him with their eyes. Where is he? What is he doing? Napoleon is dead, said a passerby to an invalid of Marengo and Waterloo. — Him dead! cried this soldier, you know him well! Imaginations deified this devastated man. The depths of Europe, after Waterloo, were gloomy. Something enormous remained empty for a long time by the disappearance of Napoleon. Kings stepped into this void. Old Europe took advantage of it to reform itself. There was a Holy Alliance. Beautiful Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo had said in advance. In the presence and facing this ancient Europe remade, the outlines of a new France were sketched out. The future, mocked by the emperor, made its entrance. He had on his brow this star, Liberty. The ardent eyes of the younger generations turned towards him. Strangely enough, people fell in love at the same time with this future, Liberty, and with this past, Napoleon. Defeat had magnified the vanquished. Bonaparte fallen seemed taller than Napoleon standing. Those who had triumphed were afraid. England had him guarded by Hudson Lowe and France had him watched by Montchenu. His crossed arms became the anxiety of thrones. Alexander called him: my insomnia. This terror came from the amount of revolution he had within him. This is what explains and excuses Bonapartist liberalism. This phantom made the old world tremble . Kings reigned uneasily, with the rock of Saint Helena on the horizon. While Napoleon lay dying at Longwood, the sixty thousand men who fell on the field of Waterloo rotted quietly, and something of their peace spread throughout the world. The Congress of Vienna made the treaties of 1815 of them, and Europe called this the Restoration. That is what Waterloo is. But what does it matter to infinity? All this storm, all this cloud, this war, then this peace, all this shadow, did not for a moment trouble the light of the immense eye before which an aphid leaping from one blade of grass to another equals the eagle flying from steeple to steeple to the towers of Notre-Dame. Chapter 19. The Battlefield at Night. Let us return, as this book requires, to that fatal battlefield . On June 18, 1815, there was a full moon. This brightness favored Blücher’s fierce pursuit , revealed the traces of the fugitives, delivered this disastrous mass to the relentless Prussian cavalry, and aided in the massacre. There are sometimes in catastrophes these tragic complacency of the night. After the last cannon shot was fired, the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean remained deserted. The English occupied the French camp, this is the usual observation of victory; sleeping in the bed of the vanquished. They established their bivouac beyond Rossomme. The Prussians, released on the rout, pushed forward. Wellington went to the village of Waterloo to write his report to Lord Bathurst. If ever the sic vos non vobis was applicable, it is certainly to this village of Waterloo. Waterloo did nothing, and remained half a league from the action. Mont-Saint-Jean was cannonaded, Hougomont was burned, Papelotte was burned, Plancenoit was burned, La Haie-Sainte was stormed, La Belle-Alliance saw the burning of the two victors; we hardly know these names, and Waterloo, which did not work in the battle, has all the honor. We are not among those who flatter war; When the opportunity presents itself, we tell him the truth. War has dreadful beauties that we have not hidden; it also has, let us admit, some ugliness. One of the most surprising is the prompt stripping of the dead after victory. The dawn that follows a battle always rises over naked corpses. Who does this? Who thus defiles the triumph? What is this hideous furtive hand that slips into the pocket of victory? Who are these rogues carrying out their deeds behind the glory? Some philosophers, Voltaire among others, affirm that it is precisely these people who have made glory. They are the same people, they say, there is no replacement, those who are standing plunder those who are on the ground. The hero of the day is the vampire of the night. One has the right, after all, to rob a corpse of which one is the author. As for us, we do not believe it. Gathering laurels and stealing a dead man’s shoes seems impossible to us with the same hand. What is certain is that, usually, after the victors come the thieves. But let us put the soldier, especially the contemporary soldier, out of the question. Every army has a tail, and that is what must be accused. Bat-like beings , half brigands and half servants, all the kinds of vespertilio engendered by this twilight called war, wearers of uniforms who do not fight, feigned sick people, fearsome cripples, shady canteen keepers trotting, sometimes with their wives, on small carts and stealing what they sell, beggars offering themselves as guides to the officers, louts, marauders, the marching armies of old—we are not speaking of the present time—dragged all this along, so much so that, in the special language , they were called stragglers. No army or nation was responsible for these beings; they spoke Italian and followed the Germans; they spoke French and followed the English. It was by one of these wretches, a Spanish straggler who spoke French, that the Marquis de Fervacques, deceived by his Picard gibberish, and taking him for one of us, was killed as a traitor and robbed on the very battlefield , on the night following the victory of Cerisoles. From marauding was born the marauder. The detestable maxim: to live on the enemy, produced this leprosy, which only strong discipline could cure. There are reputations that deceive; we do not always know why certain generals, great ones moreover, were so popular. Turenne was adored by his soldiers because he tolerated pillaging; permitted evil is part of kindness; Turenne was so good that he allowed the Palatinate to be set ablaze and bloodied. One saw following the armies fewer or more marauders according to the more or less severe the leader was. Hoche and Marceau had no stragglers; Wellington, we willingly give him this credit, had few. However, on the night of June 18-19, the dead were stripped. Wellington was rigid; orders were given to shoot anyone caught in the act; but plunder is tenacious. The marauders were flying in one corner of the battlefield while they were being shot in the other. The moon was ominous over this plain. Around midnight, a man was prowling, or rather crawling, on the side of the sunken road of Ohain. He was, to all appearances, one of those we have just characterized, neither English nor French, neither peasant nor soldier, less man than ghoul, attracted by the scent of the dead, having theft as his victory, coming to rob Waterloo. He was dressed in a blouse that was a bit like a greatcoat, he was restless and audacious, he walked ahead and looked behind him. Who was this man? The night probably knew more about him than the day. He had no bag, but evidently large pockets under his greatcoat. From time to time, he stopped, examined the plain around him as if to see if he was being watched, leaned down suddenly, disturbed something silent and motionless on the ground, then straightened up and slipped away. His gliding, his attitudes, his quick and mysterious gesture made him resemble those twilight larvae that haunt ruins and that ancient Norman legends call Alleurs. Certain nocturnal waders make these silhouettes in the marshes. A gaze that had carefully probed all this mist might have noticed, at some distance, stopped and as if hidden behind the hovel that borders the Nivelles causeway at the corner of the road from Mont-Saint-Jean to Braine-l’Alleud, a sort of small tin keeper’s van with a tarred wicker headdress, harnessed to a hungry nag grazing nettles through its bit, and in this van a kind of woman sitting on chests and packages. Perhaps there was a link between this van and this prowler. The darkness was serene. Not a cloud above its zenith. What does it matter that the earth is red, the moon remains white. Such are the indifferences of the sky. In the meadows, tree branches broken by grapeshot but not fallen and held by the bark swayed gently in the night wind. A breath, almost a respiration, stirred the undergrowth. There were shivers in the grass that resembled the departure of souls. One could vaguely hear in the distance the patrols and patrols of the English camp coming and going. Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte continued to burn, forming, one to the west, the other to the east, two large flames to which was attached, like an untied ruby necklace with two carbuncles at its ends, the line of fires of the English bivouac spread out in an immense semicircle on the hills of the horizon. We have spoken of the catastrophe on the road to Ohain. What this death had been for so many brave men, the heart is terrified to think of it. If anything is terrible, if there is a reality that surpasses dreams, it is this: to live, to see the sun, to be in full possession of virile strength, to have health and joy, to laugh valiantly, to run toward a glory that one has before oneself, dazzling, to feel in one’s chest a lung that breathes, a heart that beats, a will that reasons, to speak, to think, to hope, to love, to have a mother, to have a wife, to have children, to have light, and suddenly, in the time of a cry, in less than a minute, to collapse into an abyss, to fall, to roll, to crush, to be crushed, to see ears of wheat, flowers, leaves, branches, to be unable to hold on to anything, to feel one’s saber useless, men beneath oneself, horses upon oneself, to struggle in vain, one’s bones broken by some kick in the darkness, to feel a heel that makes one’s eyes spring out, to bite with rage on horseshoes, to suffocate, scream, writhe, be down there, and say to yourself: just now I was alive! Where this lamentable disaster had groaned, all was now silent. The hollow of the road was filled with horses and riders inextricably piled up. A terrible tangle. There was no had more embankment. The corpses leveled the road with the plain and came flush with the edge like a well-measured bushel of barley. A pile of dead in the upper part, a river of blood in the lower part; such was this road on the evening of June 18, 1815. The blood flowed as far as the Nivelles roadway and was extracted there in a large pool in front of the felled trees that blocked the roadway, at a place that is still shown. It was, as you will remember, at the opposite point, towards the Genappe roadway , that the collapse of the cuirassiers had taken place. The thickness of the corpses was proportional to the depth of the sunken road. Towards the middle, at the place where it became full, where Delord’s division had passed, the layer of dead was thinning. The night prowler, whom we have just given the reader a glimpse of, was going in that direction. He was ferreting out this immense tomb. He watched. He was passing some hideous parade of the dead. He was walking with his feet in blood. Suddenly he stopped. A few steps in front of him, in the sunken road, at the point where the heap of the dead ended, from beneath this mass of men and horses, emerged an open hand, lit by the moon. This hand had on its finger something that shone, and which was a gold ring. The man bent down, remained crouching for a moment, and when he got up, there was no longer any ring on this hand. He did not exactly get up; he remained in a wild and frightened attitude, turning his back on the pile of dead, scanning the horizon, on his knees, the whole front of his body resting on his two index fingers pressed to the ground, his head watching over the edge of the sunken road. The four legs of the jackal are suited to certain actions. Then, making up his mind, he stood up. At that moment he gave a start. He felt that someone was holding him from behind. He turned around; it was the open hand that had closed and seized the hem of his greatcoat. An honest man would have been afraid. The latter began to laugh. “Look,” he said, “it’s only the dead man. I prefer a ghost to a gendarme. ” However, the hand weakened and let go. The effort quickly exhausts itself in the “Ah!” resumed the prowler, “is this dead man alive? Let’s see.” He bent down again, searched the pile, moved aside whatever was in the way, seized the hand, grasped the arm, freed the head, pulled the body, and a few moments later he was dragging into the shadow of the sunken road an inanimate man, at least unconscious. It was a cuirassier, an officer, even an officer of some rank; A large gold epaulette protruded from under the breastplate; this officer no longer had a helmet. A furious saber blow scarred his face where only blood was visible. Besides , it did not seem that he had a broken limb, and by some happy chance, if that word is possible here, the dead had braced themselves above him so as to protect him from being crushed. His eyes were closed. He had on his breastplate the silver cross of the Legion of Honor. The prowler tore off this cross which disappeared into one of the chasms he had under his greatcoat. After which, he felt the officer’s fob, felt a watch there and took it. Then he searched the waistcoat, found a purse and pocketed it. As he was at this stage of the assistance he was giving to this dying man, the officer opened his eyes. “Thank you,” he said weakly. The abruptness of the movements of the man who wielded it, the coolness of the night, the air he breathed freely, had roused him from his lethargy. The prowler did not reply. He raised his head. Footsteps could be heard on the plain; probably some patrol was approaching. The officer murmured, for there was still agony in his voice: “Who won the battle? ” “The English,” replied the prowler. The officer continued: “Look in my pockets. You will find a purse and a watch there.” Take them. It was already done. The ranger performed the requested semblance, and said: “There is nothing. ” “I was robbed,” the officer continued; “I am sorry. It would have been for you.” The footsteps of the patrol became more and more distinct. “Here they come,” said the ranger, making the movement of a man leaving. The officer, raising his arm with difficulty, held him back: “You saved my life. Who are you?” The ranger answered quickly and quietly: “I was like you in the French army. I must leave you. If I were caught, I would be shot. I saved your life. Now get out of this trouble. ” “What is your rank?” “Sergeant. ” “What is your name? ” “Thénardier. ” “I will not forget that name,” said the officer. And you, remember mine. My name is Pontmercy. Book Two–The Ship The Orion Chapter 20. Number 24601 becomes number 9430. Jean Valjean had been recaptured. We will be grateful if we pass quickly over painful details. We limit ourselves to transcribing two snippets published by the newspapers of the time, a few months after the surprising events that took place at Montreuil-sur-Mer. These articles are a little brief. It will be remembered that at that time there was no Gazette des Tribunaux. We borrow the first from the Drapeau blanc. It is dated July 25, 1823: A district of Pas-de-Calais has just been the scene of an unusual event. A man from outside the department and named Mr. Madeleine had revived for some years, thanks to new processes , an old local industry, the manufacture of jet and black glass beads. He had made his fortune there, and, let us say, that of the district. In recognition of his services, he had been appointed mayor. The police discovered that this Mr. Madeleine was none other than a former convict who had run away from prison, convicted in 1796 for theft, and named Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean was reinstated in the penal colony. It seems that before his arrest he had managed to withdraw from Mr. Laffitte’s house a sum of more than half a million, which he had placed there, and which he had, moreover , very legitimately, it is said, earned in his business. It has not been possible to find out where Jean Valjean had hidden this sum since his return to the penal colony of Toulon. The second article, a little more detailed, is taken from the Journal de Paris, of the same date. A former freed convict, named Jean Valjean, has just appeared before the Assize Court of Var in circumstances calculated to attract attention. This scoundrel had managed to elude the vigilance of the police; He had changed his name and had managed to get himself appointed mayor of one of our small towns in the North. He had established a fairly substantial business in this town. He was finally unmasked and arrested, thanks to the tireless zeal of the public prosecutor. His concubine was a public girl who died of seizure at the time of his arrest. This wretch, who is endowed with Herculean strength, had found a way to escape; but, three or four days after his escape, the police caught him again, in Paris itself, at the moment when he was getting into one of those small carriages which make the journey from the capital to the village of Montfermeil (Seine-et-Oise). It is said that he had taken advantage of the interval of these three or four days of freedom to recover a considerable sum of money which he had invested with one of our principal bankers. This sum is estimated at six or seven hundred thousand francs. According to the indictment, he buried it in a place known only to him and it has not been seized. In any case, the man named Jean Valjean has just been brought before the Assize Court of the Var department accused of an armed highway robbery, about eight years, on the person of one of those honest children who, as the patriarch of Ferney said in immortal verses: …From Savoy they arrive every year And whose hand lightly wipes These long canals clogged with soot. This bandit has given up defending himself. It has been established, by the skillful and eloquent organ of the public prosecutor, that the theft was committed in complicity, and that Jean Valjean was part of a band of thieves in the South. Consequently, Jean Valjean, declared guilty, was sentenced to death. This criminal had refused to appeal to the Court of Cassation. The king, in his inexhaustible clemency, deigned to commute his sentence to that of hard labor for life. Jean Valjean was immediately sent to the penal colony of Toulon. It has not been forgotten that Jean Valjean had religious habits at Montreuil-sur-Mer. Some newspapers, among others the Constitutionnel, presented this commutation as a triumph of the priest party. Jean Valjean changed his number in the penal colony. He was called 9430. Moreover, let us say it so as not to return to it, with Mr. Madeleine the prosperity of Montreuil-sur-Mer disappeared; everything he had foreseen in his night of fever and hesitation came true; he was one less, in fact the soul one less. After his fall, there took place in Montreuil-sur-Mer that selfish sharing of great fallen existences, that fatal dismemberment of flourishing things which is accomplished every day obscurely in the human community and which history has noted only once, because it took place after the death of Alexander. Lieutenants crowned themselves kings; foremen improvised as manufacturers. Envious rivalries arose. Mr. Madeleine’s vast workshops were closed; The buildings fell into ruin, the workers dispersed. Some left the country, others left the trade. Everything was now done on a small scale, instead of on a large scale; for profit, instead of for good. No center; competition everywhere, and relentlessness. Mr. Madeleine dominated everything, and directed. With him fallen, everyone pulled to their own ends; the spirit of struggle succeeded the spirit of organization, harshness replaced cordiality, hatred of one against the other the benevolence of the founder for all; the threads tied by Mr. Madeleine became confused and broke; processes were falsified, products were debased, confidence was killed; outlets diminished, fewer orders; wages fell, workshops were idle, bankruptcy came. And then nothing left for the poor. Everything vanished. The state itself noticed that someone had been crushed somewhere. Less than four years after the decision of the Assize Court establishing in favor of the penal colony the identity of Mr. Madeleine and Jean Valjean, the costs of collecting the tax were doubled in the district of Montreuil-sur-Mer, and Mr. de Villèle made the observation from the tribune in February 1827. Chapter 21. In which we will read two verses which are perhaps from the devil. Before going further, it is appropriate to relate in some detail a singular fact which occurred around the same time in Montfermeil and which is perhaps not without coincidence with certain conjectures of the public prosecutor. There is in the region of Montfermeil a very ancient superstition, all the more curious and all the more precious because a popular superstition in the vicinity of Paris is like an aloe in Siberia. We are among those who respect everything that is in the state of a rare plant. Here then is the superstition of Montfermeil. It is believed that the devil has, from time immemorial, chosen the forest to hide his treasures. The good women affirm that it is not rare to meet, at nightfall, in the remote places of the wood, a black man, having the appearance of a carter or a woodcutter, wearing clogs, trousers and of a canvas smock, and recognizable in that instead of a cap or hat he has two immense horns on his head. This must make him recognizable indeed. This man is usually busy digging a hole. There are three ways to take advantage of this encounter. The first is to approach the man and talk to him. Then you realize that this man is simply a peasant, that he appears black because it is twilight, that he is not digging the slightest hole, but that he is cutting grass for his cows, and that what we had taken for horns is nothing other than a manure fork that he carries on his back and whose teeth, thanks to the perspective of the evening, seemed to come out of his head. You go home, and you die within the week. The second way is to watch him, wait until he has dug his hole, closed it up, and gone; then run quickly to the pit, reopen it, and take the treasure that the black man has necessarily deposited there. In this case, one dies within a month. Finally , the third way is not to speak to the black man, not to look at him, and to run away as fast as one can. One dies within a year. As the three ways have their drawbacks, the second, which offers at least some advantages, among others that of possessing a treasure, even if only for a month, is the most generally adopted. Bold men, tempted by all chances, have therefore, quite often, it is said, reopened the holes dug by the black man and tried to rob the devil. It seems that the operation is mediocre. At least,
if we are to believe tradition and in particular the two enigmatic verses in barbaric Latin left on this subject by a wicked Norman monk, a bit of a sorcerer, called Tryphon. This Tryphon is buried in the abbey of Saint-Georges de Bocherville near Rouen, and toads are born on his tomb. So enormous efforts are made, these graves are usually very deep, they sweat, they dig, they work all night, because it is at night that this is done, they wet their shirts, they burn their candles, they chip their pickaxes, and when they finally reach the bottom of the hole, when they lay their hands on the treasure, what do they find? What is the devil’s treasure? A penny, sometimes a crown, a stone, a skeleton, a bleeding corpse, sometimes a ghost folded in four like a sheet of paper in a wallet, sometimes nothing. This is what Trypho’s verses seem to announce to the curious indiscreet : Fodit, et in fossa thesauros condit opaca, As, nummos, lapides, cadaver, simulacre, nihilque. It seems that nowadays one also finds there, sometimes a powder flask with bullets, sometimes an old, greasy and scorched deck of cards which was evidently used by the devils. Trypho does not record these last two finds, since Trypho lived in the twelfth century and it does not seem that the devil had the idea to invent gunpowder before Roger Bacon or cards before Charles VI. Besides, if one plays with these cards, one is sure to lose everything one owns; and as for the powder which is in the flask, it has the property of making your gun explode in your face. Now, very soon after the time when it seemed to the public prosecutor that the freed convict Jean Valjean, during his escape of a few days, had prowled around Montfermeil, it was noticed in this same village that a certain old road-mender named Boulatruelle had some bearing in the woods. It was believed that it was known in the country that this Boulatruelle had been in the penal colony; he was subject to certain police surveillance, and, as he could find no work anywhere, the administration employed him at a discount as a road-mender on the side road from Gagny to Lagny. This Boulatruelle was a man viewed askance by the locals, too respectful, too humble, quick to take off his cap for everyone, trembling and smiling in front of the gendarmes, probably affiliated with gangs , it was said, suspected of an ambush at the corner of the thickets at nightfall . He had only this going for him: he was a drunkard. Here is what we thought we had noticed: For some time now, Boulatruelle had been leaving his work of paving and maintaining the road very early and going into the forest with his pickaxe. He was encountered towards evening in the most deserted clearings, in the wildest thickets, seeming to be looking for something, sometimes digging holes. The women who passed by took him at first for Beelzebub, then they recognized Boulatruelle, and were hardly more reassured. These encounters seemed to greatly annoy Boulatruelle. It was obvious that he was trying to hide, and that there was a mystery in what he was doing. It was said in the village: “It’s clear that the devil has made some appearance. Boulatruelle saw him and is looking for him. In fact, he’s bound to grab Lucifer’s loot. ” The Voltaireans added: “Will it be Boulatruelle who catches the devil, or the devil who catches Boulatruelle?” The old women made many signs of the cross. However, Boulatruelle’s antics in the woods ceased, and he regularly resumed his work as a road mender. They talked about something else. A few people, however, remained curious, thinking that there was probably in this, not the fabulous treasures of the legend, but some good windfall, more serious and more tangible than the devil’s banknotes, and whose secret the road mender had doubtless half discovered. The most intrigued were the schoolmaster and the tavern keeper Thénardier, who was everyone’s friend and had not disdained to become friends with Boulatruelle. “He’s been in the galleys?” said Thénardier. “Oh, my God! We don’t know who is there, or who will be there.” One evening the schoolmaster affirmed that once upon a time the courts would have inquired into what Boulatruelle was doing in the woods, and that he would have had to talk, and that they would have put him to torture if necessary, and that Boulatruelle would not have resisted, for example, the question of water. “Let’s give him the question of wine,” said Thénardier. They all sat down and made the old road-mender drink. Boulatruelle drank a great deal, and said little. He combined, with admirable art and in masterly proportion, the thirst of a glutton with the discretion of a judge. However, by dint of returning to the charge, and of bringing together and pressing the few obscure words which escaped him, here is what Thénardier and the schoolmaster believed they understood: Boulatruelle, one morning, on his way to his work at daybreak, was supposedly surprised to see in a corner of the wood, under some bushes, a shovel and a pickaxe, as one might say hidden. However, he supposedly thought that they were probably the shovel and pickaxe of Father Six-Fours, the water carrier, and he thought no more of it. But in the evening of the same day, he supposedly saw, without being able to be seen himself, being hidden by a large tree, heading from the road towards the thickest part of the wood a particular individual who was not at all from the area, and whom he, Boulatruelle, knew very well. Translation by Thénardier: a comrade from the penal colony. Boulatruelle had obstinately refused to say the name. This individual was carrying a package, something square, like a large box or a small chest. Boulatruelle was surprised. It would only be after seven or eight minutes that the idea of following the individual came to him. But it was too late, the individual was already in the thicket, night had fallen, and Boulatruelle had not been able to join him. So he had decided to observe the edge of the wood. It was moonlight. Two or three hours later, Boulatruelle had seen his individual emerge from the thicket carrying Now, no longer the small trunk-chest, but a pickaxe and a shovel. Boulatruelle had let the individual pass and had not thought of approaching him, because he had said to himself that the other was three times stronger than him, and armed with a pickaxe, and would probably knock him out upon recognizing him and seeing himself recognized. A touching effusion of two old comrades who meet again. But the shovel and the pickaxe had been a ray of light for Boulatruelle; he had run to the morning bush, and had found neither shovel nor pickaxe there. He had concluded that his individual, having entered the woods, had dug a hole with the pickaxe, had buried the chest, and had closed the hole with the shovel. Now, the chest was too small to contain a corpse, so it contained money. Hence his search. Boulatruelle had explored, probed, and ferreted out the entire forest, and searched everywhere where the earth seemed freshly disturbed. In vain. He had unearthed nothing. No one in Montfermeil thought anything more of it. There were only a few good gossips who said: Be certain that the road-mender from Gagny did not make all this trichamaque for nothing; it is certain that the devil has come. Chapter 22. That the chain of the shackle must have undergone some preparatory work to be thus broken with a hammer blow . Towards the end of October of that same year, 1823, the inhabitants of Toulon saw the ship Orion return to their port, following heavy weather and to repair some damage. It was later used in Brest as a training vessel and was then part of the Mediterranean squadron. This ship, crippled as it was, for the sea had battered it, made an impression upon entering the harbor. It carried I no longer know what flag, which earned it a standard salute of eleven cannon shots, returned by it shot for shot; total: twenty-two. It has been calculated that in salvos, royal and military courtesies, exchanges of courteous noises, etiquette signals, formalities of harbors and citadels, sunrises and sunsets saluted every day by all the fortresses and all the warships, openings and closings of gates, etc., etc., the civilized world fired gunpowder all over the world, every twenty-four hours, one hundred and fifty thousand useless cannon shots. At six francs a shot, that makes nine hundred thousand francs a day, three hundred million a year, which go up in smoke. This is only a detail. Meanwhile the poor are dying of hunger. The year 1823 was what the Restoration called the era of the Spanish Civil War. This war contained many events in one, and many singularities. A big family affair for the House of Bourbon; the branch of France helping and protecting the branch of Madrid, that is to say, making an act of primogeniture; an apparent return to our national traditions complicated by servitude and subjection to the northern cabinets; Mr. the Duke of Angoulême, nicknamed by the liberal papers the hero of Andujar, compressing, in a triumphant attitude somewhat thwarted by his peaceful air, the old and very real terrorism of the Holy Office grappling with the chimerical terrorism of the liberals; the sans-culottes resurrected to the great fright of the dowagers under the name of descamisados; monarchism obstructing progress called anarchy; the theories of 89 abruptly interrupted in the undermining; a European holà called to the French idea making its world tour; alongside the son of France Generalissimo, the Prince of Carignan, since Charles-Albert, enlisting in this crusade of kings against the peoples as a volunteer with red wool grenadier epaulettes ; the soldiers of the empire returning to the campaign, but after eight years of rest, aged, sad, and under the white cockade; the tricolor flag waved abroad by a heroic handful of French as the white flag had been at Coblenz thirty years before; the monks mixed with our troops; the spirit of liberty and novelty brought to reason by bayonets; principles crushed by cannon fire; France undoing by its weapons what it had done by its spirit; moreover, the enemy leaders sold, the soldiers hesitant, the cities besieged by millions; no military perils and yet possible explosions, as in any surprised and invaded mine; little blood shed, little honor won, shame for a few, glory for no one; such was this war, waged by princes who descended from Louis XIV and conducted by generals who came from Napoleon. It had the sad fate of recalling neither the great war nor great politics. Some feats of arms were serious; the capture of the Trocadéro, among others, was a fine military action; but in short, we repeat, the trumpets of this war give off a cracked sound, the whole thing was suspect, history approves of France in its difficulty in accepting this false triumph. It seemed obvious that certain Spanish officers in charge of the resistance gave in too easily, the idea of corruption emerged from the victory; it seemed that the generals had been won rather than the battles, and the victorious soldier returned humiliated. A diminishing war indeed where one could read Bank of France in the folds of the flag. Soldiers of the war of 1808, on which Saragossa had formidably collapsed, frowned in 1823 at the easy opening of the citadels, and began to regret Palafox. It is the mood of France to prefer having Rostopchine before it rather than Ballesteros. From an even more serious point of view, and one which should also be emphasized, this war, which offended the military spirit in France, outraged the democratic spirit. It was an enterprise of enslavement. In this campaign, the goal of the French soldier, son of democracy, was the conquest of a yoke for others. A hideous misinterpretation. France is made to awaken the soul of the people, not to stifle it. Since 1792, all the revolutions of Europe have been the French Revolution; liberty shines from France. This is a solar fact. Blind man who does not see it! It was Bonaparte who said so. The war of 1823, an attack on the generous Spanish nation, was therefore at the same time an attack on the French Revolution. This monstrous act of violence was committed by France; by force; for, apart from wars of liberation, everything that armies do, they do by force. The word passive obedience indicates this. An army is a strange masterpiece of combination where strength results from an enormous amount of impotence. This explains the war, waged by humanity against humanity in spite of humanity. As for the Bourbons, the war of 1823 was fatal to them. They took it for a success. They did not see the danger of killing an idea by an order. They were mistaken in their naivety to the point of introducing into their establishment as an element of force the immense weakening of a crime. The spirit of ambush entered their policy. 1830 germinated in 1823. The Spanish campaign became in their councils an argument for coups de force and for adventures of divine right. France, having reestablished el rey neto in Spain, could well reestablish the absolute king at home. They fell into the terrible error of mistaking the obedience of the soldier for the consent of the nation. This confidence loses thrones. We must not fall asleep, neither in the shade of a manchineel tree nor in the shade of an army. Let us return to the ship the Orion. During the operations of the army commanded by the Prince-Generalissimo, a squadron was cruising in the Mediterranean. We have just said that the Orion was part of this squadron and that it was brought back by events of the sea in the port of Toulon. The presence of a warship in a port has something that calls to mind and occupies the crowd. It is that it is grand, and the crowd loves what is grand. A ship of the line is one of the most magnificent encounters that the genius of man has with the power of nature. A ship of the line is composed at once of what is heaviest and what is lightest, because it deals at the same time with the three forms of substance, the solid, the liquid, the fluid, and it must fight against all three. It has eleven iron claws to grasp the granite at the bottom of the sea, and more wings and more antennae than the bigaille to catch the wind in the clouds. Its breath comes out of its one hundred and twenty cannons like enormous bugles, and proudly responds to the lightning. The ocean seeks to lead it astray in the terrifying similarity of its waves, but the ship has its soul, its compass, which advises it and always shows it the north. In the dark nights its lanterns replace the stars. Thus, against the wind it has rope and canvas, against the water wood, against the rock iron, copper and lead, against the shadow light, against the immensity a needle. If one wants to get an idea of all these gigantic proportions which together constitute the ship of the line, one has only to enter one of the covered holds, six stories high, in the ports of Brest or Toulon. The ships under construction are there under cover, so to speak. This colossal beam is a yard; this great column of wood lying on the ground as far as the eye can see is the mainmast. Taking it from its root in the hold to its summit in the cloud, it is sixty fathoms long, and three feet in diameter at its base. The English mainmast rises two hundred and seventeen feet above the waterline. The navy of our fathers used cables, ours uses chains. The simple pile of chains of a hundred-gun ship is four feet high, twenty feet wide, eight feet deep. And to make this ship, how much wood is needed? Three thousand cubic meters. It is a floating forest. And again, let it be noted, we are only talking here about the military building of forty years ago, the simple sailing ship; steam, then in its infancy, has since added new miracles to this prodigy which we call the warship. At the present time, for example, the mixed propeller ship is a surprising machine pulled by a sail area of 3,000 square meters and by a boiler with the power of 2,500 horsepower. Without speaking of these new marvels, the ancient ship of Christopher Columbus and de Ruyter is one of the great masterpieces of man. It is inexhaustible in strength as infinity is in breath, it stores the wind in its sail, it is precise in the immense diffusion of the waves, it floats and it reigns. There comes a time, however, when the gust breaks this sixty-foot-long yard like a straw, when the wind bends this four-hundred-foot-high mast like a rush, when this anchor, which weighs ten thousand pounds, twists in the mouth of the wave like a fisherman’s hook in the jaws of a pike, when these monstrous cannons utter plaintive and useless roars that the hurricane carries away into the void and into the night, when all this power and all this majesty are lost in a superior power and majesty. Every time that an immense force is deployed to end in an immense weakness, it makes men dream. From there, in the ports, the curious who abound, without themselves fully explaining why, around these marvelous machines of war and navigation. Every day, therefore, from morning to evening, the quays, the piers and the jetties of the port of Toulon were covered with a quantity of idlers and onlookers, as they say in Paris, whose business it was to watch the Orion. The Orion had been a ship that had been ill for a long time. In its previous voyages, thick layers of shells had accumulated on its hull to the point of causing it to lose half its speed; it had been put ashore the previous year to scrape off these shells, then it had put back to sea. But this scraping had damaged the hull’s bolts. Off the Balearic Islands, the planking had become tired and open, and, as the planking was not then made of sheet metal, the ship had taken on water. A violent equinoctial storm had occurred, which had smashed the port fore-pin and a gun port and damaged the foremast shroud . Following this damage, the Orion had returned to Toulon. It was anchored near the Arsenal. It was being fitted out and repaired. The hull was not damaged on the starboard side, but some planking was unnailed here and there, as was customary, to let air into the carcass. One morning the crowd watching him witnessed an accident. The crew was busy hoisting the sails. The topman in charge of taking the main starboard topsail stern lost his balance. He was seen to stagger, the crowd gathered on the quay of the Arsenal gave a cry, the head carried the body away, the man turned around the yard, his hands stretched out towards the abyss; he grabbed, as he went, the false step with one hand first, then with the other, and remained suspended there. The sea was below him at a dizzying depth. The shock of his fall had given the false step a violent swinging movement. The man went back and forth at the end of this rope like a stone in a sling. To go to his aid was to run a frightening risk. None of the sailors, all fishermen from the coast newly raised for service, dared to venture there. Meanwhile the unfortunate topman was tiring; his anguish could not be seen on his face, but his exhaustion was visible in all his limbs. His arms strained in a horrible tug. Every effort he made to climb back up only served to increase the oscillations of the false step. He did not cry out for fear of losing strength. They were only waiting for the moment when he would let go of the rope and at times all heads turned away so as not to see him pass. There are times when a piece of rope, a pole, a tree branch, is life itself, and it is a dreadful thing to see a living being detached from it and fall like a ripe fruit. Suddenly, a man was seen climbing into the rigging with the agility of a tiger cat. This man was dressed in red; he was a convict; he had a green cap; he was a convict for life. When he reached the top of the ship, a gust of wind blew his cap away and revealed a completely white head; it was not a young man. A convict, in fact, employed on board with a prison duty, had from the first moment run to the officer of the watch and, amidst the confusion and hesitation of the crew, while all the sailors trembled and recoiled, he had asked the officer for permission to risk his life to save the topman. At an affirmative sign from the officer, he had broken the chain riveted to the shackle on his foot with a hammer blow , then he had taken a rope and thrown himself into the shrouds. No one noticed at that moment how easily the chain was broken. It was only later that anyone remembered. In the blink of an eye he was on the yardarm. He stopped for a few seconds and seemed to measure it with his eyes. Those seconds, during which the wind swung the topman at the end of a line, seemed like centuries to those who were watching. Finally the convict raised his eyes to the sky and took a step forward. The crowd breathed. They saw him run along the yardarm . When he reached the point, he attached one end of the rope to it, which he had brought it, and let the other end hang down, then he began to descend with his hands along this rope, and then there was an inexplicable anguish, instead of one man hanging over the abyss, two were seen. It was like a spider coming to catch a fly; only here the spider brought life and not death. Ten thousand eyes were fixed on this group. Not a cry, not a word, the same shudder frowned on all brows. All mouths held their breath, as if they were afraid of adding the slightest breath to the wind that shook the two wretches. However, the convict had managed to collapse near the sailor. It was time; a minute more, the man, exhausted and desperate, would have let himself fall into the abyss; the convict had tied him securely with the rope to which he held with one hand while he worked with the other. Finally, he was seen to climb back up onto the yard and haul the sailor up; he held him there for a moment to let him regain his strength, then he took him in his arms and carried him, walking along the yard to the sternpost, and from there into the topmast where he left him in the hands of his comrades. At that moment, the crowd applauded; there were old galley guards who wept, the women embraced each other on the quay, and all the voices were heard crying with a sort of tender fury: The mercy of this man! He, however, had set about going back down immediately to join his task force. To arrive more quickly, he let himself slide into the rigging and began to run along a lower yard. All eyes followed him. At a certain moment, there was fear; whether he was tired, or his head was spinning, they thought they saw him hesitate and stagger. Suddenly the crowd gave a loud shout; the convict had just fallen into the sea. The fall was perilous. The frigate Algeciras was anchored near the Orion, and the poor galley slave had fallen between the two ships. There was a fear that he might slip under one or the other. Four men hastily threw themselves into a boat. The crowd encouraged them; anxiety was once again in everyone’s souls. The man had not risen to the surface. He had disappeared into the sea without a bend, as if he had fallen into a ton of oil. They sounded the water, they dived. It was in vain. They searched until evening; not even the body was found. The next day, the Toulon newspaper printed these few books:– November 17, 1823.–Yesterday, a convict, on duty aboard the Orion, while returning from rescuing a sailor, fell into the sea and drowned. His body could not be found. It is presumed that he was involved under the pilings at the Pointe de l’Arsenal. This man was imprisoned under number 9430 and his name was Jean Valjean. Book Three–Fulfillment of the promise made to the dead woman Chapter 23. The question of water at Montfermeil. Montfermeil is located between Livry and Chelles, on the southern edge of the high plateau that separates the Ourcq from the Marne. Today it is a fairly large town adorned, all year round, with plaster villas, and, on Sundays, with thriving bourgeois. In 1823, there were neither so many white houses nor so many satisfied bourgeois in Montfermeil. It was only a village in the woods. Here and there one could see a few pleasure houses from the last century, recognizable by their open air, their twisted iron balconies and those long windows whose small panes make all sorts of different greens against the white of the closed shutters . But Montfermeil was no less a village. The retired cloth merchants and the accepted holidaymakers had not yet discovered it. It was a peaceful and charming place, not on the road to anything; one lived there cheaply, that peasant life so abundant and so easy. Only water was scarce there because of the elevation of the plateau. It had to be sought quite far away. The end of the village which is on the Gagny side drew its water from the magnificent ponds there in the woods; the other end, which surrounds the church and which is on the Chelles side, only found drinking water from a small spring halfway up the hill, near the road to Chelles, about a quarter of an hour from Montfermeil. It was therefore a rather hard task for each household to supply this water. The large houses, the aristocracy, the Thénardier tavern was part of it, paid a farthing per bucket of water to a fellow whose profession was that and who earned from this Montfermeil water company about eight sous a day; but this good man only worked until seven o’clock in the evening in the summer and until five o’clock in the winter, and once night had come, once the ground-floor shutters were closed, whoever had no water to drink either went to get some or did without. This was the terror of this poor creature, whom the reader may not have forgotten, of little Cosette. We remember that Cosette was useful to the Thénardiers in two ways: they made the mother pay them and they made the child serve them. So when the mother stopped paying altogether , we have just read why in the preceding chapters, the Thénardiers kept Cosette. She replaced a servant for them. In this capacity, it was she who ran to get water when it was needed. So the child, very terrified by the idea of going to the spring at night, took great care that there was never a shortage of water in the house. Christmas in 1823 was particularly brilliant in Montfermeil. The beginning of winter had been mild; it had not yet frozen or snowed. Jugglers from Paris had obtained permission from the mayor to set up their stalls in the main street of the village, and a band of street vendors had, under the same tolerance, built their stalls on the church square and even in the Boulanger alley, where, you may remember, the Thénardier tavern was located. This filled the inns and cabarets, and gave this quiet little village a noisy and joyous life. We must even say, to be faithful historians, that among the curiosities spread out on the square, there was a menagerie in which hideous straw hats, dressed in rags and coming from who knows where, showed in 1823 to the peasants of Montfermeil one of those frightening Brazilian vultures that our Royal Museum has only possessed since 1845, and which have a tricolored cockade for an eye. Naturalists call, I believe, this bird Caracara Polyborus: it is of the order of apicides and of the vulture family. Some good old Bonapartist soldiers retired to the village went to see this beast with devotion. The mountebanks gave the tricolored cockade as a unique phenomenon and made expressly by the good Lord for their menagerie. On the evening of Christmas itself, several men, carters and peddlers, were seated at tables and drinking around four or five candles in the lower room of the Thénardier inn. This room resembled all the cabaret rooms; tables, pewter jugs, bottles, drinkers, smokers; little light, a lot of noise. The date of the year 1823 was nevertheless indicated by the two objects then fashionable among the bourgeois class which were on a table, namely a kaleidoscope and a watered tin lamp. The Thénardier woman was watching the supper which was roasting in front of a good bright fire; the Thénardier husband was drinking with his guests and talking politics. Besides the political talks, which had as their principal subjects the Spanish war and the Duke of Angoulême, one could hear in the hubbub quite local parentheses like these: –Around Nanterre and Suresnes the wine has given a lot. Where we counted on ten pieces we got twelve. That has jutted out a lot under the press. –But the grapes must not have been ripe?–In those countries, they must not harvest ripe. If they harvest ripe, the wine turns to fat as soon as spring comes.–So it’s very small wine?–These are even smaller wines than around here. They must be harvested green. Etc…. Or, it was a miller who cried out: –Are we responsible for what’s in the sacks? We find a pile of small seeds there that we can’t bother peeling, and that we have to let pass under the millstones; it’s darnel, it’s luzette, cockle, vetch, hempseed, gaverolle, foxtail, and a host of other drugs, not to mention the stones that abound in certain wheats, especially in Breton wheats. I don’t like grinding Breton wheat, any more than pit sawyers like sawing beams with nails in them. Imagine the bad dust all that adds to the yield. After that, people complain about the flour. They’re wrong. The flour isn’t our fault. In a window-space, a mower, seated at a table with a landowner who was quoting a price for some meadow work to be done in the spring, was saying: “It doesn’t hurt that the grass is wet. It cuts better. The threshing is good, sir. It doesn’t matter, this grass, your grass, is young and still very difficult. That this is so tender, that this bends before the iron board. Etc….” Cosette was in her usual place, sitting on the crosspiece of the kitchen table near the fireplace. She was in rags, her bare feet were in clogs, and by the firelight she was knitting woolen stockings for the Thénardier girls. A very young cat was playing under the chairs. Two fresh children’s voices could be heard laughing and chatting in the next room; they were Éponine and Azelma. In the corner of the fireplace, a martinet hung on a nail. At intervals, the cry of a very young child, who was somewhere in the house, pierced through the noise of the tavern. It was a little boy whom the Thénardier had had one of the previous winters—without knowing why, she said, the effect of the cold—and who was a little over three years old. The mother had fed him, but did not love him. When the child’s relentless clamor became too annoying:——Your son is squawking, Thénardier would say, go and see what he wants.——Bah! the mother would reply, he’s annoying me.—And the abandoned little one continued to cry in the darkness.
Chapter 24. Two completed portraits. The Thénardiers have so far only been seen in profile in this book; The time has come to turn around this couple and look at them from all angles. Thénardier had just passed his fifty years; Madame Thénardier was approaching forty, which is the woman’s fifty; so that there was a balance of age between the wife and the husband. Readers may have, from her first appearance, retained some memory of this tall, blond, red, fat, fleshy, square, enormous and agile Thénardier; she was, as we have said, of the race of those colossal savages who bend over at fairs with paving stones hanging from their hair. She did everything in the house, the beds, the bedrooms, the laundry, the cooking, the rain, the fine weather, the devil. Her only servant was Cosette; a mouse in the service of an elephant. Everything trembled at the sound of her voice, the windows, the furniture and the people. Her broad face, riddled with freckles, had the appearance of a skimmer. She had a beard. She was the ideal of a market-goer dressed as a girl. She swore splendidly; she boasted of cracking a nut with one blow of her fist. Without the novels she had read, and which, at times, strangely made the minx reappear beneath the ogress, the idea would never have occurred to anyone to say of her: she is a woman. This Thénardier was like the product of grafting a young lady onto a fishwife. When one heard her speak, one would say: He’s a gendarme; when one watched her drink, one would say: He’s a carter; when one saw her handle Cosette, one would say: He’s the executioner. When she was at rest, a tooth would protrude from her mouth. Thénardier was a small, thin, pale, angular, bony, puny man, who looked sick and who was in wonderful health; his deceit began there. He usually smiled as a precaution, and was polite to almost everyone, even to the beggar from whom he refused a farthing. He had the look of a weasel and the mien of a man of letters. He greatly resembled the portraits of the Abbé Delille. His coquetry consisted of drinking with the carters. No one had ever been able to intoxicate him. He smoked a large pipe. He wore a blouse and under his blouse an old black coat. He had pretensions to literature and materialism. There were names he often mentioned to support the nonsense he said: Voltaire, Raynal, Pamy, and, strangely enough, Saint Augustine. He claimed to have a system. He was, moreover, a very swindler. A filousopher. This nuance exists. We remember that he claimed to have served; he recounted with some luxury that at Waterloo, being a sergeant in some 6th or 9th light regiment, he had, alone against a squadron of Hussars of Death, covered with his body and saved a dangerously wounded general through the grapeshot . From this came, for his wall, his flamboyant ensign, and, for his inn, in the countryside, the name of the Sergeant of Waterloo’s tavern. He was a liberal, classicist, and Bonapartist. He had subscribed for the Champ d’Asile. It was said in the village that he had studied to be a priest. We believe that he had simply studied in Holland to be an innkeeper. This scoundrel of the composite order was, in all probability, some Fleming from Lille in Flanders, French in Paris, Belgian in Brussels, conveniently straddling two borders. His prowess at Waterloo is well known. As we see, he exaggerated it a little. The ebb and flow, the meander, the adventure, was the element of his existence; a torn conscience leads to a disjointed life; and probably, at the stormy time of June 18, 1815, Thénardier belonged to that variety of marauding canteen keepers of whom we have spoken, pounding the platform, selling to some, robbing others, and rolling with his family, man, woman, and children, in some rickety cart, following the marching troops, with the instinct to always attach himself to the victorious army. This campaign over, having, as he said, some money, he had come to open a tavern in Montfermeil. This money, composed of purses and watches, gold rings and silver crosses gathered at harvest time in the furrows sown with corpses, did not make a large total and had not taken this tinker turned tavern keeper very far. Thénardier had that certain something of rectilinear in his gesture which, with a curse, recalls the barracks and, with a sign of the cross, the seminary. He was a smooth talker. He let himself be thought of as a scholar. Nevertheless, the schoolmaster had noticed that he made leathers. He composed the travelers’ payment cards with superiority, but trained eyes sometimes found spelling mistakes. Thénardier was sly, greedy, a loiterer and clever. He did not disdain his servants, which meant that his wife no longer had any. This giantess was jealous. It seemed to her that this thin, yellow little man must be the object of universal covetousness. Thénardier, above all, a man of cunning and balance, was a rogue of the temperate kind. This species is the worst; hypocrisy is mixed with it. It is not that Thénardier was not on occasion capable of anger at least as much as his wife; but that was very rare, and in these At those moments, as he resented the entire human race, as he had within him a deep furnace of hatred, as he was one of those people who perpetually take revenge, who accuse everything that passes before them of everything that has befallen them, and who are always ready to throw on the first comer, as a legitimate grievance, the total of the disappointments, bankruptcies and calamities of their life, as all this leaven rose up in him and bubbled in his mouth and in his eyes, he was dreadful. Woe to anyone who passed under his fury then! Besides all his other qualities, Thénardier was attentive and penetrating, silent or talkative on occasion, and always with a high intelligence. He had something of the look of sailors accustomed to blinking in spyglasses. Thénardier was a statesman.
Every newcomer who entered the tavern said on seeing Thénardier: There is the master of the house. Wrong. She was not even the mistress. The master and mistress were the husband. She did, he created. He directed everything by a sort of invisible and continual magnetic action. A word was enough for him, sometimes a sign; the mastodon obeyed. The Thénardier was for the Thénardier, without her being too aware of it, a kind of particular and sovereign being. She had the virtues of her way of being; never, had she disagreed on a detail with Monsieur Thénardier, a hypothesis moreover inadmissible, would she have publicly found her husband wrong, on anything whatsoever. Never would she have committed before strangers that fault which women so often make, and which is called, in parliamentary language, uncovering the crown. Although their agreement resulted only in evil, there was contemplation in the submission of the Thénardier to her husband. This mountain of noise and flesh moved under the little finger of this frail despot. It was, seen from its dwarfish and grotesque side, that great universal thing: the adoration of matter for the spirit; for certain ugliness has its reason for being in the very depths of eternal beauty. There was something unknown in Thénardier; hence the absolute empire of this man over this woman. At certain moments, she saw him like a lit candle; at others, she felt him like a claw. This woman was a formidable creature who loved only her children and feared only her husband. She was a mother because she was a mammal. Besides, her maternity stopped at her daughters, and, as we shall see, did not extend to the boys. He, the man, had only one thought: to enrich himself. He did not succeed in this. A worthy theater was lacking for this great talent. Thénardier at Montfermeil was ruining himself, if ruin is possible at zero; In Switzerland or the Pyrenees, this penniless man would have become a millionaire. But where fate attaches the innkeeper, he must graze. We understand that the word innkeeper is used here in a restricted sense, and one that does not extend to an entire class. In that same year, 1823, Thénardier was in debt with about fifteen hundred francs of glaring debts, which made him anxious. Whatever the stubborn injustice of destiny towards him, Thénardier was one of the men who understood best, with the most depth and in the most modern way, that thing which is a virtue among barbarian peoples and a commodity among civilized peoples , hospitality. Moreover, he was an admirable poacher and cited for his gunshots. He had a certain cold and peaceful laugh which was particularly dangerous. His innkeeper’s theories sometimes burst from him in flashes. He had professional aphorisms that he inserted into his wife’s mind. “The duty of the innkeeper,” he told her one day violently and in a low voice, “is to sell to the first comer food, rest, the light, the fire, the dirty sheets, the maid, the fleas, the smile; to stop passers-by, to empty small purses and honestly lighten the large ones, to shelter families on the road with respect, to grate the man, to pluck the woman, to peel the child; to rate the open window, the closed window, the corner of the chimney, the armchair, the chair, the stool, the stool, the feather bed, the mattress and the bale of straw; to know how much the shadow wears the mirror and to price it, and, by the five hundred thousand devils, to make the traveler pay for everything , even the flies his dog eats! This man and this woman, it was cunning and rage married together, a hideous and terrible team. While the husband brooded and schemed, the Thénardier woman, for her part, did not think of the absent creditors, had no concern for yesterday or tomorrow, and lived with passion, entirely in the moment. Such were these two beings. Cosette was between them, subjected to their double pressure, like a creature that was at once ground by a millstone and torn to pieces by pliers. The man and the woman each had a different manner; Cosette was beaten, that came from the woman; she went barefoot in the winter, that came from the husband. Cosette went up, down, washed, brushed, scrubbed, swept, ran, toiled, panted, moved heavy things, and, quite puny, did the heavy chores. No pity; a fierce mistress, a poisonous master. The Thénardier tavern was like a web in which Cosette was caught and trembled. The ideal of oppression was realized by this sinister domesticity. It was something like the fly serving the spiders. The poor child, passive, was silent. When they find themselves like this, at dawn, very small, very naked, among men, what happens to these souls who have just left God? Chapter 25. Men need wine and horses need water. Four new travelers had arrived. Cosette was thinking sadly; for, although she was only eight years old, she had already suffered so much that she dreamed with the gloomy air of an old woman. Her eyelid was black from a blow that Thénardier had given her, which made Thénardier say from time to time : “How ugly she is with that pouch over her eye!” Cosette was thinking that it was night, very dark, that the pots and carafes had had to be filled unexpectedly in the rooms of the travelers who had arrived, and that there was no more water in the fountain. What reassured her a little was that they did not drink much water in the Thénardier house. There was no shortage of people there who were thirsty; but it was the kind of thirst that appeals more readily to a pitcher than to a jug. Anyone who had asked for a glass of water among these glasses of wine would have seemed a savage to all these men. There was, however, a moment when the child trembled: the Thénardier woman lifted the lid of a saucepan that was boiling on the stove, then seized a glass and quickly approached the fountain. She turned the tap; the child had raised his head and was following her every movement. A thin trickle of water flowed from the tap and half filled the glass. “Well,” she said, “there’s no more water!” Then there was a moment of silence. The child wasn’t breathing. “Well,” continued Thénardier, examining the half-full glass, “there will be enough as it is.” Cosette went back to her work, but for more than a quarter of an hour she felt her heart leap like a large snowflake in her chest. She counted the minutes that passed in this way, and wished it were the next morning. From time to time, one of the drinkers looked out into the street and exclaimed: “It’s as dark as an oven!” Or: “You have to be a cat to go out into the street without a lantern at this hour!” And Cosette was trembling. Suddenly, one of the peddlers lodged in the inn came in and said in a harsh voice: “No one has given my horse anything to drink. ” “Yes, indeed,” said Thénardier. “I tell you it hasn’t, mother,” replied the merchant. Cosette had come out from under the table. “Oh! yes! sir!” she said, “the horse has drunk, he has drunk from the bucket, the bucket full, and it was even I who brought him a drink, and I spoke to him. That wasn’t true. Cosette was lying. ” “There’s one as big as your fist and who lies as big as the house,” cried the merchant. “I tell you he hasn’t been drinking, you little hussy! He has a way of blowing when he hasn’t been drinking that I know well. ” Cosette persisted, and added in a voice hoarse with anguish and barely audible: “And he’s even drunk a lot!” “Come now,” the merchant continued angrily, “that’s not all, let’s give my horse a drink and let it be over with!” Cosette went back under the table. “Actually, that’s right,” said Thénardier, “if this animal hasn’t drunk, it must drink. ” Then, looking around her: “Well, where is this other one?” She bent down and discovered Cosette huddled at the other end of the table, almost under the feet of the drinkers. “Are you going to come?” shouted Thénardier. Cosette came out of the sort of hole where she had hidden herself. Thénardier continued: “Mademoiselle Chien-faute-de-nom, go and take this horse a drink.” “But, madame,” said Cosette weakly, “there’s no water.” Thénardier flung the street door wide open. “Well, go and get some!” Cosette lowered her head and went to get an empty bucket that was in the corner of the chimney. This bucket was bigger than she was, and the child could have sat in it and stayed comfortable. Thénardier went back to her stove and tasted with a wooden spoon what was in the saucepan, grumbling all the while: “There’s some at the spring. It’s no smarter than that. I think I would have done better to strain my onions.” Then she rummaged in a drawer where there were some pennies, pepper, and shallots. “Here, Mademoiselle Toad,” she added, “when you come back you can get a large loaf of bread from the baker’s. Here’s a fifteen-sou piece.” Cosette had a small side pocket in her apron; she took the coin without saying a word, and put it in this pocket. Then she remained motionless, the bucket in her hand, the door open before her. She seemed to be waiting for someone to come to her aid. “Go on!” cried Thénardier. Cosette went out. The door closed. Chapter 26. Entrance of a doll. The line of open-air shops that led from the church extended, as you will remember, as far as the Thénardier inn. These shops, because of the imminent passage of the bourgeois going to midnight mass, were all illuminated with candles burning in paper funnels, which, as the schoolmaster of Montfermeil, who was sitting at a table at that moment at Thénardier’s, said, had a magical effect . On the other hand, not a star was to be seen in the sky. The last of these huts, established precisely opposite the Thénardier gate, was a trinket shop, all gleaming with tinsel, glass beads, and magnificent things made of tin. In the front row, and at the front, the merchant had placed, on a background of white napkins, an immense doll nearly two feet high, dressed in a pink crepe dress with gold spikes on its head and which had real hair and enamel eyes. All day long, this marvel had been displayed to the astonishment of passers-by under ten years of age, without there having been a mother in Montfermeil rich enough, or prodigal enough, to give it to her child. Éponine and Azelma had spent hours contemplating it, and Cosette herself, furtively, It is true, had dared to look at her. At the moment when Cosette came out, her bucket in her hand, gloomy and dejected as she was, she could not help raising her eyes to this prodigious doll, to the lady, as she called her. The poor child stopped petrified. She had not yet seen this doll up close. The whole shop seemed to her a palace; this doll was not a doll, it was a vision. It was joy, splendor, wealth, happiness, which appeared in a sort of chimerical radiance to this unfortunate little being engulfed so deeply in a funereal and cold misery. Cosette measured with that naive and sad sagacity of childhood the abyss which separated her from this doll. She said to herself that one had to be a queen or at least a princess to have something like that. She looked at that beautiful pink dress, that beautiful straight hair, and she thought: How happy she must be, that doll! Her eyes could not tear themselves away from that fantastic shop. The more she looked, the more she was dazzled. She thought she was seeing paradise. There were other dolls behind the large one who seemed to her like fairies and genies. The merchant who came and went at the back of his hut gave her the impression of being a little like the Eternal Father. In this adoration, she forgot everything, even the errand she was on. Suddenly, the harsh voice of the Thénardier woman brought her back to reality: “What, you haven’t left? Wait! I’m coming to you! I wonder what she’s doing here! Little monster, go!” Thenardier woman had glanced into the street and seen Cosette in ecstasy. Cosette ran away, carrying her bucket and taking the longest steps she could. Chapter 27. The Little One All Alone. As the Thénardier Inn was in the part of the village near the church, Cosette had to go to the source of the woods near Chelles to draw water. She no longer looked at a single merchant’s stall. As long as she was in the Alley of the Baker and in the vicinity of the church, the illuminated shops lit the way, but soon the last glimmer of the last hut disappeared. The poor child found herself in darkness. She sank into it. Only, as a certain emotion overcame her, as she walked she shook the handle of the bucket as much as she could. It made a noise that kept her company. The further she walked, the thicker the darkness became. There was no one left in the streets. However, she met a woman who turned around as she saw her pass, and who remained motionless, muttering to herself: But where can this child be going? Is that a werewolf child? Then the woman recognized Cosette. Look, she said, it’s the Lark! Cosette thus crossed the labyrinth of winding, deserted streets that terminated the village of Montfermeil on the Chelles side. As long as there were houses, and even just walls, on both sides of her path, she went on quite boldly. From time to time, she saw the glimmer of a candle through the crack of a shutter; it was light and life; there were people there; that reassured her. However, as she advanced, her pace slowed down as if mechanically. When she had passed the corner of the last house, Cosette stopped. Going beyond the last shop had been difficult; going beyond the last house was becoming impossible. She put the bucket on the ground, plunged her hand into her hair, and began to slowly scratch her head, a gesture typical of terrified and indecisive children. This was no longer Montfermeil, it was the fields. The black and deserted space was before her. She looked with despair at this darkness where there was no one left, where there were animals, where there were perhaps ghosts. She looked closely, and she heard the animals were walking in the grass, and she clearly saw the ghosts moving in the trees. Then she seized the bucket again, fear gave her boldness. “Bah!” she said, “I’ll tell her there was no more water!” And she resolutely returned to Montfermeil. She had hardly taken a hundred steps when she stopped again and began to scratch her head again. Now it was the Thénardier who appeared to her; the hideous Thénardier with her hyena’s mouth and the blazing anger in her eyes. The child cast a pitiful look back and forth . What to do? What to become of her? Where to go? Before her the spectre of the Thénardier; behind her all the ghosts of the night and the woods. It was before the Thénardier that she recoiled. She took the path back to the spring and began to run. She ran out of the village, ran into the woods, no longer looking at anything, no longer listening to anything. She only stopped running when she could breathe, but she didn’t stop walking. She went on ahead, bewildered. As she ran, she felt like crying. The night-time shuddering of the forest enveloped her entirely. She no longer thought, she no longer saw. The immense night faced this little being. On one side, all shadow; on the other, an atom. It was only seven or eight minutes from the edge of the woods to the spring. Cosette knew the path, having walked it many times during the day. Strange to say, she didn’t get lost. A remnant of instinct guided her vaguely. However, she didn’t look to the right or to the left, for fear of seeing things in the branches and undergrowth. Thus she arrived at the spring. It was a narrow natural basin dug by water in a clayey soil, about two feet deep, surrounded by moss and those tall, embossed grasses called Henry IV’s collars, and paved with a few large stones. A stream flowed from it with a quiet little noise. Cosette did not take the time to breathe. It was very dark, but she was accustomed to coming to this fountain. She searched with her left hand in the darkness for a young oak leaning over the spring which usually served as her support, found a branch, hung from it, leaned over and plunged the bucket into the water. She was in such a violent moment that her strength was tripled. While she was thus leaning over, she did not notice that the pocket of her apron was emptying into the spring. The fifteen-sou piece fell into the water. Cosette neither saw nor heard it fall. She took out the almost full bucket and placed it on the grass. This done, she realized that she was exhausted with weariness. She would have liked to leave at once; but the effort of filling the bucket had been such that it was impossible for her to take a step. She was forced to sit down. She let herself fall on the grass and remained crouching there. She closed her eyes, then she opened them again, without knowing why, but unable to do otherwise. Beside her, the agitated water in the bucket made circles that resembled serpents of white fire. Above her head, the sky was covered with vast black clouds that were like plumes of smoke. The tragic mask of the shadow seemed to lean vaguely over this child. Jupiter was setting in the depths. The child looked with a wild eye at this large star that she did not know and that frightened her. The planet, in fact, was at that moment very close to the horizon and was passing through a thick layer of mist which gave it a horrible redness. The mist, lugubriously purple, enlarged the star. It looked like a luminous wound. A cold wind was blowing from the plain. The wood was dark, without any rustling of leaves, without any of those vague and fresh gleams of summer. Large branches stood there horribly. Stunned, misshapen bushes hissed in the clearings. The tall grasses swarmed in the north wind like eels. The brambles writhed like long arms armed with claws seeking to catch prey; a few dry heathers, driven by the wind, passed quickly and seemed to flee in terror before something that was happening. On all sides there were gloomy expanses. The darkness is dizzying. Man needs light. Whoever plunges into the opposite of day feels his heart clenched. When the eye sees black, the mind sees troubled. In the eclipse, in the night, in the sooty opacity, there is anxiety, even for the strongest. No one walks alone at night in the forest without trembling. Shadows and trees, two formidable layers. A chimerical reality appears in the indistinct depth. The inconceivable takes shape a few steps from you with spectral clarity. We see floating, in space or in our own brain, something vague and elusive like the dreams of sleeping flowers. There are fierce attitudes on the horizon. We inhale the effluvia of the great black void. We are afraid and want to look behind us. The cavities of the night, things that have become haggard, taciturn profiles that dissipate as we move forward, dark tangles, irritated tufts, livid pools, the lugubrious reflected in the funereal, the sepulchral immensity of silence, possible unknown beings, mysterious leaning branches, frightening tree twists, long handfuls of quivering grass, we are defenseless against all this. There is no boldness that does not tremble and feel the proximity of anguish. One experiences something hideous, as if the soul were amalgamating with the shadow. This penetration of darkness is inexpressibly sinister in a child. Forests are apocalypses; and the beating of a little soul’s wings makes a noise of agony beneath their monstrous vault. Without realizing what she was experiencing, Cosette felt herself seized by this black enormity of nature. It was no longer merely terror that seized her; it was something even more terrible than terror. She shuddered. Expressions fail to express the strangeness of this shudder that froze her to the depths of her heart. Her eye had become fierce. She thought she felt that she might not be able to prevent herself from returning there at the same hour the next day. Then, by a sort of instinct, to escape from this strange state which she did not understand, but which frightened her, she began to count aloud one, two, three, four, up to ten, and when she had finished, she began again. This restored to her a true perception of the things around her. She felt the cold in her hands which she had wet while drawing water. She stood up. Fear had returned to her, a natural and insurmountable fear. She had only one thought, to flee; to flee as fast as she could, through the woods, through the fields, to the houses, to the windows, to the lighted candles. Her gaze fell on the bucket in front of her. Such was the terror which the Thénardier woman inspired in her that she did not dare to flee without the bucket of water. She grasped the handle with both hands. She had difficulty lifting the bucket. She took a dozen steps like this, but the bucket was full, it was heavy, she was forced to put it back on the ground. She breathed for a moment, then she took off the handle again, and started walking again, this time a little longer. But she had to stop again. After a few seconds of rest, she started off again. She walked bent forward, her head bowed, like an old woman; the weight of the bucket stretched and stiffened her thin arms; the iron handle finished numbing and freezing her small wet hands; from time to time she was forced to stop, and each time she stopped the cold water overflowing from the bucket fell on her bare legs. This happened deep in a wood, at night, in winter, far from any human gaze; it was a child of eight years old. There was only God at that moment who saw this sad thing. And doubtless her mother, alas! For there are things that make the dead open their eyes in their tombs. She was breathing with a sort of painful rattle; sobs tightened her throat, but she did not dare to cry, so afraid was she of the Thénardier, even far away. It was her habit to always imagine that the Thénardier was there. However, she could not go very far like that, and she went very slowly. Although she had reduced the length of the stops and walked as long as possible between each, she thought with anguish that it would take her more than an hour to return to Montfermeil and that Thénardier would beat her. This anguish was mingled with her terror of being alone in the woods at night. She was exhausted with fatigue and had not yet left the forest. Having arrived near an old chestnut tree that she knew, she made a last halt, longer than the others to rest well, then she gathered all her strength, took up the bucket again and began to walk courageously again. However, the poor little desperate creature could not help crying out: Oh my God! My God! At that moment, she suddenly felt that the bucket no longer weighed anything. A hand, which seemed enormous to her, had just seized the handle and was lifting it vigorously. She raised her head. A tall, black figure, straight and upright, walked beside her in the darkness. It was a man who had arrived behind her and whom she had not heard coming. This man, without saying a word, had grasped the handle of the bucket she was carrying. There are instincts for all of life’s encounters. The child was not afraid. Chapter 28. Which perhaps proves Boulatruelle’s intelligence. In the afternoon of that same Christmas day, 1823, a man walked for some time in the most deserted part of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital in Paris. This man had the air of someone looking for a place to stay, and seemed to prefer to stop at the more modest houses on this dilapidated edge of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. We will see later that this man had indeed rented a room in this isolated neighborhood. This man, in his clothing as in his whole person, embodied the type of what one might call the beggar of good company, extreme poverty combined with extreme cleanliness. This is a rather rare mixture which inspires in intelligent hearts that double respect which one feels for the very poor and for the very worthy. He had a very old and well-brushed round hat, a threadbare frock coat of coarse ochre-yellow cloth, a color which was not at all strange at that time, a large waistcoat with pockets of age-old form, black breeches which had turned gray at the knees, black wool stockings and thick shoes with copper buckles. One would have said he was a former tutor of a good house returned from emigration. From his completely white hair, his wrinkled forehead, his livid lips, his face where everything breathed the despondency and weariness of life, one would have supposed him to be much older than sixty years. From his firm, though slow, gait, and the singular vigor imprinted in all his movements, one would have given him barely fifty. The wrinkles on his forehead were well placed, and would have prejudiced anyone who had observed him attentively in his favor. His lip contracted with a strange fold, which seemed severe and was humble. There was at the bottom of his gaze an indescribable serenity. In his left hand he carried a small package tied in a handkerchief; in his right he leaned on a kind of cut stick in a hedge. This stick had been worked with some care, and did not look too bad; advantage had been taken of the knots, and a coral knob had been given to it with red wax; it was a club, and it looked like a cane. There are few passers-by on this boulevard, especially in winter. This man, without affectation however, seemed to avoid them rather than seek them out. At that time King Louis XVIII went almost every day to Choisy-le-Roi. It was one of his favorite walks. Around two o’clock, almost invariably, one saw the carriage and the royal cavalcade pass flat out on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital. This served as a watch and a clock for the poor women of the neighborhood who said: “It’s two o’clock, there he is returning to the Tuileries.” And some would run up, and others would fall in line; for a king who passes is always a tumult. Besides, the appearance and disappearance of Louis XVIII had a certain effect in the streets of Paris. It was rapid, but majestic. This impotent king had a taste for the full gallop; not being able to walk, he wanted to run; this cripple would have gladly been dragged by lightning. He passed, peaceful and severe, in the midst of the naked sabers. His massive berlin, all gilded, with large branches of lilies painted on the panels, rolled noisily. There was hardly time to glance at it. In the far right corner, on cushions upholstered in white satin, one could see a broad, firm, ruddy face, a fresh forehead powdered with the royal bird, a proud, hard, and refined eye, a scholar’s smile, two large epaulettes with floating cables on a bourgeois coat, the Golden Fleece, the cross of Saint-Louis, the cross of the Legion of Honor, the silver plaque of the Holy Spirit, a large belly, and a wide blue ribbon; it was the king. Outside Paris, he held his hat with white plumes on his knees, which were wrapped in high English gaiters; when he returned to the city, he placed his hat on his head, rarely bowing. He looked coldly at the people, who returned it. When he appeared for the first time in the Saint-Marceau quarter, his whole success was this remark from a suburbanite to his comrade: It is this fat man who is the government. This unfailing passage of the king at the same hour was therefore a daily occurrence on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital. The stroller in the yellow frock coat was obviously not from the neighborhood, and probably not from Paris, for he was unaware of this detail. When at two o’clock the royal carriage, surrounded by a squadron of silver-braided bodyguards , emerged onto the boulevard, after turning the Salpêtrière, he seemed surprised and almost frightened. There was only him in the side alley, he quickly pulled over behind a corner of the surrounding wall, which did not prevent the Duke of Havré from seeing him. The Duke of Havré, as captain of the guards on duty that day, was sitting in the carriage opposite the king. He said to His Majesty: “There’s a man who looks rather bad.” Police officers, who were lighting the king’s path, also noticed him, and one of them was ordered to follow him. But the man went into the lonely little streets of the suburb, and as the day began to fade, the agent lost his trail, as is stated in a report sent that same evening to Count Anglès, Minister of State, Prefect of Police. When the man in the yellow frock coat had tracked the agent, he doubled his pace, not without turning around many times to make sure he was not being followed. At a quarter past four, that is to say at nightfall, he passed in front of the Porte-Saint-Martin theater where The Two Convicts was being performed that day. This poster, lit by the street lamps of the theater, struck him, for, although he was walking quickly, he stopped to read it. A moment later, he was in the cul-de-sac of Planchette, and He entered the Plat d’étain, where the Lagny carriage office was then . This carriage left at four-thirty. The horses were harnessed, and the travelers, called by the coachman, hurriedly climbed the high iron staircase of the cuckoo clock. The man asked: “Do you have a seat?” “Only one, next to me, on the seat,” said the coachman. “I’ll take it. ” “Get in.” However, before leaving, the coachman glanced at the traveler’s poor clothing, at the smallness of his pack, and asked for his fare. “Are you going as far as Lagny?” asked the coachman. “Yes,” said the man. The traveler paid as far as Lagny. They set off. When they had passed the barrier, the coachman tried to start a conversation, but the traveler only answered in monosyllables. The coachman decided to whistle and swear at his horses. The coachman wrapped himself in his coat. It was cold. The man didn’t seem to be thinking about it. They passed through Gournay and Neuilly-sur-Marne. Around six o’clock in the evening they reached Chelles. The coachman stopped to let his horses breathe, in front of the wagon inn set up in the old buildings of the royal abbey. “I’ll get out here,” said the man. He took his bundle and his stick, and jumped out of the carriage. A moment later, he had disappeared. He hadn’t entered the inn. When, after a few minutes, the carriage set off again for Lagny, it didn’t meet him in the main street of Chelles. The coachman turned to the passengers inside. “Here,” he said, “is a man who isn’t from here, for I don’t know him. He looks penniless; yet he doesn’t care for money.” he pays for Lagny, and he only goes as far as Chelles. It is night, all the houses are closed, he does not enter the inn, and he is not found again. So he has gone underground. The man had not gone underground, but had walked hastily in the darkness along the main street of Chelles; then he had turned left before reaching the church onto the country road that leads to Montfermeil, like someone who knew the area and had already been there . He followed this road quickly. At the place where it is crossed by the old tree-lined road that goes from Gagny to Lagny, he heard passers-by coming. He hastily hid in a ditch and waited there until the people who were passing had moved on. The precaution was almost superfluous, for, as we have already said, it was a very dark December night. Barely two or three stars could be seen in the sky. It was at this point that the climb up the hill began. The man did not return to the path to Montfermeil; he turned right, across the fields, and strode towards the woods. When he was in the woods, he slowed his pace and began to look carefully at all the trees, advancing step by step, as if he were searching for and following a mysterious road known only to him. There was a moment when he seemed to get lost and stopped, undecided. Finally, he arrived, by groping and groping, at a clearing where there was a pile of large whitish stones. He walked quickly towards these stones and examined them carefully through the night mist, as if he were reviewing them. A large tree, covered with those growths which are the warts of vegetation, was a few steps from the pile of stones. He went to this tree and ran his hand over the bark of the trunk, as if he were trying to recognize and count all the warts. Opposite this tree, which was an ash, there was a chestnut tree sick with a peeling, to which a strip of zinc had been nailed as a bandage . He stood on tiptoe and touched this strip of zinc. Then he trampled for some time on the ground in the space between the tree and the stones, like someone who is making sure that the earth was not freshly stirred. This done, he oriented himself and resumed his walk through the wood. It was this man who had just met Cosette. While walking through the copse in the direction of Montfermeil, he had seen this little shadow moving with a groan, who set down a burden on the ground, then picked it up again, and began to walk again. He had approached and recognized that it was a very young child carrying an enormous bucket of water. Then he had gone to the child, and silently taken the handle of the bucket. Chapter 29. Cosette side by side in the shadows with the stranger. Cosette, as we have said, had not been afraid. The man spoke to her. He spoke in a deep, almost low voice. “My child, what you are carrying there is very heavy for you.” Cosette raised her head and replied: “Yes, sir.” “Give it,” the man continued. “I’ll carry it for you.” Cosette dropped the bucket. The man began to walk beside her. “It is very heavy indeed,” he said between his teeth. Then he added: “Little one, how old are you?” “Eight years old, sir. ” “And have you come from so far away? ” “From the spring in the woods. ” “And is it far where you are going?” “A good quarter of an hour from here.” The man remained silent for a moment, then he said abruptly: “So you don’t have a mother? ” “I don’t know,” the child replied. Before the man had time to speak again, she added: “I don’t think so. Others do. I don’t have one.” And after a silence, she continued: “I don’t think I ever had one.” The man stopped, put the bucket on the ground, bent down, and placed his two hands on the child’s shoulders, making an effort to look at her and see her face in the darkness. Cosette’s thin, puny face was vaguely outlined in the livid light of the sky. “What is your name?” said the man. “Cosette.” The man felt like an electric shock. He looked at her again, then took his hands off Cosette’s shoulders, seized the bucket, and began to walk again. After a moment he asked: “Little one, where do you live?” “In Montfermeil, if you know it. ” “Is that where we are going? ” “Yes, sir.” He paused again, then began again: “Who sent you at this hour to fetch water from the woods? ” “It was Madame Thénardier. ” The man started again in a voice that he tried to make sound indifferent, but in which there was nevertheless a singular tremor: “What does she do, your Madame Thénardier? ” “She’s my bourgeoise,” said the child. “She keeps the inn. ” “The inn?” said the man. “Well, I’m going to stay there tonight. Take me there. ” “We’re going,” said the child. The man walked rather quickly. Cosette followed him without difficulty. She no longer felt tired. From time to time, she raised her eyes to this man with a sort of inexpressible tranquility and abandonment. She had never been taught to turn to providence and to pray. However, she felt within herself something that resembled hope and joy and which was going towards heaven. A few minutes passed. The man continued: “Isn’t there a servant at Madame Thénardier’s? ” “No, sir. ” “Are you alone? ” “Yes, sir.” There was another interruption. Cosette raised her voice: “That is to say, there are two little girls. ” “What little girls? ” “Ponine and Zelma. ” The child thus simplified the romantic names dear to the Thénardier.
“What are Ponine and Zelma? ” “They are Madame Thénardier’s young ladies. As one might say, her girls. “And what do they do?” “Oh!” said the child, “they have beautiful dolls, things with gold in them, lots of things. They play, they have fun. ” “All day long? ” “Yes, sir. ” “And you? ” “I work. ” “All day long?” The child raised her large eyes, in which there was a tear that could not be seen because of the night, and answered softly: “Yes, sir.” She continued after a pause: “Sometimes, when I have finished the work and people agree, I have fun too. ” “How do you have fun? ” “As best I can. They let me. But I don’t have many toys. Ponine and Zelma don’t want me to play with their dolls. I only have a small lead sword, no longer than that. ” The child pointed with her little finger. “And who doesn’t cut?” “Yes, sir,” said the child, “it cuts lettuce and flies’ heads.” They reached the village; Cosette guided the stranger through the streets. They passed the bakery; but Cosette did not think about the bread she was to bring back. The man had stopped asking her questions and now maintained a gloomy silence. When they had left the church behind them, the man, seeing all these open-air shops, asked Cosette: “Is this the fair then? ” “No, sir, it’s Christmas.” As they approached the inn, Cosette touched his arm timidly. “Sir? ” “What, my child? ” “We are quite close to the house. ” “Well? ” “Will you let me take the bucket now? ” “Why? ” “Because if madame sees that someone has brought it to me, she will beat me. ” The man handed him the bucket. A moment later, they were at the door of the tavern. Chapter 30. The unpleasantness of receiving a poor man into one’s home who is perhaps rich. Cosette could not help casting a sideways glance at the large doll still displayed at the trinket shop, then she knocked. The door opened. Thenardier appeared, a candle in her hand. “Ah! It’s you, you little beggar! Thank God you took your time! She must have had fun, the hussy! ” “Madame,” said Cosette, trembling, “here’s a gentleman coming to stay. ” Thenardier quickly replaced her gruff expression with her amiable grimace, a change of scene peculiar to innkeepers, and eagerly sought out the newcomer with her eyes. “Is it monsieur?” she said. “Yes, madame,” replied the man, putting his hand to his hat. ” Wealthy travelers are not so polite.” This gesture and the inspection of the stranger’s costume and baggage, which Thénardier reviewed at a glance, caused the amiable grimace to vanish and the gruff expression to reappear. She continued curtly: “Come in, good man.” The good man entered. Thénardier gave him a second glance, examined particularly his frock coat, which was absolutely threadbare, and his hat, which was a little battered, and consulted her husband, who always drank with the carters, with a nod of the head, a wrinkle of the nose, and a wink of the eyes . The husband replied with that imperceptible agitation of the forefinger which, supported by the swelling of the lips, signifies in such a case: complete decline. At this, Thénardier cried: “Ah! well, good man, I am very sorry, but it’s because I have no more room.” “Put me wherever you like,” said the man, “in the attic, in the stable. I ‘ll pay as if I had a room. ” “Forty sous. ” “Forty sous. Fine. ” “Good. ” “Forty sous!” said a low roadman to Thénardier, “but it’s only twenty sous. ” “It’s forty sous for him,” replied Thénardier in the same tone. “I don’t lodge poor people for less. ” “It’s true,” added the husband gently, “it spoils a house to have of that world. Meanwhile, the man, after leaving his bundle and his stick on a bench, had sat down at a table where Cosette had hastened to place a bottle of wine and a glass. The merchant who had asked for the bucket of water had gone himself to carry it to his horse. Cosette had resumed her place under the kitchen table and her knitting. The man, who had barely wet his lips in the glass of wine he had poured himself, was considering the child with a strange attention. Cosette was ugly. Happy, she would perhaps have been pretty. We have already sketched this dark little face. Cosette was thin and pale. She was nearly eight years old; she would have been barely six. Her large eyes, sunk in a sort of deep shadow, were almost extinguished from crying. The corners of her mouth had that curve of habitual anguish, which one observes in the condemned and in the hopelessly ill. Her hands were, as her mother had guessed, lost to frostbite. The fire that lit her at that moment made the angles of her bones stand out and made her thinness terribly visible. As she was always shivering, she had taken to pressing her knees together. All her clothing was a rag that would have been pitiful in summer and horrifying in winter. She wore nothing but torn canvas; not a rag of wool. Her skin was visible here and there, and everywhere you could distinguish blue or black spots that indicated the places where Thénardier had touched her. Her bare legs were red and slender. The hollows of her collarbones were enough to make you cry. The whole person of this child, her bearing, her attitude, the sound of her voice, the intervals between one word and another, her gaze, her silence, her slightest gesture, expressed and translated a single idea: fear. Fear was widespread over her; she was, so to speak, covered with it; fear brought her elbows to her hips, pulled her heels under her skirts, made her take up as little space as possible, left her breath only as necessary, and had become what one might call her bodily habit, with no variation possible except to increase. There was at the bottom of her eye an astonished corner where terror dwelt. This fear was such that on arriving, all wet as she was, Cosette had not dared to go and dry herself by the fire and had silently returned to her work. The expression in the eyes of this eight-year-old child was usually so gloomy and sometimes so tragic that it seemed, at certain moments, that she was in the process of becoming an idiot or a demon. Never, as we have said, had she known what it was to pray, never had she set foot in a church. Have I time? said Thénardier. The man in the yellow frock coat did not take his eyes off Cosette. Suddenly Thénardier cried out: “By the way! And this bread?” Cosette, as was her custom whenever Thénardier raised her voice, quickly came out from under the table. She had completely forgotten about this bread. She had recourse to the expedient of children who are always frightened. She lied. “Madame, the baker’s was closed. ” “You should have knocked. ” “I knocked, madame. ” “Well? ” “He didn’t open. ” “I’ll know tomorrow if it’s true,” said Thénardier, “and if you’re lying, you ‘ll have a proud dance. In the meantime, give me back the fifteen-sou piece.” Cosette plunged her hand into her apron pocket and turned green. The fifteen-sou piece was no longer there. “Oh, that!” said Thénardier, “did you hear me?” Cosette turned the pocket over, there was nothing. What could have become of that money? The unfortunate little girl could not find a word. She was petrified. “Have you lost the fifteen-sou piece?” grumbled Thénardier. Or do you want to steal it from me? At the same time she stretched out her arm towards the whip hanging from the chimney. This formidable gesture gave Cosette the strength to cry out: “Pardon! Madam! Madam! I won’t do it again.” Thénardier untied the whip. Meanwhile, the man in the yellow frock coat had rummaged in the pocket of his waistcoat, without anyone noticing this movement. Besides, the other travelers were drinking or playing cards and were paying no attention to anything.
Cosette huddled anxiously in the corner of the chimney, trying to pick up and steal her poor half-naked limbs. Thénardier raised her arm. “Pardon, madame,” said the man, “but just now I saw something fall out of that little girl’s apron pocket and roll away. Perhaps that was it. ” At the same time he bent down and seemed to search the ground for a moment. “Exactly. Here,” he continued, getting up. And he handed a silver coin to the Thénardier. “Yes, that’s it,” she said. “It wasn’t that, for it was a twenty-sou piece, but the Thénardier found it profitable. She put the coin in her pocket, and merely cast a fierce look at the child, saying: “May this never happen to you again, ever!” Cosette returned to what the Thénardier called her niche, and her large eye, fixed on the unknown traveler, began to take on an expression it had never had before. It was still only naive astonishment, but a sort of stupefied confidence was mingled with it. “By the way, would you like to have some supper?” the Thénardier asked the traveler. He did not answer. He seemed to be in deep thought. “Who is that man?” she said between her teeth. “He’s some dreadful pauper.” They don’t have enough for supper. Will they even pay for my lodging? It’s a good thing he didn’t think of stealing the money that was on the floor. However, a door opened and Éponine and Azelma entered. They were really two pretty little girls, more bourgeois than peasant, very charming, one with her shiny chestnut tresses, the other with her long black braids falling behind her back, both lively, clean, plump, fresh, and healthy enough to delight the eye. They were warmly dressed, but with such maternal art that the thickness of the fabrics took nothing away from the coquettishness of the adjustment. Winter was predicted without spring being erased. These two little ones gave off light. Moreover, they were reigning. In their dress, in their gaiety, in the noise they made, there was sovereignty. When they entered, Thénardier said to them in a scolding tone, which was full of adoration: “Ah! So there you are, you others!” Then, drawing them onto her knees one after the other, smoothing their hair, retying their ribbons, and then letting them go with that gentle way of shaking which is peculiar to mothers, she cried: “Are they all dressed up!” They came and sat down by the fireside. They had a doll which they turned over and over on their knees with all sorts of joyful babbling. From time to time, Cosette raised her eyes from her knitting and watched them play with a gloomy air. Éponine and Azelma did not look at Cosette. It was for them like the dog. These three little girls were not twenty-four years old between them, and they already represented the whole of human society; on one side envy, on the other disdain. The Thénardier sisters’ doll was very faded and very old and all broken, but it seemed no less admirable to Cosette, who had never in her life had a doll, a real doll, to use an expression that all children will understand. Suddenly the Thénardier, who continued to go back and forth in the room, noticed that Cosette had distractions and that instead of working she was busy with the little ones who were playing. “Ah! I’ve got you!” she cried. “That’s how you work! I ‘ll make you work with a whip.” The stranger, without leaving his chair, turned to the Thénardier. “Madame,” he said, smiling with an almost fearful air, “bah! let her play!
” From any traveler who had eaten a slice of leg of lamb and drunk two bottles of wine at his supper and who had not looked like a terrible pauper, such a wish would have been an order. But that a man who wore that hat should allow himself to have a desire and that a man who wore that frock coat should allow himself to have a will, that is what the Thénardier did not think she should tolerate. She replied sourly: “She must work, since she eats. I don’t feed her doing nothing. ” “What is she doing then?” the stranger continued in that soft voice which contrasted so strangely with his beggar’s clothes and his porter’s shoulders. The Thénardier deigned to reply: “Stockings, if you please. Stockings for my little girls who don’t have any , that is to say, and who are going barefoot soon.” The man looked at Cosette’s poor red feet, and continued: “When will she have finished this pair of stockings?” “She has at least three or four days’ worth of them, the lazy girl. ” “And how much will this pair of stockings be worth when it’s finished?” The Thénardier glanced at him contemptuously. “At least thirty sous. ” “Would you give them for five francs?” the man continued. “By Jove! cried a listening trucker with a loud laugh, “five francs? I think so! Five bucks!” Thénardier thought it his duty to speak. “Yes, sir, if that’s what you fancy, we’ll give you that pair of stockings for five francs. We don’t know how to refuse travelers anything. ” “You should pay at once,” said Thénardier in her curt and peremptory manner. “I’ll buy that pair of stockings,” replied the man, “and,” he added, taking a five-franc piece from his pocket and placing it on the table, “I ‘ll pay for it. ” Then he turned to Cosette. “Now your work is mine. Play, my child.” The trucker was so moved by the five-franc piece that he left his glass there and ran up. “It’s real!” he cried, examining it. “A real hind wheel! And not a fake! ” Thénardier approached and silently put the coin in his pocket. Thénardier had nothing to reply. She bit her lips, and her face assumed an expression of hatred. Meanwhile, Cosette trembled. She ventured to ask: “Madame, is it true? May I play? ” “Play!” said Thénardier in a terrible voice. “Thank you, madame,” said Cosette. And while her mouth thanked Thénardier, her whole little soul thanked the traveler. Thénardier had started drinking again. His wife whispered in his ear: “What can that yellow man be? ” “I have seen,” replied Thénardier sovereignly, “millionaires who had frock coats like that.” Cosette had left her knitting there, but she had not left her place. Cosette still moved as little as possible. She had taken from a box behind her some old rags and her little lead saber. Éponine and Azelma were not paying any attention to what was happening. They had just performed a very important operation; they had seized the cat. They had thrown the doll to the ground, and Éponine, who was the eldest, was swaddling the little cat, despite its meowing and contortions, with a mass of red and blue rags and rags. While doing this serious and difficult work, she was speaking to her sister in that sweet and adorable language of children whose grace, like the splendor of the butterfly’s wing, goes away when one wants to stare at it: –You see, my sister, this doll is more amusing than the other. It moves, it cries, it is warm. You see, my sister, let’s play with it. It would be my little girl. I would be a lady. I would come to see you and you would look at it. Little by little you would see its whiskers, and it would astonish you. And then you would see its ears, and then you would see its tail, and it would astonish you. And you would say to me: Ah! my God! and I would say to you: Yes, madam, it’s a little girl I have like that. Little girls are like that now. Azelma listened to Éponine with admiration. Meanwhile, the drinkers had begun to sing an obscene song at which they laughed until the ceiling shook. Thénardier encouraged them and accompanied them. As birds make a nest with everything, children make a doll with anything. While Éponine and Azelma were swaddling the cat, Cosette, for her part, had swaddled the saber. This done, she laid it in her arms and sang softly to send it to sleep. The doll is one of the most pressing needs and at the same time one of the most charming instincts of feminine childhood. To care for, clothe, adorn, dress, undress, redress, teach, scold a little, rock, coddle, put to sleep, imagine that something is someone, the whole future of woman is there. While dreaming and while gossiping, while making little trousseaux and little layettes, while sewing little dresses, little bodices and little brassieres, the child becomes a young girl, the young girl becomes a grown-up girl, the grown-up girl becomes a woman. The first child continues the last doll. A little girl without a doll is about as unhappy and quite as impossible as a woman without a child. So Cosette had made herself a doll with the saber. Thénardier, for her part, had drawn closer to the yellow man. “My husband is right,” she thought, “perhaps it is Monsieur Laffitte. There are such silly rich people!” She came and leaned on his table. “Monsieur…” she said. At this word “monsieur,” the man turned around. Thénardier had only ever called him “brave man” or “bonhomme. ” “You see, monsieur,” she continued, assuming her sickly air, which was even more unpleasant to see than her ferocious air, “I am quite willing that the child should play, I have no objection to it, but it is all right for once, because you are generous. You see, it has nothing to do with it. It must work. ” “Then she is not yours, this child?” asked the man. “Oh, my God, no, sir! She’s a poor little girl we took in like that, out of charity. A sort of imbecile child. She
must have water in her head. She’s got a big head, as you see. We’re doing what we can for her, for we’re not rich. We’ve written to her country all we want, but for six months we haven’t had a reply. It seems her mother is dead. ” “Ah!” said the man, and he fell back into his reverie. “That mother was a nobody,” added Thénardier. “She was abandoning her child.” During all this conversation, Cosette, as if some instinct had warned her that she was being talked about, had not taken her eyes off Thénardier. She listened vaguely. She heard a few words here and there. Meanwhile the drinkers, all three-quarters drunk, repeated their filthy refrain with redoubled gaiety. It was a high-style romp in which the Virgin and the infant Jesus were mingled. The Thénardier had gone to take her share of the bursts of laughter. Cosette, under the table, watched the fire which reverberated in her fixed eye; she had resumed rocking the kind of jersey she had made, and, while rocking it, she sang in a low voice: My mother is dead! My mother is dead! My mother is dead! At the hostess’s renewed insistence, the yellow man, the millionaire, finally agreed to supper. “What does monsieur want? ” “Bread and cheese,” said the man. “He’s definitely a beggar,” thought Thénardier. The drunkards were still singing their song, and the child, under the table, was also singing hers. Suddenly Cosette stopped. She had just turned around and noticed the little Thénardiers’ doll, which they had left for the cat and left on the floor a few steps from the kitchen table. Then she dropped the swaddled saber, which was only half enough for her, and then she slowly looked around the room. Thénardier was talking quietly to her husband and counting out change, Ponine and Zelma were playing with the cat, the travelers were eating, or drinking, or singing, not a single glance was fixed on her. She didn’t have a moment to lose. She came out from under the table, crawling on her knees and hands, made sure once more that no one was watching her , then slipped quickly to the doll and seized it. A moment later she was in her place, sitting motionless, turned only so as to cast a shadow over the doll she held in her arms. This happiness of playing with a doll was so rare for her that it had all the violence of voluptuousness. No one had seen her, except the traveler, who was slowly eating his meager supper. This joy lasted nearly a quarter of an hour. But, whatever precaution Cosette took, she did not notice that one of the doll’s feet was passing by, and that the fire in the fireplace shone very brightly on it. This pink and luminous foot emerging from the shadows suddenly caught Azelma’s eye, who said to Éponine: “Here! my sister!” The two little girls stopped, stupefied. Cosette had dared to take the doll! Éponine stood up, and, without letting go of the cat, went to her mother and began to pull her by her skirt. “But leave me alone!” said the mother. “What do you want from me?” “Mother,” said the child, “look!” And she pointed at Cosette. Cosette, for her part, completely in the ecstasies of possession, saw and heard nothing more. The face of the Thénardier took on that peculiar expression which is composed of the terrible mixture of life’s trifles and which has caused these sorts of women to be called shrews. This time, wounded pride further exasperated her anger. Cosette had crossed all the boundaries, Cosette had made an attempt on these young ladies’ dolls. A czarina who saw a moujik trying on the grand cordon bleu of her imperial son would not have a different face. She cried out in a voice hoarse with indignation. “Cosette! ” Cosette shuddered as if the earth had trembled beneath her. She turned around. “Cosette,” repeated Thénardier. Cosette took the doll and gently placed it on the ground with a sort of veneration mingled with despair. Then, without taking her eyes off it, she clasped her hands, and, what is frightening to say in a child of that age, she wrung them; then, what none of the emotions of the day had been able to wrest from her—neither the running through the woods, nor the weight of the bucket of water, nor the loss of the money, nor the sight of the martinet, nor even the gloomy words she had heard Thénardier say—she wept. She burst into sobs. Meanwhile the traveler had risen. “What is it?” he said to Thénardier. “Don’t you see?” said Thénardier, pointing to the body of the crime lying at Cosette’s feet. “Well, what?” continued the man. “That slut,” replied Thénardier, “permitted herself to touch the children’s doll! ” “All that fuss about that!” said the man. “Well, when would she play with that doll? ” “She touched it with her dirty hands!” continued Thénardier, “with her dreadful hands!” Here Cosette redoubled her sobs. “Will you be silent?” cried Thénardier. The man went straight to the street door, opened it, and went out. As soon as he had left, Thénardier took advantage of his absence to give Cosette a great kick under the table, which made the child cry out. The door opened again, the man reappeared, carrying in his two hands the fabulous doll we have spoken of, and which all the children of the village had been gazing at since morning, and he set it upright in front of Cosette, saying: “Here, this is for you.” It must be believed that, for more than an hour that he had been there, in the midst of his reverie, he had confusedly noticed this trinket shop lit with lanterns and candles so splendidly that it could be seen through the window of the tavern like an illumination. Cosette raised her eyes; she had seen her man coming with the doll, as she would have seen the sun coming. She heard those unheard-of words: “It’s for you.” She looked at him, looked at the doll, then slowly drew back and hid at the very back under the table in the corner of the wall. She no longer wept, she no longer screamed; she seemed as if she no longer dared to breathe. Thénardier, Éponine, Azelma were all statues. Even the drinkers had stopped. A solemn silence had fallen throughout the tavern. Thénardier, petrified and mute, began her conjectures again: “Who is this old man? Is he poor? Is he a millionaire? Perhaps he is both, that is to say, a thief.” The face of the Thénardier husband presented that expressive wrinkle which accentuates the human figure whenever the dominant instinct appears there with all its bestial power. The tavern keeper considered alternately the doll and the traveler; he seemed to scent this man as he would have scented a bag of money. It lasted only for a flash. He approached his wife and said to her in a low voice: “This machine costs at least thirty francs. No nonsense. Flat on your stomach before the man. Gross natures have this in common with naive natures that they have no transitions. ” “Well, Cosette,” said Thénardier in a voice which was intended to be sweet and which was entirely composed of that sour honey of wicked women, “aren’t you going to take your doll?” Cosette ventured to come out of her hole. “My little Cosette,” continued Thénardier with a caressing air, “monsieur is giving you a doll. Take it.” It is yours. Cosette looked at the marvelous doll with a sort of terror. Her face was still flooded with tears, but her eyes were beginning to fill, like the sky at dusk, with the strange rays of joy. What she felt at that moment was somewhat similar to what she would have felt if someone had suddenly said to her: “Little one, you are the Queen of France.” It seemed to her that if she touched this doll, thunder would come out of it. Which was true up to a certain point, for she thought that Thénardier would scold her and beat her. Yet the attraction won out. She ended by approaching it, and murmured timidly, turning to Thénardier: “May I, madame?” No expression could convey that look of despair, terror, and delight at the same time . “Pardi!” said Thénardier, “it is yours. Since monsieur gives it to you.” “True, sir?” Cosette continued. “Is it true? Is the lady mine?” The stranger’s eyes seemed to be full of tears. He seemed to be at that point of emotion where one does not speak in order not to cry. He nodded to Cosette, and placed the lady’s hand in his little one.
Cosette quickly withdrew her hand, as if the lady’s were burning, and began to look at the pavement. We are forced to add that at that moment she was sticking out her tongue in an excessive manner. Suddenly she turned and seized the doll with gusto. “I will call her Catherine,” she said. It was a strange moment when Cosette’s rags met and clasped the doll’s ribbons and fresh pink muslin . “Madame,” she continued, “may I put her on a chair? ” “Yes, my child,” replied Thénardier. Now it was Éponine and Azelma who were looking at Cosette with envy.
Cosette placed Catherine on a chair, then sat down on the ground before her, and remained motionless, without saying a word, in an attitude of contemplation. “Play, Cosette,” said the stranger. “Oh! I’m playing,” replied the child. This stranger, this unknown person who seemed like a visit that Providence was paying to Cosette, was at that moment what Thénardier hated most in the world. Yet she had to restrain herself. It was more emotion than she could bear, accustomed as she was to dissimulation by copying her husband in all his actions. She hastened to send her daughters to bed, then she asked the yellow man permission to send Cosette too, who was very tired today, she added with a maternal air. Cosette went to bed carrying Catherine in her arms. Thenardier went from time to time to the other end of the room where her man was, to ease her soul, she said. She exchanged a few words with her husband, all the more furious because she dared not say them aloud: “Old beast! What’s he up to? Coming to disturb us here! Wanting that little monster to play! Giving him dolls! Giving forty-franc dolls to a bitch that I would give for forty sous!” A little longer, he’d call her Your Majesty, as he did the Duchess of Berry! Is there any common sense? Is he mad, then, this mysterious old man? “Why? It’s quite simple,” replied Thénardier. “If it amuses him! You, it amuses you that the little girl works, he, it amuses him that she plays. He’s within his rights. A traveler does what he wants when it pays. If this old man is a philanthropist, what does that matter to you? If he’s an imbecile, that’s none of your business. What do you have to do with it, since he has money? ” Masterful language and innkeeper’s reasoning, neither of which admitted a reply. The man had leaned his elbows on the table and resumed his dreamy attitude. All the other travelers, merchants and carters, had moved a little further away and were no longer singing. They regarded him from a distance with a sort of respectful fear. This poorly dressed individual, who pulled the rear wheels from his pocket with such ease and who lavished gigantic dolls on little scullery girls in wooden shoes, was certainly a magnificent and formidable fellow. Several hours passed. Midnight mass was said, the New Year’s Eve party was over, the drinkers had left, the tavern was closed, the lower room was deserted, the fire had gone out, the stranger was still in the same place and in the same posture. From time to time he changed the elbow on which he leaned. That was all. But he had not said a word since Cosette had left. The Thénardiers alone, out of propriety and curiosity, had remained in the room. “Is he going to spend the night like this?” grumbled the Thénardier. As two o’clock in the morning struck, she declared herself defeated and said to her husband: “I am going to bed. Do with it as you wish.” The husband sat down at a table in a corner, lit a candle , and began to read the Courrier français. A good hour passed in this way. The worthy innkeeper had read the Courrier français at least three times, from the date of the issue to the name of the printer. The stranger did not move. Thénardier stirred, coughed, spat, blew his nose, and creaked his chair. No movement from the man. “Is he asleep?” thought Thénardier. “The man was not asleep, but nothing could wake him.” Finally, Thénardier took off his cap, approached quietly, and ventured to say: “Isn’t monsieur going to rest?” “Isn’t monsieur going to bed?” ” Isn’t monsieur going to bed?” would have seemed excessive and familiar to him. “To rest” smacked of luxury and was respectful. These words have the mysterious and admirable property of inflating the amount of the bill the next morning . A room in which one sleeps costs twenty sous; a room in which one rests costs twenty francs. “Well!” said the stranger, “you’re right. Where is your stable?” “Sir,” said Thénardier with a smile, “I’ll take monsieur.” He took the candle, the man took his bundle and his staff, and Thénardier led him to a room on the first floor which was of rare splendor, furnished entirely in mahogany with a sleigh bed and red calico curtains. “What is this?” said the traveler. “It’s our own wedding room,” said the innkeeper. ” My wife and I live in another one. We only go in here three or four times a year. ” “I would have liked the stable just as much,” said the man abruptly. Thénardier did not seem to hear this unkind remark. He lit two brand new wax candles which stood on the mantelpiece. A fairly good fire blazed in the hearth. There was on this mantelpiece, under a jar, a woman’s headdress of silver thread and orange blossoms. “And this, what is it?” resumed the stranger. “Sir,” said Thénardier, “this is my wife’s wedding hat.” The traveler looked at the object with a look that seemed to say: there was a time when this monster was a virgin! Besides, Thénardier was lying. When he had leased this hovel to make it a tavern, he had found this room furnished like this, and had bought this furniture and second-hand these orange blossoms, judging that it would cast a graceful shadow over his wife, and that it would result in what the English call respectability for his house . When the traveler turned around, the host had disappeared. Thénardier had slipped away discreetly, without daring to say goodnight, not wanting to treat with disrespectful cordiality a man whom he intended to royally flay the next morning. The innkeeper retired to his room. His wife was in bed, but she was not asleep. When she heard her husband’s footsteps, she turned and said to him: “You know that tomorrow I’m throwing Cosette out.” Thénardier replied coldly: “How you’re going!” They exchanged no further words, and a few minutes later their candle was out. For his part, the traveler had placed his stick and bundle in a corner. The host having left, he sat down in an armchair and remained thoughtful for some time. Then he took off his shoes, took one of the two candles, blew out the other, pushed open the door, and left the room, looking around him like someone searching. He crossed a corridor and reached the staircase. There he heard a very soft little noise that resembled a child’s breathing. He let himself be guided by this noise and arrived at a sort of triangular hollow made under the staircase, or rather formed by the staircase itself. This hollow was nothing other than the underside of the steps. There, among all sorts of old baskets and potsherds, in the dust and cobwebs , was a bed; if one can call a straw mattress with holes so full as to reveal the straw a bed, and a blanket with holes so full as to reveal the straw. No sheets. These were laid on the floor on the tiles. In this bed Cosette slept. The man came up and looked at her. Cosette slept soundly. She was fully dressed. In winter she did not undress to keep herself warm. She held the doll close to her, whose large, open eyes shone in the darkness. From time to time she gave a deep sigh as if she were about to wake up, and she clasped the doll in her arms almost convulsively. There was nothing beside her bed but one of her clogs. An open door near Cosette’s attic revealed a rather large, dark room. The stranger entered it. At the far end, through a glass door, two small, very white twin beds could be seen. They were Azelma and Éponine’s. Behind these beds half-disappeared a wicker cradle without curtains, where slept the little boy who had been screaming all evening. The stranger conjectured that this room communicated with that of the Thénardiers. He was about to retire when his gaze fell upon the fireplace; one of those vast inn chimneys where there is always such a small fire, when there is a fire, and which are so cold to look at. In that one there was no fire, there were not even ashes; what was there nevertheless attracted the attention of the traveler. They were two small children’s shoes of a coquettish shape and unequal size; the traveler remembered the graceful and immemorial custom of children who place their shoes in the chimney on Christmas Day to wait in the darkness for some sparkling gift from their good fairy. Éponine and Azelma had taken care not to miss it, and they had each put one of their shoes in the chimney. The traveler leaned over. The fairy, that is to say the mother, had already paid her visit, and one could see shining in each shoe a beautiful new ten-sou piece. The man got up and was about to leave when he saw at the back, to one side, in the darkest corner of the hearth, another object. He looked, and recognized a clog, a hideous clog of the coarsest wood , half broken, and covered with ashes and dried mud. It was Cosette’s clog. Cosette, with that touching confidence of a child who can always be deceived without ever being discouraged, had also put her clog in the fireplace. Hope is a sublime and sweet thing in a child who has never known anything but despair. There was nothing in that clog. The stranger rummaged in his waistcoat, bent down, and put a gold louis into Cosette’s clog. Then he crept back to his room on tiptoe. Chapter 31. Thénardier at the helm. The next morning, at least two hours before daybreak, Thénardier’s husband, seated at a table near a candle in the lower room of the cabaret, a quill in his hand, was composing the map of the traveler in the yellow frock coat. The woman, standing half-bent over him, followed him with her eyes. They did not exchange a word. It was, on the one hand, a profound meditation, on the other, that religious admiration with which one watches a marvel of the human spirit being born and blossoming. He heard a noise in the house; it was the Lark sweeping the stairs. After a good quarter of an hour and a few deletions, Thénardier produced this masterpiece. Note from the gentleman at No. 1. Supper Fr. 3 Room Fr. 10 Candle Fr. 5 Fire Fr. 4 Service Fr. 1 Total Fr. 23 Service was written servisse. –Twenty-three francs! cried the woman with enthusiasm mixed with some hesitation. Like all great artists, Thénardier was not happy. “Peuh!” he said. It was the accent of Castlereagh writing France’s bill of exchange at the Congress of Vienna . “Monsieur Thénardier, you are right, he owes it,” murmured the woman , who was thinking of the doll given to Cosette in the presence of her daughters, That’s right, but it’s too much. He won’t pay. Thénardier gave his cold laugh and said: “He will pay.” This laugh was the supreme meaning of certainty and authority. What was said thus had to be said. The woman did not insist. She began to clear the tables; the husband paced up and down the room. A moment later he added: “I owe fifteen hundred francs, myself!” He went and sat down by the fireplace, meditating, his feet on the warm ashes. “Oh, really!” the woman continued, “don’t you forget that I’m throwing Cosette out today? That monster! She’s eating my heart out with her doll! I’d rather marry Louis XVIII than keep her at home one more day . ” Thénardier lit his pipe and replied between puffs. “You’ll give the card to the man.” Then he left. He had barely left the room when the traveler entered. Thénardier immediately reappeared behind him and remained motionless in the half-open door, visible only to his wife. The yellow man carried his stick and his bundle in his hand. “Up so early!” said Thénardier, “is monsieur leaving us already?” As she spoke, she turned the card in her hands with an embarrassed air and made folds in it with her nails. His hard face presented a nuance that was not usual for him, timidity and scrupulousness. To present such a note to a man who so perfectly looked like a pauper seemed awkward to her. The traveler seemed preoccupied and distracted. He replied: “Yes, madame. I am going.” “Then monsieur,” she continued, “had no business in Montfermeil? ” “No. I am passing this way. That is all. Madam,” he added, “what do I owe?” Thénardier, without replying, handed him the folded card. The man unfolded the paper, looked at it, but his attention was clearly elsewhere. “Madame,” he continued, “are you doing good business in this Montfermeil? ” “Just like that, sir,” replied Thénardier, astonished not to see any other outburst. She continued in an elegiac and lamentable tone: “Oh! sir, times are very hard! And then we have so few bourgeois in our places! It’s a very small world, you see. If we didn’t have generous and rich travelers like monsieur here and there ! We have so many expenses. Look, this little girl is costing us an arm and a leg. ” “What little girl? ” “Well, the little girl, you know! Cosette! The Lark, as they say in the country! ” “Ah!” said the man. She continued: “How stupid they are, these peasants, with their nicknames! She looks more like a bat than a lark.” You see, sir, we don’t ask for charity, but we can’t give it. We earn nothing, and we have a lot to pay. The license, the taxes, the doors and windows, the centimes! Sir knows that the government demands a terrible amount of money! And then I have my daughters. I don’t need to feed other people’s children. The man continued, in that voice that he tried to make indifferent and in which there was a tremor: “And if we got rid of her?” “Whose? Cosette? ” “Yes.”
The red and violent face of the tavern-keeper lit up with a hideous bloom. “Ah, sir! my good sir! take her, keep her, take her away, take her away, sweeten her, stuff her with truffles, drink her, eat her, and be blessed by the good Holy Virgin and all the saints in Paradise! ” “That’s said.” “Really? You’re taking her? ” “I’m taking her. ” “Right away? ” “Right away. Call the child. ” “Cosette!” cried Thénardier. “Meanwhile,” continued the man, “I’ll still pay you my expenses. How much is it?” He glanced at the card and could not repress a movement of surprise: “Twenty-three francs!” He looked at the tavern owner and repeated: “Twenty-three francs?” There was in the pronunciation of these two words thus repeated the accent which separates the exclamation mark from the question mark. The Thénardier had had time to prepare herself for the shock. She answered confidently: “Yes, sir! It is twenty-three francs.” The stranger placed five five-franc pieces on the table. “Go and get the little one,” he said. At that moment, the Thénardier advanced into the middle of the room and said: “Monsieur owes twenty-six sous.” “Twenty-six sous!” cried the woman. “Twenty sous for the room,” continued the Thénardier coldly, “and six sous for supper. As for the little one, I need to talk a little with the gentleman. Leave us, my wife.” The Thénardier had one of those dazzling fits that unexpected flashes of talent give. She felt that the great actor was entering the stage, did not reply a word, and left. As soon as they were alone, the Thénardier offered the traveler a chair. The traveler sat down; the Thénardier remained standing, and his face assumed a singular expression of good nature and simplicity. “Sir,” he said, “here, I’ll tell you. I adore this child. ” The stranger looked at him fixedly. “What child? ” Thenardier continued: “How funny! One becomes attached. What is all that money? Take back your hundred-sou pieces. She is a child I adore. ” “Who?” asked the stranger. “Hey, our little Cosette! Won’t you take her with us?” Well, I’m speaking frankly, since you’re an honest man, I can’t agree to it. She would be a fault of mine, this child. I saw that when I was very young. It’s true that she costs us money, it’s true that she has faults, it’s true that we’re not rich, it’s true that I paid more than four hundred francs in drugs just for one of her illnesses! But we have to do something for God. She has neither father nor mother, I raised her. I have bread for her and for me. In fact, I care for this child. You understand, we become fond of each other; I’m a good animal; I don’t reason; I love her, this little one; my wife is lively, but she loves her too. You see, she’s like our child. I need her to babble in the house. The stranger was still staring at him fixedly. He continued: “Pardon, excuse me, sir, but you don’t give your child like that to a passer-by. Isn’t it true that I’m right? After that, I don’t say, you ‘re rich, you seem like a very good man, if it were for her happiness? But we would have to know. You understand? Supposing I were to let her go and sacrifice myself, I would like to know where she is going, I wouldn’t want to lose sight of her, I would like to know who she is with, so that I can go and see her from time to time, so that she knows that her good foster father is there, that he is watching over her. In short, there are things that are not possible. I don’t even know your name? You would take her, I would say: well, the Lark? Where has she gone? We would at least have to see some nasty scrap of paper, a little bit of passport, what!” The stranger, without ceasing to look at him with that look which goes, so to speak, to the depths of conscience, answered him in a grave and firm tone: “Monsieur Thénardier, one does not have a passport to come five leagues from Paris. If I take Cosette, I will take her, that’s all. You will not know my name, you will not know my home, you will not know where she will be, and my intention is that she never sees you again in her life. I break the thread around her foot, and she goes away. Does that suit you? Yes or no. Just as demons and genies recognized certain signs of the presence of a superior god, Thénardier understood that he was dealing with someone very strong. It was like an intuition; he understood this with his clear and sagacious promptness. The day before, while drinking with the carters, while smoking, while singing jokes, he had spent the evening observing the stranger, watching him like a cat and studying him like a mathematician. He had spied on him at once for his own benefit, for pleasure and by instinct, and spied on him as if he had been paid for it. Not a gesture, not a movement of the man in the yellow greatcoat had escaped him. Even before the stranger had so clearly manifested his interest in Cosette, Thénardier had guessed it. He had caught sight of the deep glances of this old man which always returned to the child. Why this interest? Who was this man? Why, with so much money in his purse, such a wretched costume? Questions he asked himself without being able to resolve them and which irritated him. He had thought about them all night. It couldn’t be Cosette’s father. Was it some grandfather? Then why not make himself known at once? When one has a right, one shows it. This man obviously had no right to Cosette. So what was it? Thénardier was lost in suppositions. He glimpsed everything, and saw nothing. However that might be, when he began the conversation with the man, sure that there was a secret in all this, sure that the man was interested in remaining in the shadows, he felt strong; at the stranger’s clear and firm reply, when he saw that this mysterious personage was so simply mysterious, he felt weak. He hadn’t expected anything like this. It was the rout of his conjectures. He rallied his ideas. He weighed all this in a second. Thénardier was one of those men who judge a situation at a glance . He judged that this was the moment to march straight and quickly. He did as great captains do at that decisive moment which only they know how to recognize, he abruptly unmasked his battery. “Sir,” he said, “I need fifteen hundred francs.” The stranger took an old black leather wallet from his side pocket , opened it, and took out three banknotes, which he laid on the table. Then he pressed his large thumb against these notes and said to the tavern keeper: “Bring in Cosette.” While this was going on, what was Cosette doing? Cosette, upon waking, had run to his clog. There she had found the gold piece. It was not a Napoleon, it was one of those brand-new twenty-franc pieces from the Restoration, on whose effigy the little Prussian tail had replaced the laurel wreath. Cosette was dazzled. Her destiny was beginning to intoxicate her. She didn’t know what a gold coin was, she had never seen one, she quickly hid it in her pocket as if she had stolen it. However, she felt that it was truly hers, she guessed where this gift came from, but she felt a sort of joy full of fear. She was happy; she was above all stupefied. These things, so magnificent and so pretty, did not seem real to her. The doll frightened her, the gold coin frightened her. She trembled vaguely before these magnificences. The stranger alone did not frighten her. On the contrary, he reassured her. Since the day before, through her astonishment, through her sleep, she thought in her little child’s mind of this man who looked old and poor and so sad, and who was so rich and so kind. Since she had met this good man in the woods, everything had changed for her. Cosette, less happy than the smallest swallow in the sky, had never known what it was like to take refuge in her mother’s shadow and under a wing. For five years, that is to say, as far back as she could remember, the poor child had been shivering and shivering. She had always been stark naked under the bitter breeze of the woe, now it seemed to her that she was dressed. Formerly her soul had been cold, now it was warm. She was no longer so afraid of Thénardier. She was no longer alone; there was someone there. She had quickly set to her daily work. This louis, which she had on her, in the same pocket of her apron from which the fifteen-sou piece had fallen the day before, gave her distractions. She did not dare touch it, but she spent five minutes contemplating it, it must be said, sticking her tongue out. While sweeping the stairs, she would stop and remain there, motionless, forgetting the broom and the whole universe, occupied in watching this star shining at the bottom of her pocket. It was in one of these contemplations that Thénardier joined her. On her husband’s orders, she had gone to fetch it. Unheard of, she didn’t slap him or insult him. “Cosette,” she said almost gently, “come at once.” A moment later, Cosette entered the lower room. The stranger took the package he had brought and untied it. This package contained a little woolen dress, an apron, a fustian brassiere , a petticoat, a kerchief, woolen stockings, shoes, a complete outfit for a girl of eight. All this was black. “My child,” said the man, “take this and go and dress quickly. ” Day was breaking when those of the inhabitants of Montfermeil who were beginning to open their doors saw a poorly dressed man passing in the Rue de Paris , giving his hand to a little girl in mourning who was carrying a large pink doll in her arms. They were heading in the direction of Livry. They were our man and Cosette. No one knew the man; Since Cosette was no longer in rags, many did not recognize her. Cosette was leaving. With whom? She did not know. Where? She did not know. All she understood was that she was leaving the Thénardier tavern behind her. No one had thought of saying goodbye to her, nor she of saying goodbye to anyone. She was leaving this hated and hating house. Poor sweet creature whose heart had until that hour been nothing but suppressed! Cosette walked gravely, opening her large eyes and gazing at the sky. She had put her louis in the pocket of her new apron. From time to time she bent down and glanced at him, then she looked at the old man. She felt something as if she were near the good Lord. Chapter 32. He who seeks the best may find the worst. The Thénardier, as was her custom, had let her husband do as he pleased. She was expecting great events. When the man and Cosette had left, Thénardier let a good quarter of an hour pass, then he took her aside and showed her the fifteen hundred francs. “Just that!” she said. It was the first time since they had begun living together that she had dared to criticize an act of the master. The blow landed. “By the way, you’re right,” he said, “I am an imbecile. Give me my hat.” He folded the three banknotes, stuffed them in his pocket, and hurried out, but he made a mistake and turned right first. Some neighbors, whom he inquired of, put him back on the trail; the Lark and the man had been seen going in the direction of Livry. He followed this indication, walking with great strides and monologuing. “That man is obviously a millionaire dressed in yellow, and I am an animal.” He first gave twenty sous, then five francs, then fifty francs, then fifteen hundred francs, always so easily. He would have given fifteen thousand francs. But I’m going to catch up with him. And then that bundle of clothes prepared in advance for the little girl, all that was singular; there were many mysteries beneath it. You don’t let go of mysteries once you’ve got them. The secrets of the rich are sponges full of gold; you have to know how to squeeze them. All these thoughts swirled through his brain. “I am an animal,” he said. ” When you leave Montfermeil and reach the bend in the road that goes to Livry, you see it stretching out before you far across the plateau. Having reached that point, he calculated that he should see the man and the little girl. He looked as far as his vision could extend, and saw nothing. He made further inquiries. However, he was losing time. Passers-by told him that the man and the child he was looking for had gone toward the woods near Gagny. He hurried in that direction. They were ahead of him, but a child walks slowly, and he went fast. And besides, the country was well known to him. Suddenly he stopped and struck his forehead like a man who has forgotten the essential and is ready to retrace his steps. “I should have taken my rifle!” he said to himself. Thénardier was one of those double natures that sometimes pass through our midst without our knowing it and disappear without our having known them because destiny has shown only one side. The fate of many men is to live thus half submerged. In a calm and flat situation, Thénardier had everything that was necessary to make—we do not say to be—what is commonly called an honest tradesman, a good bourgeois. At the same time, given certain circumstances, certain shocks coming to raise his nature from beneath, he had everything that was necessary to be a scoundrel. He was a shopkeeper in whom there was something of the monster. Satan must at times crouch in some corner of the hovel where Thénardier lived and dream before this hideous masterpiece. After a moment’s hesitation: “Bah!” he thought, “they would have time to escape!” And he continued on his way, going quickly ahead, and almost with an air of certainty, with the sagacity of a fox scenting a flock of partridges. Indeed, when he had passed the ponds and crossed obliquely the large clearing to the right of the Avenue de Bellevue, as he arrived at that grassy path which almost goes around the hill and covers the vault of the old water channel of the Abbey of Chelles, he saw above a thicket a hat about which he had already built up many conjectures. It was the man’s hat. The thicket was low. Thénardier recognized that the man and Cosette were sitting there. The child could not be seen because of his small size, but the doll’s head could be seen. Thénardier was not mistaken. The man had sat down there to let Cosette rest a little. The tavern-keeper turned the bush and suddenly appeared in the sight of those he was looking for. “Pardon, excuse me, sir,” he said, quite out of breath, “but here are your fifteen hundred francs.” As he spoke, he held out the three banknotes to the stranger. The man looked up. “What does this mean?” Thénardier replied respectfully: “Sir, this means that I am taking Cosette back.” Cosette shuddered and pressed herself against the man. He replied, looking deep into Thénardier’s eyes and spacing out every syllable. “Are you taking Cosette back? ” “Yes, sir, I am taking her back. I’ll tell you. I’ve thought it over. In fact, I have no right to give her to you. I’m an honest man, you see. This little girl isn’t mine, she belongs to her mother. It was her mother who entrusted her to me, I can only give her to her mother.” You will say to me: But the mother is dead. Good. In that case I can only return the child to a person who brings me a written document signed by the mother stating that I must return the child to that person. That is clear. The man, without answering, searched in his pocket and Thénardier saw the wallet with the banknotes reappear. The tavern keeper gave a thrill of joy. “Good!” he thought, “let’s hold on. He’s going to bribe me!” Before opening the wallet, the traveler glanced around . The place was absolutely deserted. There was not a soul in the woods or in the valley. The man opened the wallet and took out, not the handful of banknotes Thénardier was expecting, but a simple little piece of paper, which he unfolded and presented, fully open, to the innkeeper, saying: “You are right. Read it.” Thénardier took the paper and read: Montreuil-sur-Mer, March 25, 1823 Monsieur Thénardier, You will deliver Cosette to the person. You will be paid for all the little things. I have the honor of greeting you with consideration. Fantine. ” “Do you know this signature?” the man continued. It was indeed Fantine’s signature. Thénardier recognized it. There was nothing to reply. He felt two violent pangs of vexation, vexation at renouncing the corruption he had hoped for, and vexation at being beaten. The man added: “You can keep this paper for your discharge.” Thénardier withdrew in good order. “That signature is fairly well imitated,” he grumbled between his teeth. “Well, so be it!” Then he made a desperate effort. “Sir,” he said, “that’s fine. Since you’re the person. But you have to pay me for all the little things. I’m owed a lot.” The man stood up and said, flicking his dust from his threadbare sleeve. “Monsieur Thénardier, in January the mother reckoned she owed you one hundred and twenty francs; in February you sent her a bill for five hundred francs; you received three hundred francs at the end of February and three hundred francs at the beginning of March.” Nine months have passed since then at fifteen francs, the agreed price, that makes one hundred and thirty-five francs. You received one hundred francs too much. Thirty-five francs remain that are owed to you. I have just given you fifteen hundred francs. Thénardier felt what a wolf feels at the moment when he feels himself bitten and seized by the steel jaws of the trap. “Who the devil is this man?” he thought. He did what a wolf does. He gave a jerk. Audacity had already succeeded once. “Mister-whose-name-I-do-not-know,” he said resolutely, and this time putting aside respectful manners, “I will take Cosette back or you will give me a thousand crowns.” The stranger said calmly. “Come, Cosette.” He took Cosette with his left hand, and with his right he picked up his stick that was on the ground. Thénardier noticed the enormity of the stick and the solitude of the place. The man plunged into the woods with the child, leaving the tavern-keeper motionless and speechless. As they walked away, Thénardier considered his broad, slightly stooped shoulders and his large fists. Then his eyes, returning to themselves, fell upon his puny arms and thin hands. “I must be really stupid,” he thought, “not to have taken my gun, since I was going hunting!” However, the innkeeper did not let go. “I want to know where he will go,” he said. And he began to follow them at a distance. He had two things left in his hands, an irony, the scrap of paper signed Fantine, and a consolation, the fifteen hundred francs. The man was leading Cosette in the direction of Livry and Bondy. He walked slowly, his head bowed, in an attitude of reflection and sadness. Winter had made the woods openwork, so that Thénardier did not lose sight of them, while remaining quite far away. From time to time the man turned around and looked to see if anyone was following him . Suddenly he saw Thénardier. He suddenly entered a copse with Cosette into a thicket where they could both disappear. “Good heavens!” said Thénardier. And he quickened his pace. The thickness of the thicket had forced him to come closer to them. When the man was at its thickest, he turned around. Thénardier hid in the branches in vain; he could not prevent the man from seeing him. The man gave him a worried glance, then nodded and continued on his way. The innkeeper began to follow him again. They walked two or three hundred paces in this way. Suddenly the man turned around again. He saw the innkeeper. This time he looked at him with such a gloomy expression that Thénardier judged it useless to go any further. Thénardier turned back. Chapter 33. Number 9430 reappears and Cosette wins it in the lottery. Jean Valjean was not dead. When he fell into the sea, or rather when he threw himself into it, he was, as we have seen, without irons. He swam between two waters until he reached an anchored ship, to which a boat was moored. He found a way to hide in this boat until evening. At nightfall, he threw himself into the water again, and reached the coast a short distance from Cape Brun. There, as he was not lacking in money, he was able to obtain clothes. A tavern near Balaguier was then the dressing room for escaped convicts, a lucrative specialty. Then, Jean Valjean, like all these sad fugitives who try to elude the watch of the law and social fatality, followed an obscure and undulating route. He found a first asylum at Pradeaux, near Beausset. Then he headed for Grand-Villard, near Briançon, in the Hautes-Alpes. A groping and anxious flight, a mole’s path whose branches are unknown. Later, some trace of his passage in the Ain was found in the territory of Civrieux, in the Pyrenees, in Accons at the place called La Grange-de-Doumecq, near the hamlet of Chavailles, and in the surroundings of Périgueux, at Brunies, canton of La Chapelle-Gonaguet. He reached Paris. He has just been seen in Montfermeil. His first concern, upon arriving in Paris, had been to buy mourning clothes for a little girl of seven or eight years old, then to find a place to stay. This done, he went to Montfermeil. It will be remembered that already, during his previous escape, he had made a mysterious journey there, or in the surrounding area, which had shed some light on justice. Moreover, he was believed to be dead, and this deepened the darkness that had fallen over him. In Paris, one of the newspapers that recorded the incident fell into his hands . He felt reassured and almost at peace, as if he were really dead. On the very evening of the day when Jean Valjean had rescued Cosette from the clutches of the Thénardiers, he was returning to Paris. He was returning at nightfall, with the child, by the Barrière de Monceaux. There he got into a cabriolet which took him to the esplanade of the Observatory. He got out, paid the coachman, took Cosette by the hand, and the two of them, in the dark night, through the deserted streets near the Ourcine and the Glacière, headed towards the Boulevard de l’Hôpital. The day had been strange and full of emotion for Cosette; they had eaten bread and cheese behind hedges, bought in isolated eateries, they had often changed carriages, they had walked for parts of the way, she did not complain, but she was tired, and Jean Valjean perceived by her hand that it pulled more as she walked. He took her on his back; Cosette, without letting go of Catherine, laid her head on Jean Valjean’s shoulder, and fell asleep there. Book Four–The Gorbeau Hovel Chapter 34. Master Gorbeau. Forty years ago, the solitary walker who ventured into the lost lands of the Salpêtrière, and who climbed the boulevard as far as the Barrière d’Italie, arrived at places where one might have said that Paris was disappearing. It was not solitude, there were passers-by; it was not the countryside, there were houses and streets; it was not a city, the streets had ruts like the main roads and grass grew there; it was not a village, the houses were too high. What was it then? It was an inhabited place where there was no one, it was a deserted place where there was someone; it was a boulevard of the big city, a street of Paris, wilder at night than a forest, more gloomy by day than a cemetery. It was the old quarter of the Marché-aux-Chevaux. This walker, if he ventured beyond the four decayed walls of this Marché-aux-Chevaux, if he even consented to go beyond the rue du Petit-Banquier, after having left on his right a small courtyard guarded by high walls, then a meadow where stood tan ricks like gigantic beaver lodges, then an enclosure cluttered with timbers with piles of stumps, sawdust and shavings on top of which barked a large dog, then a long low wall all in ruins, with a small black gate in mourning, laden with moss which filled with flowers in spring, then, at the most deserted, a hideous decrepit building on which one read in large letters: NO POSTING, this risky walker reached the corner of the rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel, little-known latitudes. There, near a factory and between two garden walls, one could see at that time a hovel which, at first glance, seemed as small as a cottage and which in reality was as large as a cathedral. It appeared on the public road from the side, by the gable; hence its apparent smallness. Almost the entire house was hidden. One could only see the door and a window. This hovel had only one story. On examining it, the detail which struck one first was that this door could never have been anything other than the door of a hovel, while this window, if it had been cut in cut stone instead of in rubble, could have been the window of a hotel. The door was nothing other than an assembly of worm-eaten planks roughly joined by crosspieces like badly squared logs . It opened immediately onto a steep staircase with high steps, muddy, plastered, dusty, the same width as itself, which could be seen from the street rising straight up like a ladder and disappearing into the shadows between two walls. The top of the shapeless bay window that swung through this door was masked by a narrow boarding in the middle of which a triangular opening had been sawn out, a whole skylight and fanlight together when the door was closed. On the inside of the door a brush dipped in ink had traced with two strokes the number 52, and above the boarding the same brush had smeared the number 50; so that one hesitated. Where are we? The top of the door said: at number 50; the inside replied: no, at number 52. One does not know what dust-colored rags hung like draperies from the triangular fanlight. The window was wide, sufficiently high, furnished with shutters and frames with large panes; only these large panes had various injuries, both hidden and betrayed by an ingenious paper bandage, and the shutters, dislocated and unsealed, threatened passers-by more than they protected the inhabitants. The horizontal shades were missing here and there and were naively replaced by planks nailed perpendicularly; so that the thing began as a shutter and ended as a shutter. This door which looked filthy and this window which looked honest, although dilapidated, thus seen on the same house, had the effect of two mismatched beggars who would go together and walk side by side with two different faces under the same rags, one having always been a beggar, the other having been a gentleman. The staircase led to a very large building which resembled a shed which had been made into a house. This building had as its intestinal tube a long corridor onto which opened, on the right and On the left, there were compartments of varying sizes, at most habitable and more like shops than cells. These rooms opened onto vacant lots in the surrounding area. All this was dark, unpleasant, pale, melancholic, sepulchral; penetrated, depending on whether the cracks were in the roof or the door, by cold rays or by icy breezes. An interesting and picturesque feature of this type of dwelling is the enormity of the spiders. To the left of the entrance door, on the boulevard, at the height of a man, a walled-up dormer window made a square niche full of stones that children threw in as they passed. Part of this building was recently demolished. What remains of it today can still give an idea of what it was like. The whole thing, taken as a whole, is barely more than a hundred years old. A hundred years is the youth of a church and the old age of a house. It seems that the home of man shares in its brevity and the home of God in its eternity. The postmen called this hovel number 50-52; but it was known in the neighborhood under the name of Gorbeau house. Let us explain where this name came from. Collectors of small facts, who make herbariums of anecdotes and who prick their memory with a pin the fleeting dates, know that in Paris, in the last century, around 1770, there were two prosecutors at the Châtelet, one called Corbeau, the other Renard. Two names foreseen by La Fontaine. The opportunity was too good for the bar to not make a big deal about it. Immediately the parody ran, in somewhat lame verse, through the galleries of the Palace: Master Corbeau, perched on a file, Held in his beak an executory seizure; Master Fox, attracted by the smell, told him something like this: Hey, hello! etc. The two honest practitioners, embarrassed by the jeers and upset in their posture by the bursts of laughter that followed them, resolved to get rid of their names and decided to address the king. The request was presented to Louis XV on the very day when the papal nuncio, on one side, and Cardinal de La Roche-Aymon, on the other, both devoutly kneeling, each, in the presence of his majesty, put a slipper on the two bare feet of Madame Du Barry, just getting out of bed. The king, who was laughing, continued to laugh, cheerfully passed from the two bishops to the two attorneys, and spared these robins their names, or almost. Master Corbeau was allowed, by the king, to add a tail to his initial and to call himself Gorbeau; Master Renard was less fortunate, he could only manage to put a P before his R and call himself Prenard; so that the second name was hardly less similar than the first. Now, according to local tradition, this master Gorbeau had been the owner of the building numbered 50-52 boulevard de l’Hôpital. He was even the author of the monumental window. Hence the name Maison Gorbeau to this hovel. Opposite number 50-52 stands, among the plantations of the boulevard, a large elm tree, three-quarters dead; almost opposite opens the Rue de la Barrière des Gobelins, a street then without houses, unpaved, planted with unwelcome trees, green or muddy depending on the season, which would end squarely at the Paris wall. A smell of rosacea rises in gusts from the roofs of a neighboring factory. The barrier was very close. In 1823, the wall still existed. This barrier itself conjured up sinister images. It was the Bicêtre road. It was by this road that, under the Empire and the Restoration, those condemned to death returned to Paris on the day of their execution. It was here that the mysterious murder known as the Fontainebleau Barrier was committed around 1829, the perpetrators of which the courts were unable to discover, a funereal problem that has not been clarified, an enigma frightful that has not been opened. Take a few steps, you find that fatal Rue Croulebarbe where Ulbach stabbed the goatherd of Ivry to the sound of thunder, as in a melodrama. A few more steps, and you arrive at the abominable pollarded elms of the Barrière Saint-Jacques, that expedient of the philanthropists hiding the scaffold, that petty and shameful Place de Grève of a shopkeeper and bourgeois society, which has recoiled from the death penalty, daring neither to abolish it with grandeur, nor to maintain it with authority. Thirty-seven years ago, leaving aside that Place Saint-Jacques which was as if predestined and which has always been horrible, perhaps the most dismal point of this whole dreary boulevard was the place, so unattractive even today, where one came across the hovel 50-52. The bourgeois houses only began to appear there twenty-five years later. The place was gloomy. The funereal ideas that seized you there made you feel as if you were between the Salpêtrière, whose dome you could glimpse, and Bicêtre, whose barrier you could touch; that is to say, between the madness of woman and the madness of man. However far the eye could see, you could only see the slaughterhouses, the surrounding wall, and a few rare factory facades, like barracks or monasteries ; everywhere there were huts and plasterwork, old walls as black as shrouds, new walls as white as winding sheets; everywhere there were parallel rows of trees, buildings drawn to a line, flat constructions, long cold lines, and the lugubrious sadness of right angles. Not an accident of terrain, not a whim of architecture, not a fold. It was a glacial, regular, hideous whole. Nothing squeezes the heart like symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, and boredom is the very basis of mourning. Despair yawns. One can dream of something more terrible than a hell where one suffers; it is a hell where one would be bored. If this hell existed, this piece of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital could have been its avenue. However, at nightfall, at the moment when the light fades, especially in winter, at the hour when the twilight breeze tears the last russet leaves from the elms, when the shadow is deep and starless, or when the moon and the wind make holes in the clouds, this boulevard suddenly became frightening. The straight lines sank and were lost in the darkness like sections of infinity. The passerby could not help thinking of the innumerable sinister traditions of the place. The solitude of this spot where so many crimes had been committed had something frightful about it. One thought one sensed traps in this darkness, all the confused forms of shadow seemed suspicious, and the long square hollows that one saw between each tree seemed like pits. By day, it was ugly; by evening, it was gloomy; by night, it was sinister. In summer, at dusk, one saw here and there a few old women, sitting at the foot of the elms on benches moldered by the rain. These good old women begged willingly. Besides, this neighborhood, which had seemed rather old-fashioned than ancient, was tending from then on to be transformed. From that time on, anyone who wanted to see it had to hurry. Every day some detail of this whole was disappearing. Today, and for twenty years, the Orléans railway landing stage is there, next to the old suburb, and has been working it. Wherever a railway landing stage is placed on the edge of a capital, it is the death of a suburb and the birth of a city. It seems that around these great centers of the movement of peoples, at the rolling of these powerful machines, at the breath of these monstrous horses of civilization that eat coal and vomit fire, the earth full of germs trembles and opens to swallow up the old dwellings of men and let out the new ones. The old houses crumble, the new houses are going up. Since the Orléans railway station invaded the Salpêtrière grounds, the ancient narrow streets near the Saint-Victor moat and the Jardin des Plantes are shaking, violently crossed three or four times each day by these streams of stagecoaches, hackney carriages and omnibuses which, in a given time, push back the houses to the right and to the left; for there are strange things to state which are rigorously exact, and just as it is true to say that in large cities the sun makes the facades of houses vegetate and grow to the south, it is certain that the frequent passage of carriages widens the streets. The symptoms of a new life are evident. In this old provincial quarter, in the wildest corners, the paving stones are showing, the sidewalks are beginning to creep and lengthen, even where there are no passers-by yet. One morning, a memorable morning, in July 1845, the black pots of bitumen were suddenly seen smoking there; that day it could be said that civilization had arrived in the Rue de Lourcine and that Paris had entered the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Chapter 35. Nest for an Owl and a Warbler. It was before this Gorbeau hovel that Jean Valjean stopped. Like wild birds, he had chosen the most deserted spot to make his nest. He rummaged in his waistcoat, took out a sort of master key, opened the door, entered, then closed it carefully, and went up the stairs, still carrying Cosette. At the top of the stairs, he took another key from his pocket, with which he opened another door. The room he entered and immediately closed was a sort of rather spacious attic furnished with a mattress placed on the floor, a table, and a few chairs. A lighted stove , the embers of which could be seen, was in a corner. The street lamp on the boulevard dimly lit this poor interior. At the far end was a closet with a cot. Jean Valjean carried the child to this bed and placed her there without her waking. He struck the tinder and lit a candle; all this was prepared beforehand on the table; and, as he had done the day before, he began to consider Cosette with a look full of ecstasy, in which the expression of kindness and tenderness almost reached madness. The little girl, with that tranquil confidence which belongs only to extreme strength and extreme weakness, had fallen asleep without knowing with whom she was, and continued to sleep without knowing where she was. Jean Valjean bent down and kissed the hand of this child. Nine months before, he had kissed the hand of the mother, who, likewise, had just fallen asleep. The same painful, religious, poignant feeling filled his heart. He knelt beside Cosette’s bed. It was broad daylight and the child was still asleep. A pale ray of December sunlight pierced the garret window and trailed long threads of light and shadow across the ceiling. Suddenly a heavily laden cart, passing along the roadway of the boulevard, shook the hut like the rolling of a storm and made it tremble from top to bottom. “Yes, madame!” cried Cosette, awakened with a start, “there! there!” And she threw herself out of bed, her eyelids still half closed by the heaviness of sleep, stretching out her arm toward the corner of the wall. “Ah! my God! my broom!” she said. She opened her eyes wide and saw the smiling face of Jean Valjean. “Ah! why, it’s true!” said the child. “Good morning, sir.” Children immediately and familiarly accept joy and happiness, being themselves naturally happiness and joy. Cosette saw Catherine at the foot of her bed, and seized it, and, while playing, she asked Jean Valjean a hundred questions.–Where was she? Was Paris big? Was Madame Thénardier very far away? Was she would not come back? etc., etc. Suddenly she cried: “How pretty it is here! It was a dreadful hovel; but she felt free. ” “Must I sweep?” she continued at last. “Play,” said Jean Valjean. The day passed thus. Cosette, without worrying about understanding anything, was inexpressibly happy between this doll and this man. Chapter 36. Two misfortunes mixed together make happiness. The next day at daybreak, Jean Valjean was still near Cosette’s bed. He waited there, motionless, and watched her wake up. Something new entered his soul. Jean Valjean had never loved anything. For twenty-five years he had been alone in the world. He had never been a father, a lover, a husband, a friend. In the galleys he was bad, gloomy, chaste, ignorant, and fierce. The heart of this old convict was full of virginities. His sister and his sister’s children had left him only a vague and distant memory which had ended up vanishing almost entirely. He had made every effort to find them again, and, having been unable to find them, he had forgotten them. Human nature is such. The other tender emotions of his youth, if he had any, had fallen into an abyss. When he saw Cosette, when he had taken her, carried her away, and delivered her, he felt his entrails stir. All that was passionate and affectionate in him awoke and rushed towards this child. He went near the bed where she slept, and there he trembled with joy; he felt embraces like a mother’s, and he did not know what they were; for it is a very obscure and very sweet thing, this great and strange movement of a heart which begins to love. Poor old heart, brand new! Only, as he was fifty-five and Cosette was eight, all the love he might have had in his entire life melted into a sort of ineffable glow. It was the second white apparition he had encountered. The bishop had caused the dawn of virtue to rise on his horizon; Cosette was causing the dawn of love to rise there. The first days passed in this dazzling light. For her part, Cosette, too, was becoming something else, without her knowing it, poor little being! She had been so small when her mother left her that she no longer remembered it. Like all children, like the young shoots of the vine that cling to everything, she had tried to love. She had not succeeded. Everyone had rejected her, the Thénardiers, their children, other children. She had loved the dog, which had died. After that, nothing had wanted her, nor anyone. A sad thing to say, and one we have already mentioned, at eight years old she had a cold heart. It was not her fault, it was not the faculty of loving that she lacked; alas! it was the possibility. So, from the first day, everything that felt and thought in her began to love this good man. She felt what she had never felt before, a sensation of fulfillment. The good man no longer even gave her the impression of being old, or of being poor. She found Jean Valjean handsome, just as she found the hovel pretty. These are effects of dawn, of childhood, of youth, of joy. The newness of the earth and of life has something to do with it. Nothing is so charming as the colorful reflection of happiness on the attic. We all have thus in our past a blue garret. Nature, fifty years apart, had placed a profound separation between Jean Valjean and Cosette; this separation, destiny filled. Destiny suddenly united and betrothed with its irresistible power these two uprooted existences, different in age, similar in grief. One in fact completed the other. Cosette’s instinct sought a father as Jean Valjean’s instinct sought a child. To meet was to find each other. At the mysterious moment when their two hands touched, they were welded together. When these two souls perceived each other, they recognized each other as being the need of each other and embraced each other closely. Taking the words in their most comprehensive and absolute sense, one could say that, separated from everything by tomblike walls, Jean Valjean was the Widower as Cosette was the Orphan. This
situation caused Jean Valjean to become in a celestial way the father of Cosette. And, in truth, the mysterious impression produced on Cosette, in the depths of the Bois de Chelles, by Jean Valjean’s hand seizing hers in the darkness, was not an illusion, but a reality. The entry of this man into the destiny of this child had been the arrival of God. Besides, Jean Valjean had chosen his asylum well. He was there in a security which could seem complete. The chamber with a closet which he occupied with Cosette was the one whose window looked out on the boulevard. This window being the only one in the house, no neighbor’s gaze was to be feared, either from the side or opposite. The ground floor of number 50-52, a sort of dilapidated lean-to, served as a shed for market gardeners, and had no communication with the first. It was separated from it by the floor, which had neither trapdoor nor staircase and which was like the diaphragm of the hovel. The first floor contained, as we have said, several rooms and a few attics, only one of which was occupied by an old woman who did Jean Valjean’s housekeeping. All the rest was uninhabited. It was this old woman, adorned with the name of principal tenant and in reality charged with the duties of doorkeeper, who had rented this lodging to him on Christmas Day. He had given himself to her as a rentier ruined by Spanish bonds, who was coming to live there with his granddaughter. He had paid six months in advance and instructed the old woman to furnish the room and the study as we have seen. It was this good woman who had lit the stove and prepared everything on the evening of their arrival. Weeks passed. These two beings led a happy existence in this miserable hovel. From dawn, Cosette laughed, chattered, and sang. Children have their morning song like birds. Sometimes Jean Valjean would take her little hand, red and cracked with chilblains, and kiss it. The poor child, accustomed to being beaten, did not know what that meant and would go away quite ashamed. At times she would become serious and look at her little black dress . Cosette was no longer in rags; she was in mourning. She was emerging from poverty and entering life. Jean Valjean had begun to teach her to read. Sometimes, while making the child spell, he reflected that it was with the idea of doing evil that he had learned to read in the galleys. This idea had turned into showing a child how to read. Then the old galley slave smiled with the pensive smile of angels. He felt there a premeditation from on high, a will of someone who is not man, and he lost himself in reverie. Good thoughts have their abysses like bad ones. Teaching Cosette to read, and letting her play, that was pretty much all of Jean Valjean’s life. And then he spoke to her of his mother and made her pray. She called him: father, and knew no other name for him. He spent hours contemplating her, dressing and undressing her doll, and listening to her babble. Life now seemed full of interest to him, men seemed good and just, he no longer reproached anyone in his thoughts, he saw no reason why he should not grow old to a very old age now that this child loved him. He saw a whole future illuminated by Cosette as by a charming light. The best are not exempt from a selfish thought. At times he thought with a sort of joy that she would be ugly. This is only a personal opinion; but to express our thoughts completely whole, at the point where Jean Valjean was when he began to love Cosette, it is not proven to us that he did not need this refueling to persevere in good. He had just seen under new aspects the wickedness of men and the misery of society, incomplete aspects which fatally showed only one side of the truth, the fate of women summarized in Fantine, public authority personified in Javert; he had returned to the penal colony, this time for having done well; new bitterness had watered him; disgust and weariness were taking hold of him again; the very memory of the bishop was perhaps touching on some moment of eclipse, unless it reappeared later luminous and triumphant; but finally this sacred memory was weakening. Who knows if Jean Valjean was not on the verge of becoming discouraged and falling again? He loved, and he became strong again. Alas! He was hardly less shaky than Cosette. He protected her and she strengthened him. Thanks to him, she was able to walk in life; thanks to her, he was able to continue in virtue. He was the support of this child and this child was her point of support. O unfathomable and divine mystery of the balances of destiny! Chapter 37. The remarks of the principal tenant. Jean Valjean was prudent never to go out during the day. Every evening, at dusk, he walked for an hour or two, sometimes alone, often with Cosette, seeking the most solitary side-alleys of the boulevard , or entering churches at nightfall. He gladly went to Saint-Médard, which is the nearest church. When he did not take Cosette with him, she stayed with the old woman; but it was the child’s joy to go out with the good man. She preferred an hour with him even to Catherine’s ravishing tête-à-têtes. He walked holding her hand and saying sweet things to her. It so happened that Cosette was very cheerful. The old woman did the cleaning and cooking and went to the provisions. They lived soberly, always having a little fire, but like very embarrassed people. Jean Valjean had not changed anything in the furniture of the first day; only he had had the glass door of Cosette’s study replaced by a solid door. He still had his yellow frock coat, his black breeches, and his old hat. In the street people took him for a pauper. Sometimes some women turned around and gave him a sou. Jean Valjean received the sou and bowed low. It also sometimes happened that he met some wretch asking for charity, then he looked behind him to see if anyone was seeing him, approached the unfortunate man furtively, put a coin, often a silver coin, into his hand , and quickly moved away. This had its drawbacks. He was beginning to be known in the neighborhood under the name of the beggar who gives alms. The old principal tenant, a sulky creature, steeped in the attention of envious people towards her neighbor, examined Jean Valjean a great deal, without his suspecting it. She was a little deaf, which made her talkative. She had two teeth left from her past, one at the top, the other at the bottom, which she was always knocking together. She had asked questions of Cosette, who, knowing nothing, had been unable to say anything, except that she came from Montfermeil. One morning, this watcher perceived Jean Valjean entering, with an air that seemed peculiar to the gossip, one of the uninhabited compartments of the hovel. She followed him with the step of an old cat, and was able to observe him, unseen, through the crack of the door which was close by. Jean Valjean, doubtless as a precaution , had his back to the door. The old woman saw him rummage in his pocket and take out a case, scissors, and thread. Then he began to unpick the lining of a piece of his frock coat and took from the opening a piece of yellowish paper which he unfolded. The old woman recognized with terrified that it was a thousand-franc note. It was the second or third she had seen since she came into the world. She ran away in great fear. A moment later, Jean Valjean accosted her and asked her to go and change the thousand-franc note for him, adding that it was the half-year’s allowance he had received the day before. “Where?” thought the old woman. “He didn’t go out until six o’clock in the evening, and the government cashier is certainly not open at that hour.” The old woman went to change the note and made her conjectures. This thousand-franc note, discussed and multiplied, produced a host of terrified conversations among the gossips of the Rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel. In the following days, it happened that Jean Valjean, in his jacket sleeves, was sawing wood in the corridor. The old woman was in the room, cleaning. She was alone, Cosette being busy admiring the wood being sawed, the old woman saw the frock coat hanging on a nail, and examined it: the lining had been mended. The good woman felt it carefully, and thought she felt layers of paper in the panels and armholes. More thousand-franc notes, no doubt! She also noticed that there were all sorts of things in the pockets, not only the needles, scissors, and thread she had seen, but a large wallet, a very large knife, and, a suspicious detail, several wigs of various colors. Each pocket of this frock coat looked like a kind of snack for unforeseen events. The inhabitants of the hovel thus reached the last days of winter. Chapter 38. A five-franc piece falling to the ground makes a noise. There was a poor man near Saint-Médard who squatted on the edge of a blocked common well, and to whom Jean Valjean readily gave charity. He hardly passed by this man without giving him a few sous. Sometimes he spoke to him. Those who envied this beggar said that he was a member of the police. He was an old verger of seventy-five who continually muttered prayers. One evening when Jean Valjean was passing by, he did not have Cosette with him, he saw the beggar in his usual place under the street lamp which had just been lit. This man, as was his custom, seemed to be praying and was bent over. Jean Valjean went to him and put his customary alms into his hand . The beggar suddenly raised his eyes, looked fixedly at Jean Valjean, then quickly lowered his head. This movement was like a flash, Jean Valjean shuddered. It seemed to him that he had just glimpsed, in the light of the street lamp, not the placid and beatific face of the old verger, but a frightening and familiar figure. He had the impression one would have upon suddenly finding oneself in the darkness face to face with a tiger. He recoiled, terrified and petrified, not daring to breathe, nor to speak, nor to stay, nor to flee, looking at the beggar who had lowered his head covered with a rag and seemed no longer to know that he was there. In that strange moment, an instinct, perhaps the mysterious instinct of self- preservation, made Jean Valjean not utter a word. The beggar had the same figure, the same rags, the same appearance as every day. “Bah!” said Jean Valjean, “I’m mad! I’m dreaming! Impossible!” And he went home profoundly troubled. He hardly dared to admit to himself that the figure he thought he saw was Javert. That night, thinking about it, he regretted not having questioned the man to force him to raise his head a second time. The next day at nightfall he returned. The beggar was in his place. “Good morning, good man,” said Jean Valjean resolutely, giving him a sou. The beggar raised his head and replied in a doleful voice: “Thank you, my good sir.” “It was indeed the old verger.” Jean Valjean felt completely reassured. He began to laugh. “Where the devil did I go to see there?” Javert? he thought. Oh, am I going to be seeing things now ? He thought no more of it. A few days later, it might have been eight o’clock in the evening, he was in his room and he was making Cosette spell aloud, he heard the door of the hovel open, then close. This seemed strange to him. The old woman, who alone lived in the house with him, always went to bed at night so as not to use a candle. Jean Valjean made a sign to Cosette to be silent. He heard someone coming up the stairs. At a pinch, it might have been the old woman who had taken ill and gone to the apothecary. Jean Valjean listened. The step was heavy and sounded like a man’s step; but the old woman wore heavy shoes and nothing resembles a man’s step like the step of an old woman. Meanwhile, Jean Valjean blew out his candle. He had sent Cosette to bed, saying to her in a low voice: “Lie down very quietly.” And while he was kissing her forehead, the footsteps had stopped. Jean Valjean remained silent, motionless, his back turned to the door, sitting on his chair from which he had not moved, holding his breath in the darkness. After a considerable time, hearing nothing more, he turned around without making a noise, and, as he raised his eyes towards the door of his room, he saw a light through the keyhole . This light made a sort of sinister star in the darkness of the door and the wall. There was evidently someone there holding a candle in his hand and listening. A few minutes passed, and the light went out. Only he heard no more footsteps, which seemed to indicate that the one who had come to listen at the door had taken off his shoes. Jean Valjean threw himself fully dressed upon his bed and could not close his eyes all night. At daybreak, as he was dozing from fatigue, he was awakened by the creaking of a door opening in some garret at the end of the corridor, then he heard the same man’s footsteps that had ascended the stairs the day before. The footsteps were approaching. He threw himself out of bed and applied his eye to the keyhole, which was rather large, hoping to see as he passed the person who had entered the hovel during the night and who had listened at his door. It was indeed a man who passed, this time without stopping, in front of Jean Valjean’s room. The corridor was still too dark for his face to be distinguished; but when the man arrived at the stairs, a ray of light from without made him stand out like a silhouette, and Jean Valjean saw him completely from behind. The man was tall, dressed in a long frock coat, with a club under his arm. It was the formidable neckline of Javert. Jean Valjean could have tried to see him again through his window on the boulevard. But he would have had to open that window; he did not dare. It was evident that this man had entered with a key, and as if it were his own home. Who had given him this key? What did it mean? At seven o’clock in the morning, when the old woman came to do the cleaning, Jean Valjean gave her a penetrating glance, but he did not question her. The good woman was as usual. While sweeping, she said to him: “Perhaps, sir, someone came in last night? At that age and on this boulevard, eight o’clock in the evening is the darkest night. ” “By the way, it is true,” he replied in the most natural tone. “Who was it then?” “There’s a new tenant in the house,” said the old woman, “and who’s his name? ” “I don’t quite remember. Monsieur Dumont or Daumont. A name like that. ” “And who is he, this Monsieur Dumont?” The old woman looked at him with her little beady eyes and replied: “A man of means, like you.” Perhaps she had no intention. Jean Valjean thought he could tell her one. When the old woman had left, he made a roll of a hundred francs. that he had in a cupboard and put it in his pocket. Whatever precaution he took in this operation so that no one would hear him moving the money, a hundred-sou piece slipped from his hands and rolled noisily on the floor. At dusk, he went downstairs and looked carefully on all sides of the boulevard. He saw no one there. The boulevard seemed absolutely deserted. It is true that one can hide behind the trees. He went back up. “Come,” he said to Cosette. He took her by the hand, and they both went out. Book Five–To Black Hunt, Silent Pack Chapter 39. The Zigzags of Strategy. Here, for the pages we are about to read and for others still we will encounter later, an observation is necessary. For many years now, the author of this book, forced, with regret, to speak of himself, has been absent from Paris. Since he left it, Paris has been transformed. A new city has arisen that is in some way unknown to him. He does not need to say that he loves Paris; Paris is the native city of his mind. As a result of demolitions and reconstructions, the Paris of his youth, this Paris that he religiously carried with him in his memory, is at this hour a Paris of yesteryear. Let him be allowed to speak of that Paris as if it still existed. It is possible that where the author will lead readers by saying: In such and such a street there is such and such a house, there is today neither house nor street. Readers will check, if they want to take the trouble. As for him, he ignores the new Paris, and he writes with the old Paris before his eyes in an illusion that is precious to him. It is a pleasure for him to dream that there remains behind him something of what he saw when he was in his country, and that everything has not vanished. As long as you come and go in your native land, you imagine that these streets are indifferent to you, that these windows, these roofs and these doors are nothing to you , that these walls are foreign to you, that these trees are the first trees to come, that these houses which you do not enter are useless to you, that these paving stones on which you walk are stones. Later, when you are no longer there, you realize that these streets are dear to you, that you miss these roofs, these windows and these doors, that these walls are necessary to you, that these trees are your beloved, that these houses which you did not enter you entered every day, and that you have left your entrails, your blood and your heart in these paving stones. All these places that we no longer see, that we will perhaps never see again, and whose image we have retained, take on a painful charm, come back to you with the melancholy of an apparition, make you the visible holy land, and are, so to speak, the very form of France; and we love them and we invoke them as they are, as they were, and we persist in this, and we want to change nothing, for we hold to the figure of the fatherland as to the face of one’s mother. May we therefore be permitted to speak of the past in the present. Having said this, we ask the reader to take note of it, and we continue. Jean Valjean had immediately left the boulevard and entered the streets, making as many broken lines as he could, sometimes abruptly retracing his steps to make sure that he was not followed. This maneuver is peculiar to the hunted deer. On terrain where the track can be imprinted, this maneuver has, among other advantages, that of deceiving hunters and dogs by the opposite tack. This is what in hunting is called a false rembuchement. It was a night of a full moon. Jean Valjean was not sorry about it. The
moon, still very close to the horizon, cut through the streets with great stretches of shadow and light. Jean Valjean could slip along the houses and walls on the dark side and observe the light side. He did not perhaps he did not reflect enough that the dark side escaped him. Yet, in all the deserted alleys surrounding the Rue de Poliveau, he believed he was certain that no one was coming behind him. Cosette walked without asking questions. The sufferings of the first six years of her life had introduced something passive into her nature. Besides, and this is a remark to which we will have more than one occasion to return, she was accustomed, without really realizing it, to the peculiarities of the good man and the oddities of destiny. And then she felt safe, being with him. Jean Valjean, no more than Cosette, knew where he was going. He confided in God as she confided in him. It seemed to him that he too was holding someone greater than himself by the hand; he believed he felt a being leading him, invisible. Besides, he had no fixed ideas, no plan, no project. He was not even absolutely sure that it was Javert, and then it could be Javert without Javert knowing that it was Jean Valjean. Was he not disguised? Did they not think he was dead? However, for some days things had been happening which were becoming singular. He needed no more. He was determined not to return to the Gorbeau house. Like an animal driven from its lair, he was looking for a hole in which to hide, while waiting to find one in which to lodge. Jean Valjean described several varied labyrinths in the Mouffetard quarter, already asleep as if it still had the discipline of the Middle Ages and the yoke of the curfew; he combined in various ways, in clever strategies, the Rue Censier and the Rue Copeau, the Rue du Battoir-Saint-Victor and the Rue du Puits-l’Ermite. There are lodgers over there, but he didn’t even go in, not finding what suited him. For example, he had no doubt that, if by chance someone had been looking for his trail, they would have lost him. As eleven o’clock struck at Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, he was crossing the Rue de Pontoise in front of the police commissioner’s office at number 14. A few moments later, the instinct we mentioned above made him turn around. At that moment, he saw distinctly, thanks to the commissioner’s lantern which betrayed them, three men who were following him fairly closely pass successively under this lantern on the dark side of the street. One of these three men entered the drive of the commissioner’s house. The one who was walking in front seemed decidedly suspicious to him. “Come, child,” he said to Cosette, and he hastened to leave the Rue de Pontoise. He made a circuit, turned the Passage des Patriarches which was closed because of the hour, paced the Rue de l’Épée-de-Bois and the Rue de l’Arbalète and went into the Rue des Postes. There is a crossroads there, where the Rollin College is today and where the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève branches off. (It goes without saying that the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève is an old street, and that a post-chaise does not pass every ten years through the Rue des Postes. This Rue des Postes was inhabited by potters in the thirteenth century and its real name is Rue des Pots.) The moon cast a bright light on this crossroads. Jean Valjean hid under a door, calculating that if these men were still following him, he could not fail to see them very clearly when they crossed that light. Indeed, not three minutes had passed when the men appeared. There were now four of them; all tall, dressed in long brown frock coats, with round hats, and carrying large sticks. They were no less disturbing by their great stature and their large fists than by their sinister walk in the darkness. They looked like four spectres disguised as bourgeois. They stopped in the middle of the crossroads and formed a group, like people consulting each other. They had an undecided air. The one who seemed to be leading them turned and pointed briskly with his right hand in the direction where Jean Valjean had begun; another seemed to be indicating with a certain obstinacy the opposite direction. At the moment the first turned around, the moon shone full light on his face. Jean Valjean recognized Javert perfectly. Chapter 40. It is fortunate that the Austerlitz Bridge carries carriages. Uncertainty ceased for Jean Valjean; fortunately it still persisted for these men. He took advantage of their hesitation; it was time lost for them, gained for him. He came out from under the door where he had crouched, and pushed into the Rue des Postes towards the region of the Jardin des Plantes. Cosette was beginning to tire, he took her in his arms, and carried her. There was not a passer-by, and the street lamps had not been lit because of the moon. He quickened his pace. In a few strides, he reached the Goblet pottery, on the facade of which the moonlight made the old inscription very distinctly legible: Goblet son’s factory is here; Come and choose jugs and pitchers, Flowerpots, pipes, bricks. The Heart sells Tiles to all comers. He left behind him the Rue de la Clef, then the Saint-Victor fountain, skirted the Jardin des Plantes through the lower streets, and arrived at the quay. There he turned around. The quay was deserted. The streets were deserted. No one behind him. He breathed. He reached the Pont d’Austerlitz. The toll still existed there at that time. He presented himself at the toll collector’s office and handed over a sou. “It’s two sous,” said the invalid from the bridge. “You are carrying a child who can walk. Pay for two.” He paid, annoyed that his passage had given rise to an observation. Every escape must be a slip. A large cart was crossing the Seine at the same time as him and was going like him to the right bank. This was useful to him. He was able to cross the entire bridge in the shadow of this cart. Towards the middle of the bridge, Cosette, whose feet were numb, wanted to walk. He put her down and took her hand again. Having crossed the bridge, he saw some building sites in front of him a little to the right; he walked there. To get there, he had to venture into a fairly large, open and lighted space. He did not hesitate. Those who were tracking him were evidently tracked, and Jean Valjean believed himself out of danger. Sought, yes; followed, no. A small street, the Rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, opened between two building sites enclosed by walls. This street was narrow, dark, and as if made expressly for him. Before entering it, he looked back. From the point where he was, he saw the whole length of the Pont d’Austerlitz. Four shadows had just entered the bridge. These shadows turned their backs on the Jardin des Plantes and were heading toward the right bank. These four shadows were the four men. Jean Valjean felt the shudder of a beast recaptured. He had one hope left; that perhaps these men had not yet entered the bridge and had not seen him at the moment when he crossed, holding Cosette by the hand, the great lighted square. In that case, by plunging into the little street before him, if he succeeded in reaching the building sites, the marshes, the crops, the undeveloped land, he could escape. It seemed to him that one could trust this silent little street. He entered it. Chapter 41. See the map of Paris of 1727. At the end of three hundred paces, he arrived at a point where the street forked. It divided into two streets, one slanting to the left, the other to the right. Jean Valjean had before him something like the two branches of a Y. Which should he choose? He didn’t hesitate, he took the right. Why? The left branch went toward the suburbs, that is to say, toward inhabited places, and the right branch toward the countryside, that is to say, toward deserted places. However, they were no longer walking very quickly. Cosette’s step Jean Valjean’s pace slowed. He began to carry her again. Cosette rested her head on the good man’s shoulder and said not a word. He turned around from time to time and looked. He was careful to always keep to the dark side of the street. The street was straight behind him. The first two or three times he turned around, he saw nothing, the silence was profound, he continued his walk a little reassured. Suddenly , at a certain moment, having turned around, he seemed to see in the part of the street where he had just passed, far away in the darkness, something moving. He rushed forward, rather than walking, hoping to find some side alley, to escape that way, and once again break his trail. He came to a wall. This wall, however, was not an impossibility of going further; It was a wall bordering a transverse alleyway which led to the street into which Jean Valjean had entered. Here again he had to decide: to take the right or the left. He looked to the right. The alleyway continued in a section between buildings which were sheds or barns, then ended in a dead end. The end of the cul-de-sac was distinctly visible; a great white wall. He looked to the left. The alleyway on this side was open, and, after about two hundred paces, fell into a street of which it was the tributary. It was on that side that safety lay. At the moment when Jean Valjean was thinking of turning to the left, to try to reach the street which he glimpsed at the end of the alleyway, he perceived, at the angle of the alleyway and of this street towards which he was about to proceed, a sort of black statue, motionless. It was someone, a man, who had evidently just been posted there, and who, barring the passage, was waiting. Jean Valjean drew back. The point of Paris where Jean Valjean was, situated between the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Râpée, is one of those which have been transformed from top to bottom by recent works, disfigurement according to some, transfiguration according to others. The crops, the building sites, and the old buildings have been erased. There are there today wide , brand-new streets, arenas, circuses, racecourses, railway landing stages, a prison, Mazas; progress, as we see, with its corrective. Half a century ago, in that popular everyday language, made up of traditions, which persists in calling the Institute the Four Nations and the Opéra-Comique Feydeau, the precise spot where Jean Valjean had arrived was called the Petit-Picpus. The Porte Saint-Jacques, the Porte Paris, the Barrière des Sergents, the Porcherons, the Galiote, the Célestins, the Capucins, the Mail, the Bourbe, the Arbre-de-Cracovie, Little Poland, the Petit-Picpus, these are the names of old Paris floating in the new. The memory of the people floats on these wrecks of the past. The Petit-Picpus, which, moreover, barely existed and was never more than the beginnings of a district, had almost the monastic aspect of a Spanish town. The roads were sparsely paved, the streets were sparsely built. Except for the two or three streets we are going to talk about, everything there was walled and solitude. Not a shop, not a car; barely a candle lit in the windows here and there; all lights extinguished after ten o’clock. Gardens, convents, building sites, marshes; rare low houses, and great walls as high as the houses. Such was this district in the last century. The revolution had already strongly rebuked it. The republican authorities had demolished it, pierced it, made holes. Rubble dumps had been established there. Thirty years ago, this district was disappearing under the erasure of new buildings. Today it has been completely erased. The Petit-Picpus, of which no current plan has preserved a trace, is quite clearly indicated in the 1727 plan, published in Paris by Denis Thierry, rue Saint-Jacques, opposite rue du Plâtre, and at Lyon at Jean Girin’s on Rue Mercière, at La Prudence. Petit-Picpus had what we have just called a Y of streets, formed by Rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine diverging into two branches and taking on the left the name Petite Rue Picpus and on the right the name Rue Polonceau. The two branches of the Y were joined at their summit as if by a bar. This bar was called Rue Droit-Mur. Rue Polonceau ended there; Petite Rue Picpus passed beyond it, and climbed towards the Lenoir market. Anyone coming from the Seine who arrived at the end of Rue Polonceau had on his left Rue Droit-Mur, turning sharply at a right angle, before him the wall of this street, and on his right a truncated extension of Rue Droit-Mur, with no exit, called Cul-de-sac Genrot. This was where Jean Valjean was. As we have just said, on seeing the black silhouette, in the spotlight at the corner of the Rue Droit-Mur and the Little Rue Picpus, he fell back. There was no doubt. He was being watched by this phantom. What was to be done? There was no time to retreat. What he had seen moving in the shadows some distance behind him a moment before was undoubtedly Javert and his squad. Javert was probably already at the beginning of the street at the end of which was Jean Valjean. Javert, to all appearances, knew this little maze, and had taken precautions by sending one of his men to guard the exit. These conjectures, so like evidence, whirled at once , like a handful of dust blown away by a sudden wind, in the aching brain of Jean Valjean. He examined the Genrot cul-de-sac; there, a barrier. He examined the Little Rue Picpus; there, a sentinel. He saw this dark figure stand out in black against the white pavement bathed in moonlight. To advance was to fall upon this man. To retreat was to throw oneself into Javert. Jean Valjean felt himself caught as in a net which was slowly tightening. He looked at the sky in despair. Chapter 42. The Gropings of Escape. To understand what follows, one must picture to oneself exactly the Rue Droit-Mur, and in particular the angle which one left on the left when leaving the Rue Polonceau to enter this alley. The Rue Droit-Mur was almost entirely bordered on the right as far as the little Rue Picpus by houses of poor appearance; on the left by a single building of severe design composed of several main buildings which gradually rose by a story or two as they approached the little Rue Picpus; so that this building, very high on the side of the little rue Picpus, was quite low on the side of the rue Polonceau. There, at the angle we have spoken of, it lowered to the point of having only a wall. This wall did not end squarely on the street; it drew a very recessed cut-off , hidden by its two angles from two observers who would have been one on rue Polonceau, the other on rue Droit-Mur. From the two angles of the cut-off, the wall continued on rue Polonceau to a house which bore the number 49 and on rue Droit-Mur, where its section was much shorter, to the dark building of which we have spoken and whose gable it cut, thus making a new re-entrant angle in the street. This gable was of a gloomy appearance; one could see only a single window, or, to put it better, two shutters covered with a sheet of zinc, and always closed. The inventory we are drawing up here is rigorously accurate and will certainly awaken a very precise memory in the minds of the former inhabitants of the district. The cut side was entirely filled by something that looked like a colossal and miserable door. It was a vast, shapeless assembly of perpendicular planks, the upper ones wider than the lower ones , connected by long transverse iron straps. Beside it there was had a carriage entrance of ordinary size, the opening of which evidently did not go back more than fifty years. A lime tree showed its branches above the cut corner, and the wall was covered with ivy on the side of the Rue Polonceau. In the imminent peril in which Jean Valjean found himself, this dark building had something uninhabited and solitary about it that tempted him. He quickly looked over it. He said to himself that if he succeeded in getting inside, he would perhaps be saved. He had at first an idea and a hope. In the middle part of the front of this building on the Rue Droit-Mur, there were old lead funnel-shaped basins at all the windows of the various floors. The various branches of the conduits which led from a central conduit to all these basins drew on the facade a kind of tree. These branches of pipes with their hundred bends imitated those old, bare vines that twist over the fronts of old farms. This strange espalier with branches of sheet metal and iron was the first object that caught Jean Valjean’s eye. He sat Cosette with her back against a boundary stone, recommending silence, and ran to the place where the conduit touched the pavement. Perhaps there was a way to climb up that way and enter the house. But the conduit was dilapidated and out of order, and barely held its seal. Besides, all the windows of this silent dwelling were barred with thick iron bars, even the garrets of the roof. And then the moon fully lit up this facade, and the man who watched it from the end of the street would have seen Jean Valjean making the climb. Finally, what was to be done with Cosette? How to hoist her to the top of a three-story house? He gave up climbing through the conduit and crawled along the wall to get back into Rue Polonceau. When he reached the chamfered corner where he had left Cosette, he noticed that no one could see him there. He escaped, as we have just explained, all eyes, from whichever direction they came. Besides, he was in the shadows. Finally, there were two doors. Perhaps they could be forced. The wall above which he saw the linden and the ivy evidently opened into a garden where he could at least hide, although there were no leaves on the trees yet, and spend the rest of the night. Time was running out. He had to act quickly. He felt the carriage entrance and recognized at once that it was locked inside and out. He approached the other large door with more hope. It was horribly decrepit, its very immensity made it less solid, the planks were rotten, the iron bindings, there were only three of them, were rusty. It seemed possible to pierce this worm-eaten fence. On examining it, he saw that this door was not a door. It had neither hinges, nor straps, nor lock, nor a crack in the middle. The iron bands crossed it from one side to the other without any break in continuity. Through the cracks in the planks he glimpsed roughly cemented rubble and stones that passers-by could still see there ten years ago. He was forced to admit to himself with dismay that this appearance of a door was simply the wooden facing of a building against which it was built. It was easy to tear off a plank, but one found oneself face to face with a wall. Chapter 43. Which would be impossible with gas lighting. At this moment a dull, rhythmic noise began to be heard some distance away. Jean Valjean risked his glance a little beyond the corner of the street. Seven or eight soldiers, arranged in a platoon, had just emerged into the Rue Polonceau. He saw the bayonets gleam. It was coming towards him. These soldiers, at the head of whom he distinguished the tall stature of Javert, were advancing slowly and cautiously. They stopped frequently. It was evident that they were exploring every nook and cranny of the walls and every doorway and alleyway. It was, and here conjecture could not be mistaken, some patrol that Javert had encountered and had requested. Javert’s two acolytes marched in their ranks. With the pace at which they marched, and with the stops they made, it took them about a quarter of an hour to arrive at the place where Jean Valjean was. It was a dreadful moment. A few minutes separated Jean Valjean from this frightful precipice which opened before him for the third time. And the galleys were now no longer only the galleys, they were Cosette lost forever; that is to say, a life which resembled the interior of a tomb. There was only one thing possible. Jean Valjean had this peculiarity that one could say that he carried two satchels; in one he had the thoughts of a saint, in the other the formidable talents of a convict. He delved into one or the other, according to the occasion. Among other resources, thanks to his numerous escapes from the galleys of Toulon, he was, it will be remembered, a past master in this incredible art of raising himself, without ladders, without crampons, by muscular force alone, supporting himself with the neck, shoulders, hips and knees, with the aid of scarce stone reliefs, in the right angle of a wall, if necessary up to the height of a sixth story; an art which made so frightening and so famous the corner of the courtyard of the Conciergerie of Paris through which the condemned Battemolle escaped, some twenty years ago . Jean Valjean measured with his eyes the wall above which he saw the linden tree. It was about eighteen feet high. The angle it formed with the gable of the large building was filled, in its lower part, with a triangular-shaped mass of masonry, probably intended to protect this too convenient nook from the resting places of those stercorarians called passers-by. This preventive filling of wall corners is much used in Paris. This mass was about five feet high. From the top of this mass the space to be crossed to reach the wall was hardly fourteen feet. The wall was surmounted by a flat stone without a chevron. The difficulty was Cosette. Cosette, for her part, did not know how to climb a wall. Abandon it? Jean Valjean did not dream of it. To carry her off was impossible. All a man’s strength is necessary to him to carry out these strange ascents. The slightest burden would disturb his center of gravity and throw him off. A rope would have been necessary. Jean Valjean did not have one. Where could one find a rope at midnight on the Rue Polonceau? Certainly, at that moment, if Jean Valjean had had a kingdom, he would have given it for a rope. All extreme situations have their flashes which sometimes blind us, sometimes illuminate us. Jean Valjean’s desperate gaze fell upon the gallows of the street lamp in the Cul-de-sac Genrot. At that time there were no gas lamps in the streets of Paris. At nightfall, street lamps were lit, placed at intervals , which rose and fell by means of a rope which crossed the street from one side to the other and fitted into the groove of a gallows. The turnstile through which this rope was unwound was sealed below the lantern in a small iron cabinet, the key of which was held by the lighter, and the rope itself was protected up to a certain height by a metal case. Jean Valjean, with the energy of a supreme struggle, leaped across the street , entered the cul-de-sac, snapped the bolt of the little wardrobe with the point of his knife, and a moment later he was back beside Cosette. He had a rope. They go quickly to work, these gloomy finders of expedients, grappling with fatality. We explained that the street lamps had not been lit that night. The lantern in the Genrot cul-de-sac was therefore naturally extinguished like the others, and one could pass by it without even noticing that it was no longer in its place. However, the hour, the place, the darkness, Jean Valjean’s preoccupation , his singular gestures, his comings and goings, all this was beginning to worry Cosette. Any other child would have long since cried out. She confined herself to pulling Jean Valjean by the hem of his coat. The noise of the approaching patrol was heard more and more distinctly . “Father,” she said in a low voice, “I’m afraid. What’s coming there?” “Hush!” replied the unfortunate man. “It’s the Thénardier woman.” Cosette shuddered. He added: “Don’t say anything. Leave it to me.” If you scream, if you cry, Thénardier is watching you. She’s coming to get you back. Then, without hurrying, but without trying twice for nothing, with a firm and brief precision, all the more remarkable at such a moment as the patrol and Javert could arrive at any moment, he undid his cravat, passed it around Cosette’s body under the armpits, taking care that it could not hurt the child, attached this cravat to one end of the rope by means of that knot that seafarers call a swallow knot, took the other end of this rope in his teeth, took off his shoes and stockings which he threw over the wall, climbed onto the mass of masonry, and began to climb up the angle of the wall and the gable with as much solidity and certainty as if he had rungs under his heels and elbows. Half a minute had not passed before he was kneeling on the wall. Cosette gazed at him in stupor, without saying a word. Jean Valjean’s recommendation and the name of the Thénardier had frozen her. Suddenly she heard Jean Valjean’s voice calling to her, while remaining very low: “Lean against the wall.” She obeyed. “Don’t say a word and don’t be afraid,” Jean Valjean continued. And she felt herself lifted from the ground. Before she had time to recognize herself, she was at the top of the wall. Jean Valjean seized her, put her on his back, took her two little hands in his left hand, lay flat on her stomach, and crawled along the top of the wall to the cut-off corner. As he had guessed, there was a building there whose roof started from the top of the wooden fence and descended very close to the ground, along a rather gently inclined plane, touching the linden tree. A fortunate circumstance, for the wall was much higher on this side than on the street side. Jean Valjean could only see the ground below him very deeply. He had just reached the inclined plane of the roof and had not yet let go of the crest of the wall when a violent uproar announced the arrival of the patrol. Javert’s thundering voice was heard: “Search the cul-de-sac! The Rue Droit-Mur is guarded, the little Rue Picpus too. I tell you he is in the cul-de-sac!” The soldiers rushed into the Genrot cul-de-sac. Jean Valjean slid down the roof, while supporting Cosette, reached the linden tree, and jumped to the ground. Whether from terror or courage, Cosette had not breathed. Her hands were a little grazed. Chapter 44. Beginning of an Enigma. Jean Valjean found himself in a sort of garden, very vast and of a singular appearance; one of those sad gardens which seem made to be looked at in winter and at night. This garden was oblong in shape, with an avenue of tall poplars at the far end, some fairly high copses in the corners, and a space without shade in the middle, where one could distinguish a very large isolated tree, then some fruit trees twisted and bristling like large bushes, squares of vegetables, a melon garden whose bells shone in the moonlight, and an old cesspool. There were stone benches here and there that seemed black with moss. The paths were lined with small, dark shrubs, and all straight. Grass invaded half of them, and a green mold covered the rest. Jean Valjean had beside him the building whose roof he had used to descend, a heap of people, and behind the people, right against the wall, a stone statue whose mutilated face was nothing more than a shapeless mask that appeared vaguely in the darkness. The building was a sort of ruin in which one could distinguish dismantled rooms, one of which, all cluttered, seemed to serve as a shed. The large building on the Rue Droit-Mur, which returned to the little Rue Picpus, developed two facades at right angles to this garden. These facades on the inside were even more tragic than those on the outside. All the windows were barred. No light could be seen. On the upper floors there were hoods like those in prisons. One of these facades cast its shadow on the other, which fell back on the garden like an immense black sheet. No other house could be seen. The end of the garden was lost in the mist and the night. However, one could vaguely distinguish walls that intersected each other as if there were other crops beyond, and the low roofs of the Rue Polonceau. Nothing could be imagined more savage and solitary than this garden. There was no one there, which was quite simple because of the hour; but it did not seem that this place was made for anyone to walk in, even at midday. Jean Valjean’s first care had been to find his shoes and put them back on, then to enter the shed with Cosette. He who escapes never believes himself sufficiently hidden. The child, still thinking of the Thénardier, shared his instinct to curl up as much as possible. Cosette trembled and pressed herself against him. They could hear the tumultuous noise of the patrol searching the cul-de-sac and the street, the blows of rifle butts against the stones, Javert’s calls to the spies he had posted, and his imprecations mingled with words that could not be distinguished. At the end of a quarter of an hour, it seemed that this kind of stormy rumbling was beginning to fade away. Jean Valjean was not breathing. He had gently placed his hand on Cosette’s mouth. Besides, the solitude in which he found himself was so strangely calm that this frightful uproar, so furious and so close, did not even cast the shadow of a disturbance upon it. It seemed as if these walls were built with those dull stones of which Scripture speaks. Suddenly, in the midst of this profound calm, a new noise arose; a heavenly, divine, ineffable noise, as ravishing as the other was horrible. It was a hymn issuing from the darkness, a dazzling of prayer and harmony in the obscure and frightening silence of the night; women’s voices, but voices composed at once of the pure accent of virgins and the naive accent of children, of those voices which are not of the earth and which resemble those which newborn babies still hear and which the dying already hear. This song came from the somber edifice which dominated the garden. At the moment when the din of the demons was fading away, one would have said a choir of angels was approaching in the darkness. Cosette and Jean Valjean fell on their knees. They did not know what it was, they did not know where they were, but they both felt, the man and the child, the penitent and the innocent, that they must be on their knees. These voices had this strange thing about them, that they did not prevent the building from appearing deserted. It was like a supernatural chant in an uninhabited dwelling. While these voices sang, Jean Valjean no longer thought of anything. He no longer saw the night, he saw a blue sky. It seemed to him to feel those wings that we all have within us open. The song died away. Perhaps it had lasted a long time. Jean Valjean could not have said. The hours of ecstasy are never more than a minute.
Everything had fallen silent again. Nothing in the street, nothing in the garden. What threatened, what reassured, everything had vanished. The wind rustled some dry grass on the crest of the wall, which made a soft, mournful little noise. Chapter 45. Continuation of the riddle. The night breeze had risen, which indicated that it must be between one and two in the morning. Poor Cosette said nothing. As she sat down on the ground beside him and leaned her head over him, Jean Valjean thought she had fallen asleep. He bent down and looked at her. Cosette had her eyes wide open and a pensive expression that hurt Jean Valjean. She was still trembling. “Do you want to sleep?” said Jean Valjean. “I’m very cold,” she replied. A moment later she continued: “Is she still there? ” “Who?” said Jean Valjean. “Madame Thénardier.” Jean Valjean had already forgotten the method he had used to make Cosette keep silent. “Ah!” he said, “she’s gone. Have no more fear.” The child sighed as if a weight were lifted from her breast. The ground was damp, the shed open on all sides, the north wind fresher every moment. The good man took off his frock coat and wrapped it around Cosette. “Are you less cold like this?” he said. “Oh yes, father! ” “Well, wait for me a moment. I’ll come back.” He left the ruin and began to walk along the side of the large building, looking for some better shelter. He came across doors, but they were closed. There were bars on all the windows on the ground floor. As he had just passed the interior corner of the building, he noticed that he was coming to some arched windows, and he saw some light there. He stood on tiptoe and looked through one of these windows. They all opened into a fairly large room, paved with large flagstones, cut through by arcades and pillars, where nothing could be seen but a small glow and long shadows. The glow came from a nightlight lit in a corner. This room was deserted and nothing moved. However, as he looked further and further, he thought he saw on the ground, on the pavement, something that seemed covered with a shroud and resembled a human form. It was stretched out flat on its stomach, its face against the stone, its arms outstretched, in the immobility of death. One would have said, from a sort of serpent dragging itself along the pavement, that this sinister form had a rope around its neck. The whole room was bathed in this mist of the barely lit place which adds to the horror. Jean Valjean has often said since that, although many funereal spectacles had crossed his life, he had never seen anything more chilling and more terrible than this enigmatic figure accomplishing some unknown mystery in this dark place and thus glimpsed in the night. It was frightening to suppose that it was perhaps dead, and even more frightening to think that it was perhaps alive. He had the courage to press his forehead to the window and watch if this thing would stir. In spite of his remaining there for what seemed to him a very long time, the stretched-out form made no movement. Suddenly he felt seized by an inexpressible terror, and he fled. He began to run toward the shed without daring to look back. It seemed to him that if he turned his head he would see the figure striding behind him, waving its arms. He arrived at the ruin panting. His knees were bending; sweat was running down his back. Where was he? Who would ever have imagined something like this kind of sepulchre in the middle of Paris? What was this Strange house? A building full of nocturnal mysteries, calling souls from the shadows with the voice of angels and, when they come, suddenly offering them this dreadful vision, promising to open the radiant gate of heaven and opening the horrible door of the tomb! And this was indeed a building, a house with its number on a street! It was not a dream! He needed to touch the stones to believe it. The cold, the anxiety, the worry, the emotions of the evening, gave him a real fever, and all these ideas clashed in his brain. He approached Cosette. She was asleep. Chapter 46. The enigma redoubles. The child had laid her head on a stone and had fallen asleep. He sat down beside her and began to contemplate her. Little by little, as he looked at her, he calmed down, and he regained possession of his freedom of mind. He clearly perceived this truth, the basis of his life henceforth, that as long as she was there, as long as he had her near him, he would need nothing but for her, nor fear anything but because of her. He did not even feel that he was very cold, having taken off his frock coat to cover her with it. However, through the reverie into which he had fallen, he had for some time heard a singular noise. It was like a bell being rung. This noise was in the garden. It could be heard distinctly, though faintly. It resembled the faint music made by the cowbells of the cattle at night in the pastures. This noise made Jean Valjean turn around. He looked, and saw that there was someone in the garden. A being who resembled a man was walking among the bells of the melon garden, rising, stooping, stopping, with regular movements , as if he were dragging or spreading something on the ground. This being seemed to be limping. Jean Valjean shuddered with that continual trembling of the unfortunate. Everything is hostile and suspicious to them. They distrust the day because it helps them to see them and the night because it helps to surprise them. Just now he shuddered because the garden was deserted; now he shuddered because someone was there. He fell back from fanciful terrors to real ones. He told himself that Javert and the spies had perhaps not left, that they had doubtless left people in the street under observation, that if this man discovered him in this garden, he would cry ‘thief’ and hand him over. He gently took the sleeping Cosette in his arms and carried her behind a pile of old, disused furniture, to the most remote corner of the shed. Cosette did not stir. From there he observed the movements of the being who was in the melon patch. What was strange was that the sound of the bell followed all the movements of this man. When the man approached, the sound approached; when he moved away, the sound moved away; if he made any hasty gesture, a tremolo accompanied it ; when he stopped , the sound ceased. It seemed evident that the bell was attached to this man ; but then what could that mean? What was this man to whom a bell was suspended as from a ram or an ox? While asking himself these questions, he touched Cosette’s hands. They were freezing. “Oh, my God!” he said. He called in a low voice: “Cosette! ” She did not open her eyes. He shook her vigorously. She did not wake. “Is she dead?” he said, and he stood up, trembling from head to foot. The most dreadful ideas flashed through his mind in a jumble. There are times when hideous suppositions besiege us like a rabble of furies and violently force open the walls of our brain. When it comes to those we love, our prudence invents all the follies. He remembered that sleep can be deadly in the open air on a cold night. Cosette, pale, had fallen back, stretched out on the ground at his feet without making a movement. He listened to her breathing; she was breathing; but with a breathing that seemed to him weak and ready to die out. How to warm her? How to wake her? Everything that was not this was erased from his thoughts. He rushed frantically out of the ruin. It was absolutely necessary that within a quarter of an hour Cosette be before a fire and in a bed . Chapter 47. The Man with the Bell. He walked straight to the man he saw in the garden. He had taken from his hand the roll of silver that was in his waistcoat pocket. This man lowered his head and did not see him coming. In a few strides, Jean Valjean was at his side. Jean Valjean accosted him, shouting: “A hundred francs!” The man gave a start and raised his eyes. “A hundred francs to be won,” resumed Jean Valjean, “if you give me shelter for this night!” The moon shone full light on Jean Valjean’s terrified face. “Look, it’s you, Father Madeleine!” said the man. This name, thus pronounced, at this dark hour, in this unknown place, by this unknown man, made Jean Valjean shrink back. He expected anything, except this. The one who spoke to him was a bent and lame old man, dressed almost like a peasant, who had a leather knee-piece on his left knee from which hung a rather large bell. His face, which was in the shadow, could not be seen. Meanwhile this good man had taken off his cap, and was crying out, trembling: “Ah, my God! How did you get here, Father Madeleine? Where did you get in, Jesus Christ? You have fallen from heaven!” It is not embarrassment, if you ever fall, it is from there that you will fall. And how you are made! You have no tie, you have no hat, you have no coat! Do you know that you would have frightened someone who did not know you? My Lord, are the saints going mad these days? But how did you get in here? One word did not wait for another. The old man spoke with a rustic volubility in which there was nothing disturbing. All this was said with a mixture of stupefaction and naive good nature. “Who are you? And what is this house?” asked Jean Valjean. “Ah, by Jove, that is strong!” cried the old man, “I am the one you had placed here, and this house is the one where you had me placed. What! You do not recognize me?” “No,” said Jean Valjean. “And how is it that you know me ? ” “You saved my life,” said the man. He turned, a moonbeam outlined his profile, and Jean Valjean recognized old Fauchelevent. “Ah!” said Jean Valjean, “is that you? Yes, I recognize you. ” “That’s very fortunate!” said the old man reproachfully. “And what are you doing here?” continued Jean Valjean. “Well! I’m covering my melons then! ” Old Fauchelevent was, in fact, holding in his hand, at the moment Jean Valjean accosted him, the end of a straw mat which he was busy spreading over the melon bed. He had already laid a certain number of them thus during the hour or so he had been in the garden. It was this operation which made him make the peculiar movements observed from the shed by Jean Valjean. He continued: “I said to myself: the moon is bright, it is going to freeze.” “Suppose I put their carricks on my melons?” “And,” he added, looking at Jean Valjean with a loud laugh, “you, by Jove, ought to have done the same! But how come you are here?” Jean Valjean, feeling himself known by this man, at least under his name of Madeleine, now advanced only cautiously. He multiplied his questions. Strangely enough, the roles seemed reversed. It was he, the intruder, who was questioning. “And what is this bell on your knee? ” “That?” replied Fauchelevent, “is to keep me out of my sight. ” “What! To keep you out of my sight? ” Old Fauchelevent winked with an inexpressible expression. “Ah, lady! There are only women in this house; many young girls. It seems I would be dangerous to meet. The bell warns them. When I come, they go away. ” “What is this house? ” “Well! You know very well. ” “But no, I don’t know. ” “Since you had me put in as gardener! ” “Answer me as if I knew nothing. ” “Well, then, it is the convent of Petit-Picpus! ” Memories returned to Jean Valjean. Chance, that is to say, providence, had thrown him precisely into this convent in the Saint-Antoine quarter where old Fauchelevent, crippled by a fall from his cart, had been admitted on his recommendation two years earlier . He repeated as if speaking to himself: “The convent of Petit-Picpus!” “Ah, but, in fact,” continued Fauchelevent, “how the devil did you manage to get in there, Father Madeleine? You may be a saint, but you are a man, and no men enter here. ” “You are comfortable here.” “There is no one but me.” “However,” continued Jean Valjean, “I must stay here. ” “Ah, my God!” cried Fauchelevent. Jean Valjean approached the old man and said to him in a grave voice: “Father Fauchelevent, I saved your life.” “It was I who first remembered it,” replied Fauchelevent. “Well, you can do for me today what I once did for you. ” Fauchelevent took in his old, wrinkled, trembling hands the two sturdy hands of Jean Valjean, and for a few seconds it seemed as if he could not speak. Finally he cried: “Oh! it would be a blessing from God if I could repay you a little of that! I! Save your life! Monsieur le maire, dispose of the old fellow! ” An admirable joy had, as it were, transfigured this old man. A ray seemed to come from his face. “What do you want me to do?” he continued. “I will explain it to you. Do you have a room? ” “I have a secluded hut there, behind the ruins of the old convent, in a corner that no one sees. There are three rooms.” The hut was indeed so well hidden behind the ruin and so well arranged so that no one could see it, that Jean Valjean had not seen it. “Good,” said Jean Valjean. “Now I ask you two things. ” “What are they, Mr. Mayor? ” “First, you will tell no one what you know about me. Second, you will not seek to know more. ” “As you wish. I know that you can do nothing but honest things and that you have always been a man of God. And besides, it was you who put me here. That concerns you. I am yours . ” “That is agreed. Now come with me. We will fetch the child. ” “Ah!” said Fauchelevent. “There is a child!” He did not add another word and followed Jean Valjean as a dog follows its master. Less than half an hour later, Cosette, having become rosy again by the flame of a good fire, was asleep in the old gardener’s bed. Jean Valjean had put his cravat and his frock coat back on; the hat thrown over the wall had been found and picked up; while Jean Valjean was putting on his frock coat, Fauchelevent had taken off his knee-piece with a bell, which now, hanging on a nail near a basket, adorned the wall. The two men were warming themselves with their elbows on a table where Fauchelevent had placed a piece of cheese, some brown bread, a bottle of wine, and two glasses, and the old man was saying to Jean Valjean, laying his hand on his knee: “Ah! Father Madeleine! You didn’t recognize me at once! You save people’s lives, and then you forget them! Oh! that’s bad! them They remember you! You are an ingrate! Chapter 48. Where it is explained how Javert made a hollow bush. The events of which we have just seen, so to speak, the reverse, had taken place under the simplest conditions. When Jean Valjean, on the very night of the day when Javert arrested him near Fantine’s deathbed, escaped from the municipal prison of Montreuil-sur-Mer, the police assumed that the escaped convict must have headed for Paris. Paris is a maelstrom where everything is lost, and everything disappears into this navel of the world as into the navel of the sea. No forest hides a man like this crowd. Fugitives of all kinds know this. They go to Paris as if to a sinking; there are sinkings that save. The police also know this, and it is in Paris that they seek what they have lost elsewhere. She looked for the former mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer. Javert was called to Paris to help with the searches. Javert, in fact, helped powerfully to recapture Jean Valjean. Javert’s zeal and intelligence on this occasion were noticed by Mr. Chabouillet, secretary of the prefecture under Count Anglès. Mr. Chabouillet, who had already protected Javert, had the inspector of Montreuil-sur-Mer attached to the Paris police. Javert went there in a diverse and, let us say, although the word seems unexpected for such services, honorably useful way. He was no longer thinking of Jean Valjean—of those dogs always on the hunt, the wolf of today makes one forget the wolf of yesterday—when in December 1823 he read a newspaper, he who never read newspapers; But Javert, a monarchical man, had been anxious to know the details of the triumphant entry of the Prince Generalissimo into Bayonne. As he was finishing the article that interested him, a name, the name of Jean Valjean, at the bottom of a page, caught his attention. The newspaper announced that the convict Jean Valjean was dead, and published the fact in such formal terms that Javert had no doubt. He merely said: that is the right prisoner. Then he threw the newspaper away, and thought no more of it. Some time afterward, it happened that a police note was transmitted by the prefecture of Seine-et-Oise to the police prefecture of Paris concerning the abduction of a child, which had taken place, it was said, with particular circumstances, in the commune of Montfermeil. A little girl of seven or eight years old, the note said, who had been entrusted by her mother to an innkeeper in the region, had been stolen by an unknown person; This little girl answered to the name of Cosette and was the child of a girl named Fantine, who had died in the hospital, no one knew when or where. This note passed before Javert’s eyes, and made him dream. The name Fantine was well known to him. He remembered that Jean Valjean had made him, Javert, burst out laughing by asking him for a three-day respite to go and fetch the child of this creature. He remembered that Jean Valjean had been arrested in Paris at the moment he was getting into the carriage from Montfermeil. Some indications had even led one to think at that time that it was the second time he had gotten into that carriage, and that he had already, the day before, made a first excursion to the environs of that village, for he had not been seen in the village itself. What was he going to do in this region of Montfermeil? No one had been able to guess. Javert understood it now. Fantine’s daughter was there. Jean Valjean was going to look for her. Now, this child had just been stolen by a stranger. Who could this stranger be? Could it be Jean Valjean? But Jean Valjean was dead. Javert, without saying anything to anyone, took the cuckoo clock from the Tin Platter, at the cul-de-sac of the Planchette, and made the journey to Montfermeil. He expected to find there a great enlightenment; he found there a great darkness. In the first few days, the Thénardiers, vexed, had gossiped. The disappearance of the Lark had caused a stir in the village. There was immediately had several versions of the story which had ended up being a child theft. From there, the police note. However, the first mood having passed, Thénardier, with his admirable instinct, had very quickly understood that it is never useful to move the king’s prosecutor, and that his complaints about the abduction of Cosette would have as their first result to fix on him, Thénardier, and on many of the murky affairs which he had, the sparkling apple of the eye of justice. The first thing that owls do not want is to be brought them a candle. And first of all, how would he get out of the fifteen hundred francs which he had received? He stopped short, put a gag on his wife, and pretended to be astonished when someone spoke to him about the stolen child. He understood nothing; no doubt he had complained at the time that this dear little one was being taken from him so quickly; He would have liked to keep her for two or three more days out of tenderness; but it was her grandfather who had come to seek her out, as naturally as possible. He had added the grandfather, which was a good thing. It was on this story that Javert fell upon arriving at Montfermeil. The grandfather made Jean Valjean faint. Javert, however, plunged a few questions, like probes, into Thénardier’s story. “Who was this grandfather, and what was his name?” Thénardier replied simply: “He is a rich farmer. I have seen his passport. I believe his name is Mr. Guillaume Lambert. Lambert is a good-natured and very reassuring name.” Javert returned to Paris. “Jean Valjean is really dead,” he said to himself, “and I am a fool.” He was beginning to forget the whole story again when, in the course of March 1824, he heard talk of a strange character who lived in the parish of Saint-Médard and who was nicknamed the beggar who gives alms. This character was said to be a man of means of income whose name no one knew exactly and who lived alone with a little girl of eight, who herself knew nothing except that she came from Montfermeil. Montfermeil! This name kept coming up, and made Javert prick up his ears. An old beggar, a spy, a former verger, to whom this character gave charity, added a few other details. This man of means of income was a very fierce being, never going out except in the evening, speaking to no one, except sometimes to the poor, and not allowing himself to be approached. He wore a horrible old yellow frock coat worth several millions, being all sewn with banknotes. This decidedly piqued Javert’s curiosity. In order to see this fantastic rentier up close without frightening him, he one day borrowed the verger’s rags and the place where the old spy squatted every evening , nasally mouthing orations and spying through prayer. The suspicious individual indeed came to Javert thus disguised, and gave him alms. At that moment Javert raised his head, and the shock that Jean Valjean received when he thought he recognized Javert, Javert received when he thought he recognized Jean Valjean. However, the darkness had been able to deceive him; the death of Jean Valjean was official; Javert still had doubts, and grave doubts; and in doubt, Javert, the man of scruples, put his hand on anyone’s collar. He followed his man to the Gorbeau hovel and got the old woman to talk, which wasn’t difficult. The old woman confirmed the fact of the frock coat lined with millions, and told him about the episode of the thousand-franc note. She had seen! She had touched it! Javert rented a room. That same evening he moved in. He came to listen at the door of the mysterious tenant, hoping to hear the sound of his voice, but Jean Valjean saw his candle through the keyhole and outwitted the spy by remaining silent. The next day Jean Valjean made off. But the noise of the five- franc piece that he dropped was noticed by the old woman who, hearing moving money, thought that they were going to move and hastened to warn Javert. At night, when Jean Valjean went out, Javert was waiting for him behind the trees on the boulevard with two men. Javert had asked for help from the prefecture, but he had not given the name of the individual he hoped to seize. It was his secret; and he had kept it for three reasons: first, because the slightest indiscretion could alert Jean Valjean; secondly, because getting his hands on an old escaped convict presumed dead, on a condemned man whom the records of justice had once classified forever among the most dangerous criminals, was a magnificent success that the veterans of the Parisian police would certainly not allow to a newcomer like Javert, and he feared that his galley slave would be taken from him; finally, because Javert, being an artist, had a taste for the unexpected. He hated those announced successes that are deflowered by talking about them long in advance. He insisted on developing his masterpieces in the shadows and then unveiling them abruptly. Javert had followed Jean Valjean from tree to tree, then from street corner to street corner, and had not lost sight of him for a single instant. Even at the moments when Jean Valjean believed himself most secure, Javert’s eye was upon him. Why did Javert not arrest Jean Valjean? It was because he still had doubts. It must be remembered that at that time the police were not exactly at ease; the free press embarrassed them. A few arbitrary arrests, denounced by the newspapers, had echoed even to the chambers and made the prefecture timid. An attack on individual liberty was a serious matter. The agents were afraid of making a mistake; the prefect took it out on them; an error meant dismissal. Can you imagine the effect that this brief item, reproduced by twenty newspapers, would have had in Paris: Yesterday, an old, white-haired grandfather, a respectable pensioner, who was walking with his eight-year-old granddaughter , was arrested and taken to the Prefecture Depot as an escaped convict! Let us repeat, moreover, that Javert had his own scruples; the recommendations of his conscience were added to those of the prefect. He was really in doubt. Jean Valjean turned his back and walked in the darkness. Sadness, disquiet, anxiety, dejection, this new misfortune of being obliged to flee at night and seek asylum at random in Paris for Cosette and for himself, the necessity of adjusting his step to that of a child, all this, without his knowledge, had changed Jean Valjean’s gait and imprinted such senility on his bodily habit that the police themselves, embodied in Javert, could be mistaken, and did . The impossibility of approaching too closely, his costume of an old émigré tutor, Thénardier’s declaration that he was a grandfather, and finally the belief in his death in the galleys, added still further to the uncertainties that were thickening in Javert’s mind. He had for a moment the idea of abruptly asking him for his papers. But if this man was not Jean Valjean, and if this man was not a good old honest man of means, he was probably some fellow deeply and cleverly mixed up in the obscure web of Parisian misdeeds, some dangerous gang leader, giving alms to hide his other talents, old rubric. He had cronies, accomplices, and spare lodgings where he would doubtless take refuge. All these detours he made in the streets seemed to indicate that he was not just any old fellow. To arrest him too quickly was to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. What was the harm in waiting? Javert was quite sure that he would not escape. He therefore walked on rather perplexed, asking himself a hundred questions about this enigmatic personage. It was only quite late, in the Rue de Pontoise, that, thanks to the bright light that a cabaret was throwing, he definitely recognized Jean Valjean. There are two beings in this world who shudder deeply: the mother who finds her child, and the tiger who finds its prey. Javert had this deep shudder. As soon as he had positively recognized Jean Valjean, the formidable convict, he realized that there were only three of them, and he sent for reinforcements to the police commissioner of the rue de Pontoise. Before grasping a thorn stick, one puts on gloves. This delay and the stop at the Rollin crossroads to confer with his agents almost made him lose the trail. However, he quickly guessed that Jean Valjean would like to place the river between his hunters and himself. He bent his head and reflected like a bloodhound who puts his nose to the ground to be right on the track. Javert, with his powerful rectitude of instinct, went straight to the Austerlitz bridge. A word to the toll-keeper put him straight : “Did you see a man with a little girl?” “I made him pay two sous,” replied the toll-keeper. Javert arrived on the bridge in time to see Jean Valjean crossing the moonlit space with Cosette in his hand on the other side of the water . He saw him enter the Rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine; he thought of the Genrot cul-de-sac arranged there like a trapdoor and of the only exit from the Rue Droit-Mur onto the little Rue Picpus. He kept the front lines, as hunters say; he hastily sent one of his agents by a circuit to guard this exit. A patrol, which was returning to the Arsenal post, having passed, he requisitioned it and had it accompanied him. In such games, soldiers are assets. Besides, it is the principle that, to overcome a wild boar, one must have the skill of a huntsman and the strength of dogs. These combined dispositions, feeling Jean Valjean caught between the impasse Genrot on the right, his agent on the left, and himself Javert behind, he took a pinch of snuff. Then he began to play. He had a ravishing and infernal moment; he let his man go before him, knowing that he held him, but wishing to postpone as long as possible the moment of arresting him, happy to feel him caught and to see him free, brooding over him with that voluptuousness of the spider that lets the fly flutter and the cat that lets the mouse run. The claw and the talon have a monstrous sensuality; it is the obscure movement of the beast imprisoned in their pincers. What a delight this suffocation! Javert enjoyed himself. The meshes of his net were firmly attached. He was sure of success; now he had only to close his hand. Accompanied as he was, the very idea of resistance was impossible, however energetic, vigorous, and desperate Jean Valjean was. Javert advanced slowly, probing and searching every nook and cranny of the street as he went, like a thief’s pockets. When he reached the center of his web, he no longer found a fly. One can imagine his exasperation. He questioned his patrolman from the Rue Droit-Mur and Rue Picpus; this agent, who remained imperturbable at his post, had not seen the man pass. It sometimes happens that a deer is broken with its head covered, that is to say, it escapes, even though the pack is upon its body, and then the oldest hunters do not know what to say. Duvivier, Ligniville, and Desprez remain short. In a disappointment of this kind, Artonge cried out: ” It’s not a deer, it’s a sorcerer.” Javert would have gladly uttered the same cry. His disappointment bordered for a moment on despair and fury. It is certain that Napoleon made mistakes in the Russian war, that Alexander made mistakes in the Indian war, that Caesar made mistakes in the African war, that Cyrus made mistakes in the Scythian war, and that Javert made mistakes in this campaign against Jean Valjean. He was perhaps wrong to hesitate to recognize the former galley slave. The first glance should have been enough for him. He was wrong to not to apprehend him purely and simply in the hovel. He was wrong not to arrest him when he positively recognized him on Rue de Pontoise. He was wrong to consult with his auxiliaries in broad moonlight at the Rollin crossroads; certainly, advice is useful, and it is good to know and question those dogs who deserve credibility. But the hunter cannot take too many precautions when he hunts restless animals, like the wolf and the convict. Javert, by worrying too much about putting the bloodhounds on the trail, alarmed the beast by giving it wind of the shot and made it leave. He was especially wrong, as soon as he found the trail at the Austerlitz bridge, to play this formidable and childish game of holding such a man at the end of a thread. He considered himself stronger than he was, and believed he could play mouse with a lion. At the same time, he considered himself too weak when he judged it necessary to add reinforcements. A fatal precaution, a waste of precious time. Javert committed all these errors, and was nonetheless one of the most learned and correct spies who ever existed. He was, in the full force of the term, what in hunting is called a wise dog. But who is perfect? Great strategists have their eclipses. Great stupidities are often made, like thick ropes, of a multitude of strands. Take the cable thread by thread, take separately all the small determining motifs, you break them one after the other, and you say: That’s all! Braid them and twist them together, it’s an enormity; it’s Attila who hesitates between Marcian in the East and Valentinian in the West; It is Hannibal who lingers at Capua; it is Danton who falls asleep at Arcis-sur-Aube. Be that as it may, at the very moment when he realized that Jean Valjean was escaping him, Javert did not lose his head. Sure that the convict who had run away from him could not be far away, he set up lookouts, organized traps and ambushes and scoured the neighborhood all night. The first thing he saw was the disorder of the street lamp, whose cord had been cut. A valuable clue, which nevertheless led him astray in that it caused all his searches to be diverted towards the Genrot cul-de-sac. In this cul-de-sac there are fairly low walls which open onto gardens whose enclosures touch on immense wastelands. Jean Valjean must obviously have fled that way. The fact is that, if he had penetrated a little further into the Genrot cul-de-sac, he probably would have done so, and he would have been lost. Javert explored these gardens and grounds as if he were looking for a needle. At daybreak, he left two intelligent men under observation and returned to the police headquarters, as ashamed as a spy caught by a thief. Book Six–Le Petit-Picpus Chapter 49. Petite rue Picpus, number 62. Half a century ago, nothing more resembled the first carriage entrance than the carriage entrance of number 62 Petite rue Picpus. This door, usually half-open in the most inviting manner, revealed two things that were not at all very funereal: a courtyard surrounded by walls covered with vines and the face of a porter loitering. Above the back wall, tall trees could be seen. When a ray of sunshine brightened the courtyard, when a glass of wine cheered the porter, it was difficult to pass by number 62 of the little rue Picpus without carrying away a laughing idea. Yet it was a dark place that one had glimpsed. The threshold smiled; the house prayed and wept. If one succeeded, which was not easy, in crossing the porter’s door,–which even for almost everyone was impossible, for there was a sesame, open yourself! that one had to know;–if, having crossed the porter’s door, one entered on the right into a small vestibule where a staircase opened , confined between two walls and so narrow that only one could pass through it no one at a time, if one did not let oneself be frightened by the canary yellow wash with chocolate base that coated this staircase, if one ventured to climb, one passed a first landing, then a second, and one arrived on the first floor in a corridor where the yellow distemper and the chocolate baseboard followed one with a peaceful determination. Staircase and corridor were lit by two beautiful windows. The corridor made a bend and became dark. If one doubled this cape, one arrived after a few steps in front of a door all the more mysterious because it was not closed. One pushed it, and one found oneself in a small room about six feet square, tiled, washed, clean, cold, hung with nankeen paper with green flowers, at fifteen sous a roll. A white and dull daylight came from a large window with small panes which was on the left and which took up the whole width of the room. We looked, we saw no one; we listened, we heard neither a step nor a human murmur. The wall was bare; the room was unfurnished; not a chair. We looked again, and we saw in the wall opposite the door a quadrangular hole about a foot square, grilled with an iron grating with crossed bars, black, knotty, solid, which formed squares , I almost said meshes, less than an inch and a half diagonally. The small green florets of the nankeen paper arrived calmly and in order as far as these iron bars, without this funereal contact frightening them and making them whirl around. Supposing that a living being had been admirably thin enough to try to enter or exit through the square hole, this grating would have prevented it. It did not allow the body to pass, but it did allow the eyes, that is to say, the spirit, to pass . It seemed that someone had thought of this, for it had been lined with a tin plate set into the wall a little behind and studded with a thousand holes more microscopic than the holes in a skimmer. At the bottom of this plate was pierced an opening exactly like the mouth of a letter box. A ribbon of wire attached to a bell movement hung to the right of the grilled hole. If one shook this ribbon, a bell jingled and one heard a voice, very close to oneself, which made one shudder. “Who is there?” the voice asked. It was a woman’s voice, a soft voice, so soft that it was lugubrious. Here again there was a magic word that one had to know. If one did not know it, the voice fell silent, and the wall became silent again as if the frightened darkness of the sepulchre had been on the other side. If one knew the word, the voice would continue: “Enter on the right.” One then noticed to one’s right, opposite the window, a glass door surmounted by a glass frame and painted gray. One lifted the latch, went through the door, and experienced exactly the same impression as when one enters a play in a grilled bathtub before the grille is lowered and the chandelier is lit. One was in fact in a kind of theater box, barely lit by the vague daylight from the narrow glass door, furnished with two old chairs and a completely unraveled doormat, a real box with its front at sill height bearing a black wooden tablet. This box was grilled, only it was not a gilded wooden grille like at the Opera, it was a monstrous latticework of iron bars horribly tangled and sealed to the wall by enormous seals that resembled closed fists. After the first few minutes, when his eyes were beginning to adjust to the half-light of the cellar, he tried to get through the gate, but he didn’t get further than six inches beyond. There he encountered a barrier of black shutters, secured and fortified with wooden crosspieces painted gingerbread yellow. These shutters were jointed, divided in long thin blades, and masked the entire length of the grille. They were always closed. After a few moments, you heard a voice calling you from behind these shutters and saying: “I am here. What do you want from me?” It was a beloved voice, sometimes an adored voice. You saw no one. You could barely hear the sound of breathing. It seemed that it was an evocation speaking to you through the partition of the tomb. If you were in certain desired conditions, very rare, the narrow blade of one of the shutters opened in front of you, and the evocation became an apparition. Behind the grille, behind the shutter, you could see, as far as the grille allowed you to see, a head of which you could only see the mouth and the chin; the rest was covered with a black veil. You could glimpse a black wimple and a barely distinguishable form covered with a black shroud. This head spoke to you, but did not look at you and never smiled at you. The daylight coming from behind you was arranged in such a way that you saw it white and it saw you black. This daylight was a symbol. However, the eyes plunged avidly through this opening which had been made in this place closed to all eyes. A deep vagueness enveloped this form dressed in mourning. The eyes searched this vagueness and sought to unravel what was around the apparition. After a very short time, one realized that one saw nothing. What one saw was night , emptiness, darkness, a winter mist mixed with vapor from the tomb, a sort of frightening peace, a silence in which one gathered nothing, not even sighs, a shadow in which one distinguished nothing, not even ghosts. What one saw was the interior of a cloister. It was the interior of that gloomy and severe house that was called the Convent of the Bernardines of Perpetual Adoration. This lodge where you were was the parlor. This voice, the first that had spoken to you, was the voice of the turnpike who was always seated, motionless and silent, on the other side of the wall, near the square opening, protected by the iron grille and by the plate with a thousand holes like a double visor. The darkness into which the grilled lodge plunged came from the fact that the parlor, which had a window on the side of the world, had none on the side of the convent. Profane eyes should see nothing of this sacred place. Yet there was something beyond this shadow, there was a light; there was a life in this death. Although this convent was the most walled of all, we will try to penetrate it and make the reader penetrate it, and to say, without forgetting the measure, things that the storytellers have never seen and consequently never said. Chapter 50. The obedience of Martin Verga. This convent, which in 1824 had already existed for many years on the little rue Picpus, was a community of Bernardines of the obedience of Martin Verga. These Bernardines, consequently, were attached not to Clairvaux, like the Bernardines, but to Cîteaux, like the Benedictines. In other words, they were subjects, not of Saint Bernard, but of Saint Benedict.
Anyone who has moved a little folios knows that Martin Verga founded in 1425 a congregation of Bernardine-Benedictine, having as its head of order Salamanca and as its branch Alcala. This congregation had sprouted branches in all the Catholic countries of Europe. These grafts of one order onto another are not unusual in the Latin Church.
To speak only of the order of Saint Benedict in question here, to this order are attached, without counting the obedience of Martin Verga, four congregations: two in Italy, Monte Cassino and Sainte-Justine of Padua, two in France, Cluny and Saint-Maur; and nine orders, Valombrosa, Grammont, the Celestines, the Camaldolese, the Carthusians, the humiliated, the olive growers, and the Silvestrins, finally Cîteaux; for Cîteaux itself, a trunk for other orders, is only a shoot for Saint Benedict. Cîteaux dates from Saint Robert, abbot of Molesme in the diocese of Langres in 1098. Now it was in 529 that the devil, having retired to the desert of Subiaco (he was old; had he become a hermit?), was driven from the ancient temple of Apollo where he lived, by Saint Benedict, aged seventeen. After the rule of the Carmelites, who go barefoot, wear a piece of wicker on their throats and never sit down, the hardest rule is that of the Bernardine-Benedictine nuns of Martin Verga. They are dressed in black with a wimple which, according to the express prescription of Saint Benedict, reaches up to the chin. A serge dress with wide sleeves, a large woolen veil, the wimple that reaches up to the chin cut squarely on the chest, the headband that goes down to the eyes, this is their habit. Everything is black, except for the headband which is white. The novices wear the same habit, all white. The professed also have a rosary at their side. The Bernardine-Benedictine nuns of Martin Verga practice Perpetual Adoration , like the Benedictines called Ladies of the Blessed Sacrament, who, at the beginning of this century, had two houses in Paris, one in the Temple, the other on Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève. Moreover, the Bernardine-Benedictine nuns of the Petit-Picpus, of whom we are speaking, were an order completely different from the Ladies of the Blessed Sacrament cloistered on Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève and in the Temple. There were many differences in the rule; there were some in the costume. The Bernardine-Benedictine nuns of the Petit-Picpus wore the black wimple, and the Benedictines of the Saint-Sacrement and of the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève wore it in white, and also had on their chests a Blessed Sacrament about three inches high in silver-gilt or gilded copper. The nuns of the Petit-Picpus did not wear this Blessed Sacrament. Perpetual Adoration, common to the house of the Petit-Picpus and the house of the Temple, leaves the two orders perfectly distinct. There is only a resemblance in this practice between the ladies of the Blessed Sacrament and the Bernardines of Martin Verga, just as there was a similarity, in the study and glorification of all the mysteries relating to the childhood, life and death of Jesus Christ, and to the Virgin, between two orders, however very separate and sometimes hostile, the oratory of Italy, established in Florence by Philip Neri, and the oratory of France, established in Paris by Peter of Bérulle. The oratory of Paris claimed the lead, Philip Neri being only a saint, and Bérulle being a cardinal. Let us return to the harsh Spanish rule of Martin Verga. The Bernardine-Benedictine nuns of this obedience fast all year round, fast during Lent and on many other days that are special to them, rise in their first sleep from one o’clock in the morning until three to read the breviary and sing matins, sleep in serge sheets in all seasons and on straw, do not use baths, never light a fire, discipline themselves every Friday, observe the rule of silence, speak to each other only during recreation, which is very short, and wear homespun shirts for six months, from September 14, which is the exaltation of the Holy Cross, until Easter. These six months are a moderation, the rule says all year; but this homespun shirt, unbearable in the heat of summer, produced fevers and nervous spasms. It was necessary to restrict its use. Even with this softening, on September 14, when the nuns put on this shirt, they have three or four days of fever. Obedience, poverty, chastity, stability under enclosure; these are their vows, greatly aggravated by the rule. The prioress is elected for three years by the mothers, who are called vocal mothers because they have a voice in the matter. A prioress cannot be re-elected only twice, which sets the longest possible reign of a prioress at nine years. They never see the officiating priest, who is always hidden from them by a serge stretched nine feet high. At the sermon, when the preacher is in the chapel, they lower their veil over their faces. They must always speak quietly, walk with their eyes to the ground and their heads bowed. Only one man can enter the convent, the diocesan archbishop. There is indeed another, who is the gardener; but he is always an old man, and so that he is perpetually alone in the garden and the nuns are warned to avoid him, a bell is tied to his knee. They are subject to the prioress with absolute and passive submission. This is canonical subjection in all its abnegation. As at the voice of Christ, ut voci Christi, at the gesture, at the first sign, ad nutum, ad primum signum, immediately, happily, perseveringly, with a certain blind, prompt obedience, hilariter perseveranter et caeca quadam obedientia, like the file in the hand of the worker, quasi limam in manibus fabri, unable to read or write anything without express permission, legere vel scribere non addiscerit sine expressa superioris licentia. In turn, each of them makes what they call reparation. Reparation is prayer for all sins, for all faults, for all disorders, for all violations, for all iniquities, for all crimes committed on earth . For twelve consecutive hours, from four in the evening to four in the morning, or from four in the morning to four in the evening, the sister making reparation remains kneeling on the stone before the Blessed Sacrament, her hands clasped, the rope around her neck. When fatigue becomes unbearable, she prostrates herself flat on her stomach, face to the ground, arms outstretched; this is her only relief. In this attitude, she prays for all the guilty in the universe. This is great to the point of being sublime. As this act is performed before a post at the top of which a candle burns, we say indistinctly making reparation or being at the post. The nuns even prefer, out of humility, this last expression which contains an idea of torture and abasement. Making reparation is a function in which the whole soul is absorbed. The sister at the post would not turn around for the thunder falling behind her. In addition, there is always a nun kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament. This station lasts one hour. They rise like soldiers on guard. This is Perpetual Adoration. Prioresses and mothers almost always bear names imbued with a particular gravity, recalling, not saints and martyrs, but moments in the life of Jesus Christ, such as Mother Nativity, Mother Conception, Mother Presentation, Mother Passion. However, the names of saints are not forbidden. When one sees them, one never sees anything but their mouths. All have yellow teeth. A toothbrush has never entered the convent. Brushing one’s teeth is at the top of a ladder at the bottom of which is: losing one’s soul. They say nothing of my nor mine. They have nothing of their own and must hold on to nothing. They say everything our; thus: our veil, our rosary; if they spoke of their chemise, they would say our chemise. Sometimes they attach themselves to some small object, to a book of hours, to a relic, to a blessed medal. As soon as they realize that they are beginning to care for this object, they must give it away. They remember the words of Saint Theresa to whom a great lady, at the moment of entering her order, said: Allow me, Mother, to send for a holy Bible to which I am very attached. Ah! You care for something! In that case, do not come into our house. It is forbidden for anyone to shut themselves in, and to have a home, a room. They live in open cells. When they approach each other, one says: Praised be and adored the Most Holy Sacrament of the altar! The other replies: Forever. The same ceremony is performed when one knocks at the other’s door. Hardly has the door been touched than one hears from the other side a soft voice hurriedly saying: Forever! Like all practices, this becomes mechanical through habit; and one sometimes says forever before the other has had time to say, which is quite a long time, moreover: Praised be and adored the Most Holy Sacrament of the altar! Among the Visitandines, the one who enters says: Ave Maria, and the one being entered says: Gratiâ plena. This is their greeting, which is indeed full of grace. At each hour of the day, three additional strokes are rung from the bell of the convent church. At this signal, the prioress, vocal mothers, professed sisters, lay sisters, novices, and postulants interrupt what they are saying, doing, or thinking, and all say at once, if it is five o’clock, for example:– At five o’clock and at all hours, praised be and adored the Most Holy Sacrament of the altar! If it is eight o’clock:– At eight o’clock and at all hours, etc., and so on, according to the hour. This custom, which aims to interrupt thought and always bring it back to God, exists in many communities; only the formula varies. Thus, to the Child Jesus, we say:– At this hour and at all hours, let the love of Jesus inflame my heart! The Bernardine Benedictines of Martin Verga, cloistered fifty years ago at the Petit-Picpus, sing the services to a grave psalmody, pure plainchant, and always in full voice throughout the entire service. Wherever there is an asterisk in the missal, they pause and say in a low voice: Jesus-Mary-Joseph. For the office of the dead, they take such a low tone that women’s voices can hardly descend that far. The result is a striking and tragic effect.
Those of the Petit-Picpus had had a vault made under their high altar for the burial of their community. The government, as they say, did not allow this vault to receive the coffins. They therefore left the convent when they were dead. This afflicted and dismayed them as an offense. They had obtained, as a small consolation, to be buried at a special hour and in a special corner in the old Vaugirard cemetery, which was made of land formerly belonging to their community. On Thursdays these nuns hear high mass, vespers and all the services as on Sundays. They also scrupulously observe all the small feasts, unknown to people of the world, which the church formerly lavished in France and still lavishly lavishes in Spain and Italy. Their stations in the chapel are interminable. As for the number and duration of their prayers, we can give no better idea than by quoting the naive words of one of them: The prayers of the postulants are frightening, the prayers of the novices even worse, and the prayers of the professed even worse. Once a week, the chapter is assembled; the prioress presides, the mothers vocal assist. Each sister comes in turn to kneel on the stone, and confess aloud, before all, the faults and sins she has committed during the week. The vocal mothers consult after each confession, and inflict penances aloud. Besides the confession aloud, for which all the somewhat serious faults are reserved, they have for venial faults what they call the coulpe. To commit one’s coulpe is to prostrate oneself flat on one’s stomach during the service before the prioress until the latter, who is never called anything but our mother, warns the patient with a little a blow struck on the wood of her stall that she can get up. One commits one’s guilt for very little things, a broken glass, a torn veil, an involuntary delay of a few seconds at a service, a wrong note in church, etc., that’s enough, one commits one’s guilt. Guilt is entirely spontaneous; it is the guilty party herself (this word is etymologically in its place here ) who judges herself and inflicts it on herself. On feast days and Sundays there are four mother singers who chant the services in front of a large lectern with four desks. One day a mother singer intoned a psalm that began with Ecce, and, instead of Ecce, said aloud these three notes: ut, si, sol; she suffered for this distraction a guilt that lasted the entire service. What made the fault enormous was that the chapter had laughed. When a nun is called to the parlor, even the prioress, she lowers her veil so that, as we remember, only her mouth is visible. Only the prioress can communicate with strangers. The others can only see their close family, and very rarely. If by chance someone from outside comes to see a nun they have known or loved in the world, a whole negotiation is necessary. If it is a woman, permission can sometimes be granted; the nun comes and is spoken to through the shutters, which are only opened for a mother or a sister. It goes without saying that permission is always refused to men. This is the rule of Saint Benedict, aggravated by Martin Verga. These nuns are not cheerful, rosy, and fresh as the girls of other orders often are . They are pale and serious. From 1825 to 1830, three went mad. Chapter 51. Severities. One is a postulant for at least two years, often four; four years a novice. It is rare that final vows can be pronounced before the age of twenty-three or twenty-four. The Bernardine-Benedictine nuns of Martin Verga do not admit widows into their order. They indulge in many unknown macerations in their cells , of which they must never speak. The day a novice makes her profession, she is dressed in her finest attire, her head is covered with white roses, her hair is polished and curled, then she prostrates herself; a large black veil is spread over her and the office of the dead is sung. Then the nuns divide into two lines, one line passes near her, saying in a plaintive tone: our sister is dead, and the other line responds in a resounding voice: alive in Jesus Christ! At the time this story takes place, a boarding school was attached to the convent. A boarding school for noble young girls, most of them wealthy, among whom were the young ladies of Sainte-Aulaire and Bélissen, and an Englishwoman with the illustrious Catholic name of Talbot. These young girls, raised by these nuns within four walls, grew up in horror of the world and the century. One of them told us one day: ” Seeing the paving stones of the street made me shudder from head to toe.” They were dressed in blue with a white bonnet and a vermeil or copper Holy Spirit fixed on their chests. On certain major feast days, particularly on the feast of Saint Martha, they were granted, as a high favor and supreme happiness, to dress as nuns and perform the offices and practices of Saint Benedict for a whole day. In the early days, the nuns lent them their black clothes. This seemed profane, and the prioress forbade it. This loan was only permitted to novices. It is remarkable that these performances, no doubt tolerated and encouraged in the convent by a secret spirit of proselytism, and to give these children some foretaste of the holy habit, were a real joy and a true recreation for the boarders. They simply enjoyed them. It was new, it changed them. Candid reasons for childhood which do not succeed in making us worldlings understand this bliss of holding an aspergillum in one’s hand and standing for hours on end, singing together at a lectern. The pupils, apart from their austerities, conformed to all the practices of the convent. There is a young woman who, having entered the world and after several years of marriage, had not yet managed to break the habit of saying hastily every time someone knocked at her door: forever! Like the nuns, the boarders only saw their parents in the parlor. Even their mothers were not allowed to kiss them. This is how far the severity went on this point. One day a young girl was visited by her mother accompanied by a little three-year-old sister. The girl was crying, because she would have liked to kiss her sister. Impossible. She begged at least that the child be allowed to put his little hand through the bars so that she could kiss it. This was refused almost with scandal. Chapter 52. Gaieties. These young girls nonetheless filled this solemn house with charming memories. At certain hours, childhood sparkled in this cloister. Recreation rang. A door turned on its hinges. The birds said: Good! Here are the children! An irruption of youth flooded this garden cut by a cross like a shroud. Radiant faces, white foreheads, ingenuous eyes full of gay light, all sorts of dawns, scattered in this darkness. After the psalms, the bells, the ringing, the knells, the services, suddenly burst forth this noise of the little girls, sweeter than the noise of bees. The hive of joy opened, and each one brought her honey. People played, they called to each other, they grouped together, they ran; pretty little white teeth chattered in corners; The veils, from afar, watched the laughter, the shadows watched the rays, but what did it matter! They shone and laughed. These four gloomy walls had their moment of dazzlement. They witnessed, vaguely whitened by the reflection of so much joy, this gentle swirling of swarms. It was like a shower of roses crossing this mourning. The young girls frolicked under the eye of the nuns; the gaze of impeccability does not hinder innocence. Thanks to these children, among so many austere hours, there was the naive hour. The little ones jumped, the big ones danced. In this cloister, the play was mixed with heaven. Nothing was ravishing and august like all these fresh, blossoming souls. Homer would have come to laugh there with Perrault, and there was, in this dark garden, youth, health, noise, cries, giddiness , pleasure, happiness, enough to cheer up all the grandmothers, those of the epic as well as those of the tale, those of the throne as well as those of the thatch, from Hecuba to the Grandmother. It was said in this house, more than anywhere else perhaps, those children’s words which have so much grace and which make one laugh with a laugh full of reverie. It was between these four funereal walls that a five-year-old child cried out one day: – My mother! A grown-up has just told me that I have only nine years and ten months left to stay here. What happiness! It was also there that this memorable dialogue took place: A vocal mother. – Why are you crying, my child? The child: (six years old), sobbing: –I told Alix that I knew my history of France. She tells me that I don’t know it, and I do. Alix (the eldest, nine years old). –No. She doesn’t know it. The mother. –What do you mean, my child? Alix. –She told me to open the book at random and ask her a question from the book, and she would answer. –Well? –She didn’t answer. –Let’s see. What did you ask her? –I opened the book at random as she said, and I asked her the first question I found. –And what was this question? –It was: What happened next? It was there that this profound observation was made about a rather greedy parakeet that belonged to a lady boarder: — Is she nice! She eats the top of her toast, like a person! It was on one of the flagstones of this cloister that this confession was picked up, written in advance, so as not to forget it, by a seven-year-old sinner: –My father, I accuse myself of having been avaricious. –My father, I accuse myself of having been an adulteress. –My father, I accuse myself of having raised my eyes to the gentlemen. It was on one of the grassy benches in this garden that this tale was improvised by a pink mouth of six years old, listened to by blue eyes of four or five years old: –There were three little roosters who had a country where there were many flowers. They picked the flowers and put them in their pockets. After that, they picked the leaves and put them in their toys. There was a wolf in the country, and there was a lot of wood; and the wolf was in the woods; and he ate the little roosters. And again this other poem: –There came a blow from a stick. It was Punchinello who gave it to the cat. It didn’t do him any good, it hurt him. So a lady put Punchinello in prison. It was there that this sweet and heartbreaking phrase was said by a little abandoned girl, a foundling whom the convent was raising out of charity. She heard the others talking about their mothers, and she murmured to herself: — My mother wasn’t there when I was born! There was a fat lairy woman who was always seen hurrying through the corridors with her bunch of keys and whose name was Sister Agathe. The big girls, over ten years old, called it Agathocles. The refectory, a large oblong and square room, which received daylight only through a cloister with archivolts on the same level as the garden, was dark and damp, and, as the children say, full of animals. All the surrounding areas provided their quota of insects. Each of the four corners had received, in the language of the boarders, a particular and expressive name. There was the Spiders’ Corner, the Caterpillars’ Corner, the Woodlice’s Corner and the Crickets’ Corner. The Crickets’ Corner was next to the kitchen and highly esteemed. It was less cold there than elsewhere. From the refectory the names had passed to the boarding school and served to distinguish four nations there, as at the old Mazarin College. Every pupil belonged to one of these four nations according to the corner of the refectory where she sat at mealtimes. One day, the Archbishop, while making a pastoral visit, saw a pretty little girl, all rosy with wonderful blond hair, enter the classroom he was passing by. He asked another boarder, a charming brunette with fresh cheeks, who was near him: “What is this one? ” “It’s a spider, my lord. ” “Well! And that other one? ” “It’s a cricket. ” “And that one? ” “It’s a caterpillar. ” “Truly! And you yourself? ” “I’m a woodlouse, my lord.” Every house of this kind has its peculiarities. At the beginning of this century, Écouen was one of those graceful and severe places where the childhood of young girls grew up in an almost august shadow. At Écouen, to take their place in the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, a distinction was made between the virgins and the florists. There were also the canopies and the censers, some carrying the canopy cords, others incensing the Blessed Sacrament. The flowers belonged by right to the florists. Four “virgins” walked in front. On the morning of this great day, it was not uncommon to hear someone ask in the dormitory: “Who is a virgin?” Madame Campan quoted this word from a little girl of seven to a big one of sixteen, who took the head of the procession while she, the little one, remained at the tail: –You are a virgin, you; I am not. Chapter 53. Distractions. Above the door of the refectory was written in large black letters this prayer which was called the White Paternoster, and which had the virtue of leading people straight to paradise: Little white paternoster, which God made, which God said, which God put in paradise. In the evening, going to bed, I found (sic) three angels lying at my bed, one at the feet, two at the head, the good Virgin Mary in the middle, who told me that I lay there, that nothing doubted. The good God is my father, the good Virgin is my mother, the three apostles are my brothers, the three virgins are my sisters. The shirt in which God was born, my body is wrapped in it; the Saint Margaret cross on my chest is written; Madame the Virgin goes to the fields, God weeping, meets Mr. Saint John. Mr. Saint John, where do you come from? I come from Ave Salus. You have not seen the good Lord, have you? He is in the tree of the cross, his feet dangling, his hands nailing, a small hat of white thorn on his head. Whoever says it three times in the evening, three times in the morning, will win paradise in the end. In 1827, this characteristic prayer had disappeared from the wall under a triple layer of whitewash. It is now finishing fading in the memory of some young girls of the time, old women today. A large crucifix hanging on the wall completed the decoration of this refectory, whose single door, we believe we have said, opened onto the garden. Two narrow tables, each side by two wooden benches , formed two long parallel lines from one end of the refectory to the other . The walls were white, the tables were black; these two colors of mourning are the only change in convents. The meals were harsh and the children’s food was severe. A single dish, mixed meat and vegetables, or salted fish, was the luxury. This ordinary meal, reserved for the boarders alone, was nevertheless an exception. The children ate and were silent under the watchful eye of the weekly mother who, from time to time, if a fly took it into her head to fly and buzz against the rule, would noisily open and close a wooden book. This silence was seasoned with the lives of the saints, read aloud in a small pulpit at the foot of the crucifix. The reader was a senior student, during the week. There were varnished bowls here and there on the bare table where the students washed their own cups and cutlery, and sometimes threw in some piece of waste, tough meat or spoiled fish; this was punished. These bowls were called round bowls of water. The child who broke the silence made a cross with his tongue. Where? On the ground. She licked the pavement. Dust, that end of all joys, was charged with punishing these poor little rose leaves, guilty of chirping. There was in the convent a book which has never been printed but in a single copy, and which it is forbidden to read. It is the rule of Saint Benedict. An arcane into which no profane eye must penetrate. Nemo regulas, seu constitutiones nostras, externis communicabit. The boarders one day managed to steal this book, and began to read it avidly, a reading often interrupted by terrors of being surprised which made them close the volume hastily. They derived only mediocre pleasure from this great danger they ran. A few unintelligible pages on the sins of young boys, that was the most interesting thing they had. They played in a garden path, bordered by a few meager fruit trees. Despite the extreme surveillance and the severity of the punishments, when the wind had shaken the trees, they sometimes managed to stealthily pick up a green apple, or a spoiled apricot, or an inhabited pear. Now I let a letter I have speak before my eyes, a letter written twenty-five years ago by a former boarder, now Madame la Duchesse de–, one of the most elegant women in Paris. I quote verbatim: One hides one’s pear or one’s apple, as one can. When one goes up to put the veil on the bed while waiting for supper, one stuffs them under one’s pillow and in the evening one eats them in one’s bed, and when one cannot, one eats them in the toilets. This was one of their most intense pleasures. Once, it was still at the time of a visit from the Archbishop to the convent, one of the young girls, Mademoiselle Bouchard, who was a bit of a Montmorency, bet that she would ask him for a day off, an enormity in such an austere community. The bet was accepted, but none of those who took the bet believed it. When the time came, as the archbishop passed in front of the boarders, Mademoiselle Bouchard, to the indescribable terror of her companions, stepped out of the ranks and said: Monseigneur, a day off. Mademoiselle Bouchard was fresh and tall, with the prettiest little rosy face in the world. Mr. de Quélen smiled and said: What then, my dear child, a day off! Three days, if you please. I grant three days. The prioress could do nothing about it; the archbishop had spoken. A scandal for the convent, but a joy for the boarding school. Judge the effect. This rough cloister was not, however, so well walled up that the life of passions from outside, that drama, even romance, could not penetrate it. To prove this, we will confine ourselves to stating here and briefly indicating a real and incontestable fact, which, moreover, has no connection in itself and is not connected by any thread to the story we are telling. We mention this fact to complete in the reader’s mind the physiognomy of the convent. Around this time, therefore, there was in the convent a mysterious person who was not a nun, who was treated with great respect, and who was called Madame Albertine. Nothing was known of her except that she was mad, and that in society she was considered dead. Under this story, it was said, there were makeshift arrangements necessary for a grand marriage. This woman, barely thirty years old, dark, quite beautiful, looked vaguely with large black eyes. Did she see? It was doubted. She
glided rather than walked; she never spoke; it was not quite certain that she breathed. Her nostrils were pinched and livid as if after her last breath. To touch her hand was to touch snow . She had a strange, spectral grace. Wherever she went, one was cold. One day, a sister, seeing her pass, said to another: She is considered dead. – Perhaps she is, replied the other. A hundred stories were told about Madame Albertine. It was the eternal curiosity of the boarders. There was a gallery in the chapel called the Æil-de-Boeuf. It was in this gallery, which had only one circular bay, a Æil-de-Boeuf, that Madame Albertine attended services. She was usually there alone, because from this gallery, placed on the first floor, one could see the preacher or the officiant; which was forbidden to the nuns. One day the pulpit was occupied by a young priest of high rank, Mr. the Duke of Rohan, peer of France, officer of the Red Musketeers in 1815 when he was Prince of Léon, who died after 1830, cardinal and archbishop of Besançon. It was the first time that Mr. de Rohan preached at the convent of Petit-Picpus. Madame Albertine usually attended sermons and services in perfect calm and complete immobility. That day, as soon as she saw Mr. de Rohan, she half stood up and said aloud in the silence of the chapel: Look! Auguste! The whole community turned their heads in astonishment, the preacher raised his eyes, but Madame Albertine had fallen back into her immobility. A breath from the outside world, a glimmer of life, had passed for a moment over that face . extinct and frozen, then everything had vanished, and the madwoman had become a corpse again. These two words, however, set everyone in the convent who could talk talking. How many things in this! Auguste! How many revelations! Mr. de Rohan was indeed called Auguste. It was obvious that Madame Albertine came from the highest society, since she knew Mr. de Rohan, that she herself was highly placed there, since she spoke of such a great lord so familiarly, and that she had a relationship with him , perhaps of kinship, but certainly very close, since she knew his first name. Two very strict duchesses, Mesdames de Choiseul and de Sérent, often visited the community, which they undoubtedly entered by virtue of the Magnates mulieres privilege, and caused great fear in the boarding school. When the two old ladies passed, all the poor young girls trembled and lowered their eyes. M. de Rohan was, moreover, unbeknownst to him, the object of the boarders’ attention. At that time, while awaiting the episcopate, he had just been made grand vicar of the Archbishop of Paris. It was one of his habits to come quite often to sing at the services of the chapel of the nuns of the Petit-Picpus. None of the young recluses could see him because of the serge curtain, but he had a sweet and slightly shrill voice, which they had managed to recognize and distinguish . He had been a musketeer; and then he was said to be very coquettish, very well-dressed with beautiful chestnut hair arranged in a roll around his head, and that he had a magnificent wide moiré belt, and that his black cassock was cut in the most elegant way in the world. He occupied all these sixteen-year-old imaginations. No sound from outside penetrated the convent. However, there was a year when the sound of a flute reached there. It was an event, and the boarders of that time still remember it. It was a flute that someone was playing in the neighborhood. This flute always played the same tune, a tune that is now very distant: Ma Zétulbé, viens réigner sur mon âme, and it was heard two or three times a day. The young girls spent hours listening, the vocal mothers were upset, brains worked, punishments rained down. This lasted several months. The boarders were all more or less in love with the unknown musician. Each dreamed of being Zétulbé. The sound of the flute came from the direction of the rue Droit-Mur; They would have given everything, compromised everything, tried everything, to see, even for a second, to glimpse, to catch a glimpse of, the young man who played so delightfully on that flute and who, without realizing it, was playing all those souls at the same time. There were some who escaped through a service door and went up to the third floor on the rue Droit-Mur, in order to try to see through the days of suffering. Impossible. One went so far as to put her arm above her head through the gate and waved her white handkerchief. Two were even bolder. They found a way to climb up onto a roof and took the risk and finally succeeded in seeing the young man. He was an old gentleman, an emigrant, blind and ruined, who played the flute in his attic to relieve his boredom. Chapter 54. The Little Convent. There were within this enclosure of the Petit-Picpus three perfectly distinct buildings, the large convent inhabited by the nuns, the boarding school where the pupils lodged, and finally what was called the small convent. It was a main building with a garden where all sorts of old nuns of various orders lived together, remnants of the cloisters destroyed by the revolution; a gathering of all the black, gray, and white variegations, of all the communities and all the possible varieties; what one could call, if such a coupling of words were permissible, a sort of harlequin convent. Since the Empire, all these poor, scattered and disoriented girls had been granted the opportunity to come and shelter there under the wings of the Bernardine Benedictines. The government paid them a small pension; the ladies of the Petit-Picpus had received them eagerly. It was a bizarre jumble. Each followed her own rule. The boarding students were sometimes allowed, as a great recreation, to visit them; which is why these young memories have kept, among others, the memory of Mother Saint-Basile, Mother Sainte-Scolastique, and Mother Jacob. One of these refugees found herself almost at home. She was a nun from Sainte-Aure, the only one of her order who had survived. The former convent of the ladies of Sainte-Aure occupied from the beginning of the 18th century precisely this same house of the Petit-Picpus which later belonged to the Benedictines of Martin Verga. This holy girl, too poor to wear the magnificent habit of her order, which was a white dress with a scarlet scapular, had piously dressed a small mannequin in it, which she displayed with complacency and which, upon her death, she bequeathed to the house. In 1824, there remained of this order only one nun; today there remains only a doll. Besides these worthy mothers, some old women of the world had obtained permission from the prioress, like Madame Albertine, to retire to the small convent. Among this number were Madame de Beaufort d’Hautpoul and Madame la Marquise Dufresne. Another was never known in the convent except for the formidable noise she made when blowing her nose. The students called her Madame Vacarmini. Around 1820 or 1821, Madame de Genlis, who was at that time writing a small periodical collection entitled l’Intrépide, asked to be admitted as a lady -in-waiting to the Petit-Picpus convent. The Duke of Orléans recommended her. Rumor in the hive; the vocal mothers were all trembling. Madame de Genlis had written novels. But she declared that she was the first to hate them, and then she had reached her phase of fierce devotion. With the help of God, and the prince too , she entered. She left after six or eight months, giving as her reason that the garden had no shade. The nuns were delighted. Although very old, she still played the harp, and very well. In leaving, she left her mark on her cell. Madame de Genlis was superstitious and a Latinist. These two words give a fairly good profile of her . A few years ago, these five Latin verses, written by her hand in red ink on yellow paper, were still to be seen stuck inside a small cupboard in her cell where she kept her money and jewels, and which, in her opinion, had the virtue of scaring off thieves: Imparibus meritis pendent tria corpora ramis: Dismas et Gesmas, media est divina potestas; Alta petit Dismas, infelix, infima, Gesmas. Nos et res nostras conservet summa potestas. Hos versus dicas, ne tu furto tua perdas. These verses, in sixth-century Latin, raise the question of whether the two thieves of Calvary were called, as is commonly believed , Dimas and Gestas, or Dismas and Gesmas. This spelling could have contradicted the claims that the Viscount of Gestas had, in the last century, to be descended from the bad thief. Moreover, the useful virtue attached to these verses is an article of faith in the order of the Hospitallers. The church of the house, built in such a way as to separate, like a real divide, the large convent from the boarding school, was, of course, common to the boarding school, the large convent and the small convent. The public was even admitted through a sort of lazaretto entrance arranged on the street. But everything was arranged in such a way that none of the inhabitants of the cloister could see a face from outside. Imagine a church whose choir was grasped by a gigantic hand, and folded in such a way as to form, no longer, as in ordinary churches, an extension behind the altar, but a sort of dark room or cavern to the right of the officiant; imagine this room closed by the seven- foot-high curtain we have already spoken of; crowd into the shadow of this curtain, on wooden stalls, the choir nuns on the left, the boarders on the right, the lay sisters and novices at the back, and you will have some idea of the nuns of the Petit-Picpus, attending divine service . This cavern, which was called the choir, communicated with the cloister by a corridor. The church looked out onto the garden. When the nuns attended services where their rule commanded them to be silent, the public was only alerted to their presence by the sound of the misericords of the stalls rising or falling noisily. Chapter 55. Some silhouettes of this shadow. During the six years between 1819 and 1825, the prioress of Petit-Picpus was Mademoiselle de Blemeur, who in religion was called Mother Innocente. She was of the family of Marguerite de Blemeur, author of the Lives of the Saints of the Order of Saint Benedict. She had been re-elected. She was a woman of about sixty, short, fat, singing like a cracked pot, says the letter we have already quoted; moreover, excellent, the only cheerful one in the whole convent, and for that adored. Mother Innocente took after her ancestor Marguerite, the Dacier of the Order. She was well-read, erudite, learned, competent, curiously a historian, stuffed with Latin, stuffed with Greek, full of Hebrew, and more Benedictine than Benedictine. The sub-prioress was an old, almost blind Spanish nun, Mother Cineres. The most important among the vocals were Mother Sainte-Honorine, treasurer; Mother Sainte-Gertrude, first mistress of novices; Mother Sainte-Ange, second mistress; Mother Annonciation, sacristan; Mother Saint-Augustin, nurse, the only one in the whole convent who was wicked; then Mother Sainte-Mechtilde (Miss Gauvain), very young, with an admirable voice; Mother of the Angels (Miss Drouet), who had been at the convent of the Filles-Dieu and at the convent of the Trésor between Gisors and Magny; Mother Saint-Joseph (Miss de Cogolludo); Mother Sainte-Adélaïde (Miss d’Auverney); Mother Miséricorde (Miss de Cifuentes, who could not resist the austerities); Mother Compassion (Miss de la Miltière, received at sixty , despite the rule, very rich); Mother Providence (Miss de Laudinière); Mother Presentation (Miss de Siguenza), who was prioress in 1847; finally, Mother Sainte-Céligne (the sister of the sculptor Ceracchi), who had gone mad; Mother Sainte-Chantal (Miss de Suzon), who had gone mad. There was still among the prettiest a charming girl of twenty-three, who was from the island of Bourbon and a descendant of the knight Roze, who would have been called in society Mademoiselle Roze and who was called Mother Assumption. Mother Sainte-Mechtilde, in charge of singing and the choir, readily employed the boarders. She usually took a complete range of them, that is to say seven, from ten years old to sixteen inclusive, voices and sizes assorted, whom she made sing standing up, lined up side by side by age from the smallest to the tallest. This offered to the eyes something like a pipe of young girls, a sort of living Pan flute made with angels. The lay sisters whom the boarders loved best were Sister Saint Euphrasia, Sister Saint Margaret, Sister Saint Martha, who was in her infancy, and Sister Saint Michael, whose long nose made them laugh. All these women were kind to all these children. The nuns were only strict with themselves. Fires were only made at the boarding school, and food, compared to that of the convent, was sought after. With that, a thousand cares. Only, when a child passed near a nun and spoke to her, the nun never answered. This rule of silence had brought about the fact that, throughout the convent, the speech was taken away from human creatures and given to inanimate objects. Sometimes it was the church bell that spoke, sometimes the gardener’s bell. A very loud bell, placed next to the doorkeeper and heard throughout the house, indicated by various rings, which were a kind of acoustic telegraph, all the actions of material life to be accomplished, and called to the parlor, if necessary, this or that inhabitant of the house. Each person and each thing had its own ring. The prioress had one and one; the sub-prioress one and two. Six-five announced class, so that the students never said to go to class, but to go at six-five. Four-four was the bell of Madame de Genlis. It was heard very often. ‘It’s the devil at four,’ said those who were not charitable. Nineteen strokes announced a great event. It was the opening of the enclosure gate, a frightful iron board bristling with bolts which turned on its hinges only in front of the archbishop. Except for him and the gardener, as we have said, no man entered the convent. The boarders saw two others: the chaplain, Abbé Banès, old and ugly, whom they were allowed to contemplate in the choir through a grille; the other, the drawing master, Mr. Ansiaux, whom the letter of which we have already read a few lines calls Mr. Anciot, and describes as a dreadful old hunchback. We see that all the men were chosen. Such was this curious house. Chapter 56. Post corda lapides. After having sketched its moral figure, it is not useless to indicate in a few words its material configuration. The reader already has some idea of it. The Petit-Picpus-Saint-Antoine convent almost entirely filled the vast trapezoid that resulted from the intersections of Rue Polonceau, Rue Droit-Mur, Petite Rue Picpus, and the closed alley named Rue Aumarais on old maps. These four streets surrounded this trapezoid like a moat. The convent consisted of several buildings and a garden. The main building, taken as a whole, was a juxtaposition of hybrid constructions which, seen from a bird’s eye view, formed a fairly precise outline of a gallows resting on the ground. The large arm of the gallows occupied the entire section of Rue Droit-Mur between Petite Rue Picpus and Rue Polonceau; the small arm was a tall, gray, and severe grilled facade that faced Petite Rue Picpus; carriage entrance No. 62 marked its end. Towards the middle of this facade, dust and ashes whitened an old, low arched door where spiders made their webs and which opened only for an hour or two on Sundays and on the rare occasions when a nun’s coffin left the convent. This was the public entrance to the church. The bend of the gallows was a square room which served as an office and which the nuns called the expense. In the large arm were the cells of the mothers and sisters and the novitiate. In the small arm were the kitchens, the refectory, doubled by the cloister, and the church. Between door number 62 and the corner of the closed Aumarais alley was the boarding school, which could not be seen from the outside. The rest of the trapezoid formed the garden which was much lower than the level of the rue Polonceau; which made the walls much higher inside than outside. The garden, slightly domed, had in its middle, at the top of a mound, a beautiful sharp and conical fir tree from which branched off, like the roundabout of a shield, four large paths, and, arranged two by two in the branches of the large ones, eight small ones, so that, if the enclosure had been circular, the geometric plan of the paths would have resembled a cross placed on a wheel. The paths, all coming to a stop at the very irregular walls of the garden, were of unequal lengths. They were bordered with gooseberry bushes. At the end, an avenue of tall poplars led from the ruins of the old convent, which was at the corner of Rue Droit-Mur, to the house of the small convent, which was at the corner of Rue Aumarais. In front of the small convent, there was what was called the small garden. Add to this a courtyard, all sorts of varied angles made by the interior buildings, prison walls, for all perspective and for all neighborhood the long black line of roofs which bordered the other side of Rue Polonceau, and one can form a complete image of what , forty-five years ago, the house of the Bernardines of Petit-Picpus was. This holy house had been built precisely on the site of a famous tennis court from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century which was called the gambling den of the eleven thousand devils. All these streets, moreover, were among the oldest in Paris. These names, Droit-Mur and Aumarais, are very old; the streets that bear them are much older still. The Aumarais alley was called the Maugout alley; the Droit-Mur street was called the Rue des Églantiers, because God opened the flowers before man cut the stones. Chapter 57. A century under a wimple. Since we are in the process of detailing what the convent of Petit-Picpus was once like and we have dared to open a window onto this discreet asylum, may the reader allow us one more small digression, foreign to the substance of this book, but characteristic and useful in that it makes us understand that the cloister itself has its original figures. There was in the small convent a centenarian who came from the abbey of Fontevrault. Before the revolution she had even been of the world. She spoke a lot about Mr. de Miromesnil, Keeper of the Seals under Louis XVI, and about a President Duplat whom she had known well. It was her pleasure and her vanity to bring up these two names at every turn. She spoke of the wonders of the Abbey of Fontevrault, that it was like a city, and that there were streets in the monastery. She spoke with a Picard dialect that enlivened the boarders. Every year, she solemnly renewed her vows, and, at the moment of taking the oath, she said to the priest: Monseigneur Saint François gave it to Monseigneur Saint Julien, Monseigneur Saint Julien gave it to Monseigneur Saint Eusèbe, Monseigneur Saint Eusèbe gave it to Monseigneur Saint Procope, etc., etc.; so I give it to you, my father.–And the boarders laughed, not under their cloaks, but under their veils; charming little stifled laughs that made vocal mothers frown . Another time, the centenarian was telling stories. She said that in her youth the Bernardins were no less than the Musketeers. It was a century that was speaking, but it was the eighteenth century. She recounted the Champagne and Burgundian custom of the four wines before the revolution. When a great personage, a marshal of France, a prince, a duke and peer, passed through a town in Burgundy or Champagne, the town council came to harangue him and presented him with four silver gondolas into which four different wines had been poured. On the first goblet one could read this inscription: monkey wine, on the second: lion wine, on the third: sheep wine, on the fourth: pig wine. These four legends expressed the four degrees that the drunkard descends; the first drunkenness, that which cheers; the second, the one that irritates; the third, the one that stupefies; and finally the last, the one that stupefies. She had in a cupboard, under lock and key, a mysterious object that she held dear. The Fontevrault rule did not forbid it. She did not want to show this object to anyone. She locked herself in, which her rule allowed, and hid every time she wanted to look at it. If she heard walking in the corridor, she closed the cupboard as quickly as she could with her old hands. As soon as When anyone spoke to her about this, she remained silent, she who spoke so willingly. The most curious failed before her silence and the most tenacious before her obstinacy. This was also a subject of comment for all who were idle or bored in the convent. What could this precious and secret thing be, which was the treasure of the centenarian? Perhaps some holy book? Some unique rosary? Some proven relic? People were lost in conjecture. When the poor old woman died, they ran to the cupboard , perhaps faster than would have been appropriate, and it was opened. The object was found under a triple cloth like a blessed paten. It was a Faënza dish representing flying cupids pursued by apothecary boys armed with enormous syringes. The chase abounds in grimaces and comical postures. One of the charming little cupids is already all skewered. He struggles, flaps his little wings and tries to fly again, but the matassin laughs a satanic laugh. Moral: love defeated by colic. This dish, very curious indeed, and which may have had the honor of giving Molière an idea, still existed in September 1845; it was for sale at a bric-a-brac dealer on Boulevard Beaumarchais. This good old woman did not want to receive any visitors from outside, because , she said, the parlor is too sad. Chapter 58. Origin of Perpetual Adoration. Besides, this almost sepulchral parlor of which we have tried to give an idea is a completely local fact which is not reproduced with the same severity in other convents. At the convent of the Rue du Temple in particular, which, in truth, was of a different order, the black shutters were replaced by brown curtains, and the parlor itself was a parqueted salon whose windows were framed with white muslin curtains and whose walls admitted all sorts of frames, a portrait of a Benedictine nun with her face uncovered, painted bouquets , and even a Turk’s head. It was in the garden of the convent of the Rue du Temple that there was this horse chestnut tree which was considered the most beautiful and largest in France and which had among the good people of the eighteenth century the reputation of being the father of all the chestnut trees in the kingdom. As we have said, this convent of the Temple was occupied by Benedictines of Perpetual Adoration, Benedictines quite different from those who were under the control of Cîteaux. This order of Perpetual Adoration is not very old and does not go back more than two hundred years. In 1649, the Blessed Sacrament was desecrated twice, a few days apart, in two churches in Paris, at Saint-Sulpice and at Saint-Jean en Grève, a frightening and rare sacrilege which moved the whole city. The prior, grand vicar of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, ordered a solemn procession of all his clergy, at which the papal nuncio officiated. But expiation was not enough for two worthy women, Madame Courtin, Marquise de Boucs, and the Countess of Châteauvieux. This outrage, made to the most august sacrament of the altar, although temporary, did not leave these two holy souls, and seemed to them to be able to be repaired only by a Perpetual Adoration in some monastery of girls. Both, one in 1652, the other in 1653, donated significant sums to Mother Catherine de Bar, known as the Blessed Sacrament, a Benedictine nun, to found, for this pious purpose, a monastery of the Order of Saint Benedict; the first permission for this foundation was given to Mother Catherine de Bar by Mr de Metz, Abbot of Saint-Germain, on the condition that no girl could be received unless she brought three hundred pounds of pension, which made six thousand pounds in principal. After the Abbot of Saint-Germain, the king granted letters patent, and everything, abbatial charter and royal letters, was approved in 1654 by the Chamber of Accounts and Parliament. Such is the origin and legal consecration of the establishment of the Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in Paris. Their first convent was built anew, rue Cassette, with the money of Mesdames de Boucs and de Châteauvieux. This order, as we see, was not to be confused with the so-called Benedictines of Cîteaux. It was under the abbot of Saint-Germain des Prés, in the same way that the Ladies of the Sacred Heart were under the general of the Jesuits and the Sisters of Charity under the general of the Lazarists. It was also quite different from the Bernardines of the Petit-Picpus, whose interior we have just shown. In 1657, Pope Alexander VII had authorized, by special brief, the Bernardines of the Petit-Picpus to practice Perpetual Adoration like the Benedictines of the Blessed Sacrament. But the two orders nevertheless remained distinct. Chapter 59. End of the Petit-Picpus. From the beginning of the Restoration, the convent of the Petit-Picpus was in decline; this is part of the general death of the order, which, after the eighteenth century, is disappearing like all religious orders. Contemplation is, like prayer, a need of humanity; but, like everything that the Revolution has touched, it will be transformed, and, from hostile to social progress, will become favorable to it. The house of the Petit-Picpus was rapidly depopulating. In 1840, the small convent had disappeared, the boarding school had disappeared. There were neither the old women nor the young girls; some had died, others had left. Volaverunt. The rule of Perpetual Adoration is so rigid that it is terrifying; vocations are declining, the order is not recruited. In 1845, there were still a few lay sisters here and there; but no choir nuns. Forty years ago, there were nearly a hundred nuns; fifteen years ago, there were only twenty-eight. How many are there today? In 1847, the prioress was young, a sign that the circle of choice is narrowing. She was not yet forty. As the number diminishes, the fatigue increases; the service of each one becomes more difficult; one could see the time approaching when they would be no more than a dozen aching , bent shoulders to carry the heavy rule of Saint Benedict. The burden is implacable and remains the same for the few as for the many. It weighs, it crushes. So they die. While the author of this book still lived in Paris, two died. One was twenty-five, the other twenty-three. The latter can say like Julia Alpinula: Hic jaceo. Vvixi annos viginti et tres . It is because of this decadence that the convent has renounced the education of girls. We could not pass in front of this extraordinary, unknown, obscure house, without entering it and without bringing in the spirits who accompany us and who listen to us tell, perhaps for the benefit of some, the melancholy story of Jean Valjean. We have penetrated into this community full of these old practices which seem so new today. It is the enclosed garden. Hortus conclusus . We have spoken of this singular place with detail, but with respect, at least as much as respect and detail are reconcilable. We do not understand everything, but we do not insult anything. We are at an equal distance from the hosanna of Joseph de Maistre which ends in consecrating the executioner and from the sneer of Voltaire which goes so far as to mock the crucifix. Illogicality of Voltaire, by the way; for Voltaire would have defended Jesus as he defended Calas; and, for those who deny superhuman incarnations, what does the crucifix represent? The murdered sage. In the nineteenth century, the religious idea underwent a crisis. We unlearn certain things, and we do well, provided that in unlearning this, we learn that. There is no emptiness in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is good that they take place, but on the condition that they are followed by reconstructions. In the meantime, let us study the things that are no more. It is necessary to know them, if only to avoid them. The counterfeits of the past take on false names and readily call themselves the future. This ghost, the past, is prone to falsifying its passport. Let us be aware of the trap. Let us be wary. The past has a face, superstition, and a mask, hypocrisy. Let us denounce the face and tear off the mask. As for convents, they present a complex question. A question of civilization, which condemns them; a question of freedom, which protects them. Book Seven–Parenthesis Chapter 60. The Convent, an Abstract Idea. This book is a drama whose first character is infinity. Man is the second. That being so, since a convent happened to be on our path, we had to enter it. Why? The convent, which is proper to the East as to the West, to antiquity as to modern times, to paganism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, as to Christianity, is one of the optical devices applied by man to the infinite. This is not the place to develop certain ideas beyond measure ; however, while absolutely maintaining our reservations, our restrictions, and even our indignation, we must say that every time we encounter the infinite in man, well or badly understood, we feel overcome with respect. There is in the synagogue, in the mosque, in the pagoda, in the wigwam, a hideous side that we abhor and a sublime side that we adore. What contemplation for the spirit and what bottomless reverie! the reverberation of God on the human wall. Chapter 61. The convent, a historical fact. From the point of view of history, reason, and truth, monasticism is doomed. Monasteries, when they abound in a nation, are traffic hubs , cumbersome establishments, centers of laziness where centers of work are needed. Monastic communities are to the great social community what mistletoe is to the oak, what a wart is to the human body. Their prosperity and their plumpness are the impoverishment of the country. The monastic regime, good at the beginning of civilizations, useful in producing the reduction of brutality through spirituality, is bad for the virility of peoples. Moreover, when it relaxes, and enters its period of disorder, as it continues to set an example, it becomes bad for all the reasons that made it salutary in its period of purity. Cloisters have had their day. Cloisters, useful for the first education of modern civilization, have been hindering its growth and are harmful to its development. As an institution and a mode of training for man, monasteries, good in the tenth century, questionable in the fifteenth, are detestable in the nineteenth. Monastic leprosy has almost eaten away to the skeleton two admirable nations, Italy and Spain, one the light, the other the splendor of Europe for centuries, and, at the time in which we live, these two illustrious peoples are only beginning to heal thanks to the healthy and vigorous hygiene of 1789. The convent, the ancient convent of women in particular, as it still appears at the threshold of this century in Italy, Austria, and Spain, is one of the darkest concretions of the Middle Ages. The cloister, this cloister, is the point of intersection of terrors. The Catholic cloister properly speaking is filled with the black radiance of death. The Spanish convent especially is funereal. There rise in the darkness, under vaults full of mist, under domes vague with shadow, massive Babel altars, as high as cathedrals; there hang from chains in the darkness immense white crucifixes; there spread out, naked on the ebony, great ivory Christs; more than bloody, bleeding; hideous and magnificent, the elbows showing the bones, the kneecaps showing the integuments, the wounds showing the flesh, crowned with silver thorns, nailed with gold nails, with drops of blood in rubies on their foreheads and tears in diamonds in their eyes. The
diamonds and rubies seem wet, and make veiled beings weep below in the shadows, their sides bruised by hair shirts and by the whip with iron tips, their breasts crushed by wicker racks, their knees grazed by prayer; women who believe themselves to be wives; specters who believe themselves to be seraphim. Do these women think? No. Do they want? No. Do they love? No. Do they live? No. Their nerves have become bones; their bones have become stones. Their veil is woven from the night. Their breath under the veil resembles some unknown tragic breath of death. The abbess, a larva, sanctifies them and terrifies them. The immaculate is there, fierce. Such are the old monasteries of Spain. Dens of terrible devotion; lairs of virgins; ferocious places. Catholic Spain was more Roman than Rome itself. The Spanish convent was par excellence the Catholic convent. One could feel the Orient there. The archbishop, kislar-aga of heaven, locked and spied on this seraglio of souls reserved for God. The nun was the odalisque, the priest was the eunuch. The devout were chosen in dreams and possessed Christ. At night, the beautiful naked young man came down from the cross and became the ecstasy of the cell. High walls guarded from all living distraction the mystical sultana who had the crucified one for sultan. A glance outside was an infidelity. The in-pace replaced the leather bag. What was thrown into the sea in the East was thrown to the land in the West. On both sides, women were wringing their arms; the wave to some, the grave to others; here the drowned, there the buried. Monstrous parallelism. Today the supporters of the past, unable to deny these things, have decided to smile at them. A convenient and strange way has become fashionable to suppress the revelations of history, to invalidate the commentaries of philosophy, and to elude all the embarrassing facts and all the dark questions. Matter for declamations, say the clever. Declamations, repeat the simpletons. Jean-Jacques, declaimer; Diderot, declaimer; Voltaire on Calas, Labarre and Sirven, declaimer. I don’t know who recently found that Tacitus was a declaimer, that Nero was a victim, and that one should definitely feel sorry for this poor Holofernes. The facts, however, are difficult to disconcert, and persist. The author of this book saw, with his own eyes, eight leagues from Brussels, it is there from the Middle Ages that everyone has at hand, at the abbey of Villers, the hole of the dungeons in the middle of the meadow which was the courtyard of the cloister and, on the edge of the Dyle, four stone dungeons, half underground, half underwater. These were in-pace. Each of these dungeons has a remnant of an iron door, a latrine, and a grilled skylight which, outside, is two feet above the river, and, inside, six feet above the ground . Four feet of river flow externally along the wall. The ground is always wet. The inhabitant of the in-pace had this wet earth for a bed. In one of the dungeons, there is a section of iron collar sealed to the wall; in another we see a kind of square box made of four granite slats, too short for one to lie down in, too low for one to stand up in. A being was put inside with a stone lid on top. That is it. We see it. We touch it. These in-pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these iron collars, this high skylight at the level of which the river flows, this stone box closed with a granite lid like a tomb, with this difference that here the dead was a living person, this ground which is mud, this latrine hole, these walls which ooze, what declaimers! Chapter 62. On what condition can we respect the past? Monasticism, as it existed in Spain and as it exists in Tibet, is for civilization a sort of consumption. It stops life dead. It depopulates, quite simply. Cloistering, castration. It has been a scourge in Europe. Add to that the violence so often done to conscience, forced vocations, feudalism relying on the cloister, primogeniture pouring into monasticism the overflow of the family, the ferocities we have just spoken of, the in-pace, the closed mouths, the walled-up minds, so many unfortunate minds put in the dungeon of eternal vows, the taking of the habit, burial of souls still alive. Add individual tortures to national degradations, and, whoever you are, you will feel yourself shudder before the frock and the veil, these two shrouds of human invention. Yet, on certain points and in certain places, despite philosophy, despite progress, the cloistered spirit persists in the middle of the nineteenth century, and a bizarre ascetic resurgence is astonishing the civilized world at this moment. The stubbornness of aging institutions to perpetuate themselves resembles the obstinacy of rancid perfume that claims our hair, the pretension of spoiled fish that wants to be eaten, the persecution of children’s clothing that wants to clothe men, and the tenderness of corpses that return to embrace the living.
Ungrateful! says the garment, I protected you in bad weather, why do you no longer want me? I come from the open sea, says the fish. I was the rose, says the perfume. I loved you, says the corpse. I civilized you, says the convent. To that there is only one answer: Once upon a time. To dream of the indefinite prolongation of deceased things and the government of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in poor condition, to regild reliquaries, to replaster cloisters, to rebless reliquaries, to refurnish superstitions, to refuel fanaticisms, to re-sleeve holy water sprinklers and sabers, to reconstitute monasticism and militarism, to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication of parasites, to impose the past on the present, this seems strange. There are, however, theoreticians for these theories. These theoreticians, people of wit, moreover, have a very simple procedure: they apply to the past a coating which they call social order, divine right, morality, family, respect for ancestors, ancient authority, holy tradition, legitimacy, religion; and they go about crying: “Look! Take this, honest people.” This logic was known to the ancients. The haruspices practiced it. They rubbed a black heifer with chalk and said: She is white. Bos cretatus. As for us, we respect the past here and there and everywhere we spare it, provided it consents to be dead. If it wants to be alive, we attack it and try to kill it. Superstitions, bigotries, cagotisms, prejudices, these larvae, larvae as they are, are tenacious of life, they have teeth and nails in their smoke, and we must embrace them body to body, and wage war on them, and wage war on them without respite, for it is one of the fatalities of humanity to be condemned to the eternal combat of ghosts. The shadow is difficult to take by the throat and to overcome. A convent in France, in the middle of the nineteenth century, is a college of owls facing the day. A cloister, caught red-handed in asceticism in the middle of the city of 89, 1830, and 1848, Rome blossoming in Paris, is an anachronism. In ordinary times, to dissolve an anachronism and make it vanish, one only has to make it spell out the vintage. But these are not ordinary times. Let us fight. Let us fight, but let us distinguish. The characteristic of truth is that it is never excessive. What need does it have to exaggerate? There is what must be destroyed, and there is what must simply be illuminated and examined. The benevolent and serious examination, what force! Let us not bring the flame where light suffices. Therefore, the nineteenth century being given, we are opposed, in general thesis, and among all peoples, in Asia as in Europe, in India as in Turkey, to ascetic cloisters. Who says convent says swamp. Their putrescibility is evident, their stagnation is unhealthy, their fermentation fevers the peoples and withers them; their multiplication becomes a plague of Egypt. We cannot think without fear of these countries where fakirs, bonzes, santons, caloyers, marabouts, talapoins and dervishes swarm to the point of verminous swarming. That said, the religious question remains. This question has certain mysterious, almost formidable aspects; let us be allowed to look at it fixedly. Chapter 63. The convent from the point of view of principles. Men gather and live in common. By what right? By the right of association. They lock themselves in their homes. By what right? By the right that every man has to open or close his door. They do not go out. By what right? By the right to come and go, which implies the right to remain at home. There, at home, what do they do? They speak quietly; they lower their eyes; they work. They renounce the world, cities, sensualities, pleasures, vanities, pride, interests. They are dressed in coarse wool or coarse linen. Not one of them owns anything. By entering there, the one who was rich becomes poor. What he has, he gives to all. The one who was what is called noble, gentleman, and lord, is the equal of the one who was a peasant. The cell is identical for all. All undergo the same tonsure, wear the same frock, eat the same black bread, sleep on the same straw, die on the same ashes. The same sack on their backs, the same rope around their waists. If the decision is to go barefoot, all go barefoot. There may be a prince there, this prince is the same shadow as the others. No more titles. Even family names have disappeared. They only bear first names. All are bowed under the equality of baptismal names. They have dissolved the carnal family and constituted in their community the spiritual family. They no longer have any other relatives than all men. They help the poor, they care for the sick. They elect those whom they obey. They say to each other: my brother. You stop me, and you exclaim: “But this is the ideal convent! It is enough that it is the possible convent for me to have to take it into account.” Hence it is that, in the preceding book, I spoke of a convent with a respectful accent. The Middle Ages aside, Asia aside, the historical and political question reserved, from the purely philosophical point of view, outside the necessities of militant politics, on the condition that the monastery be absolutely voluntary and contain only consents, I will always consider the cloistered community with a certain attentive gravity and, in some respects, deferential. Where there is community, there is the commune; where there is the commune, there is law. The monastery is the product of the formula: Equality, Fraternity. Oh! how great Liberty is! and what a splendid transfiguration ! Liberty is enough to transform the monastery into a republic. Let us continue. But these men, or these women, who are behind these four walls, they dress in sackcloth, they are equal, they call themselves brothers; that is good; but they do something else too? Yes.
What? They look at the shadow, they kneel down, and they join hands. What does this mean? Chapter V Prayer They pray. Who? God. Pray to God, what does this word mean? Is there an infinity outside of us? Is this infinity one, immanent, permanent; necessarily substantial, since it is infinite, and if matter were lacking, it would be limited there; necessarily intelligent, since it is infinite, and if intelligence were lacking, it would be finite there? Does this infinity awaken in us the idea of essence, while we can only attribute to ourselves the idea of existence? In other words, is it not the absolute of which we are the relative? At the same time as there is an infinity outside of us, is there not an infinity within us? Do not these two infinities (what a frightening plural!) superimpose one upon the other? Is not the second infinite, so to speak, underlying the first? Is it not its mirror, its reflection, its echo, an abyss concentric with another abyss? Is this second infinite also intelligent? Does it think? Does it love? Does it want? If the two infinities are intelligent, each of them has a willing principle, and there is a self in the infinity above as there is a self in the infinity below . The self below is the soul; the self above is God. To put the infinity below in contact with the infinity above through thought is called praying. Let us not take anything away from the human spirit; to suppress is bad. We must reform and transform. Certain faculties of man are directed toward the Unknown: thought, reverie, prayer. The Unknown is an ocean. What is consciousness? It is the compass of the Unknown. Thought, reverie, prayer, these are great mysterious radiances. Let us respect them. Where do these majestic irradiations of the soul go? Into the shadow; that is to say, into the light. The greatness of democracy is to deny nothing and to renounce nothing of humanity. Near the right of Man, at least alongside it, there is the right of the Soul. To crush fanaticism and venerate the infinite, such is the law. Let us not limit ourselves to prostrating ourselves under the tree of Creation, and to contemplating its immense branches full of stars. We have a duty: to work for the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd, to admit, in fact of the inexplicable, only the necessary, to purify belief, to remove superstitions from religion; to defoliate God. Chapter 64. Absolute goodness of prayer. As for the mode of praying, all are good, provided they are sincere. Turn your book upside down, and be in infinity. There is, we know, a philosophy that denies infinity. There is also a philosophy, classified pathologically, that denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness. To erect a sense that we lack into a source of truth is a fine blind aplomb. The curious thing is the haughty, superior, and compassionate airs that this groping philosophy takes on toward the philosophy that sees God . One thinks one hears a mole exclaim: They make me feel sorry for them with their sun! There are, we know, illustrious and powerful atheists. These, at bottom, brought back to the truth by their very power, are not quite sure of being atheists; with them it is hardly more than a matter of definition, and, in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God. We salute the philosophers in them, while inexorably qualifying their philosophy. Let us continue. What is also admirable is the ease with which words are indulged. A metaphysical school from the north, somewhat steeped in fog, believed it had made a revolution in human understanding by replacing the word Force with the word Will. To say: the plant wants; instead of: the plant grows; this would be fruitful, in fact, if we added: the universe wants. Why? It is that this would come out of it: the plant wants, therefore it has a self; the universe wants, therefore he has a God. As for us, who, however, contrary to this school, reject nothing a priori, a will in the plant, accepted by this school, seems to us more difficult to admit than a will in the universe, denied by it. Denying the will of the infinite, that is to say God, is only possible on the condition of denying infinity. We have demonstrated this. The negation of infinity leads straight to nihilism. Everything becomes a conception of the mind. With nihilism, no discussion is possible. For logical nihilism doubts that its interlocutor exists, and is not quite sure of existing itself. From its point of view, it is possible that it is itself for itself only a conception of its mind. Only, he does not realize that everything he has denied, he admits en bloc, just by pronouncing this word: Spirit. In short, no path is opened for thought by a philosophy that makes everything end in the monosyllable No. To: No, there is only one answer: Yes. Nihilism is without scope. There is no nothingness. Zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives by affirmation even more than by bread. Seeing and showing, even that is not enough. Philosophy must be an energy; its effort and effect must be to improve man. Socrates must enter Adam and produce Marcus Aurelius; in other words, bring out of the man of happiness the man of wisdom. Change Eden into a Lyceum. Science must be a cordial. To enjoy, what a sad goal and what a puny ambition! The brute enjoys. To think, that is the true triumph of the soul. To extend thought to the thirst of men, to give them all the elixir of the notion of God, to make conscience and science fraternize in them, to make them just by this mysterious confrontation, such is the function of real philosophy. Morality is a flowering of truths. To contemplate leads to action. The absolute must be practical. The ideal must be breathable, drinkable and edible to the human spirit. It is the ideal that has the right to say: Take, this is my flesh, this is my blood. Wisdom is a sacred communion. It is on this condition that it ceases to be a sterile love of science to become the one and sovereign mode of human rallying, and that from philosophy it is promoted to religion. Philosophy must not be a corbel built on the mystery to look at it at its ease, with no other result than to be convenient to curiosity. For us, by postponing the development of our thought to another occasion, we limit ourselves to saying that we understand neither man as a starting point, nor progress as a goal, without these two forces which are the two driving forces: believing and loving. Progress is the goal, the ideal is the type. What is the ideal? It is God. Ideal, absolute, perfection, infinity; identical words. Chapter 65. Precautions to be taken in blaming. History and philosophy have eternal duties which are at the same time simple duties; to combat Caiaphas the bishop, Draco the judge, Trimalcion the legislator, Tiberius the emperor, this is clear, direct and limpid, and offers no obscurity. But the right to live apart, even with its drawbacks and abuses, must be noted and protected. Cenobitism is a human problem. When we speak of convents, these places of error, but of innocence, of straying, but of good will, of ignorance, but of devotion, of torture, but of martyrdom, we must almost always say yes and no. A convent is a contradiction. For goal, salvation; for means, sacrifice. The convent is the supreme egoism resulting in the supreme abnegation. To abdicate in order to reign seems to be the motto of monasticism. In the cloister, one suffers in order to enjoy. One draws a bill of exchange on the Death. In earthly night, we discount the heavenly light. In the cloister, hell is accepted as an inheritance in advance of paradise. The taking of the veil or the frock is a suicide paid for with eternity. It does not seem to us that mockery is appropriate in such a subject. Everything is serious, good as well as evil. The just man frowns, but never smiles with an evil smile. We understand anger, not malice. Chapter 66. Faith, Law. A few more words. We blame the Church when it is saturated with intrigue, we despise the spiritual harsh to the temporal; but we honor everywhere the thoughtful man . We salute the one who kneels. One faith; that is what is necessary for man. Woe to him who believes nothing! One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is visible labor and invisible labor. To contemplate is to plow; to think is to act. Crossed arms work, joined hands make. Gazing at the sky is a work. Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy. For us, cenobites are not idlers, and solitary people are not lazy. Thinking of the Shadow is a serious matter. Without denying anything we have just said, we believe that a perpetual memory of the tomb is appropriate for the living. On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree. We must die. The Abbot of La Trappe replies to Horace. To mix a certain presence of the sepulchre into one’s life is the law of the wise man; and it is the law of the ascetic. In this respect, the ascetic and the wise man converge. There is material growth; we want it. There is also moral grandeur; we hold to it. The thoughtless and quick-witted say: “What good are these motionless figures on the side of mystery? What are they for? What are they doing? Alas! In the presence of the darkness that surrounds us and awaits us, not knowing what the immense dispersion will do to us, we reply: There is perhaps no work more sublime than that which these souls perform.” And we add: There is perhaps no work more useful. Those who always pray are needed for those who never pray. For us, the whole question is in the quantity of thought that is mixed with prayer. Leibniz praying, that is great; Voltaire adoring, that is beautiful. Deo erexit Voltaire. We are for religion against religions. We are among those who believe in the misery of orations and the sublimity of prayer. Moreover, in this moment that we are passing through, a minute that fortunately will not leave the nineteenth century its mark, at this hour when so many men have low foreheads and low souls, among so many living beings whose morality is to enjoy, and occupied with the short and deformed things of matter, anyone who goes into exile seems venerable to us. The monastery is a renunciation. The sacrifice that is false is still sacrifice. To take a severe error as duty has its grandeur. Taken in itself, and ideally, and to circle around the truth until all aspects are impartially exhausted, the monastery, the women’s convent above all, because in our society it is the woman who suffers the most, and in this exile from the cloister there is protest, the women’s convent has incontestably a certain majesty. This cloistered existence so austere and so dreary, of which we have just indicated some of the features, is not life, because it is not freedom; it is not the grave, for it is not fullness; it is the strange place from which one sees, as from the crest of a high mountain, on one side the abyss where we are, on the other the abyss where we will be; it is a narrow and misty border separating two worlds, illuminated and obscured by both at the same time, where the weakened ray of life mingles with the vague ray of death; it is the half-light of the tomb. As for us, who do not believe what these women believe, but who live like them by faith, we have never been able to consider without a kind of religious and tender terror, without a kind of pity full of envy, these devoted, trembling and trusting creatures, these humble and august souls who dare to live on the very edge of mystery, waiting, between the world which is closed and the sky which is not open, turned towards the clarity which is not seen, having only the happiness of thinking that they know where it is, aspiring to the abyss and the unknown, their eyes fixed on the motionless darkness, kneeling, bewildered, stupefied, shivering, half lifted at certain hours by the deep breaths of eternity. Book Eight–Cemeteries Take What They Are Given Chapter 67. Where the manner of entering the convent is treated. It was in this house that Jean Valjean had, as Fauchelevent had said, fallen from heaven. He had crossed the garden wall which formed the angle of the Rue Polonceau. That hymn of the angels which he had heard in the middle of the night was the nuns singing matins; that room which he had glimpsed in the darkness was the chapel; that phantom which he had seen stretched out on the ground was the sister making the repairs; that bell whose noise had so strangely surprised him was the gardener’s bell attached to Father Fauchelevent’s knee. Once Cosette was in bed, Jean Valjean and Fauchelevent had, as we have seen, supped on a glass of wine and a piece of cheese in front of a flamboyant gentleman; Then, the only bed in the hut being occupied by Cosette, they each threw themselves on a bale of straw. Before closing their eyes, Jean Valjean had said: “From now on, I must stay here.” These words had been running through Fauchelevent’s head all night . To tell the truth, neither of them had slept. Jean Valjean, feeling himself discovered and Javert on his trail, understood that he and Cosette were lost if they returned to Paris. Since the fresh gale that had just blown upon him had stranded him in this cloister, Jean Valjean had but one thought, to remain there. Now, for an unfortunate man in his position, this convent was at once the most dangerous and the safest place; the most dangerous, for, no man being able to enter it, if he were discovered there, it would be a flagrant offense, and Jean Valjean took but one step from the convent to the prison; the safest, because if one managed to get accepted and stay there, who would come looking for you there? Living in an impossible place was salvation.
For his part, Fauchelevent racked his brains. He began by declaring to himself that he understood nothing. How did Mr. Madeleine end up there , with the walls there? Cloister walls cannot be climbed. How could he be there with a child? One does not climb a sheer wall with a child in one’s arms. What was this child? Where did they both come from? Since Fauchelevent had been in the convent, he had not heard anything about Montreuil-sur-Mer, and he knew nothing of what had happened. Father Madeleine had that air that discourages questions; and besides, Fauchelevent said to himself: One does not question a saint. Mr. Madeleine had kept all his prestige for himself . Only, from a few words that escaped Jean Valjean, the gardener believed he could conclude that Mr. Madeleine had probably gone bankrupt due to the hard times, and that he was being pursued by his creditors; or that he was compromised in a political affair and was in hiding; which did not displease Fauchelevent, who, like many of our northern peasants, had an old Bonapartist background. In hiding, Mr. Madeleine had taken the convent for asylum, and he was It was simple that he wanted to stay there. But the inexplicable thing, which Fauchelevent always returned to and racked his brains over, was that Mr. Madeleine was there, and that he was there with this little girl. Fauchelevent saw them, touched them, spoke to them, and didn’t believe it. The incomprehensible thing had just entered Fauchelevent’s hut. Fauchelevent was groping in conjectures, and could no longer see anything clearly except this: Mr. Madeleine saved my life. This single certainty was enough, and determined him. He said to himself: It’s my turn. He added to his conscience: Mr. Madeleine didn’t deliberate so much when it came to getting under the car to get me out. He decided that he would save Mr. Madeleine. Yet he asked himself various questions and various answers: –After what he has been to me, if he were a thief, would I save him? All the same. If he were a murderer, would I save him? All the same. Since he is a saint, would I save him? All the same. But to make him remain in the convent, what a problem! Faced with this almost chimerical attempt, Fauchelevent did not back down; this poor Picard peasant, with no other ladder than his devotion, his good will, and a little of that old country finesse put this time at the service of a generous intention, undertook to scale the impossibilities of the cloister and the harsh escarpments of the Rule of Saint Benedict. Father Fauchelevent was an old man who had been selfish all his life, and who, at the end of his days, lame, infirm, having no more interest in the world, found it sweet to be grateful, and, seeing a virtuous action to be performed, threw himself upon it like a man who, at the moment of death, would find under his hand a glass of good wine which he had never tasted and would drink it greedily. It may be added that the air he had been breathing for several years already in this convent had destroyed the personality in him, and had ended up making some good action necessary for him. He therefore made his resolution: to devote himself to Mr. Madeleine. We have just described him as a poor Picard peasant. The description is apt, but incomplete. At the point in this story where we are, a little physiology of Father Fauchelevent becomes useful. He was a peasant, but he had been a notary, which added chicanery to his finesse, and penetration to his naiveté. Having, for various reasons, failed in his business, from notary he had fallen to carter and laborer. But, despite the swearing and whippings, necessary for horses, it seems, there was still some of the notary in him. He had some natural wit; he said neither “j’ons” nor “j’avons”; he chatted, a rare thing in the village; and the other peasants said of him: “He speaks almost like a gentleman in a hat.” Fauchelevent was indeed of that species that the impertinent and light vocabulary of the last century described as: half-bourgeois, half-chum; and that the metaphors falling from the castle to the cottage labeled in the commoner’s pigeonhole : a bit rustic, a bit of a city dweller; pepper and salt. Fauchelevent, although much tried and much worn by fate, a sort of poor old soul showing the rope, was nevertheless a man of the first impulse, and very spontaneous; a precious quality that prevents one from ever being bad. His faults and vices, for he had had some, were superficial; in short, his physiognomy was one of those which succeed near the observer. This old face had none of those annoying wrinkles on the upper forehead which signify wickedness or stupidity. At daybreak, having thought a great deal, Father Fauchelevent opened his eyes and saw Monsieur Madeleine who, sitting on his bale of straw, was watching Cosette sleep. Fauchelevent sat up and said: “Now that you are here, how are you going to get in?” This word summed up the situation, and woke Jean Valjean from his reverie. The two good men held a council. “First,” said Fauchelevent, “you will begin by not putting on the feet out of this room. The little one nor you. One step into the garden, we’re burned. –That’s right. –Monsieur Madeleine, resumed Fauchelevent, you have arrived at a very good time, I mean very bad, there is one of these ladies very ill. That means that they will not look much in our direction. It seems that she is dying. They say the forty-hour prayers. The whole community is in the air. It keeps them busy. The one who is leaving is a saint. In fact, we are all saints here. The only difference between them and me is that they say: our cell, and I say: my bed. There will be the prayer for the dying, and then the prayer for the dead. For today we will be quiet here; but I cannot answer for tomorrow. “Yet,” observed Jean Valjean, “this hut is in the recess of the wall, it is hidden by a kind of ruin, there are trees, it is not seen from the convent. ” “And I add that the nuns never approach it. ” “Well?” said Jean Valjean. The question mark which accentuated this: “well,” meant: it seems to me that one can remain hidden there. It was to this question mark that Fauchelevent replied: “There are the little ones. ” “What little ones?” asked Jean Valjean. As Fauchelevent opened his mouth to explain the word he had just uttered, a bell rang once. “The nun is dead,” he said. “Here is the bell.” And he signaled to Jean Valjean to listen. The bell rang a second time. “It is the bell, Monsieur Madeleine. The bell will continue from minute to minute for twenty-four hours until the body leaves the church.” You see, it’s a game. At recreation time, all it takes is a ball to roll for them to come, despite the defenses, searching and scavenging everywhere around here. They’re devils, those cherubs. “Who?” asked Jean Valjean. “The little ones. You’d be discovered very quickly, come on. They’d cry out: Look! A man! But there’s no danger today. There won’t be any recreation. The day is going to be all prayers. You hear the bell. As I was telling you, one stroke every minute. It’s the death knell. ” “I understand, Father Fauchelevent. There are boarders.” And Jean Valjean thought to himself: “That would be Cosette’s education all ready made. ” Fauchelevent exclaimed: “Pardine! If there are little girls! And who would squeal around you! And who would run away! Here, to be a man is to have the plague.” You see they’re tying a bell to my leg like a wild beast. Jean Valjean was thinking more and more deeply. “This convent would save us,” he murmured. Then he raised his voice: “Yes, the difficult thing is to stay. ” “No,” said Fauchelevent, “it’s to get out. ” Jean Valjean felt the blood rush back to his heart. “Get out! ” “Yes, Monsieur Madeleine, to get back, you must get out.” And, after letting a peal of the bell pass, Fauchelevent continued: “You can’t be found here like this. Where do you come from? As far as I’m concerned, you fell from the sky, because I know you; but nuns require one to enter by the door.” Suddenly a rather complicated ringing of another bell was heard. “Ah!” said Fauchelevent, “they’re ringing for the vocal mothers. They’re going to the chapter. They always hold chapter when someone is dead.” She died at daybreak. It is usually at daybreak that people die. But could you not leave by the way you came in? Come now, I am not asking you a question, where did you come in? Jean Valjean turned pale. The very idea of going back down that formidable street made him shudder. Come out of a forest full of tigers, and, once outside, imagine a friendly advice that urges you to go there go back.
Jean Valjean imagined the whole police force still swarming in the neighborhood, officers on observation, vedettes everywhere, hideous fists outstretched towards his collar, Javert perhaps at the corner of the crossroads. “Impossible!” he said. “Father Fauchelevent, say I fell from up there. ” “But I believe it, I believe it,” Fauchelevent continued. “You don’t need to tell me. The good Lord will have taken you in his hand to look at you closely, and then let you go. Only he wanted to put you in a convent for men; he made a mistake. Come on, one more ring. This one is to warn the porter to go and warn the municipality so that they can go and warn the doctor of the dead so that he can come and see that there is a dead woman. All that is the ceremony of dying. They don’t like that visit very much, these good ladies. A doctor doesn’t believe in anything.” He lifts the veil. He even sometimes lifts something else. How quickly they warned the doctor this time! What is it? Your little one is still asleep. What is her name? “Cosette. ” “Is she your daughter? As if you were her grandfather? ” “Yes.”
“For her, getting out of here will be easy. I have my back door that opens onto the courtyard. I knock. The porter opens it. I have my basket on my back, the little one is inside. I go out. Father Fauchelevent comes out with his basket, it’s quite simple. You will tell the little one to be very quiet. She will be under the tarpaulin. I will leave her for as long as necessary at the house of an old friend of mine, a fruit seller, on Rue du Chemin-Vert, who is deaf and where there is a small bed. I’ll shout in the fruit seller’s ear that she’s a niece of mine, and to keep her for me until tomorrow. Then the little one will come home with you. For I’ll get you back in. It’ll have to be. But how will you get out? Jean Valjean nodded. “Let no one see me. Everything’s here, Father Fauchelevent. Find a way to get me out like Cosette in a basket and under a tarpaulin. ” Fauchelevent scratched the bottom of his ear with the middle finger of his left hand, a sign of serious embarrassment. A third ring created a diversion. “Here’s the doctor of the dead leaving,” said Fauchelevent. “He looked and said: she’s dead, that’s all right. When the doctor has stamped the passport to paradise, the undertakers send a coffin. If it’s a mother, the mothers bury her; if it’s a sister, the sisters bury her. After that, I nail her.” This is part of my gardening. A gardener is a bit like a gravedigger. It is placed in a low room of the church which communicates with the street and where no man can enter except the doctor of the dead. I do not count undertakers and myself as men . It is in this room that I nail the coffin. The undertakers come to take it, and whip the coachman! that is how one goes to heaven. One brings a box in which there is nothing, one takes it back with something in it. That is what a burial is. De profundis. A horizontal ray of sunlight touched the face of the sleeping Cosette who vaguely opened her mouth, and looked like an angel drinking the light. Jean Valjean had begun to look at her. He was no longer listening to Fauchelevent. Not being listened to is no reason to remain silent. The good old gardener continued his ranting peacefully: “They’re digging a grave at the Vaugirard cemetery. They say they’re going to abolish this Vaugirard cemetery. It’s an old cemetery that’s outside the regulations, that doesn’t have a uniform, and that’s going to retire. It’s a shame, because it’s convenient. I have a friend there, Father Mestienne, the gravedigger. The nuns here have a privilege, which is to be taken to this cemetery at nightfall. There’s a decree from the prefecture expressly for them. But how many events have happened since then.” Yesterday! Mother Crucifixion died, and Father Madeleine…. “Is buried,” said Jean Valjean, smiling sadly. Fauchelevent bounced the word. “Lady! If you were right here, it would be a real funeral. ” A fourth peal rang out. Fauchelevent quickly unhooked the knee-piece with the bell from the nail and buckled it back on his knee. “This time, it’s me. The Mother Prioress is asking for me. Well, I’ll prick myself on the tongue of my buckle. Monsieur Madeleine, don’t move, and wait for me. There’s something new. If you’re hungry, there’s wine, bread , and cheese here. ” And he left the hut, saying: “Let’s go! Let’s go!” Jean Valjean saw him hurry across the garden, as fast as his twisted leg would allow, all the while glancing sideways at his melon patches. Less than ten minutes later, Father Fauchelevent, whose bell was routing the nuns in his path, knocked gently at a door, and a soft voice answered: Forever. Forever, that is to say: Enter. This door was that of the parlor reserved for the gardener for the needs of the service. This parlor was adjacent to the chapter room. The prioress, seated on the only chair in the parlor, was waiting for Fauchelevent. Chapter 68. Fauchelevent in the presence of difficulty. To appear agitated and serious is peculiar, on critical occasions, to certain characters and certain professions, notably to priests and monks. At the moment when Fauchelevent entered, this double form of preoccupation was imprinted on the physiognomy of the prioress, who was that charming and learned Mlle de Blemeur, Mother Innocente, ordinarily cheerful. The gardener made a fearful bow and remained on the threshold of the cell. The prioress, who was telling her rosary, raised her eyes and said: “Ah! It’s you, Father Fauvent. ” This abbreviation had been adopted in the convent. Fauchelevent began his bow again. “Father Fauvent, I have sent for you. ” “Here I am, reverend mother. ” “I have to speak to you. ” “And I, for my part,” said Fauchelevent with a boldness he was inwardly afraid of, “have something to say to the very reverend mother. ” The prioress looked at him. “Ah! You have something to tell me. ” “A prayer. ” “Well, speak.” The good man Fauchelevent, ex-notary, belonged to the category of peasants who have aplomb. A certain clever ignorance is a strength; one does not mistrust it and it takes hold of you. For a little over two years that he had lived in the convent, Fauchelevent had succeeded in the community. Always solitary, and while attending to his gardening, he had little else to do but be curious. At a distance as he was from all these veiled women coming and going, he saw little before him but a bustle of shadows. By dint of attention and penetration, he had managed to put flesh back into all these ghosts, and these dead women lived for him. He was like a deaf man whose sight lengthens and like a blind man whose hearing sharpens. He had applied himself to unraveling the meaning of the various bells, and he had succeeded, so that this enigmatic and taciturn cloister had nothing hidden from him; this sphinx chattered all its secrets in his ear. Fauchelevent, knowing everything, hid everything. That was his art. The whole convent thought him stupid. Great merit in religion. The vocal mothers made a point of Fauchelevent. He was a curious mute. He inspired confidence. Moreover, he was regular, and only went out for the demonstrated needs of the orchard and the vegetable garden. This discretion of manner was taken into account. He had nevertheless made two men gossip: at the convent, the porter, and he knew the particularities of the parlor; and, at the cemetery, the gravedigger, and he knew the peculiarities of the burial; in this way, he had, with regard to these nuns, a double light, one on life, the other on death. But he didn’t abuse anything. The congregation cared about him. Old, lame, blind , probably a little deaf, what qualities! He would have been difficult to replace. The good man, with the assurance of someone who feels appreciated, began, in front of the reverend prioress, a rather diffuse and very profound country speech. He spoke at length of his age, his infirmities, the burden of years counting double for him now, the increasing demands of work, the size of the garden, the nights to be spent, like the last one, for example, when they had to put straw mats over the melon beds because of the moon, and he ended up with this: that he had a brother,–(the prioress made a movement)–a brother who was not young,–(second movement of the prioress, but a movement reassured)–that, if they would, this brother could come and stay with him and help him, that he was an excellent gardener, that the community would get good service from him, better than his own;–that, otherwise, if his brother were not admitted, like him, the eldest, he felt broken and inadequate for the task, he would be, with great regret, obliged to leave;–and that his brother had a little girl whom he would bring with him, who would rise in God in the house, and who perhaps, who knows? would make a nun one day. When he had finished speaking, the prioress interrupted the sliding of her rosary between his fingers, and said to him: “Could you, between now and this evening, procure a strong iron bar?” “Why? ” “To serve as a lever. ” “Yes, reverend mother,” replied Fauchelevent. The prioress, without adding another word, got up and entered the next room, which was the chapter room and where the vocal mothers were probably assembled. Fauchelevent remained alone. Chapter 69. Mother Innocent. About a quarter of an hour passed. The prioress returned and came back to sit on the chair. The two speakers seemed preoccupied. We wrote down as best we could the dialogue that began. “Father Fauvent?” “Reverend mother? ” “Do you know the chapel?” –I have a small cage there to hear Mass and the services. –And you entered the choir for your work? –Two or three times. –It is a question of lifting a stone. –Heavy? –The slab of the pavement which is next to the altar. –The stone which closes the vault? –Yes. –This is an occasion where it would be good to be two men. –Mother Ascension, who is as strong as a man, will help you. –A woman is never a man. –We have only one woman to help you. Each one does what he can. Because Dom Mabillon gives 417 Epistles of Saint Bernard and Merlonus Horstius gives only 367 , I do not despise Merlonus Horstius. –Nor myself. –The merit is to work according to one’s strength. A cloister is not a construction site. –And a woman is not a man. It is my brother who is strong! –And then you will have a lever. –It is the only kind of key that fits these kinds of doors. –There is a ring on the stone. –I will pass the lever through it. –And the stone is arranged to pivot. –That is good, reverend mother. I will open the vault. –And the four singing mothers will assist you. –And when the vault is opened? –It will have to be closed. –Will that be all? –No.
–Give me your orders, most reverend mother. –Fauvent, we have confidence in you. –I am here to do everything. –And to keep everything quiet. –Yes, reverend mother. –When the vault is opened…. –I will close it. –But first…. –What, reverend mother? “We’ll have to get something down there.” There was a silence. The prioress, after a curl of her lower lip that resembled hesitation, broke it. “Father Fauvent? ” “Reverend Mother? ” “You know that a mother died this morning. ” “No. ” “Then you didn’t hear the bell? ” “Nothing can be heard at the bottom of the garden. ” “Really? ” “I can barely make out my ringing. ” “She died at daybreak. ” “And then, this morning, the wind wasn’t blowing my way. ” “It’s Mother Crucifixion. A blessed one. ” The prioress fell silent, moved her lips for a moment, as if in mental prayer, and continued: “Three years ago, just for having seen Mother Crucifixion pray, a Jansenist, Madame de Béthune, became Orthodox. ” “Ah yes, I can hear the bell now, Reverend Mother.” –The mothers carried her into the chamber of the dead which opens into the church. –I know. –No man but you can and must enter that chamber. Take good care of it. It would be a fine sight if a man entered the chamber of the dead! –More often! –Huh?
–More often! –What do you say? –I say more often.
–More often than what? –Reverend Mother, I don’t say more often than what, I say more often.
–I don’t understand you. Why do you say more often? –To say like you, Reverend Mother. –But I didn’t say more often. –You didn’t say it, but I said it to say like you. At that moment nine o’clock struck. –At nine o’clock in the morning and at all hours praised and adored be the Blessed Sacrament of the altar, said the prioress. –Amen, said Fauchelevent. The hour struck appropriately. She cut Plus Often short. It is likely that without her the Prioress and Fauchelevent would never have extricated themselves from this tangle. Fauchelevent wiped his brow. The Prioress made another small interior murmur, probably sacred, then raised her voice. “During her lifetime, Mother Crucifixion made conversions; after her death, she will perform miracles. ” “She will!” replied Fauchelevent, falling into step, and making an effort not to flinch from now on. “Father Fauvent, the community has been blessed in Mother Crucifixion. Doubtless it is not given to everyone to die like Cardinal de Bérulle while saying Holy Mass, and to exhale their soul to God while pronouncing these words: Hanc igitur oblationem.” But, without attaining such happiness, Mother Crucifixion had a very precious death. She was conscious until the last moment. She spoke to us, then she spoke to the angels. She gave us her last commandments. If you had a little more faith, and if you had been able to be in her cell, she would have healed your leg by touching it. She smiled. You could feel that she was resurrected in God. There was something of paradise in that death. Fauchelevent thought it was a prayer that was ending. “Amen,” he said. “Father Fauvent, we must do what the dead want.” The prioress unwound a few beads from her rosary. Fauchelevent was silent. She continued. “I have consulted on this question several clergymen working in Our Lord who are busy exercising the clerical life and who bear admirable fruit. ” “Reverend Mother, you can hear the bells much better from here than in the garden. ” “Besides, she is more than dead, she is a saint. ” “Like you, Reverend Mother.” –She had been lying in her coffin for twenty years, by express permission of our Holy Father Pius VII. –The one who crowned the Emp…. Buonaparte. For a clever man like Fauchelevent, the memory was unfortunate. Fortunately the prioress, lost in thought, did not hear it not. She continued: –Father Fauvent? –Reverend Mother? –Saint Diodorus, Archbishop of Cappadocia, wanted this single word to be written on his tomb: Acarus, which means earthworm; this was done. Is it true? –Yes, Reverend Mother. –Blessed Mezzocanus, Abbot of Aquila, wanted to be buried under the gallows; this was done. –It is true. –Saint Terence, Bishop of Port on the mouth of the Tiber into the sea, asked that the sign that was placed on the pit of parricides be engraved on his stone , in the hope that passers-by would spit on his tomb. This was done. One must obey the dead. –So be it. –The body of Bernard Guidonis, born in France near Roche-Abeille, was, as he had ordered and despite the King of Castile, carried to the Dominican church of Limoges, although Bernard Guidonis was Bishop of Tuy in Spain. Can one say otherwise? –Not so, Reverend Mother. –The fact is attested by Plantavit de la Fosse. A few more beads of the rosary were silently counted. The prioress continued: –Father Fauvent, Mother Crucifixion will be buried in the coffin where she has lain for twenty years. –That is correct. –It is a continuation of sleep. –So I will have to nail her in that coffin? –Yes. –And we will leave out the bier of the pumps? –Precisely. –I am at the orders of the very reverend community. –The four mother singers will help you. –To nail the coffin? I don’t need them. –No. To lower it. –Where? –In the vault. –What vault? –Under the altar. Fauchelevent gave a start. –The vault under the altar! –Under the altar. –But….
–You will have an iron bar. –Yes, but…. –You will lift the stone with the bar by means of the ring. –But…. –We must obey the dead. To be buried in the vault under the altar of the chapel, not to go onto profane ground, to remain dead where she prayed alive; that was Mother Crucifixion’s supreme wish. She asked it of us, that is to say, commanded it. –But it is forbidden. –Forbidden by men, ordained by God. –If this were to become known? –We have confidence in you. –Oh, I am a stone in your wall. –The chapter has assembled. The Vocal Mothers, whom I have just consulted again and who are deliberating, have decided that Mother Crucifixion would be, according to her wish, buried in her coffin under our altar. Judge, Father Fauvent, if miracles were going to be performed here! What glory in God for the community! Miracles come from tombs. –But, Reverend Mother, if the agent of the Health Commission…. –Saint Benedict II, in matters of burial, resisted Constantine Pogonatus. –Yet the police commissioner…. –Chonodemaire, one of the seven German kings who entered Gaul under the empire of Constance, expressly recognized the right of religious to be buried in religion, that is to say under the altar. –But the inspector of the prefecture…. –The world is nothing before the cross. Martin, eleventh general of the Carthusians, gave this motto to his order: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis. “Amen,” said Fauchelevent, imperturbable in this way of getting out of trouble whenever he heard Latin. “Any audience is enough for someone who has been silent for too long. The day the rhetorician Gymnastoras came out of prison, having in his body many dilemmas and syllogisms repressed, he stopped in front of the first tree he came across, harangued it, and made very great efforts to convince it. The prioress, usually subject to the barrier of silence, and having overflow in her reservoir, stood up and cried out with a The loquacity of a sluice gate: –I have on my right Benoît and on my left Bernard. What is Bernard? He is the first abbot of Clairvaux. Fontaines in Burgundy is a blessed country for having seen his birth. His father was called Técelin and his mother Alèthe. He started in Cîteaux and ended up in Clairvaux; he was ordained abbot by the bishop of Châlon-sur-Saône, Guillaume de Champeaux; he had seven hundred novices and founded one hundred and sixty monasteries; he overthrew Abeilard at the Council of Sens, in 1140, and Pierre de Bruys and Henry his disciple, and another kind of deviant people who were called the Apostolics; he confounded Arnaud de Bresce, struck down the monk Raoul, the killer of Jews, dominated the Council of Reims in 1148, condemned Gilbert de la Porée, Bishop of Poitiers, condemned Eon de l’Étoile, settled the disputes of princes, enlightened King Louis the Younger, advised Pope Eugene III, regulated the Temple, preached the crusade, performed two hundred and fifty miracles in his life, and up to thirty-nine in one day. What is Benedict? He is the Patriarch of Monte Cassino; he is the second founder of claustral sanctity, he is the Basil of the West. His order has produced forty popes, two hundred cardinals, fifty patriarchs, sixteen hundred archbishops, four thousand six hundred bishops, four emperors, twelve empresses, forty-six kings, forty-one queens, three thousand six hundred canonized saints, and has existed for fourteen hundred years. On one side, Saint Bernard; on the other, the sanitation officer! On one side, Saint Benedict; on the other, the highway inspector! The state, the highways, the funeral homes, the regulations, the administration, do we know that? No passerby would be outraged to see how we are treated. We do not even have the right to give our dust to Jesus Christ! Your sanitation is a revolutionary invention. God subordinate to the police commissioner; such is the century. Silence, Fauvent! Fauchelevent, under this shower, was not very comfortable. The prioress continued. –The monastery’s right to burial is not in doubt for anyone. Only fanatics and wanderers deny it. We live in times of terrible confusion. We do not know what we need to know, and we know what we need to ignore. We are filthy and impious. There are people in this era who do not distinguish between the great Saint Bernard and the Bernard known as the Bernard of the Poor Catholics, a certain good ecclesiastic who lived in the thirteenth century. Others blaspheme to the point of comparing the scaffold of Louis XVI with the cross of Jesus Christ. Louis XVI was only a king. Let us therefore beware of God! There is no longer either just or unjust. We know the name of Voltaire but we do not know the name of César de Bus. Yet César de Bus is blessed and Voltaire is unhappy. The last archbishop, Cardinal de Périgord, did n’t even know that Charles de Gondren succeeded Bérulle, and François Bourgoin succeeded Gondren, and Jean-François Senault succeeded Bourgoin, and the father of Sainte-Marthe succeeded Jean-François Senault. We know the name of Father Coton, not because he was one of the three who pushed for the foundation of the Oratory, but because he was the subject of oaths for the Huguenot king Henry IV. What makes Saint Francis de Sales lovable to people of the world is that he cheated at games. And then religion is attacked. Why? Because there were bad priests, because Sagittarius, Bishop of Gap, was the brother of Salone, Bishop of Embrun, and both followed Mommol. What does that matter? Does it prevent Martin of Tours from being a saint and from having given half his cloak to a poor man? Saints are persecuted. Eyes are closed to truth. Darkness is the habit. The most ferocious beasts are blind beasts. No one thinks about hell for real. Oh! the wicked people! By the King means today by the Revolution. We no longer know what that we owe, neither to the living nor to the dead. It is forbidden to die a holy death. The tomb is a civil matter. This is horrifying. Saint Leo II wrote two express letters, one to Pierre Notaire, the other to the king of the Visigoths, to combat and reject, in matters concerning the dead, the authority of the exarch and the supremacy of the emperor. Gautier, bishop of Châlons, stood up to Otho, Duke of Burgundy in this matter. The ancient magistracy agreed. Formerly we had a voice even in the affairs of the century. The abbot of Cîteaux, general of the order, was a born councilor in the parliament of Burgundy. We do with our dead what we want. Is not the body of Saint Benedict himself in France in the abbey of Fleury, called Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, although he died in Italy at Monte Cassino, on Saturday the 21st of March in the year 543? All this is incontestable. I abhor psalters, I hate priors, I execrate heretics, but I would hate even more anyone who would maintain the contrary. One has only to read Arnoul Wion, Gabriel Bucelin, Trithème, Maurolicus and Dom Luc d’Achery. The prioress breathed, then turned to Fauchelevent: “Father Fauvent, is it agreed? ” “It is agreed, reverend mother. ” “Can we count on you? ” “I will obey.” “That is good. ” “I am entirely devoted to the convent.” “It is understood.” You will close the coffin. The sisters will carry it into the chapel. The office for the dead will be said. Then we will return to the cloister. Between eleven o’clock and midnight, you will come with your iron bar . Everything will take place in the greatest secrecy. There will be only the four mother singers in the chapel, Mother Ascension, and you. “And the sister at the post? ” “She won’t turn around. ” “But she will hear. ” “She won’t listen. Besides, what the cloister knows, the world doesn’t know.” There was another pause. The prioress continued: “You will take off your bell. It is useless for the sister at the post to notice that you are there. ” “Reverend Mother? ” “What, Father Fauvent? ” “Has the doctor of the dead made his visit? ” “He will make it today at four o’clock. The bell that summons the doctor of the dead has rung.” But you don’t hear any bells? “I only pay attention to my own. ” “That’s good, Father Fauvent. ” “Reverend Mother, you’ll need a lever at least six feet long. ” “Where will you get it? ” “Where there’s no shortage of gates, no shortage of iron bars. I have my pile of scrap iron at the bottom of the garden. ” “About three-quarters of an hour before midnight; don’t forget. ” “Reverend Mother? ” “What? ” “If you ever have other works like that, it’s my brother who ‘s strong. A Turk! ” “You’ll do it as quickly as possible. ” “I’m not going boldly fast. I’m infirm; that’s why I need an assistant. I limp. ” “To limp is not a fault, and can be a blessing.” Emperor Henry II, who fought the antipope Gregory and reinstated Benedict VIII, has two nicknames: the Saint and the Lame. “That’s all right, two especially,” murmured Fauchelevent, who, in reality, was a little hard of hearing. “Father Fauvent, I’m thinking, let’s take a whole hour. It’s not too much. Be near the high altar with your iron bar at eleven o’clock. The service begins at midnight. Everything must be finished a good quarter of an hour beforehand. ” “I will do everything to prove my zeal to the community. That’s it . I will nail the coffin. At eleven o’clock sharp I will be in the chapel.
The mother singers will be there, Mother Ascension will be there. Two men would be better. Anyway, no matter! I will have my lever. We will open the vault, we will lower the coffin, and we will close the vault. After that, there will be no trace of anything. The government will not be concerned .” will not doubt. Reverend Mother, is everything arranged like this? “No.”
“What is there still? ” “Then there remains the empty coffin.” This caused a pause. Fauchelevent was thinking. The prioress was thinking. “Father Fauvent, what will be done with the coffin? ” “It will be carried to the ground. ” “Empty? ” Another silence. Fauchelevent made with his left hand that sort of gesture which dismisses a disturbing question. “Reverend Mother, it is I who nail the coffin in the lower chamber of the church, and no one can enter there but myself, and I will cover the coffin with the funeral pall. ” “Yes, but the bearers, when they put it in the hearse and lower it into the grave, will feel that there is nothing in it. ” “Ah! dear…” cried Fauchelevent. The prioress began to make the sign of the cross and looked fixedly at the gardener. Able remained in his throat. He hastened to improvise an expedient to make him forget the oath. “Reverend Mother, I will put some earth in the coffin. It will have the effect of someone. ” “You are right. Earth is the same as man. So you will arrange the empty coffin? ” “I will take care of it.” The prioress’s face, until then troubled and obscure, calmed down. She made him the sign of the superior dismissing the inferior. Fauchelevent went to the door. As he was about to leave, the prioress gently raised her voice: “Father Fauvent, I am pleased with you; tomorrow, after the burial, bring your brother to me, and tell him to bring me his daughter. ” Chapter 70. In which Jean Valjean looks exactly as if he had read Austin Castillejo. The strides of a lame man are like the glances of a one-eyed man; they do not quickly reach their goal. Besides, Fauchelevent was perplexed. It took him nearly a quarter of an hour to return to the garden shed. Cosette was awake. Jean Valjean had seated her near the fire. At the moment Fauchelevent entered, Jean Valjean pointed to the gardener’s basket hanging on the wall and said to her: “Listen to me, my little Cosette. We must leave this house, but we will return and we will be very comfortable there. The good man here will carry you on his back there. You will wait for me at a lady’s house. I will go and find you. Above all, if you do not want the Thénardier to take you back, obey and say nothing!” Cosette nodded gravely. At the sound of Fauchelevent pushing the door, Jean Valjean turned around. “Well?” “Everything is arranged, and nothing is,” said Fauchelevent. “I have permission to let you in; but before letting you in, you must be let out. That’s where the trouble with the carts lies. For the little one, it’s easy. ” “Will you carry her off? ” “And will she be silent? ” “I’ll answer for it. ” “But you, Father Madeleine?” And, after a silence in which there was some anxiety, Fauchelevent cried: “But go out by the way you came in! ” Jean Valjean, as the first time, merely replied: “Impossible.” Fauchelevent, speaking more to himself than to Jean Valjean, grumbled: “There is another thing that torments me. I said I would put some earth in it.” It’s that I think that the earth in there, instead of a body, it won’t be like it, it won’t fit, it will move, it will stir. Men will feel it. You understand, Father Madeleine, the government will notice it. Jean Valjean looked him straight in the eye, and thought he was delirious. Fauchelevent continued: “How on earth are you going to get out? It’s because all this must be done tomorrow! I’m bringing you tomorrow. The prioress is expecting you. ” Then he explained to Jean Valjean that it was a reward for a service that he, Fauchelevent, rendered to the community. That it was within his responsibilities to participate in the burials, that he nailed the coffins and assisted the gravedigger in the cemetery. That the dead nun In the morning she had asked to be buried in the coffin that served as her bed and buried in the vault under the altar of the chapel. That this was forbidden by police regulations, but that she was one of those dead women to whom nothing is refused. That the prioress and the vocal mothers intended to carry out the deceased’s wish. That so much the worse for the government. That Fauchelevent would nail the coffin in the cell, raise the stone in the chapel, and lower the dead woman into the vault. And that, to thank him, the prioress was admitting her brother into the house as gardener and her niece as a boarder. That her brother was Mr. Madeleine, and her niece was Cosette. That the prioress had told her to bring her brother the following evening, after the false burial in the cemetery. But that he could not bring Mr. Madeleine in from outside, if Mr. Madeleine were not outside. That this was the first embarrassment. And then that he had another embarrassment, the empty coffin.
“What is the empty coffin?” asked Jean Valjean. Fauchelevent replied: “The coffin of the administration. ” “What coffin? And what administration? ” “A nun dies. The municipal doctor comes and says: there is a dead nun. The government sends a coffin. The next day he sends a hearse and undertakers to take the coffin and carry it to the cemetery. The undertakers will come and lift the coffin; there will be nothing in it. “Put something in it.” ” A dead person? I have none. ” “No.”
” What then?” “A living person.” ” What living person? ” “Me,” said Jean Valjean. Fauchelevent, who had sat down, rose as if a firecracker had gone off under his chair. “You!” “Why not?” Jean Valjean gave one of those rare smiles that came to him like a glimmer in a winter sky. “You know, Fauchelevent, that you said: Mother Crucifixion is dead, and I added: And Father Madeleine is buried. That will be it. ” “Ah, well, you’re laughing. You’re not speaking seriously. ” “Very seriously. We must get out of here? ” “No doubt. ” “I told you to find me a basket and a tarpaulin too. ” “Well? ” “The basket will be made of fir, and the tarpaulin will be a black cloth. ” “First, a white cloth. They bury nuns in white. ” “The white cloth is fine.” “You’re not a man like the others, Father Madeleine.” To see such fancies, which are nothing other than the wild and reckless inventions of the penal colony, emerging from the peaceful things that surrounded him and mingling with what he called the little routine of the convent, was for Fauchelevent a stupor comparable to that of a passer-by who sees a gull fishing in the stream in the Rue Saint-Denis. Jean Valjean continued: “It is a question of getting out of here without being seen. That is one way. But first, tell me. How does that happen? Where is this coffin? ” “The empty one? ” “Yes.” “Downstairs, in what is called the hall of the dead. It is on two trestles and under the pall. ” “How long is the coffin?” “Six feet. ” “What is the hall of the dead?” –It’s a ground-floor room with a barred window overlooking the garden that you close from the outside with a shutter, and two doors; one leading to the convent, the other to the church. –Which church? –The church on the street, everyone’s church. –Do you have the keys to these two doors? –No. I have the key to the door that leads to the convent; the caretaker has the key to the door that leads to the church. –When does the caretaker open that door? –Only to let in the undertakers who come to get the coffin. Once the coffin is taken out, the door closes. “Who nails the coffin? ” “It’s me. ” “Who puts the sheet over it? ” “It’s me. ” “Are you alone? ” “No other man, except the police doctor, may enter the room for the dead. It’s even written on the wall. ” “Could you, tonight, when everyone in the convent is asleep, hide me in this room? ” “No. But I can hide you in a small, dark closet that opens into the room for the dead, where I keep my burial tools, and of which I have custody and the key. ” “At what time will the hearse come for the coffin tomorrow? ” “Around three o’clock in the evening. The burial takes place at the Vaugirard cemetery, a little before nightfall. It’s not very close. ” “I’ll stay hidden in your tool closet all night and all morning. And food? I’ll be hungry. ” “I’ll bring you something.” “You could come and nail me in the coffin at two o’clock.” Fauchelevent recoiled and cracked the bones in his fingers. “But that’s impossible! ” “Bah! Take a hammer and hammer nails into a board! ” What seemed unheard of to Fauchelevent was, we repeat, simple for Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean had crossed worse straits. Anyone who has been a prisoner knows the art of shrinking according to the diameter of escapes. The prisoner is subject to flight as the sick person is to the crisis that saves or destroys him. An escape is a cure. What will one not accept to be cured? To be nailed and carried away in a box like a parcel, to live a long time in a box, to find air where there is none, to save one’s breathing for hours on end, to know how to suffocate without dying—this was one of Jean Valjean’s dark talents . Besides, a coffin containing a living being, this convict’s expedient, is also an emperor’s expedient. If we are to believe the monk Austin Castillejo, this was the means that Charles V, wishing after his abdication to see Plombes one last time, used to bring her into the monastery of Saint-Just and to bring her out. Fauchelevent, having somewhat recovered, cried out: “But how will you breathe? ” “I will breathe. ” “In this box! I’m suffocating just thinking about it. ” “You do have a gimlet; you’ll make a few small holes around the mouth here and there, and you’ll loosely nail the top board. ” “Good! And if you happen to cough or sneeze? ” “He who escapes neither coughs nor sneezes.” And Jean Valjean added: “Father Fauchelevent, you must make up your mind: either be taken here, or accept the exit by the hearse. Everyone has noticed the taste cats have for stopping and loitering between the two leaves of a half-open door. Who has not said to a cat: But come in then! There are men who, in an incident half-open before them, also have a tendency to remain undecided between two resolutions, at the risk of being crushed by destiny abruptly closing the adventure. The overly cautious, cats as they are, and because they are cats, sometimes run more danger than the bold. Fauchelevent was of this hesitant nature. Yet Jean Valjean’s coolness won him over in spite of himself. He grumbled: “In fact, there is no other way.” Jean Valjean continued: “The only thing that worries me is what will happen at the cemetery. ” “That’s precisely what doesn’t bother me,” cried Fauchelevent. “If you’re sure of getting yourself out of the coffin, I’m sure of getting you out of the grave. The gravedigger is a drunkard friend of mine. He’s Father Mestienne. An old man from the old vineyard. The gravedigger puts the dead in the grave, and I put the gravedigger in my pocket. I’ll tell you what will happen. We’ll arrive a little before dusk, three-quarters of an hour before the cemetery gates close. The hearse will roll to the grave. I will follow; that is my job. I will have a hammer, a chisel and pliers in my pocket. The hearse stops, the undertakers tie a rope around your coffin and lower you down. The priest says the prayers, makes the sign of the cross, throws the holy water, and leaves. I am left alone with Father Mestienne. He is my friend, I tell you. One of two things, either he will be drunk, or he will not be drunk. If he is not drunk, I say to him: Come and have a drink while the Bon Coing is still open. I will take him, I will get him drunk, Father Mestienne does not take long to get drunk, he is always started, I will lay him under the table, I will take his card to return to the cemetery, and I will come back without him. You will only have to deal with me. If he is drunk, I tell him: Go away, I will do your work. He goes away, and I will pull you out of the hole. Jean Valjean held out his hand, which Fauchelevent threw himself upon with touching peasant effusion. “It is agreed, Father Fauchelevent. Everything will be all right. ” “Provided nothing gets out of place,” thought Fauchelevent. “If it were to become terrible!” Chapter 71. It is not enough to be drunk to be immortal. The next day, as the sun was setting, the very sparsely populated comings and goings on the Boulevard du Maine took off their hats as an old-fashioned hearse passed, adorned with skulls, shinbones, and tears. In this hearse there was a coffin covered with a white sheet on which was spread a vast black cross, like a great dead woman with her arms hanging down. A draped carriage, in which one could see a priest in a surplice and an altar boy in a red skullcap, followed. Two undertakers in gray uniforms with black facings walked to the right and left of the hearse. Behind came an old man in workman’s clothes, who was limping. This procession was heading towards the Vaugirard cemetery. From the man’s pocket could be seen the handle of a hammer, the blade of a cold chisel, and the double antenna of a pair of pliers. The Vaugirard cemetery was an exception among the cemeteries of Paris. It had its own particular uses, just as it had its carriage entrance and its bastard entrance, which, in the neighborhood, the old people, who were tenacious of the old words, called the cavalier entrance and the pedestrian entrance. The Bernardine-Benedictine nuns of Petit-Picpus had obtained, as we have said, to be buried there in a separate corner and in the evening, this land having formerly belonged to their community. The gravediggers, having in this way in the cemetery an evening service in the summer and a night service in the winter, were subject to a particular discipline. The gates of the cemeteries of Paris closed at this time at sunset, and, this being a municipal measure, the Vaugirard cemetery was subject to it like the others. The cavalier gate and the pedestrian gate were two adjoining gates, flanked by a pavilion built by the architect Perronet and inhabited by the cemetery gatekeeper. These gates thus turned inexorably on their hinges at the moment when the sun disappeared behind the dome of the Invalides. If any gravedigger, at that time, was delayed in the cemetery, he had only one resource to leave, his gravedigger’s card issued by the funeral administration. A kind of mailbox was made in the shutter of the concierge’s window. The gravedigger threw his card into this box, the concierge heard it fall, pulled the cord, and the pedestrian door opened. If the gravedigger did not have his card, he named himself, the concierge, sometimes lying down and asleep, got up, went to recognize the gravedigger, and opened the door with the key; the gravedigger left, but paid a fifteen franc fine. This cemetery, with its originalities outside the rules, disturbed the administrative symmetry. It was abolished shortly after 1830. The Montparnasse cemetery, called the Eastern cemetery, succeeded it, and inherited this famous cabaret adjoining the Vaugirard cemetery, which was surmounted by a quince painted on a board, and which formed an angle, on one side over the drinkers’ tables, on the other over the tombs, with this sign: Au Bon Coing. The Vaugirard cemetery was what one might call a faded cemetery. It was falling into disuse. Mold was invading it, the flowers were leaving it. The bourgeoisie cared little about being buried at Vaugirard; it smelled of poverty. Père-Lachaise, good time! Being buried at Père-Lachaise is like having mahogany furniture. Elegance is recognized there. The Vaugirard cemetery was a venerable enclosure, planted in an old French garden. Straight paths, boxwood, thuias, holly, old graves under old yew trees, very tall grass. The evening there was tragic. There were some very gloomy lines there. The sun had not yet set when the hearse with the white sheet and the black cross entered the avenue of the Vaugirard cemetery. The lame man who followed it was none other than Fauchelevent. The burial of Mother Crucifixion in the vault under the altar, the exit of Cosette, the introduction of Jean Valjean into the room of the dead, all had been executed without incident, and nothing had snagged. Let us say in passing, the burial of Mother Crucifixion under the altar of the convent is for us a perfectly venial thing. It is one of those faults which resemble a duty. The nuns had accomplished it, not only without trouble, but with the applause of their conscience. In the cloister, what is called government is only an interference with authority, an interference always debatable. First the rule; As for the code, we’ll see. Men, make laws as much as you like, but keep them to yourselves. The toll to Caesar is nothing but the remainder of the toll to God. A prince is nothing close to a principle. Fauchelevent limped behind the hearse, very pleased. His two twin plots, one with the nuns, the other with Mr. Madeleine, one for the convent, the other against it, had succeeded simultaneously. Jean Valjean’s calm was one of those powerful tranquilities that communicate themselves. Fauchelevent no longer doubted success. What remained to be done was nothing. For two years, he had intoxicated ten times the gravedigger, the good Father Mestienne, a chubby fellow. He played with Father Mestienne. He did with him what he wanted. He dressed him with his will and his whim. Mestienne’s head fitted Fauchelevent’s cap. Fauchelevent’s security was complete. As the convoy entered the avenue leading to the cemetery, Fauchelevent, happy, looked at the hearse and rubbed his large hands, saying in a low voice: “What a joke!” Suddenly the hearse stopped; they were at the gate. They had to show the burial permit. The undertaker spoke to the cemetery porter. During this conversation, which always produces a pause of one or two minutes, someone, a stranger, came and stood behind the hearse beside Fauchelevent. He was a kind of workman who had a jacket with large pockets and a pickaxe under his arm. Fauchelevent looked at this stranger. “Who are you?” he asked. The man replied: “The gravedigger. If one survived a cannonball in the chest, one would look like Fauchelevent. ” “The gravedigger! ” “Yes. ” “You? ” “Me. ” “The gravedigger is Father Mestienne. ” “It was. ” “What! It was? ” “He’s dead.” Fauchelevent had expected everything, except this: that a gravedigger might die. Yet it’s true; gravediggers themselves die. By digging other people’s graves, you open your own. Fauchelevent remained gaping. He barely had the strength to stammer: “But it’s not possible! ” “It is. ” “But,” he continued weakly, “the gravedigger is Father Mestienne. ” “After Napoleon, Louis XVIII. After Mestienne, Gribier. Peasant, my name is Gribier. ” Fauchelevent, quite pale, looked at this Gribier. He was a tall, thin, livid man, perfectly funereal. He had the air of a failed doctor turned gravedigger. Fauchelevent burst out laughing. “Ah! How funny things happen! Father Mestienne is dead. Little Father Mestienne is dead, but long live little Father Lenoir! Do you know what little Father Lenoir is? He’s the pitcher of red wine with six on the lead. He’s the pitcher of Suresne, morbigou! of the real Suresne of Paris! Ah! He’s dead, old Mestienne! I’m sorry; he was a bon vivant.” But you, too, are a bon vivant. Aren’t you, comrade? We’re going to go and have a drink together later. The man replied: “I studied. I did my eighth grade. I never drink .” The hearse had started moving again and was rolling down the wide avenue of the cemetery. Fauchelevent had slowed his pace. He was limping, more from anxiety than from infirmity. The gravedigger walked in front of him. Fauchelevent once again examined the unexpected Gribier. He was one of those men who, young, look old, and who, thin, are very strong. “Comrade!” cried Fauchelevent. The man turned around. “I am the convent gravedigger. ” “My colleague,” said the man. Fauchelevent, illiterate but very shrewd, understood that he was dealing with a formidable species, a smooth talker. He grumbled: “So, Father Mestienne is dead.” The man replied: “Completely. The good Lord consulted his payment book. It was Father Mestienne’s turn. Father Mestienne is dead. ” Fauchelevent repeated mechanically: “The good Lord… ” “The good Lord,” the man said authoritatively. “For the philosophers, the Eternal Father; for the Jacobins, the Supreme Being. ” “Won’t we get to know each other?” Fauchelevent stammered. “It’s done. You’re a peasant, I’m a Parisian. ” “We don’t know each other until we’ve drunk together. He who empties his glass empties his heart. You’re going to come and drink with me. You can’t refuse that . ” “First the work.” Fauchelevent thought: I’m lost. We were only a few turns of the wheel from the little path that led to the nuns’ corner. The gravedigger continued: “Peasant, I have seven kids that need feeding. Since they have to eat, I mustn’t drink.” And he added with the satisfaction of a serious person speaking a sentence: “Their hunger is the enemy of my thirst.” The hearse turned a clump of cypresses, left the main drive, took a smaller one, entered the grounds, and plunged into a thicket. This indicated the immediate proximity of the grave. Fauchelevent slowed his pace, but could not slow the hearse. Fortunately, the loose earth, wet from the winter rains, stuck the wheels and made the going heavy. He moved closer to the gravedigger. “There is such a good little Argenteuil wine,” murmured Fauchelevent. “Villager,” the man continued, “it shouldn’t be that I am a gravedigger. My father was a porter at the Prytaneum.” He intended me for literature. But he had misfortunes. He made losses on the Stock Exchange. I had to give up being an author. Yet I am still a public writer. “But you are not a gravedigger then?” replied Fauchelevent, clinging to this very weak branch. “One does not preclude the other. I am accumulating. ” Fauchelevent did not understand this last word. “Let’s come and drink,” he said. Here an observation is necessary. Fauchelevent, whatever his anguish, offered a drink, but did not explain one point: who Will pay? Usually Fauchelevent offered, and Father Mestienne paid. An offer of a drink obviously resulted from the new situation created by the new gravedigger, and this offer had to be made, but the old gardener left, not without intention, the proverbial quarter of an hour, said by Rabelais, in the shadows. As for Fauchelevent, however moved he was, he did not care to pay. The gravedigger continued, with a superior smile: “One must eat. I have accepted the survival of Father Mestienne. When one has almost completed one’s classes, one is a philosopher. To the work of the hand, I have added the work of the arm. I have my writer’s stall at the market on the rue de Sèvres. You know? The Umbrella Market. All the cooks of the Red Cross come to me. I rush their declarations to the tourlourous.” In the morning I write love letters, in the evening I dig graves. Such is life, countryman. The hearse moved on. Fauchelevent, at the height of anxiety, looked around him in all directions. Large tears of sweat fell from his brow. “Yet,” continued the gravedigger, “one cannot serve two mistresses. I will have to choose between the pen or the pickaxe. The pickaxe is spoiling my hand. ” The hearse stopped. The choirboy got out of the draped carriage, then the priest. One of the little front wheels of the hearse rose a little onto a pile of earth beyond which an open grave could be seen. “What a farce!” repeated Fauchelevent, dismayed. Chapter 72. Between Four Planks. Who was in the coffin? We know. Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean had managed to live in it, and he could more or less breathe . It is a strange thing to what extent security of conscience gives security of the rest. The whole plan premeditated by Jean Valjean had been working, and working well, since the day before. He counted, like Fauchelevent, on Father Mestienne. He had no doubt of the end. Never had a situation been more critical, never more complete calm. The four planks of the coffin exuded a sort of terrible peace. It seemed as if something of the repose of the dead had entered into Jean Valjean’s tranquility. From the depths of this coffin, he had been able to follow and he was following all the phases of the formidable drama he was playing with death. Shortly after Fauchelevent had finished nailing the top plank, Jean Valjean had felt himself being carried away, then rolling. Barring any jolts, he had felt that he was passing from the pavement to the beaten earth, that is to say, that he was leaving the streets and arriving at the boulevards. From a dull noise, he had guessed that they were crossing the Austerlitz Bridge. At the first pause, he had understood that they were entering the cemetery; at the second pause, he had said to himself: here is the grave. Suddenly he felt hands grasping the coffin, then a harsh scraping on the planks; he realized that it was a rope being tied around the coffin to lower it into the excavation. Then he felt a kind of dizziness. Probably the undertakers and the gravedigger had let the coffin tip over and lowered it head first. He came to fully, feeling horizontal and motionless. He had just touched the bottom. He felt a certain coldness. A voice rose above him, icy and solemn. He heard passing by, so slowly that he could catch them one after the other, Latin words he did not understand: — Qui dormiunt in terrae pulvere, evigilabunt; alii in vitam aeternam, et alii in opprobrium, ut videant semper . A child’s voice said: — De profundis . The deep voice began again: — Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine . The child’s voice answered: — Et lux perpetua luceat ei . He heard on the board that covered him something like the soft tapping of a few drops of rain. It was probably the water blessed. He thought: It will be over. Just a little more patience. The priest will leave. Fauchelevent will take Mestienne to drink. They will leave me. Then Fauchelevent will come back alone, and I will go out. It will take a good hour. The deep voice continued: “Requiescat in pace.” And the child’s voice said: “Amen.” Jean Valjean, his ears strained, heard something like footsteps moving away. “There they are going,” he thought. “I am alone.” Suddenly he heard a noise over his head that seemed to him like thunder . It was a shovelful of earth falling on the coffin. A second shovelful of earth fell. One of the holes through which he breathed had just been stopped up. A third shovelful of earth fell. Then a fourth. There are things stronger than the strongest man. Jean Valjean lost consciousness. Chapter 73. Where we will find the origin of the word: not to lose the map This is what was happening above the coffin where Jean Valjean was. When the hearse had moved away, when the priest and the choirboy had got back into the carriage and left, Fauchelevent, who had not taken his eyes off the gravedigger, saw him bend down and seize his shovel, which was stuck straight into the pile of earth. Then Fauchelevent took a supreme resolution. He placed himself between the grave and the gravedigger, crossed his arms, and said: “I’m the one who pays!” The gravedigger looked at him in astonishment, and replied: “What, peasant?” Fauchelevent repeated: “I’m the one who pays!” “What? ” “The wine.” “What wine? ” “Argenteuil. ” “Where is Argenteuil? ” “Au Bon Coing.” “Go to the devil! ” said the gravedigger. And he threw a shovelful of earth onto the coffin. The coffin made a hollow sound. Fauchelevent felt himself reeling and ready to fall into the grave himself. He cried out, in a voice beginning to mingle with the strangulation of a death rattle: “Comrade, before the Good Quince is closed!” The gravedigger put more earth in the shovel. Fauchelevent continued: “I’ll pay!” And he seized the gravedigger’s arm. “Listen to me, comrade. I am the gravedigger of the convent. I have come to help you. It is a job that can be done at night. Let us begin by going for a drink. ” And while speaking, while clinging to this desperate insistence, he made this lugubrious reflection: “And when he drinks! Would he get drunk?” “Provincial,” said the gravedigger, “if you absolutely want it, I consent.” We’ll drink. After the work, never before. And he gave his shovel a good swing. Fauchelevent held him back. “It’s Argenteuil for six! ” “Oh, that’s it,” said the gravedigger, “you’re a bell ringer. Din don, din don; that’s all you know how to say. Go and get yourselves a lanlaire.” And he threw the second shovelful. Fauchelevent was arriving at that moment when one no longer knows what one is saying. “But come and drink,” he shouted, “since I’m the one paying! ” “When we’ve put the child to bed,” said the gravedigger. He threw the third shovelful. Then he pushed the shovel into the earth and added: “You see, it’s going to be cold tonight, and the dead woman would scream after us if we left her there without a blanket.” At that moment, while loading his shovel, the gravedigger bent over and his jacket pocket gaped. Fauchelevent’s frightened gaze mechanically fell into this pocket and stopped there. The sun was not yet hidden by the horizon; it was light enough for something white to be distinguished at the bottom of this gaping pocket. All the light that the eye of a Picard peasant can have crossed Fauchelevent’s pupil. An idea had just come to him. Without the gravedigger, who was completely absorbed in his shovel of earth, noticing it, he He plunged his hand into his pocket from behind, and from it he pulled out the white thing that was at the bottom. The gravedigger threw the fourth shovelful into the grave. As he turned to take the fifth, Fauchelevent looked at him with profound calm and said: “By the way, newbie, have you got your card?” The gravedigger stopped. “What card? ” “The sun is going to set. ” “All right, let him put on his nightcap. ” “The cemetery gate is going to close. ” “Well, what about after that? ” “Have you got your card? ” “Ah, my card!” said the gravedigger. And he searched in his pocket. One pocket searched, he searched the other. He went through the pockets, explored the first, turned over the second. “But no,” he said, “I haven’t got my card. I must have forgotten it. ” “Fifteen francs fine,” said Fauchelevent. The gravedigger turned green. Green is the pallor of livid people. “Ah, Jesus-my-God-slump-down-with-the-moon!” he cried. “A fine of fifteen francs! ” “Three hundred-sou pieces,” said Fauchelevent. The gravedigger dropped his shovel. Fauchelevent’s turn had come. “Ah, there,” said Fauchelevent, “a conscript, no need to despair. It’s not a question of committing suicide and profiting from the grave. Fifteen francs is fifteen francs, and besides, you can avoid paying them. I’m old, you ‘re new. I know the tricks, the bartering, the tricks and the tricks. I’ll give you some friendly advice. One thing is clear: the sun is setting, it’s touching the dome, the cemetery will close in five minutes.
” “That’s true,” replied the gravedigger. “In five minutes, you won’t have time to fill the grave, it’s as deep as the devil, this grave, and to arrive in time to get out before the gate is closed. ” “That’s right. ” “In that case, fifteen francs fine. ” “Fifteen francs. ” “But you have time…” “Where do you live? ” “Two steps from the gate. A quarter of an hour from here. Rue de Vaugirard, number 87. ” “You have time, by hanging your legs around your neck, to get out right away. ” “That’s right.” “Once outside the gate, you gallop home, you take your card, you come back, the cemetery gatekeeper lets you in. With your card, nothing to pay. And you bury your dead body. I’ll look after him for you in the meantime so he doesn’t run away. ” “I owe you my life, peasant. ” “Get out of here,” said Fauchelevent. The gravedigger, overcome with gratitude, shook his hand and ran off . When the gravedigger had disappeared into the thicket, Fauchelevent listened until he heard the footsteps fade away, then he leaned toward the grave and said in a low voice: “Father Madeleine! ” There was no answer. Fauchelevent shuddered. He let himself roll into the grave rather than descend into it, threw himself on the head of the coffin, and cried: “Are you there? ” Silence in the coffin. Fauchelevent, no longer breathing from trembling, took his cold chisel and hammer and broke off the top board. Jean Valjean’s face appeared in the twilight, his eyes closed, pale. Fauchelevent’s hair bristled, he rose to his feet, then fell, leaning against the wall of the grave, ready to sink into the coffin. He looked at Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean lay there, pale and motionless. Fauchelevent murmured in a voice as low as a breath: “He’s dead!” And straightening up, crossing his arms so violently that his two clenched fists struck his two shoulders, he cried: “That’s how I save him!” Then the poor fellow began to sob. Monologued, for it is a mistake to believe that monologue is not in nature. Strong agitations often speak aloud. “It’s Father Mestienne’s fault. Why did he die, this That idiot? What did he need to die when we least expect it? He’s the one who killed Monsieur Madeleine. Father Madeleine! He’s in the coffin. He’s all carried away. It’s over. –So, these things, do they make sense? Oh! my God! He ‘s dead! Well, and his little one, what am I going to do with her? What’s the cheese-keeper going to say? That a man like that should die like that, if God can do it! When I think he put himself under my cart! Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine! Pardine, he suffocated, I said so. He wouldn’t believe me. Well, there’s a pretty naughty thing done! He’s dead, that good man, the nicest man there was among God’s good people! And his little one Ah! First of all , I’m not going back there. I’m staying here. To have pulled a stunt like that! It’s worth two old men to be two old fools. But first of all, how did he manage to get into the convent? It was already the beginning. One shouldn’t do things like that. Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine! Madeleine! Monsieur Madeleine! Monsieur Mayor! He can’t hear me. Get out of here now! And he tore his hair. Far off in the trees, a sharp creaking sound was heard. It was the cemetery gate closing. Fauchelevent leaned over Jean Valjean, and suddenly felt a sort of rebound and all the distance one can have in a grave. Jean Valjean had his eyes open, and was looking at him. To see a death is frightening, to see a resurrection is almost as much so. Fauchelevent became as if made of stone, pale, haggard, overwhelmed by all these excesses of emotion, not knowing whether he was dealing with a living person or a dead person, looking at Jean Valjean who was looking at him. “I was falling asleep,” said Jean Valjean. And he sat up. Fauchelevent fell to his knees. “Just good Virgin! Did you frighten me!” Then he got up and cried: “Thank you, Father Madeleine!” Jean Valjean had only fainted. The fresh air had awakened him. Joy is the ebb of terror. Fauchelevent had almost as much to do as Jean Valjean to come to himself. “You are not dead then! Oh! what wit you have! I called you so much that you came back. When I saw your eyes closed, I said: “Good! There he is suffocated.” I would have gone raving mad, a real madman in a straitjacket. They would have put me in Bicêtre. What do you expect me to do if you were dead? And your little one! It’s the fruit seller who wouldn’t have understood anything! They put the child in her arms, and the grandfather is dead! What a story! My good saints in paradise, what a story! Ah! you’re alive, here’s the bouquet. “I’m cold,” said Jean Valjean. This word completely recalled Fauchelevent to reality, which was urgent. These two men, even when they had come to, had, without realizing it , troubled souls, and within them something strange which was the sinister bewilderment of the place. “Let’s get out of here quickly,” cried Fauchelevent. He searched in his pocket and took out a flask with which he had provided himself. “But first the drop!” he said. The flask completed what the fresh air had begun. Jean Valjean took a sip of brandy and regained full possession of himself. He took out the coffin and helped Fauchelevent nail the lid back on. Three minutes later, they were out of the grave. Besides, Fauchelevent was calm. He took his time. The cemetery was closed. The arrival of the gravedigger Gribier was not to be feared. This conscript was at home, busy looking for his card, and quite prevented from finding it in his lodgings since it was in Fauchelevent’s pocket . Without a card, he could not return to the cemetery. Fauchelevent took the shovel and Jean Valjean the pickaxe, and the two of them buried the empty coffin. When the grave was filled, Fauchelevent said to Jean Valjean: “Let’s go. I’ll keep the shovel; take the pickaxe with you.” Night was falling. Jean Valjean had some difficulty moving and walking. In this coffin, he had stiffened and become a bit like a corpse. The stiffness of death had seized him between these four planks. He had to, as it were , thaw himself out of the sepulchre. “You’re numb,” said Fauchelevent. “It’s a pity I’m wobbly, we’d be stumbling. ” “Bah!” replied Jean Valjean, “four steps will give me enough walking time .” They went off along the paths where the hearse had passed. Arriving in front of the closed gate and the porter’s lodge, Fauchelevent, who was holding the gravedigger’s card in his hand, threw it into the box, the porter pulled the cord, the door opened, and they went out. “How well everything is going!” said Fauchelevent; what a good idea you had, Father Madeleine! They crossed the Vaugirard barrier in the simplest way in the world. Around a cemetery, a shovel and a pickaxe are two passports. The Rue de Vaugirard was deserted. “Father Madeleine,” said Fauchelevent, as he walked along and looked up at the houses, “you have better eyes than I. Show me number 87. ” “Here it is,” said Jean Valjean. “There is no one in the street,” continued Fauchelevent. “Give me the pickaxe, and wait two minutes. ” Fauchelevent entered number 87, went to the very top, guided by the instinct that always leads the poor to the attic, and knocked in the darkness at the door of an attic. A voice answered: “Come in.” It was Gribier’s voice. Fauchelevent pushed the door open. The gravedigger’s lodgings were, like all these unfortunate dwellings, an unfurnished and cluttered attic. A packing case—perhaps a coffin—served as a chest of drawers, a butter pot as a fountain, a straw mattress as a bed, the floor tiles as chairs and a table. In a corner, on a rag that was an old scrap of carpet, there was a thin woman and several children, making a pile. All this poor interior bore the traces of an upheaval. One would have said that there had been an earthquake there. The lids were displaced, the rags were scattered, the jug was broken, the mother had wept, the children had probably been beaten; traces of a relentless and rough search . It was evident that the gravedigger had frantically searched for his card, and blamed everything in the attic for this loss, from his pitcher to his wife. He looked desperate. But Fauchelevent was hurrying too much toward the outcome of the adventure to notice this sad side of his success. He entered and said: “I’ll bring you your pick and shovel.” Gribier looked at him in astonishment. “Is that you, peasant? ” “And tomorrow morning at the cemetery caretaker’s you will find your card. ” And he placed the shovel and pick on the tile. “What does that mean?” asked Gribier. “It means that you dropped your card from your pocket, that I found it on the ground when you left, that I buried the dead man, that I filled the grave, that I did your work, that the porter will give you back your card, and that you will not pay fifteen francs. There, conscript. ” “Thank you, villager!” cried Gribier, dazzled. Next time, I’ll pay for the drink. Chapter 74. Successful Interrogation. An hour later, in the dark of night, two men and a child appeared at number 62, rue Picpus. The oldest of these men raised the hammer and knocked. They were Fauchelevent, Jean Valjean, and Cosette. The two men had gone to fetch Cosette from the fruit seller on rue du Chemin-Vert where Fauchelevent had dropped her off the day before. Cosette had spent those twenty-four hours understanding nothing and trembling. silently. She trembled so much that she had not cried. She had not eaten either, nor slept. The worthy fruit seller had asked her a hundred questions, without obtaining any other answer than a dull look, always the same. Cosette had let nothing transpire of all that she had heard and seen for two days. She guessed that we were passing through a crisis. She felt deeply that one must be wise. Who has not experienced the sovereign power of these three words pronounced with a certain accent in the ear of a frightened little being: Say nothing! Fear is mute. Besides, no one keeps a secret like a child. Only, when, after those lugubrious twenty-four hours, she saw Jean Valjean again, she had uttered such a cry of joy that any thoughtful person who had heard it would have guessed in that cry the exit from an abyss. Fauchelevent was from the convent and knew the passwords. All the doors opened. Thus was solved the double and frightening problem: to get out, and to get in. The porter, who had his instructions, opened the little service door which communicated from the courtyard to the garden, and which twenty years ago could still be seen from the street, in the wall at the back of the courtyard, facing the carriage entrance. The porter ushered all three of them through this door, and from there they reached the reserved inner parlor where Fauchelevent, the day before, had taken the prioress’s orders. The prioress, her rosary in her hand, was waiting for them. A vocal mother, her veil drawn low, was standing near her. A discreet candle lit, one might almost say pretended to light, the parlor. The prioress reviewed Jean Valjean. Nothing examines like a lowered eye. Then she questioned him: “Are you the brother? ” “Yes, reverend mother,” replied Fauchelevent. “What is your name?” Fauchelevent replied: “Ultime Fauchelevent. He had indeed had a brother named Ultime who had died. ” “What country are you from?” Fauchelevent replied: “From Picquigny, near Amiens. ” “How old are you? ” Fauchelevent replied: “Fifty years old. ” “What is your condition? ” Fauchelevent replied: “Gardener. ” “Are you a good Christian?” Fauchelevent replied: “Everyone in the family is. ” “Is this little one yours? ” Fauchelevent replied: “Yes, reverend mother. ” “You are her father? ” Fauchelevent replied: “Her grandfather.” The vocal mother said to the prioress in a low voice: “He answers well.” Jean Valjean had not uttered a word. The prioress looked at Cosette attentively, and said in a low voice to the vocal mother: “She will be ugly.” The two mothers chatted for a few minutes in a low corner of the parlor, then the prioress turned around and said: “Father Fauvent, you will have another knee-piece with a bell. We need two now.” The next day, in fact, two bells could be heard in the garden, and the nuns could not resist lifting a corner of their veil. In the background, under the trees, two men could be seen digging side by side, Fauvent and another. An enormous event. The silence was broken to the point of saying to each other: He is a gardener’s assistant. The vocal mothers added: He is a brother of Father Fauvent. Jean Valjean, in fact, was regularly installed; he had the leather knee-piece and the bell; he was henceforth official. His name was Ultime Fauchelevent. The strongest determining cause of the admission had been the prioress’s observation about Cosette: She will be ugly. The prioress, having made this prognosis, immediately took a liking to Cosette and gave her a place at the boarding school as a charity pupil. This is quite logical. Although there may not be a mirror in the convent, women have a conscience for their faces; now, girls those who feel pretty are not easily made nuns; vocation being quite readily in inverse proportion to beauty, one hopes more from ugly than from beautiful ones. Hence a keen taste for ugly people. This whole adventure made good old Fauchelevent grow; he had a triple success; with Jean Valjean whom he saved and sheltered; with the gravedigger Gribier who said to himself: he spared me the fine; with the convent which, thanks to him, by keeping the coffin of Mother Crucifixion under the altar, eluded Caesar and satisfied God. There was a coffin with a corpse at Petit-Picpus and a coffin without a corpse at Vaugirard cemetery; public order was doubtless deeply disturbed, but did not notice it. As for the convent, its gratitude for Fauchelevent was great. Fauchelevent became the best of servants and the most valuable of gardeners. At the archbishop’s next visit , the prioress told His Grace about it, confessing a little and boasting about it too. The archbishop, on leaving the convent, spoke of it, with applause and in a low voice, to Mr. de Latil, Monsieur’s confessor, later Archbishop of Reims and Cardinal. Admiration for Fauchelevent spread, for it went to Rome. We have before us a note addressed by the then reigning Pope, Leo XII, to one of his relatives, a monsignor in the nunciature of Paris, and named like him Della Genga; it reads these lines: It seems that in a convent in Paris there is an excellent gardener, who is a holy man, called Fauvent. Nothing of all this triumph reached Fauchelevent in his hut; He continued to graft, to weed, and to cover his melon beds, without being aware of his excellence and his sanctity. He had no more suspicion of his glory than a Durham or Surrey ox suspects it, whose portrait is published in the Illustrated London News with this inscription: Ox which won the prize in the horned beast competition. Chapter 75. Enclosure. Cosette at the convent continued to remain silent. Cosette quite naturally believed herself to be the daughter of Jean Valjean. Besides , knowing nothing, she could say nothing, and then, in any case, she would have said nothing. As we have just pointed out, nothing trains children to silence like misfortune. Cosette had suffered so much that she feared everything, even speaking, even breathing. A word had so often brought an avalanche crashing down on her! She had scarcely begun to feel reassured since she had been with Jean Valjean. She got used to the convent quite quickly. Only she missed Catherine, but she didn’t dare say so. Once, however, she said to Jean Valjean: “Father, if I had known, I would have taken her with me. ” Cosette, on becoming a boarder at the convent, had to take the habit of the students of the house. Jean Valjean obtained the return of the clothes she was stripping off. It was the same mourning attire he had made her wear when she left Thénardier’s tavern. It was not yet very worn. Jean Valjean packed these rags, plus the woolen stockings and shoes, with plenty of camphor and all the aromatics with which convents abound, in a small valise which he managed to procure. He put this suitcase on a chair near his bed, and he always had the key with him. “Father,” Cosette asked him one day, “what is this box that smells so good?” Father Fauchelevent, besides this glory that we have just recounted and which he was unaware of, was rewarded for his good action; at first he was happy about it; then he had much less work, sharing it. Finally, as he was very fond of tobacco, he found in the presence of Monsieur Madeleine this advantage that he took three times more tobacco than in the past, and in an infinitely more voluptuous manner, since Monsieur Madeleine paid him for it. The nuns did not adopt this name of Ultime; they called Jean Valjean, the other Fauvent. If these holy girls had had anything of Javert’s gaze, they might have ended by noticing that, when there was some errand to run outside for the upkeep of the garden, it was always the eldest Fauchelevent, the old one, the infirm, the wobbly one, who went out, and never the other; but, whether because eyes always fixed on God do not know how to spy, or because they were, by preference, occupied in watching each other, they paid no attention. Besides, it was well done to Jean Valjean to keep quiet and not move. Javert observed the neighborhood for more than a full month. This convent was for Jean Valjean like an island surrounded by chasms. These four walls were henceforth the world for him. He saw enough of the sky there to be serene and Cosette enough to be happy. A very sweet life began again for him. He lived with old Fauchelevent in the hut at the bottom of the garden. This shack, built of plaster, which still existed in 1845, was composed, as we know, of three rooms, which were all bare and had only the walls. The main one had been forcibly given up , because Jean Valjean had resisted in vain, by Father Fauchelevent to Mr. Madeleine. The wall of this room, besides the two nails intended for the attachment of the knee-piece and the hood, was decorated with a royalist paper money of 93 applied to the wall above the fireplace and of which here is the exact facsimile: This Vendean assignat had been nailed to the wall by the previous gardener, a former Chouan who had died in the convent and whom Fauchelevent had replaced. Jean Valjean worked every day in the garden and was very useful there. He had formerly been a pruner and gladly found himself gardener again. We remember that he had all sorts of recipes and cultivation secrets. He took advantage of them. Almost all the trees in the orchard were wild; he budded them and made them bear excellent fruit.
Cosette was allowed to come every day to spend an hour near him. As the sisters were sad and he was good, the child compared him to him and adored him. At the appointed hour, she ran to the hut. When she entered the hovel, she filled it with paradise. Jean Valjean blossomed, and felt his happiness increase with the happiness he gave to Cosette. The joy we inspire has this charm that, far from weakening like any reflection, it returns to us more radiant. At recreation times, Jean Valjean watched Cosette play and run from afar , and he distinguished her laughter from the laughter of others. For now Cosette laughed. Cosette’s face was even changed to a certain extent. The gloom had disappeared. Laughter is the sun; it drives winter from the human face. When recreation was over, when Cosette came home, Jean Valjean looked at the windows of his classroom, and at night he got up to look at the windows of his dormitory. Besides, God has his ways; the convent contributed, like Cosette, to maintaining and completing in Jean Valjean the work of the bishop. It is certain that one side of virtue ends in pride. There is a bridge built by the devil. Jean Valjean was perhaps, without knowing it, quite close to that side and to that bridge, when Providence threw him into the convent of Petit-Picpus. As long as he had compared himself only to the bishop, he had found himself unworthy and he had been humble; but for some time he had begun to compare himself to men, and pride was born. Who knows? he might have ended up returning very gently to hatred. The convent stopped him on this slope. It was the second place of captivity that he had seen. In his youth, in what had been for him the beginning of life, and later, quite recently still, he had seen another, a dreadful place, a terrible place, and whose severities had always seemed to him to be the iniquity of justice and the crime of the law. Today after the galleys he saw the cloister; and thinking that he had been part of the galleys and that he was now, so to speak, a spectator of the cloister, he confronted them in his thoughts with anxiety. Sometimes he leaned his elbows on his spade and slowly descended into the bottomless spirals of reverie. He remembered his old companions; how miserable they were; they rose at dawn and worked until nightfall; they were hardly allowed to sleep; they slept on camp beds, where only mattresses two inches thick were allowed, in rooms that were heated only in the harshest months of the year; they were dressed in hideous red jackets; they were allowed, as a favor, canvas trousers in the great heat and a woolen roulière on their backs in the great cold; They drank wine and ate meat only when they were near to weariness. They lived, no longer having names, designated only by numbers and in a way made ciphers, lowering their eyes, lowering their voices, their hair cut, under the stick, in shame. Then his mind fell back on the beings before his eyes. These beings also lived, with their hair cut, their eyes lowered, their voices low, not in shame, but amidst the mockery of the world, not their backs bruised by the stick, but their shoulders torn by discipline. Their name among men too had vanished; they existed only under austere appellations. They never ate meat and never drank wine; they often remained until evening without food; They were dressed, not in a red jacket, but in a black woolen shroud, heavy in summer, light in winter, without being able to take anything away or add anything; without even having, depending on the season, the resource of a linen garment or a woolen overcoat; and they wore serge shirts for six months of the year, which gave them fever. They lived, not in rooms heated only in the harsh cold, but in cells where a fire was never lit; they slept, not on mattresses two inches thick, but on straw. Finally, they were not even allowed to sleep; every night, after a day of labor, it was necessary, in the exhaustion of the first rest, at the moment when one fell asleep and was barely warm, to wake up, get up, and go to pray in a cold and dark chapel , both knees on the stone. On certain days, each of these beings had to take turns remaining for twelve hours in a row kneeling on the slab or prostrate with their faces to the ground and their arms outstretched. The others were men; these were women. What had these men done? They had stolen, raped, pillaged, killed, murdered. They were bandits, forgers, poisoners, arsonists, murderers, parricides. What had these women done? They had done nothing. On the one hand, brigandage, fraud, deceit, violence, lewdness, homicide, all the species of sacrilege, all the varieties of outrage; on the other, only one thing, innocence. Perfect innocence, almost taken away in a mysterious assumption, still attached to the earth by virtue, already attached to heaven by holiness.
On the one hand, confidences of crimes made to one another in hushed tones. On the other, the confession of faults made aloud. And what crimes! And what faults! On one side, miasmas, on the other, an ineffable perfume. On one side, a moral plague, kept under surveillance, penned up under the cannon, and slowly devouring its plague victims; on the other, a chaste conflagration of all souls in the same hearth. There, darkness; here, shadow; but a shadow full of brightness, and brightness full of radiance. Two places of slavery; but in the first, deliverance was possible, a legal limit always glimpsed, and then escape. In the second, perpetuity; for all hope, at the far end of the future, that glimmer of liberty which men call death. In the first, one was chained only by chains; in the other, one was chained by one’s faith. What emerged from the first? An immense curse, the gnashing of teeth, hatred, desperate malice, a cry of rage against human association, a sarcasm to heaven. What emerged from the second? Blessing and love. And in these two places, so similar and so different, these two species of beings so different accomplished the same work, expiation. Jean Valjean understood well the expiation of the first; personal expiation , expiation for oneself. But he did not understand that of others, that of these creatures without reproach and without stain, and he asked himself with trembling: Atonement for what? What atonement? A voice answered in his conscience: The most divine of human generosities , atonement for others. Here all personal theory is reserved, we are only narrators; it is from the point of view of Jean Valjean that we place ourselves, and we translate his impressions. He had before his eyes the sublime summit of self-denial, the highest possible peak of virtue; the innocence which forgives men their faults and which atones for them in their place; the servitude undergone, the torture accepted, the torment demanded by souls who have not sinned to exempt from it souls who have failed; the love of humanity sinking into the love of God, but remaining distinct there, and supplicating; gentle weak beings having the misery of those who are punished and the smile of those who are rewarded. And he remembered that he had dared to complain! Often, in the middle of the night, he would get up to listen to the grateful singing of these innocent creatures overwhelmed by severities, and he felt cold in his veins at the thought that those who were justly punished raised their voices to heaven only to blaspheme, and that he, a wretch, had shaken his fist at God. A striking thing and one that made him dream deeply like a low-voiced warning from providence itself, the climbing, the fences crossed, the adventure accepted even to the point of death, the difficult and hard ascent, all those same efforts that he had made to leave the other place of expiation, he had made to enter this one. Was it a symbol of his destiny? This house was a prison too, and resembled lugubriously the other dwelling from which he had fled, and yet he had never had the idea of anything like it. He saw again gates, bolts, iron bars, to guard whom? Angels. Those high walls he had seen around the tigers, he saw them again around the sheep. It was a place of expiation, not of punishment; and yet it was even more austere, more gloomy and more pitiless than the other. These virgins were more severely bent than the convicts. A cold and harsh wind , the wind that had frozen his youth, crossed the grilled and padlocked pit of the vultures; a harsher and more painful north wind blew through the cage of the doves. Why? When he thought of these things, everything in him was destroyed by this mystery of sublimity. In these meditations, pride vanished. He made all sorts of reflections on himself; he felt puny and wept many times. Everything that had entered his life for the past six months brought him back to the holy injunctions of the bishop, Cosette by love, the convent by humility. Sometimes, in the evening, at dusk, at the hour when the garden was deserted, he could be seen kneeling in the middle of the path that ran alongside the chapel, in front of the window where he had looked the night of his arrival, turned towards the place where he knew that the sister who was making the reparation was prostrate and praying. He prayed, thus kneeling before this sister. It seemed that he did not dare to kneel directly before God. Everything that surrounded him, this peaceful garden, these fragrant flowers, these children crying joyfully, these grave and simple women, this silent cloister, slowly penetrated him, and little by little his soul was composed of silence like this cloister, of perfume like these flowers, of peace like this garden, of simplicity like these women, of joy like these children. And then he thought that these were two houses of God which had successively taken him in at the two critical moments of his life, the first when all the doors closed and human society rejected him, the second at the moment when human society began to pursue him again and the penal colony reopened; and that without the first he would have fallen back into crime and without the second into torture. His whole heart melted in gratitude and he loved more and more.
Several years passed in this way; Cosette grew up. Thus ends this second volume of Les Misérables, where shadow and light confront each other in the hearts of men. We have followed Jean Valjean and Cosette through poignant trials, witnesses to a constant struggle for freedom, dignity and compassion. Victor Hugo, with his masterful pen, reminds us that even in the midst of misery, there is always a spark of hope capable of illuminating the world. May this reading inspire you to believe in the strength of humanity and the power of good in the face of darkness.
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