



[Illustration: The Gorbeau Hovel]






Forty years ago, a rambler who had ventured into that unknown country
of the Salpêtrière, and who had mounted to the Barrière d’Italie by way
of the boulevard, reached a point where it might be said that Paris
disappeared. It was no longer solitude, for there were passers-by; it
was not the country, for there were houses and streets; it was not the
city, for the streets had ruts like highways, and the grass grew in
them; it was not a village, the houses were too lofty. What was it,
then? It was an inhabited spot where there was no one; it was a desert
place where there was some one; it was a boulevard of the great city, a
street of Paris; more wild at night than the forest, more gloomy by day
than a cemetery.

It was the old quarter of the Marché-aux-Chevaux.

The rambler, if he risked himself outside the four decrepit walls of
this Marché-aux-Chevaux; if he consented even to pass beyond the Rue du
Petit-Banquier, after leaving on his right a garden protected by high
walls; then a field in which tan-bark mills rose like gigantic beaver
huts; then an enclosure encumbered with timber, with a heap of stumps,
sawdust, and shavings, on which stood a large dog, barking; then a
long, low, utterly dilapidated wall, with a little black door in
mourning, laden with mosses, which were covered with flowers in the
spring; then, in the most deserted spot, a frightful and decrepit
building, on which ran the inscription in large letters: POST NO
BILLS,—this daring rambler would have reached little known latitudes at
the corner of the Rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel. There, near a factory,
and between two garden walls, there could be seen, at that epoch, a
mean building, which, at the first glance, seemed as small as a
thatched hovel, and which was, in reality, as large as a cathedral. It
presented its side and gable to the public road; hence its apparent
diminutiveness. Nearly the whole of the house was hidden. Only the door
and one window could be seen.

This hovel was only one story high.

The first detail that struck the observer was, that the door could
never have been anything but the door of a hovel, while the window, if
it had been carved out of dressed stone instead of being in rough
masonry, might have been the lattice of a lordly mansion.

The door was nothing but a collection of worm-eaten planks roughly
bound together by cross-beams which resembled roughly hewn logs. It
opened directly on a steep staircase of lofty steps, muddy, chalky,
plaster-stained, dusty steps, of the same width as itself, which could
be seen from the street, running straight up like a ladder and
disappearing in the darkness between two walls. The top of the
shapeless bay into which this door shut was masked by a narrow
scantling in the centre of which a triangular hole had been sawed,
which served both as wicket and air-hole when the door was closed. On
the inside of the door the figures 52 had been traced with a couple of
strokes of a brush dipped in ink, and above the scantling the same hand
had daubed the number 50, so that one hesitated. Where was one? Above
the door it said, “Number 50”; the inside replied, “no, Number 52.” No
one knows what dust-colored figures were suspended like draperies from
the triangular opening.

The window was large, sufficiently elevated, garnished with Venetian
blinds, and with a frame in large square panes; only these large panes
were suffering from various wounds, which were both concealed and
betrayed by an ingenious paper bandage. And the blinds, dislocated and
unpasted, threatened passers-by rather than screened the occupants. The
horizontal slats were missing here and there and had been naïvely
replaced with boards nailed on perpendicularly; so that what began as a
blind ended as a shutter. This door with an unclean, and this window
with an honest though dilapidated air, thus beheld on the same house,
produced the effect of two incomplete beggars walking side by side,
with different miens beneath the same rags, the one having always been
a mendicant, and the other having once been a gentleman.

The staircase led to a very vast edifice which resembled a shed which
had been converted into a house. This edifice had, for its intestinal
tube, a long corridor, on which opened to right and left sorts of
compartments of varied dimensions which were inhabitable under stress
of circumstances, and rather more like stalls than cells. These
chambers received their light from the vague waste grounds in the
neighborhood.

All this was dark, disagreeable, wan, melancholy, sepulchral; traversed
according as the crevices lay in the roof or in the door, by cold rays
or by icy winds. An interesting and picturesque peculiarity of this
sort of dwelling is the enormous size of the spiders.

To the left of the entrance door, on the boulevard side, at about the
height of a man from the ground, a small window which had been walled
up formed a square niche full of stones which the children had thrown
there as they passed by.

A portion of this building has recently been demolished. From what
still remains of it one can form a judgment as to what it was in former
days. As a whole, it was not over a hundred years old. A hundred years
is youth in a church and age in a house. It seems as though man’s
lodging partook of his ephemeral character, and God’s house of his
eternity.

The postmen called the house Number 50-52; but it was known in the
neighborhood as the Gorbeau house.

Let us explain whence this appellation was derived.

Collectors of petty details, who become herbalists of anecdotes, and
prick slippery dates into their memories with a pin, know that there
was in Paris, during the last century, about 1770, two attorneys at the
Châtelet named, one Corbeau (Raven), the other Renard (Fox). The two
names had been forestalled by La Fontaine. The opportunity was too fine
for the lawyers; they made the most of it. A parody was immediately put
in circulation in the galleries of the court-house, in verses that
limped a little:—

Maître Corbeau, sur un dossier perché,
Tenait dans son bec une saisie exécutoire;
Maître Renard, par l’odeur alléché,
Lui fit à peu près cette histoire:
Hé! bonjour.  Etc.13



The two honest practitioners, embarrassed by the jests, and finding the
bearing of their heads interfered with by the shouts of laughter which
followed them, resolved to get rid of their names, and hit upon the
expedient of applying to the king.

Their petition was presented to Louis XV. on the same day when the
Papal Nuncio, on the one hand, and the Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon on
the other, both devoutly kneeling, were each engaged in putting on, in
his Majesty’s presence, a slipper on the bare feet of Madame du Barry,
who had just got out of bed. The king, who was laughing, continued to
laugh, passed gayly from the two bishops to the two lawyers, and
bestowed on these limbs of the law their former names, or nearly so. By
the kings command, Maître Corbeau was permitted to add a tail to his
initial letter and to call himself Gorbeau. Maître Renard was less
lucky; all he obtained was leave to place a P in front of his R, and to
call himself Prenard; so that the second name bore almost as much
resemblance as the first.

Now, according to local tradition, this Maître Gorbeau had been the
proprietor of the building numbered 50-52 on the Boulevard de
l’Hôpital. He was even the author of the monumental window.

Hence the edifice bore the name of the Gorbeau house.

Opposite this house, among the trees of the boulevard, rose a great elm
which was three-quarters dead; almost directly facing it opens the Rue
de la Barrière des Gobelins, a street then without houses, unpaved,
planted with unhealthy trees, which was green or muddy according to the
season, and which ended squarely in the exterior wall of Paris. An odor
of copperas issued in puffs from the roofs of the neighboring factory.

The barrier was close at hand. In 1823 the city wall was still in
existence.

This barrier itself evoked gloomy fancies in the mind. It was the road
to Bicêtre. It was through it that, under the Empire and the
Restoration, prisoners condemned to death re-entered Paris on the day
of their execution. It was there, that, about 1829, was committed that
mysterious assassination, called “The assassination of the
Fontainebleau barrier,” whose authors justice was never able to
discover; a melancholy problem which has never been elucidated, a
frightful enigma which has never been unriddled. Take a few steps, and
you come upon that fatal Rue Croulebarbe, where Ulbach stabbed the
goat-girl of Ivry to the sound of thunder, as in the melodramas. A few
paces more, and you arrive at the abominable pollarded elms of the
Barrière Saint-Jacques, that expedient of the philanthropist to conceal
the scaffold, that miserable and shameful Place de Grève of a
shop-keeping and bourgeois society, which recoiled before the death
penalty, neither daring to abolish it with grandeur, nor to uphold it
with authority.

Leaving aside this Place Saint-Jacques, which was, as it were,
predestined, and which has always been horrible, probably the most
mournful spot on that mournful boulevard, seven and thirty years ago,
was the spot which even to-day is so unattractive, where stood the
building Number 50-52.

Bourgeois houses only began to spring up there twenty-five years later.
The place was unpleasant. In addition to the gloomy thoughts which
assailed one there, one was conscious of being between the Salpêtrière,
a glimpse of whose dome could be seen, and Bicêtre, whose outskirts one
was fairly touching; that is to say, between the madness of women and
the madness of men. As far as the eye could see, one could perceive
nothing but the abattoirs, the city wall, and the fronts of a few
factories, resembling barracks or monasteries; everywhere about stood
hovels, rubbish, ancient walls blackened like cerecloths, new white
walls like winding-sheets; everywhere parallel rows of trees, buildings
erected on a line, flat constructions, long, cold rows, and the
melancholy sadness of right angles. Not an unevenness of the ground,
not a caprice in the architecture, not a fold. The _ensemble_ was
glacial, regular, hideous. Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry.
It is because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of
grief. Despair yawns. Something more terrible than a hell where one
suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored. If such
a hell existed, that bit of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital might have
formed the entrance to it.

Nevertheless, at nightfall, at the moment when the daylight is
vanishing, especially in winter, at the hour when the twilight breeze
tears from the elms their last russet leaves, when the darkness is deep
and starless, or when the moon and the wind are making openings in the
clouds and losing themselves in the shadows, this boulevard suddenly
becomes frightful. The black lines sink inwards and are lost in the
shades, like morsels of the infinite. The passer-by cannot refrain from
recalling the innumerable traditions of the place which are connected
with the gibbet. The solitude of this spot, where so many crimes have
been committed, had something terrible about it. One almost had a
presentiment of meeting with traps in that darkness; all the confused
forms of the darkness seemed suspicious, and the long, hollow square,
of which one caught a glimpse between each tree, seemed graves: by day
it was ugly; in the evening melancholy; by night it was sinister.

In summer, at twilight, one saw, here and there, a few old women seated
at the foot of the elm, on benches mouldy with rain. These good old
women were fond of begging.

However, this quarter, which had a superannuated rather than an antique
air, was tending even then to transformation. Even at that time any one
who was desirous of seeing it had to make haste. Each day some detail
of the whole effect was disappearing. For the last twenty years the
station of the Orleans railway has stood beside the old faubourg and
distracted it, as it does to-day. Wherever it is placed on the borders
of a capital, a railway station is the death of a suburb and the birth
of a city. It seems as though, around these great centres of the
movements of a people, the earth, full of germs, trembled and yawned,
to engulf the ancient dwellings of men and to allow new ones to spring
forth, at the rattle of these powerful machines, at the breath of these
monstrous horses of civilization which devour coal and vomit fire. The
old houses crumble and new ones rise.

Since the Orleans railway has invaded the region of the Salpêtrière,
the ancient, narrow streets which adjoin the moats Saint-Victor and the
Jardin des Plantes tremble, as they are violently traversed three or
four times each day by those currents of coach fiacres and omnibuses
which, in a given time, crowd back the houses to the right and the
left; for there are things which are odd when said that are rigorously
exact; and just as it is true to say that in large cities the sun makes
the southern fronts of houses to vegetate and grow, it is certain that
the frequent passage of vehicles enlarges streets. The symptoms of a
new life are evident. In this old provincial quarter, in the wildest
nooks, the pavement shows itself, the sidewalks begin to crawl and to
grow longer, even where there are as yet no pedestrians. One morning,—a
memorable morning in July, 1845,—black pots of bitumen were seen
smoking there; on that day it might be said that civilization had
arrived in the Rue de l’Ourcine, and that Paris had entered the suburb
of Saint-Marceau.






It was in front of this Gorbeau house that Jean Valjean halted. Like
wild birds, he had chosen this desert place to construct his nest.

He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, drew out a sort of a pass-key,
opened the door, entered, closed it again carefully, and ascended the
staircase, still carrying Cosette.

At the top of the stairs he drew from his pocket another key, with
which he opened another door. The chamber which he entered, and which
he closed again instantly, was a kind of moderately spacious attic,
furnished with a mattress laid on the floor, a table, and several
chairs; a stove in which a fire was burning, and whose embers were
visible, stood in one corner. A lantern on the boulevard cast a vague
light into this poor room. At the extreme end there was a dressing-room
with a folding bed; Jean Valjean carried the child to this bed and laid
her down there without waking her.

He struck a match and lighted a candle. All this was prepared
beforehand on the table, and, as he had done on the previous evening,
he began to scrutinize Cosette’s face with a gaze full of ecstasy, in
which the expression of kindness and tenderness almost amounted to
aberration. 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 that child’s hand.

Nine months before he had kissed the hand of the mother, who had also
just fallen asleep.

The same sad, piercing, religious sentiment filled his heart.

He knelt beside Cosette’s bed.

lt was broad daylight, and the child still slept. A wan ray of the
December sun penetrated the window of the attic and lay upon the
ceiling in long threads of light and shade. All at once a heavily laden
carrier’s cart, which was passing along the boulevard, shook the frail
bed, like a clap of thunder, and made it quiver from top to bottom.

“Yes, madame!” cried Cosette, waking with a start, “here I am! here I
am!”


And she sprang out of bed, her eyes still half shut with the heaviness
of sleep, extending her arms towards the corner of the wall.

“Ah! mon Dieu, my broom!” said she.

She opened her eyes wide now, and beheld the smiling countenance of
Jean Valjean.

“Ah! so it is true!” said the child. “Good morning, Monsieur.”


Children accept joy and happiness instantly and familiarly, being
themselves by nature joy and happiness.

Cosette caught sight of Catherine at the foot of her bed, and took
possession of her, and, as she played, she put a hundred questions to
Jean Valjean. Where was she? Was Paris very large? Was Madame
Thénardier very far away? Was she to go back? etc., etc. All at once
she exclaimed, “How pretty it is here!”


It was a frightful hole, but she felt free.

“Must I sweep?” she resumed at last.

“Play!” said Jean Valjean.

The day passed thus. Cosette, without troubling herself to understand
anything, was inexpressibly happy with that doll and that kind man.






On the following morning, at daybreak, Jean Valjean was still by
Cosette’s bedside; he watched there motionless, waiting for her to
wake.

Some new thing had come into his soul.

Jean Valjean had never loved anything; for twenty-five years he had
been alone in the world. He had never been father, lover, husband,
friend. In the prison he had been vicious, gloomy, chaste, ignorant,
and shy. The heart of that ex-convict was full of virginity. His sister
and his sister’s children had left him only a vague and far-off memory
which had finally almost completely vanished; he had made every effort
to find them, and not having been able to find them, he had forgotten
them. Human nature is made thus; the other tender emotions of his
youth, if he had ever had any, had fallen into an abyss.

When he saw Cosette, when he had taken possession of her, carried her
off, and delivered her, he felt his heart moved within him.

All the passion and affection within him awoke, and rushed towards that
child. He approached the bed, where she lay sleeping, and trembled with
joy. He suffered all the pangs of a mother, and he knew not what it
meant; for that great and singular movement of a heart which begins to
love is a very obscure and a very sweet thing.

Poor old man, with a perfectly new heart!

Only, as he was five and fifty, and Cosette eight years of age, all
that might have been love in the whole course of his life flowed
together into a sort of ineffable light.

It was the second white apparition which he had encountered. The Bishop
had caused the dawn of virtue to rise on his horizon; Cosette caused
the dawn of love to rise.

The early days passed in this dazzled state.

Cosette, on her side, had also, unknown to herself, become another
being, poor little thing! She was so little when her mother left her,
that she no longer remembered her. Like all children, who resemble
young shoots of the vine, which cling to everything, she had tried to
love; she had not succeeded. All had repulsed her,—the Thénardiers,
their children, other children. She had loved the dog, and he had died,
after which nothing and nobody would have anything to do with her. It
is a sad thing to say, and we have already intimated it, that, at eight
years of age, her heart was cold. It was not her fault; it was not the
faculty of loving that she lacked; alas! it was the possibility. Thus,
from the very first day, all her sentient and thinking powers loved
this kind man. She felt that which she had never felt before—a
sensation of expansion.

The man no longer produced on her the effect of being old or poor; she
thought Jean Valjean handsome, just as she thought the hovel pretty.

These are the effects of the dawn, of childhood, of joy. The novelty of
the earth and of life counts for something here. Nothing is so charming
as the coloring reflection of happiness on a garret. We all have in our
past a delightful garret.

Nature, a difference of fifty years, had set a profound gulf between
Jean Valjean and Cosette; destiny filled in this gulf. Destiny suddenly
united and wedded with its irresistible power these two uprooted
existences, differing in age, alike in sorrow. 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 hands touched, they were welded together.
When these two souls perceived each other, they recognized each other
as necessary to each other, and embraced each other closely.

Taking the words in their most comprehensive and absolute sense, we may
say that, separated from every one by the walls of the tomb, Jean
Valjean was the widower, and Cosette was the orphan: this situation
caused Jean Valjean to become Cosette’s father after a celestial
fashion.

And in truth, the mysterious impression produced on Cosette in the
depths of the forest of Chelles by the hand of Jean Valjean grasping
hers in the dark was not an illusion, but a reality. The entrance of
that man into the destiny of that child had been the advent of God.

Moreover, Jean Valjean had chosen his refuge well. There he seemed
perfectly secure.

The chamber with a dressing-room, which he occupied with Cosette, was
the one whose window opened on the boulevard. This being the only
window in the house, no neighbors’ glances were to be feared from
across the way or at the side.

The ground floor of Number 50-52, a sort of dilapidated penthouse,
served as a wagon-house for market-gardeners, and no communication
existed between it and the first story. It was separated by the
flooring, which had neither traps nor stairs, and which formed the
diaphragm of the building, as it were. The first story contained, as we
have said, numerous chambers and several attics, only one of which was
occupied by the old woman who took charge of Jean Valjean’s
housekeeping; all the rest was uninhabited.

It was this old woman, ornamented with the name of the _principal
lodger_, and in reality intrusted with the functions of portress, who
had let him the lodging on Christmas eve. He had represented himself to
her as a gentleman of means who had been ruined by Spanish bonds, who
was coming there to live with his little daughter. He had paid her six
months in advance, and had commissioned the old woman to furnish the
chamber and dressing-room, as we have seen. It was this good woman who
had lighted the fire in the stove, and prepared everything on the
evening of their arrival.

Week followed week; these two beings led a happy life in that hovel.

Cosette laughed, chattered, and sang from daybreak. Children have their
morning song as well as birds.

It sometimes happened that Jean Valjean clasped her tiny red hand, all
cracked with chilblains, and kissed it. The poor child, who was used to
being beaten, did not know the meaning of this, and ran away in
confusion.

At times she became serious and stared at her little black gown.
Cosette was no longer in rags; she was in mourning. She had emerged
from misery, and she was entering into life.

Jean Valjean had undertaken to teach her to read. Sometimes, as he made
the child spell, he remembered that it was with the idea of doing evil
that he had learned to read in prison. This idea had ended in teaching
a child to read. Then the ex-convict smiled with the pensive smile of
the angels.

He felt in it a premeditation from on high, the will of some one who
was not man, and he became absorbed in reverie. Good thoughts have
their abysses as well as evil ones.

To teach Cosette to read, and to let her play, this constituted nearly
the whole of Jean Valjean’s existence. And then he talked of her
mother, and he made her pray.

She called him _father_, and knew no other name for him.

He passed hours in watching her dressing and undressing her doll, and
in listening to her prattle. Life, henceforth, appeared to him to be
full of interest; men seemed to him good and just; he no longer
reproached any one in thought; he saw no reason why he should not live
to be a very old man, now that this child loved him. He saw a whole
future stretching out before him, illuminated by Cosette as by a
charming light. The best of us are not exempt from egotistical
thoughts. At times, he reflected with a sort of joy that she would be
ugly.

This is only a personal opinion; but, to utter our whole thought, at
the point where Jean Valjean had arrived when he began to love Cosette,
it is by no means clear to us that he did not need this encouragement
in order that he might persevere in well-doing. He had just viewed the
malice of men and the misery of society under a new aspect—incomplete
aspects, which unfortunately only exhibited one side of the truth, the
fate of woman as summed up in Fantine, and public authority as
personified in Javert. He had returned to prison, this time for having
done right; he had quaffed fresh bitterness; disgust and lassitude were
overpowering him; even the memory of the Bishop probably suffered a
temporary eclipse, though sure to reappear later on luminous and
triumphant; but, after all, that sacred memory was growing dim. Who
knows whether Jean Valjean had not been on the eve of growing
discouraged and of falling once more? He loved and grew strong again.
Alas! he walked with no less indecision than Cosette. He protected her,
and she strengthened him. Thanks to him, she could walk through life;
thanks to her, he could continue in virtue. He was that child’s stay,
and she was his prop. Oh, unfathomable and divine mystery of the
balances of destiny!






Jean Valjean was prudent enough never to go out by day. Every evening,
at twilight, he walked for an hour or two, sometimes alone, often with
Cosette, seeking the most deserted side alleys of the boulevard, and
entering churches at nightfall. He liked to go to Saint-Médard, which
is the nearest church. When he did not take Cosette with him, she
remained with the old woman; but the child’s delight was to go out with
the good man. She preferred an hour with him to all her rapturous
_tête-à-têtes_ with Catherine. He held her hand as they walked, and
said sweet things to her.

It turned out that Cosette was a very gay little person.

The old woman attended to the housekeeping and cooking and went to
market.

They lived soberly, always having a little fire, but like people in
very moderate circumstances. Jean Valjean had made no alterations in
the furniture as it was the first day; he had merely had the glass door
leading to Cosette’s dressing-room replaced by a solid door.

He still wore his yellow coat, his black breeches, and his old hat. In
the street, he was taken for a poor man. It sometimes happened that
kind-hearted women turned back to bestow a sou on him. Jean Valjean
accepted the sou with a deep bow. It also happened occasionally that he
encountered some poor wretch asking alms; then he looked behind him to
make sure that no one was observing him, stealthily approached the
unfortunate man, put a piece of money into his hand, often a silver
coin, and walked rapidly away. This had its disadvantages. He began to
be known in the neighborhood under the name of _the beggar who gives
alms_.

The old _principal lodger_, a cross-looking creature, who was
thoroughly permeated, so far as her neighbors were concerned, with the
inquisitiveness peculiar to envious persons, scrutinized Jean Valjean a
great deal, without his suspecting the fact. She was a little deaf,
which rendered her talkative. There remained to her from her past, two
teeth,—one above, the other below,—which she was continually knocking
against each other. She had questioned Cosette, who had not been able
to tell her anything, since she knew nothing herself except that she
had come from Montfermeil. One morning, this spy saw Jean Valjean, with
an air which struck the old gossip as peculiar, entering one of the
uninhabited compartments of the hovel. She followed him with the step
of an old cat, and was able to observe him without being seen, through
a crack in the door, which was directly opposite him. Jean Valjean had
his back turned towards this door, by way of greater security, no
doubt. The old woman saw him fumble in his pocket and draw thence a
case, scissors, and thread; then he began to rip the lining of one of
the skirts of his coat, and from the opening he took a bit of yellowish
paper, which he unfolded. The old woman recognized, with terror, the
fact that it was a bank-bill for a thousand francs. It was the second
or third only that she had seen in the course of her existence. She
fled in alarm.

A moment later, Jean Valjean accosted her, and asked her to go and get
this thousand-franc bill changed for him, adding that it was his
quarterly income, which he had received the day before. “Where?”
thought the old woman. “He did not go out until six o’clock in the
evening, and the government bank certainly is not open at that hour.”
The old woman went to get the bill changed, and mentioned her surmises.
That thousand-franc note, commented on and multiplied, produced a vast
amount of terrified discussion among the gossips of the Rue des Vignes
Saint-Marcel.

A few days later, it chanced that Jean Valjean was sawing some wood, in
his shirt-sleeves, in the corridor. The old woman was in the chamber,
putting things in order. She was alone. Cosette was occupied in
admiring the wood as it was sawed. The old woman caught sight of the
coat hanging on a nail, and examined it. The lining had been sewed up
again. The good woman felt of it carefully, and thought she observed in
the skirts and revers thicknesses of paper. More thousand-franc
bank-bills, no doubt!

She also noticed that there were all sorts of things in the pockets.
Not only the needles, thread, and scissors which she had seen, but a
big pocket-book, a very large knife, and—a suspicious
circumstance—several wigs of various colors. Each pocket of this coat
had the air of being in a manner provided against unexpected accidents.

Thus the inhabitants of the house reached the last days of winter.






Near Saint-Médard’s church there was a poor man who was in the habit of
crouching on the brink of a public well which had been condemned, and
on whom Jean Valjean was fond of bestowing charity. He never passed
this man without giving him a few sous. Sometimes he spoke to him.
Those who envied this mendicant said that he belonged to the police. He
was an ex-beadle of seventy-five, who was constantly mumbling his
prayers.

One evening, as Jean Valjean was passing by, when he had not Cosette
with him, he saw the beggar in his usual place, beneath the lantern
which had just been lighted. The man seemed engaged in prayer,
according to his custom, and was much bent over. Jean Valjean stepped
up to him and placed his customary alms in his hand. The mendicant
raised his eyes suddenly, stared intently at Jean Valjean, then dropped
his head quickly. This movement was like a flash of lightning. Jean
Valjean was seized with a shudder. It seemed to him that he had just
caught sight, by the light of the street lantern, not of the placid and
beaming visage of the old beadle, but of a well-known and startling
face. He experienced the same impression that one would have on finding
one’s self, all of a sudden, face to face, in the dark, with a tiger.
He recoiled, terrified, petrified, daring neither to breathe, to speak,
to remain, nor to flee, staring at the beggar who had dropped his head,
which was enveloped in a rag, and no longer appeared to know that he
was there. At this strange moment, an instinct—possibly the mysterious
instinct of self-preservation,—restrained Jean Valjean from uttering a
word. The beggar had the same figure, the same rags, the same
appearance as he had every day. “Bah!” said Jean Valjean, “I am mad! I
am dreaming! Impossible!” And he returned profoundly troubled.

He hardly dared to confess, even to himself, that the face which he
thought he had seen was the face of Javert.

That night, on thinking the matter over, he regretted not having
questioned the man, in order to force him to raise his head a second
time.

On the following day, at nightfall, he went back. The beggar was at his
post. “Good day, my good man,” said Jean Valjean, resolutely, handing
him a sou. The beggar raised his head, and replied in a whining voice,
“Thanks, my good sir.” It was unmistakably the ex-beadle.

Jean Valjean felt completely reassured. He began to laugh. “How the
deuce could I have thought that I saw Javert there?” he thought. “Am I
going to lose my eyesight now?” And he thought no more about it.

A few days afterwards,—it might have been at eight o’clock in the
evening,—he was in his room, and engaged in making Cosette spell aloud,
when he heard the house door open and then shut again. This struck him
as singular. The old woman, who was the only inhabitant of the house
except himself, always went to bed at nightfall, so that she might not
burn out her candles. Jean Valjean made a sign to Cosette to be quiet.
He heard some one ascending the stairs. It might possibly be the old
woman, who might have fallen ill and have been out to the apothecary’s.
Jean Valjean listened.

The step was heavy, and sounded like that of a man; but the old woman
wore stout shoes, and there is nothing which so strongly resembles the
step of a man as that of an old woman. Nevertheless, Jean Valjean blew
out his candle.

He had sent Cosette to bed, saying to her in a low voice, “Get into bed
very softly”; and as he kissed her brow, the steps paused.

Jean Valjean remained silent, motionless, with his back towards the
door, seated on the chair from which he had not stirred, and holding
his breath in the dark.

After the expiration of a rather long interval, he turned round, as he
heard nothing more, and, as he raised his eyes towards the door of his
chamber, he saw a light through the keyhole. This light formed a sort
of sinister star in the blackness of the door and the wall. There was
evidently some one there, who was holding a candle in his hand and
listening.

Several minutes elapsed thus, and the light retreated. But he heard no
sound of footsteps, which seemed to indicate that the person who had
been listening at the door had removed his shoes.

Jean Valjean threw himself, all dressed as he was, on his bed, and
could not close his eyes all night.

At daybreak, just as he was falling into a doze through fatigue, he was
awakened by the creaking of a door which opened on some attic at the
end of the corridor, then he heard the same masculine footstep which
had ascended the stairs on the preceding evening. The step was
approaching. He sprang off the bed and applied his eye to the keyhole,
which was tolerably large, hoping to see the person who had made his
way by night into the house and had listened at his door, as he passed.
It was a man, in fact, who passed, this time without pausing, in front
of Jean Valjean’s chamber. The corridor was too dark to allow of the
person’s face being distinguished; but when the man reached the
staircase, a ray of light from without made it stand out like a
silhouette, and Jean Valjean had a complete view of his back. The man
was of lofty stature, clad in a long frock-coat, with a cudgel under
his arm. The formidable neck and shoulders belonged to Javert.

Jean Valjean might have attempted to catch another glimpse of him
through his window opening on the boulevard, but he would have been
obliged to open the window: he dared not.

It was evident that this man had entered with a key, and like himself.
Who had given him that key? What was the meaning of this?

When the old woman came to do the work, at seven o’clock in the
morning, Jean Valjean cast a penetrating glance on her, but he did not
question her. The good woman appeared as usual.

As she swept up she remarked to him:—

“Possibly Monsieur may have heard some one come in last night?”


At that age, and on that boulevard, eight o’clock in the evening was
the dead of the night.

“That is true, by the way,” he replied, in the most natural tone
possible. “Who was it?”


“It was a new lodger who has come into the house,” said the old woman.

“And what is his name?”


“I don’t know exactly; Dumont, or Daumont, or some name of that sort.”


“And who is this Monsieur Dumont?”


The old woman gazed at him with her little polecat eyes, and answered:—

“A gentleman of property, like yourself.”


Perhaps she had no ulterior meaning. Jean Valjean thought he perceived
one.

When the old woman had taken her departure, he did up a hundred francs
which he had in a cupboard, into a roll, and put it in his pocket. In
spite of all the precautions which he took in this operation so that he
might not be heard rattling silver, a hundred-sou piece escaped from
his hands and rolled noisily on the floor.

When darkness came on, he descended and carefully scrutinized both
sides of the boulevard. He saw no one. The boulevard appeared to be
absolutely deserted. It is true that a person can conceal himself
behind trees.

He went upstairs again.

“Come.” he said to Cosette.

He took her by the hand, and they both went out.




