





About the middle of the last century, a chief justice in the Parliament
of Paris having a mistress and concealing the fact, for at that period
the grand seignors displayed their mistresses, and the bourgeois
concealed them, had “a little house” built in the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, in the deserted Rue Blomet, which is now called Rue
Plumet, not far from the spot which was then designated as _Combat des
Animaux_.

This house was composed of a single-storied pavilion; two rooms on the
ground floor, two chambers on the first floor, a kitchen downstairs, a
boudoir upstairs, an attic under the roof, the whole preceded by a
garden with a large gate opening on the street. This garden was about
an acre and a half in extent. This was all that could be seen by
passers-by; but behind the pavilion there was a narrow courtyard, and
at the end of the courtyard a low building consisting of two rooms and
a cellar, a sort of preparation destined to conceal a child and nurse
in case of need. This building communicated in the rear by a masked
door which opened by a secret spring, with a long, narrow, paved
winding corridor, open to the sky, hemmed in with two lofty walls,
which, hidden with wonderful art, and lost as it were between garden
enclosures and cultivated land, all of whose angles and detours it
followed, ended in another door, also with a secret lock which opened a
quarter of a league away, almost in another quarter, at the solitary
extremity of the Rue du Babylone.

Through this the chief justice entered, so that even those who were
spying on him and following him would merely have observed that the
justice betook himself every day in a mysterious way somewhere, and
would never have suspected that to go to the Rue de Babylone was to go
to the Rue Blomet. Thanks to clever purchasers of land, the magistrate
had been able to make a secret, sewer-like passage on his own property,
and consequently, without interference. Later on, he had sold in little
parcels, for gardens and market gardens, the lots of ground adjoining
the corridor, and the proprietors of these lots on both sides thought
they had a party wall before their eyes, and did not even suspect the
long, paved ribbon winding between two walls amid their flower-beds and
their orchards. Only the birds beheld this curiosity. It is probable
that the linnets and tomtits of the last century gossiped a great deal
about the chief justice.

The pavilion, built of stone in the taste of Mansard, wainscoted and
furnished in the Watteau style, rocaille on the inside, old-fashioned
on the outside, walled in with a triple hedge of flowers, had something
discreet, coquettish, and solemn about it, as befits a caprice of love
and magistracy.

This house and corridor, which have now disappeared, were in existence
fifteen years ago. In ’93 a coppersmith had purchased the house with
the idea of demolishing it, but had not been able to pay the price; the
nation made him bankrupt. So that it was the house which demolished the
coppersmith. After that, the house remained uninhabited, and fell
slowly to ruin, as does every dwelling to which the presence of man
does not communicate life. It had remained fitted with its old
furniture, was always for sale or to let, and the ten or a dozen people
who passed through the Rue Plumet were warned of the fact by a yellow
and illegible bit of writing which had hung on the garden wall since
1819.

Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers-by might have
noticed that the bill had disappeared, and even that the shutters on
the first floor were open. The house was occupied, in fact. The windows
had short curtains, a sign that there was a woman about.

In the month of October, 1829, a man of a certain age had presented
himself and had hired the house just as it stood, including, of course,
the back building and the lane which ended in the Rue de Babylone. He
had had the secret openings of the two doors to this passage repaired.
The house, as we have just mentioned, was still very nearly furnished
with the justice’s old fitting; the new tenant had ordered some
repairs, had added what was lacking here and there, had replaced the
paving-stones in the yard, bricks in the floors, steps in the stairs,
missing bits in the inlaid floors and the glass in the lattice windows,
and had finally installed himself there with a young girl and an
elderly maid-servant, without commotion, rather like a person who is
slipping in than like a man who is entering his own house. The
neighbors did not gossip about him, for the reason that there were no
neighbors.

This unobtrusive tenant was Jean Valjean, the young girl was Cosette.
The servant was a woman named Toussaint, whom Jean Valjean had saved
from the hospital and from wretchedness, and who was elderly, a
stammerer, and from the provinces, three qualities which had decided
Jean Valjean to take her with him. He had hired the house under the
name of M. Fauchelevent, independent gentleman. In all that has been
related heretofore, the reader has, doubtless, been no less prompt than
Thénardier to recognize Jean Valjean.

Why had Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Petit-Picpus? What had
happened?

Nothing had happened.

It will be remembered that Jean Valjean was happy in the convent, so
happy that his conscience finally took the alarm. He saw Cosette every
day, he felt paternity spring up and develop within him more and more,
he brooded over the soul of that child, he said to himself that she was
his, that nothing could take her from him, that this would last
indefinitely, that she would certainly become a nun, being thereto
gently incited every day, that thus the convent was henceforth the
universe for her as it was for him, that he should grow old there, and
that she would grow up there, that she would grow old there, and that
he should die there; that, in short, delightful hope, no separation was
possible. On reflecting upon this, he fell into perplexity. He
interrogated himself. He asked himself if all that happiness were
really his, if it were not composed of the happiness of another, of the
happiness of that child which he, an old man, was confiscating and
stealing; if that were not theft? He said to himself, that this child
had a right to know life before renouncing it, that to deprive her in
advance, and in some sort without consulting her, of all joys, under
the pretext of saving her from all trials, to take advantage of her
ignorance of her isolation, in order to make an artificial vocation
germinate in her, was to rob a human creature of its nature and to lie
to God. And who knows if, when she came to be aware of all this some
day, and found herself a nun to her sorrow, Cosette would not come to
hate him? A last, almost selfish thought, and less heroic than the
rest, but which was intolerable to him. He resolved to quit the
convent.

He resolved on this; he recognized with anguish, the fact that it was
necessary. As for objections, there were none. Five years’ sojourn
between these four walls and of disappearance had necessarily destroyed
or dispersed the elements of fear. He could return tranquilly among
men. He had grown old, and all had undergone a change. Who would
recognize him now? And then, to face the worst, there was danger only
for himself, and he had no right to condemn Cosette to the cloister for
the reason that he had been condemned to the galleys. Besides, what is
danger in comparison with the right? Finally, nothing prevented his
being prudent and taking his precautions.

As for Cosette’s education, it was almost finished and complete.

His determination once taken, he awaited an opportunity. It was not
long in presenting itself. Old Fauchelevent died.

Jean Valjean demanded an audience with the revered prioress and told
her that, having come into a little inheritance at the death of his
brother, which permitted him henceforth to live without working, he
should leave the service of the convent and take his daughter with him;
but that, as it was not just that Cosette, since she had not taken the
vows, should have received her education gratuitously, he humbly begged
the Reverend Prioress to see fit that he should offer to the community,
as indemnity, for the five years which Cosette had spent there, the sum
of five thousand francs.

It was thus that Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Perpetual
Adoration.

On leaving the convent, he took in his own arms the little valise the
key to which he still wore on his person, and would permit no porter to
touch it. This puzzled Cosette, because of the odor of embalming which
proceeded from it.

Let us state at once, that this trunk never quitted him more. He always
had it in his chamber. It was the first and only thing sometimes, that
he carried off in his moving when he moved about. Cosette laughed at
it, and called this valise his _inseparable_, saying: “I am jealous of
it.”


Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not reappear in the open air without
profound anxiety.

He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet, and hid himself from sight
there. Henceforth he was in the possession of the name:—Ultime
Fauchelevent.

At the same time he hired two other apartments in Paris, in order that
he might attract less attention than if he were to remain always in the
same quarter, and so that he could, at need, take himself off at the
slightest disquietude which should assail him, and in short, so that he
might not again be caught unprovided as on the night when he had so
miraculously escaped from Javert. These two apartments were very
pitiable, poor in appearance, and in two quarters which were far remote
from each other, the one in the Rue de l’Ouest, the other in the Rue de
l’Homme Armé.

He went from time to time, now to the Rue de l’Homme Armé, now to the
Rue de l’Ouest, to pass a month or six weeks, without taking Toussaint.
He had himself served by the porters, and gave himself out as a
gentleman from the suburbs, living on his funds, and having a little
temporary resting-place in town. This lofty virtue had three domiciles
in Paris for the sake of escaping from the police.






However, properly speaking, he lived in the Rue Plumet, and he had
arranged his existence there in the following fashion:—

Cosette and the servant occupied the pavilion; she had the big
sleeping-room with the painted pier-glasses, the boudoir with the
gilded fillets, the justice’s drawing-room furnished with tapestries
and vast armchairs; she had the garden. Jean Valjean had a canopied bed
of antique damask in three colors and a beautiful Persian rug purchased
in the Rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul at Mother Gaucher’s, put into
Cosette’s chamber, and, in order to redeem the severity of these
magnificent old things, he had amalgamated with this bric-à-brac all
the gay and graceful little pieces of furniture suitable to young
girls, an étagère, a bookcase filled with gilt-edged books, an
inkstand, a blotting-book, paper, a work-table incrusted with mother of
pearl, a silver-gilt dressing-case, a toilet service in Japanese
porcelain. Long damask curtains with a red foundation and three colors,
like those on the bed, hung at the windows of the first floor. On the
ground floor, the curtains were of tapestry. All winter long, Cosette’s
little house was heated from top to bottom. Jean Valjean inhabited the
sort of porter’s lodge which was situated at the end of the back
courtyard, with a mattress on a folding-bed, a white wood table, two
straw chairs, an earthenware water-jug, a few old volumes on a shelf,
his beloved valise in one corner, and never any fire. He dined with
Cosette, and he had a loaf of black bread on the table for his own use.

When Toussaint came, he had said to her: “It is the young lady who is
the mistress of this house.”—“And you, monsieur?” Toussaint replied in
amazement.—“I am a much better thing than the master, I am the father.”


Cosette had been taught housekeeping in the convent, and she regulated
their expenditure, which was very modest. Every day, Jean Valjean put
his arm through Cosette’s and took her for a walk. He led her to the
Luxembourg, to the least frequented walk, and every Sunday he took her
to mass at Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, because that was a long way off.
As it was a very poor quarter, he bestowed alms largely there, and the
poor people surrounded him in church, which had drawn down upon him
Thénardier’s epistle: “To the benevolent gentleman of the church of
Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.” He was fond of taking Cosette to visit the
poor and the sick. No stranger ever entered the house in the Rue
Plumet. Toussaint brought their provisions, and Jean Valjean went
himself for water to a fountain nearby on the boulevard. Their wood and
wine were put into a half-subterranean hollow lined with rock-work
which lay near the Rue de Babylone and which had formerly served the
chief-justice as a grotto; for at the epoch of follies and “Little
Houses” no love was without a grotto.

In the door opening on the Rue de Babylone, there was a box destined
for the reception of letters and papers; only, as the three inhabitants
of the pavilion in the Rue Plumet received neither papers nor letters,
the entire usefulness of that box, formerly the go-between of a love
affair, and the confidant of a love-lorn lawyer, was now limited to the
tax-collector’s notices, and the summons of the guard. For M.
Fauchelevent, independent gentleman, belonged to the national guard; he
had not been able to escape through the fine meshes of the census of
1831. The municipal information collected at that time had even reached
the convent of the Petit-Picpus, a sort of impenetrable and holy cloud,
whence Jean Valjean had emerged in venerable guise, and, consequently,
worthy of mounting guard in the eyes of the town-hall.

Three or four times a year, Jean Valjean donned his uniform and mounted
guard; he did this willingly, however; it was a correct disguise which
mixed him with every one, and yet left him solitary. Jean Valjean had
just attained his sixtieth birthday, the age of legal exemption; but he
did not appear to be over fifty; moreover, he had no desire to escape
his sergeant-major nor to quibble with Comte de Lobau; he possessed no
civil status, he was concealing his name, he was concealing his
identity, so he concealed his age, he concealed everything; and, as we
have just said, he willingly did his duty as a national guard; the sum
of his ambition lay in resembling any other man who paid his taxes.
This man had for his ideal, within, the angel, without, the bourgeois.

Let us note one detail, however; when Jean Valjean went out with
Cosette, he dressed as the reader has already seen, and had the air of
a retired officer. When he went out alone, which was generally at
night, he was always dressed in a workingman’s trousers and blouse, and
wore a cap which concealed his face. Was this precaution or humility?
Both. Cosette was accustomed to the enigmatical side of her destiny,
and hardly noticed her father’s peculiarities. As for Toussaint, she
venerated Jean Valjean, and thought everything he did right.

One day, her butcher, who had caught a glimpse of Jean Valjean, said to
her: “That’s a queer fish.” She replied: “He’s a saint.”


Neither Jean Valjean nor Cosette nor Toussaint ever entered or emerged
except by the door on the Rue de Babylone. Unless seen through the
garden gate it would have been difficult to guess that they lived in
the Rue Plumet. That gate was always closed. Jean Valjean had left the
garden uncultivated, in order not to attract attention.

In this, possibly, he made a mistake.






The garden thus left to itself for more than half a century had become
extraordinary and charming. The passers-by of forty years ago halted to
gaze at it, without a suspicion of the secrets which it hid in its
fresh and verdant depths. More than one dreamer of that epoch often
allowed his thoughts and his eyes to penetrate indiscreetly between the
bars of that ancient, padlocked gate, twisted, tottering, fastened to
two green and moss-covered pillars, and oddly crowned with a pediment
of undecipherable arabesque.

There was a stone bench in one corner, one or two mouldy statues,
several lattices which had lost their nails with time, were rotting on
the wall, and there were no walks nor turf; but there was enough grass
everywhere. Gardening had taken its departure, and nature had returned.
Weeds abounded, which was a great piece of luck for a poor corner of
land. The festival of gilliflowers was something splendid. Nothing in
this garden obstructed the sacred effort of things towards life;
venerable growth reigned there among them. The trees had bent over
towards the nettles, the plant had sprung upward, the branch had
inclined, that which crawls on the earth had gone in search of that
which expands in the air, that which floats on the wind had bent over
towards that which trails in the moss; trunks, boughs, leaves, fibres,
clusters, tendrils, shoots, spines, thorns, had mingled, crossed,
married, confounded themselves in each other; vegetation in a deep and
close embrace, had celebrated and accomplished there, under the
well-pleased eye of the Creator, in that enclosure three hundred feet
square, the holy mystery of fraternity, symbol of the human fraternity.
This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket, that is
to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as peopled as a city,
quivering like a nest, sombre like a cathedral, fragrant like a
bouquet, solitary as a tomb, living as a throng.

In Floréal34 this enormous thicket, free behind its gate and within its
four walls, entered upon the secret labor of germination, quivered in
the rising sun, almost like an animal which drinks in the breaths of
cosmic love, and which feels the sap of April rising and boiling in its
veins, and shakes to the wind its enormous wonderful green locks,
sprinkled on the damp earth, on the defaced statues, on the crumbling
steps of the pavilion, and even on the pavement of the deserted street,
flowers like stars, dew like pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy,
perfumes. At midday, a thousand white butterflies took refuge there,
and it was a divine spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling
about there in flakes amid the shade. There, in those gay shadows of
verdure, a throng of innocent voices spoke sweetly to the soul, and
what the twittering forgot to say the humming completed. In the
evening, a dreamy vapor exhaled from the garden and enveloped it; a
shroud of mist, a calm and celestial sadness covered it; the
intoxicating perfume of the honeysuckles and convolvulus poured out
from every part of it, like an exquisite and subtle poison; the last
appeals of the woodpeckers and the wagtails were audible as they dozed
among the branches; one felt the sacred intimacy of the birds and the
trees; by day the wings rejoice the leaves, by night the leaves protect
the wings.

In winter the thicket was black, dripping, bristling, shivering, and
allowed some glimpse of the house. Instead of flowers on the branches
and dew in the flowers, the long silvery tracks of the snails were
visible on the cold, thick carpet of yellow leaves; but in any fashion,
under any aspect, at all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn, this
tiny enclosure breathed forth melancholy, contemplation, solitude,
liberty, the absence of man, the presence of God; and the rusty old
gate had the air of saying: “This garden belongs to me.”


It was of no avail that the pavements of Paris were there on every
side, the classic and splendid hotels of the Rue de Varennes a couple
of paces away, the dome of the Invalides close at hand, the Chamber of
Deputies not far off; the carriages of the Rue de Bourgogne and of the
Rue Saint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously, in vain, in the vicinity, in
vain did the yellow, brown, white, and red omnibuses cross each other’s
course at the neighboring crossroads; the Rue Plumet was the desert;
and the death of the former proprietors, the revolution which had
passed over it, the crumbling away of ancient fortunes, absence,
forgetfulness, forty years of abandonment and widowhood, had sufficed
to restore to this privileged spot ferns, mulleins, hemlock, yarrow,
tall weeds, great crimped plants, with large leaves of pale green
cloth, lizards, beetles, uneasy and rapid insects; to cause to spring
forth from the depths of the earth and to reappear between those four
walls a certain indescribable and savage grandeur; and for nature,
which disconcerts the petty arrangements of man, and which sheds
herself always thoroughly where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant
as well as in the eagle, to blossom out in a petty little Parisian
garden with as much rude force and majesty as in a virgin forest of the
New World.

Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound and
penetrating influence of nature knows this. Although no absolute
satisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe the cause
or to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into those unfathomable
ecstasies caused by these decompositions of force terminating in unity.
Everything toils at everything.

Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profits the
rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of the
hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the
course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not
determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal ebb
and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, the
reverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanches
of creation? The tiniest worm is of importance; the great is little,
the little is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming
vision for the mind. There are marvellous relations between beings and
things; in that inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing
despises the other; all have need of each other. The light does not
bear away terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing
what it is doing; the night distributes stellar essences to the
sleeping flowers. All birds that fly have round their leg the thread of
the infinite. Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a
meteor and with the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places
on one level the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates.
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two
possesses the larger field of vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a
pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars. The same
promiscuousness, and yet more unprecedented, exists between the things
of the intelligence and the facts of substance. Elements and principles
mingle, combine, wed, multiply with each other, to such a point that
the material and the moral world are brought eventually to the same
clearness. The phenomenon is perpetually returning upon itself. In the
vast cosmic exchanges the universal life goes and comes in unknown
quantities, rolling entirely in the invisible mystery of effluvia,
employing everything, not losing a single dream, not a single slumber,
sowing an animalcule here, crumbling to bits a planet there,
oscillating and winding, making of light a force and of thought an
element, disseminated and invisible, dissolving all, except that
geometrical point, the _I_; bringing everything back to the soul-atom;
expanding everything in God, entangling all activity, from summit to
base, in the obscurity of a dizzy mechanism, attaching the flight of an
insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating, who knows? Were it
only by the identity of the law, the evolution of the comet in the
firmament to the whirling of the infusoria in the drop of water. A
machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, the prime motor of which is the
gnat, and whose final wheel is the zodiac.






It seemed that this garden, created in olden days to conceal wanton
mysteries, had been transformed and become fitted to shelter chaste
mysteries. There were no longer either arbors, or bowling greens, or
tunnels, or grottos; there was a magnificent, dishevelled obscurity
falling like a veil over all. Paphos had been made over into Eden. It
is impossible to say what element of repentance had rendered this
retreat wholesome. This flower-girl now offered her blossom to the
soul. This coquettish garden, formerly decidedly compromised, had
returned to virginity and modesty. A justice assisted by a gardener, a
goodman who thought that he was a continuation of Lamoignon, and
another goodman who thought that he was a continuation of Lenôtre, had
turned it about, cut, ruffled, decked, moulded it to gallantry; nature
had taken possession of it once more, had filled it with shade, and had
arranged it for love.

There was, also, in this solitude, a heart which was quite ready. Love
had only to show himself; he had here a temple composed of verdure,
grass, moss, the sight of birds, tender shadows, agitated branches, and
a soul made of sweetness, of faith, of candor, of hope, of aspiration,
and of illusion.

Cosette had left the convent when she was still almost a child; she was
a little more than fourteen, and she was at the “ungrateful age”; we
have already said, that with the exception of her eyes, she was homely
rather than pretty; she had no ungraceful feature, but she was awkward,
thin, timid and bold at once, a grown-up little girl, in short.

Her education was finished, that is to say, she has been taught
religion, and even and above all, devotion; then “history,” that is to
say the thing that bears that name in convents, geography, grammar, the
participles, the kings of France, a little music, a little drawing,
etc.; but in all other respects she was utterly ignorant, which is a
great charm and a great peril. The soul of a young girl should not be
left in the dark; later on, mirages that are too abrupt and too lively
are formed there, as in a dark chamber. She should be gently and
discreetly enlightened, rather with the reflection of realities than
with their harsh and direct light. A useful and graciously austere
half-light which dissipates puerile fears and obviates falls. There is
nothing but the maternal instinct, that admirable intuition composed of
the memories of the virgin and the experience of the woman, which knows
how this half-light is to be created and of what it should consist.

Nothing supplies the place of this instinct. All the nuns in the world
are not worth as much as one mother in the formation of a young girl’s
soul.

Cosette had had no mother. She had only had many mothers, in the
plural.

As for Jean Valjean, he was, indeed, all tenderness, all solicitude;
but he was only an old man and he knew nothing at all.

Now, in this work of education, in this grave matter of preparing a
woman for life, what science is required to combat that vast ignorance
which is called innocence!

Nothing prepares a young girl for passions like the convent. The
convent turns the thoughts in the direction of the unknown. The heart,
thus thrown back upon itself, works downward within itself, since it
cannot overflow, and grows deep, since it cannot expand. Hence visions,
suppositions, conjectures, outlines of romances, a desire for
adventures, fantastic constructions, edifices built wholly in the inner
obscurity of the mind, sombre and secret abodes where the passions
immediately find a lodgement as soon as the open gate permits them to
enter. The convent is a compression which, in order to triumph over the
human heart, should last during the whole life.

On quitting the convent, Cosette could have found nothing more sweet
and more dangerous than the house in the Rue Plumet. It was the
continuation of solitude with the beginning of liberty; a garden that
was closed, but a nature that was acrid, rich, voluptuous, and
fragrant; the same dreams as in the convent, but with glimpses of young
men; a grating, but one that opened on the street.

Still, when she arrived there, we repeat, she was only a child. Jean
Valjean gave this neglected garden over to her. “Do what you like with
it,” he said to her. This amused Cosette; she turned over all the
clumps and all the stones, she hunted for “beasts”; she played in it,
while awaiting the time when she would dream in it; she loved this
garden for the insects that she found beneath her feet amid the grass,
while awaiting the day when she would love it for the stars that she
would see through the boughs above her head.

And then, she loved her father, that is to say, Jean Valjean, with all
her soul, with an innocent filial passion which made the goodman a
beloved and charming companion to her. It will be remembered that M.
Madeleine had been in the habit of reading a great deal. Jean Valjean
had continued this practice; he had come to converse well; he possessed
the secret riches and the eloquence of a true and humble mind which has
spontaneously cultivated itself. He retained just enough sharpness to
season his kindness; his mind was rough and his heart was soft. During
their conversations in the Luxembourg, he gave her explanations of
everything, drawing on what he had read, and also on what he had
suffered. As she listened to him, Cosette’s eyes wandered vaguely
about.

This simple man sufficed for Cosette’s thought, the same as the wild
garden sufficed for her eyes. When she had had a good chase after the
butterflies, she came panting up to him and said: “Ah! How I have run!”
He kissed her brow.

Cosette adored the goodman. She was always at his heels. Where Jean
Valjean was, there happiness was. Jean Valjean lived neither in the
pavilion nor the garden; she took greater pleasure in the paved back
courtyard, than in the enclosure filled with flowers, and in his little
lodge furnished with straw-seated chairs than in the great drawing-room
hung with tapestry, against which stood tufted easy-chairs. Jean
Valjean sometimes said to her, smiling at his happiness in being
importuned: “Do go to your own quarters! Leave me alone a little!”


She gave him those charming and tender scoldings which are so graceful
when they come from a daughter to her father.

“Father, I am very cold in your rooms; why don’t you have a carpet here
and a stove?”


“Dear child, there are so many people who are better than I and who
have not even a roof over their heads.”


“Then why is there a fire in my rooms, and everything that is needed?”


“Because you are a woman and a child.”


“Bah! must men be cold and feel uncomfortable?”


“Certain men.”


“That is good, I shall come here so often that you will be obliged to
have a fire.”


And again she said to him:—

“Father, why do you eat horrible bread like that?”


“Because, my daughter.”


“Well, if you eat it, I will eat it too.”


Then, in order to prevent Cosette eating black bread, Jean Valjean ate
white bread.

Cosette had but a confused recollection of her childhood. She prayed
morning and evening for her mother whom she had never known. The
Thénardiers had remained with her as two hideous figures in a dream.
She remembered that she had gone “one day, at night,” to fetch water in
a forest. She thought that it had been very far from Paris. It seemed
to her that she had begun to live in an abyss, and that it was Jean
Valjean who had rescued her from it. Her childhood produced upon her
the effect of a time when there had been nothing around her but
millepeds, spiders, and serpents. When she meditated in the evening,
before falling asleep, as she had not a very clear idea that she was
Jean Valjean’s daughter, and that he was her father, she fancied that
the soul of her mother had passed into that good man and had come to
dwell near her.

When he was seated, she leaned her cheek against his white hair, and
dropped a silent tear, saying to herself: “Perhaps this man is my
mother.”


Cosette, although this is a strange statement to make, in the profound
ignorance of a girl brought up in a convent,—maternity being also
absolutely unintelligible to virginity,—had ended by fancying that she
had had as little mother as possible. She did not even know her
mother’s name. Whenever she asked Jean Valjean, Jean Valjean remained
silent. If she repeated her question, he responded with a smile. Once
she insisted; the smile ended in a tear.

This silence on the part of Jean Valjean covered Fantine with darkness.

Was it prudence? Was it respect? Was it a fear that he should deliver
this name to the hazards of another memory than his own?

So long as Cosette had been small, Jean Valjean had been willing to
talk to her of her mother; when she became a young girl, it was
impossible for him to do so. It seemed to him that he no longer dared.
Was it because of Cosette? Was it because of Fantine? He felt a certain
religious horror at letting that shadow enter Cosette’s thought; and of
placing a third in their destiny. The more sacred this shade was to
him, the more did it seem that it was to be feared. He thought of
Fantine, and felt himself overwhelmed with silence.

Through the darkness, he vaguely perceived something which appeared to
have its finger on its lips. Had all the modesty which had been in
Fantine, and which had violently quitted her during her lifetime,
returned to rest upon her after her death, to watch in indignation over
the peace of that dead woman, and in its shyness, to keep her in her
grave? Was Jean Valjean unconsciously submitting to the pressure? We
who believe in death, are not among the number who will reject this
mysterious explanation.

Hence the impossibility of uttering, even for Cosette, that name of
Fantine.

One day Cosette said to him:—

“Father, I saw my mother in a dream last night. She had two big wings.
My mother must have been almost a saint during her life.”


“Through martyrdom,” replied Jean Valjean.

However, Jean Valjean was happy.

When Cosette went out with him, she leaned on his arm, proud and happy,
in the plenitude of her heart. Jean Valjean felt his heart melt within
him with delight, at all these sparks of a tenderness so exclusive, so
wholly satisfied with himself alone. The poor man trembled, inundated
with angelic joy; he declared to himself ecstatically that this would
last all their lives; he told himself that he really had not suffered
sufficiently to merit so radiant a bliss, and he thanked God, in the
depths of his soul, for having permitted him to be loved thus, he, a
wretch, by that innocent being.






One day, Cosette chanced to look at herself in her mirror, and she said
to herself: “Really!” It seemed to her almost that she was pretty. This
threw her in a singularly troubled state of mind. Up to that moment she
had never thought of her face. She saw herself in her mirror, but she
did not look at herself. And then, she had so often been told that she
was homely; Jean Valjean alone said gently: “No indeed! no indeed!” At
all events, Cosette had always thought herself homely, and had grown up
in that belief with the easy resignation of childhood. And here, all at
once, was her mirror saying to her, as Jean Valjean had said: “No
indeed!” That night, she did not sleep. “What if I were pretty!” she
thought. “How odd it would be if I were pretty!” And she recalled those
of her companions whose beauty had produced a sensation in the convent,
and she said to herself: “What! Am I to be like Mademoiselle
So-and-So?”


The next morning she looked at herself again, not by accident this
time, and she was assailed with doubts: “Where did I get such an idea?”
said she; “no, I am ugly.” She had not slept well, that was all, her
eyes were sunken and she was pale. She had not felt very joyous on the
preceding evening in the belief that she was beautiful, but it made her
very sad not to be able to believe in it any longer. She did not look
at herself again, and for more than a fortnight she tried to dress her
hair with her back turned to the mirror.

In the evening, after dinner, she generally embroidered in wool or did
some convent needlework in the drawing-room, and Jean Valjean read
beside her. Once she raised her eyes from her work, and was rendered
quite uneasy by the manner in which her father was gazing at her.

On another occasion, she was passing along the street, and it seemed to
her that some one behind her, whom she did not see, said: “A pretty
woman! but badly dressed.” “Bah!” she thought, “he does not mean me. I
am well dressed and ugly.” She was then wearing a plush hat and her
merino gown.

At last, one day when she was in the garden, she heard poor old
Toussaint saying: “Do you notice how pretty Cosette is growing, sir?”
Cosette did not hear her father’s reply, but Toussaint’s words caused a
sort of commotion within her. She fled from the garden, ran up to her
room, flew to the looking-glass,—it was three months since she had
looked at herself,—and gave vent to a cry. She had just dazzled
herself.

She was beautiful and lovely; she could not help agreeing with
Toussaint and her mirror. Her figure was formed, her skin had grown
white, her hair was lustrous, an unaccustomed splendor had been lighted
in her blue eyes. The consciousness of her beauty burst upon her in an
instant, like the sudden advent of daylight; other people noticed it
also, Toussaint had said so, it was evidently she of whom the passer-by
had spoken, there could no longer be any doubt of that; she descended
to the garden again, thinking herself a queen, imagining that she heard
the birds singing, though it was winter, seeing the sky gilded, the sun
among the trees, flowers in the thickets, distracted, wild, in
inexpressible delight.

Jean Valjean, on his side, experienced a deep and undefinable
oppression at heart.

In fact, he had, for some time past, been contemplating with terror
that beauty which seemed to grow more radiant every day on Cosette’s
sweet face. The dawn that was smiling for all was gloomy for him.

Cosette had been beautiful for a tolerably long time before she became
aware of it herself. But, from the very first day, that unexpected
light which was rising slowly and enveloping the whole of the young
girl’s person, wounded Jean Valjean’s sombre eye. He felt that it was a
change in a happy life, a life so happy that he did not dare to move
for fear of disarranging something. This man, who had passed through
all manner of distresses, who was still all bleeding from the bruises
of fate, who had been almost wicked and who had become almost a saint,
who, after having dragged the chain of the galleys, was now dragging
the invisible but heavy chain of indefinite misery, this man whom the
law had not released from its grasp and who could be seized at any
moment and brought back from the obscurity of his virtue to the broad
daylight of public opprobrium, this man accepted all, excused all,
pardoned all, and merely asked of Providence, of man, of the law, of
society, of nature, of the world, one thing, that Cosette might love
him!

That Cosette might continue to love him! That God would not prevent the
heart of the child from coming to him, and from remaining with him!
Beloved by Cosette, he felt that he was healed, rested, appeased,
loaded with benefits, recompensed, crowned. Beloved by Cosette, it was
well with him! He asked nothing more! Had any one said to him: “Do you
want anything better?” he would have answered: “No.” God might have
said to him: “Do you desire heaven?” and he would have replied: “I
should lose by it.”


Everything which could affect this situation, if only on the surface,
made him shudder like the beginning of something new. He had never
known very distinctly himself what the beauty of a woman means; but he
understood instinctively, that it was something terrible.

He gazed with terror on this beauty, which was blossoming out ever more
triumphant and superb beside him, beneath his very eyes, on the
innocent and formidable brow of that child, from the depths of her
homeliness, of his old age, of his misery, of his reprobation.

He said to himself: “How beautiful she is! What is to become of me?”


There, moreover, lay the difference between his tenderness and the
tenderness of a mother. What he beheld with anguish, a mother would
have gazed upon with joy.

The first symptoms were not long in making their appearance.

On the very morrow of the day on which she had said to herself:
“Decidedly I am beautiful!” Cosette began to pay attention to her
toilet. She recalled the remark of that passer-by: “Pretty, but badly
dressed,” the breath of an oracle which had passed beside her and had
vanished, after depositing in her heart one of the two germs which are
destined, later on, to fill the whole life of woman, coquetry. Love is
the other.

With faith in her beauty, the whole feminine soul expanded within her.
She conceived a horror for her merinos, and shame for her plush hat.
Her father had never refused her anything. She at once acquired the
whole science of the bonnet, the gown, the mantle, the boot, the cuff,
the stuff which is in fashion, the color which is becoming, that
science which makes of the Parisian woman something so charming, so
deep, and so dangerous. The words _heady woman_ were invented for the
Parisienne.

In less than a month, little Cosette, in that Thebaid of the Rue de
Babylone, was not only one of the prettiest, but one of the “best
dressed” women in Paris, which means a great deal more.

She would have liked to encounter her “passer-by,” to see what he would
say, and to “teach him a lesson!” The truth is, that she was ravishing
in every respect, and that she distinguished the difference between a
bonnet from Gérard and one from Herbaut in the most marvellous way.

Jean Valjean watched these ravages with anxiety. He who felt that he
could never do anything but crawl, walk at the most, beheld wings
sprouting on Cosette.

Moreover, from the mere inspection of Cosette’s toilet, a woman would
have recognized the fact that she had no mother. Certain little
proprieties, certain special conventionalities, were not observed by
Cosette. A mother, for instance, would have told her that a young girl
does not dress in damask.

The first day that Cosette went out in her black damask gown and
mantle, and her white crape bonnet, she took Jean Valjean’s arm, gay,
radiant, rosy, proud, dazzling. “Father,” she said, “how do you like me
in this guise?” Jean Valjean replied in a voice which resembled the
bitter voice of an envious man: “Charming!” He was the same as usual
during their walk. On their return home, he asked Cosette:—

“Won’t you put on that other gown and bonnet again,—you know the ones I
mean?”


This took place in Cosette’s chamber. Cosette turned towards the
wardrobe where her cast-off schoolgirl’s clothes were hanging.

“That disguise!” said she. “Father, what do you want me to do with it?
Oh no, the idea! I shall never put on those horrors again. With that
machine on my head, I have the air of Madame Mad-dog.”


Jean Valjean heaved a deep sigh.

From that moment forth, he noticed that Cosette, who had always
heretofore asked to remain at home, saying: “Father, I enjoy myself
more here with you,” now was always asking to go out. In fact, what is
the use of having a handsome face and a delicious costume if one does
not display them?

He also noticed that Cosette had no longer the same taste for the back
garden. Now she preferred the garden, and did not dislike to promenade
back and forth in front of the railed fence. Jean Valjean, who was shy,
never set foot in the garden. He kept to his back yard, like a dog.

Cosette, in gaining the knowledge that she was beautiful, lost the
grace of ignoring it. An exquisite grace, for beauty enhanced by
ingenuousness is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as a dazzling
and innocent creature who walks along, holding in her hand the key to
paradise without being conscious of it. But what she had lost in
ingenuous grace, she gained in pensive and serious charm. Her whole
person, permeated with the joy of youth, of innocence, and of beauty,
breathed forth a splendid melancholy.

It was at this epoch that Marius, after the lapse of six months, saw
her once more at the Luxembourg.






Cosette in her shadow, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire.
Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, slowly drew together
these two beings, all charged and all languishing with the stormy
electricity of passion, these two souls which were laden with love as
two clouds are laden with lightning, and which were bound to overflow
and mingle in a look like the clouds in a flash of fire.

The glance has been so much abused in love romances that it has finally
fallen into disrepute. One hardly dares to say, nowadays, that two
beings fell in love because they looked at each other. That is the way
people do fall in love, nevertheless, and the only way. The rest is
nothing, but the rest comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these
great shocks which two souls convey to each other by the exchange of
that spark.

At that particular hour when Cosette unconsciously darted that glance
which troubled Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he had also
launched a look which disturbed Cosette.

He caused her the same good and the same evil.

She had been in the habit of seeing him for a long time, and she had
scrutinized him as girls scrutinize and see, while looking elsewhere.
Marius still considered Cosette ugly, when she had already begun to
think Marius handsome. But as he paid no attention to her, the young
man was nothing to her.

Still, she could not refrain from saying to herself that he had
beautiful hair, beautiful eyes, handsome teeth, a charming tone of
voice when she heard him conversing with his comrades, that he held
himself badly when he walked, if you like, but with a grace that was
all his own, that he did not appear to be at all stupid, that his whole
person was noble, gentle, simple, proud, and that, in short, though he
seemed to be poor, yet his air was fine.

On the day when their eyes met at last, and said to each other those
first, obscure, and ineffable things which the glance lisps, Cosette
did not immediately understand. She returned thoughtfully to the house
in the Rue de l’Ouest, where Jean Valjean, according to his custom, had
come to spend six weeks. The next morning, on waking, she thought of
that strange young man, so long indifferent and icy, who now seemed to
pay attention to her, and it did not appear to her that this attention
was the least in the world agreeable to her. She was, on the contrary,
somewhat incensed at this handsome and disdainful individual. A
substratum of war stirred within her. It struck her, and the idea
caused her a wholly childish joy, that she was going to take her
revenge at last.

Knowing that she was beautiful, she was thoroughly conscious, though in
an indistinct fashion, that she possessed a weapon. Women play with
their beauty as children do with a knife. They wound themselves.

The reader will recall Marius’ hesitations, his palpitations, his
terrors. He remained on his bench and did not approach. This vexed
Cosette. One day, she said to Jean Valjean: “Father, let us stroll
about a little in that direction.” Seeing that Marius did not come to
her, she went to him. In such cases, all women resemble Mahomet. And
then, strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is
timidity; in a young girl it is boldness. This is surprising, and yet
nothing is more simple. It is the two sexes tending to approach each
other and assuming, each the other’s qualities.

That day, Cosette’s glance drove Marius beside himself, and Marius’
glance set Cosette to trembling. Marius went away confident, and
Cosette uneasy. From that day forth, they adored each other.

The first thing that Cosette felt was a confused and profound
melancholy. It seemed to her that her soul had become black since the
day before. She no longer recognized it. The whiteness of soul in young
girls, which is composed of coldness and gayety, resembles snow. It
melts in love, which is its sun.

Cosette did not know what love was. She had never heard the word
uttered in its terrestrial sense. On the books of profane music which
entered the convent, _amour_ (love) was replaced by _tambour_ (drum) or
_pandour_. This created enigmas which exercised the imaginations of the
_big girls_, such as: _Ah, how delightful is the drum! _ or, _Pity is
not a pandour_. But Cosette had left the convent too early to have
occupied herself much with the “drum.” Therefore, she did not know what
name to give to what she now felt. Is any one the less ill because one
does not know the name of one’s malady?

She loved with all the more passion because she loved ignorantly. She
did not know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, useful or
dangerous, eternal or temporary, allowable or prohibited; she loved.
She would have been greatly astonished, had any one said to her: “You
do not sleep? But that is forbidden! You do not eat? Why, that is very
bad! You have oppressions and palpitations of the heart? That must not
be! You blush and turn pale, when a certain being clad in black appears
at the end of a certain green walk? But that is abominable!” She would
not have understood, and she would have replied: “What fault is there
of mine in a matter in which I have no power and of which I know
nothing?”


It turned out that the love which presented itself was exactly suited
to the state of her soul. It was a sort of admiration at a distance, a
mute contemplation, the deification of a stranger. It was the
apparition of youth to youth, the dream of nights become a reality yet
remaining a dream, the longed-for phantom realized and made flesh at
last, but having as yet, neither name, nor fault, nor spot, nor
exigence, nor defect; in a word, the distant lover who lingered in the
ideal, a chimæra with a form. Any nearer and more palpable meeting
would have alarmed Cosette at this first stage, when she was still half
immersed in the exaggerated mists of the cloister. She had all the
fears of children and all the fears of nuns combined. The spirit of the
convent, with which she had been permeated for the space of five years,
was still in the process of slow evaporation from her person, and made
everything tremble around her. In this situation he was not a lover, he
was not even an admirer, he was a vision. She set herself to adoring
Marius as something charming, luminous, and impossible.

As extreme innocence borders on extreme coquetry, she smiled at him
with all frankness.

Every day, she looked forward to the hour for their walk with
impatience, she found Marius there, she felt herself unspeakably happy,
and thought in all sincerity that she was expressing her whole thought
when she said to Jean Valjean:—

“What a delicious garden that Luxembourg is!”


Marius and Cosette were in the dark as to one another. They did not
address each other, they did not salute each other, they did not know
each other; they saw each other; and like stars of heaven which are
separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing at each other.

It was thus that Cosette gradually became a woman and developed,
beautiful and loving, with a consciousness of her beauty, and in
ignorance of her love. She was a coquette to boot through her
ignorance.






All situations have their instincts. Old and eternal Mother Nature
warned Jean Valjean in a dim way of the presence of Marius. Jean
Valjean shuddered to the very bottom of his soul. Jean Valjean saw
nothing, knew nothing, and yet he scanned with obstinate attention, the
darkness in which he walked, as though he felt on one side of him
something in process of construction, and on the other, something which
was crumbling away. Marius, also warned, and, in accordance with the
deep law of God, by that same Mother Nature, did all he could to keep
out of sight of “the father.” Nevertheless, it came to pass that Jean
Valjean sometimes espied him. Marius’ manners were no longer in the
least natural. He exhibited ambiguous prudence and awkward daring. He
no longer came quite close to them as formerly. He seated himself at a
distance and pretended to be reading; why did he pretend that? Formerly
he had come in his old coat, now he wore his new one every day; Jean
Valjean was not sure that he did not have his hair curled, his eyes
were very queer, he wore gloves; in short, Jean Valjean cordially
detested this young man.

Cosette allowed nothing to be divined. Without knowing just what was
the matter with her she was convinced that there was something in it,
and that it must be concealed.

There was a coincidence between the taste for the toilet which had
recently come to Cosette, and the habit of new clothes developed by
that stranger which was very repugnant to Jean Valjean. It might be
accidental, no doubt, certainly, but it was a menacing accident.

He never opened his mouth to Cosette about this stranger. One day,
however, he could not refrain from so doing, and, with that vague
despair which suddenly casts the lead into the depths of its despair,
he said to her: “What a very pedantic air that young man has!”


Cosette, but a year before only an indifferent little girl, would have
replied: “Why, no, he is charming.” Ten years later, with the love of
Marius in her heart, she would have answered: “A pedant, and
insufferable to the sight! You are right!”—At the moment in life and
the heart which she had then attained, she contented herself with
replying, with supreme calmness: “That young man!”


As though she now beheld him for the first time in her life.

“How stupid I am!” thought Jean Valjean. “She had not noticed him. It
is I who have pointed him out to her.”


Oh, simplicity of the old! oh, the depth of children!

It is one of the laws of those fresh years of suffering and trouble, of
those vivacious conflicts between a first love and the first obstacles,
that the young girl does not allow herself to be caught in any trap
whatever, and that the young man falls into every one. Jean Valjean had
instituted an undeclared war against Marius, which Marius, with the
sublime stupidity of his passion and his age, did not divine. Jean
Valjean laid a host of ambushes for him; he changed his hour, he
changed his bench, he forgot his handkerchief, he came alone to the
Luxembourg; Marius dashed headlong into all these snares; and to all
the interrogation marks planted by Jean Valjean in his pathway, he
ingenuously answered “yes.” But Cosette remained immured in her
apparent unconcern and in her imperturbable tranquillity, so that Jean
Valjean arrived at the following conclusion: “That ninny is madly in
love with Cosette, but Cosette does not even know that he exists.”


Nonetheless did he bear in his heart a mournful tremor. The minute when
Cosette would love might strike at any moment. Does not everything
begin with indifference?

Only once did Cosette make a mistake and alarm him. He rose from his
seat to depart, after a stay of three hours, and she said: “What,
already?”


Jean Valjean had not discontinued his trips to the Luxembourg, as he
did not wish to do anything out of the way, and as, above all things,
he feared to arouse Cosette; but during the hours which were so sweet
to the lovers, while Cosette was sending her smile to the intoxicated
Marius, who perceived nothing else now, and who now saw nothing in all
the world but an adored and radiant face, Jean Valjean was fixing on
Marius flashing and terrible eyes. He, who had finally come to believe
himself incapable of a malevolent feeling, experienced moments when
Marius was present, in which he thought he was becoming savage and
ferocious once more, and he felt the old depths of his soul, which had
formerly contained so much wrath, opening once more and rising up
against that young man. It almost seemed to him that unknown craters
were forming in his bosom.

What! he was there, that creature! What was he there for? He came
creeping about, smelling out, examining, trying! He came, saying: “Hey!
Why not?” He came to prowl about his, Jean Valjean’s, life! to prowl
about his happiness, with the purpose of seizing it and bearing it
away!

Jean Valjean added: “Yes, that’s it! What is he in search of? An
adventure! What does he want? A love affair! A love affair! And I?
What! I have been first, the most wretched of men, and then the most
unhappy, and I have traversed sixty years of life on my knees, I have
suffered everything that man can suffer, I have grown old without
having been young, I have lived without a family, without relatives,
without friends, without life, without children, I have left my blood
on every stone, on every bramble, on every mile-post, along every wall,
I have been gentle, though others have been hard to me, and kind,
although others have been malicious, I have become an honest man once
more, in spite of everything, I have repented of the evil that I have
done and have forgiven the evil that has been done to me, and at the
moment when I receive my recompense, at the moment when it is all over,
at the moment when I am just touching the goal, at the moment when I
have what I desire, it is well, it is good, I have paid, I have earned
it, all this is to take flight, all this will vanish, and I shall lose
Cosette, and I shall lose my life, my joy, my soul, because it has
pleased a great booby to come and lounge at the Luxembourg.”


Then his eyes were filled with a sad and extraordinary gleam.

It was no longer a man gazing at a man; it was no longer an enemy
surveying an enemy. It was a dog scanning a thief.

The reader knows the rest. Marius pursued his senseless course. One day
he followed Cosette to the Rue de l’Ouest. Another day he spoke to the
porter. The porter, on his side, spoke, and said to Jean Valjean:
“Monsieur, who is that curious young man who is asking for you?” On the
morrow Jean Valjean bestowed on Marius that glance which Marius at last
perceived. A week later, Jean Valjean had taken his departure. He swore
to himself that he would never again set foot either in the Luxembourg
or in the Rue de l’Ouest. He returned to the Rue Plumet.

Cosette did not complain, she said nothing, she asked no questions, she
did not seek to learn his reasons; she had already reached the point
where she was afraid of being divined, and of betraying herself. Jean
Valjean had no experience of these miseries, the only miseries which
are charming and the only ones with which he was not acquainted; the
consequence was that he did not understand the grave significance of
Cosette’s silence.

He merely noticed that she had grown sad, and he grew gloomy. On his
side and on hers, inexperience had joined issue.

Once he made a trial. He asked Cosette:—

“Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?”


A ray illuminated Cosette’s pale face.

“Yes,” said she.

They went thither. Three months had elapsed. Marius no longer went
there. Marius was not there.

On the following day, Jean Valjean asked Cosette again:—

“Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?”


She replied, sadly and gently:—

“No.”


Jean Valjean was hurt by this sadness, and heart-broken at this
gentleness.

What was going on in that mind which was so young and yet already so
impenetrable? What was on its way there within? What was taking place
in Cosette’s soul? Sometimes, instead of going to bed, Jean Valjean
remained seated on his pallet, with his head in his hands, and he
passed whole nights asking himself: “What has Cosette in her mind?” and
in thinking of the things that she might be thinking about.

Oh! at such moments, what mournful glances did he cast towards that
cloister, that chaste peak, that abode of angels, that inaccessible
glacier of virtue! How he contemplated, with despairing ecstasy, that
convent garden, full of ignored flowers and cloistered virgins, where
all perfumes and all souls mount straight to heaven! How he adored that
Eden forever closed against him, whence he had voluntarily and madly
emerged! How he regretted his abnegation and his folly in having
brought Cosette back into the world, poor hero of sacrifice, seized and
hurled to the earth by his very self-devotion! How he said to himself,
“What have I done?”


However, nothing of all this was perceptible to Cosette. No ill-temper,
no harshness. His face was always serene and kind. Jean Valjean’s
manners were more tender and more paternal than ever. If anything could
have betrayed his lack of joy, it was his increased suavity.

On her side, Cosette languished. She suffered from the absence of
Marius as she had rejoiced in his presence, peculiarly, without exactly
being conscious of it. When Jean Valjean ceased to take her on their
customary strolls, a feminine instinct murmured confusedly, at the
bottom of her heart, that she must not seem to set store on the
Luxembourg garden, and that if this proved to be a matter of
indifference to her, her father would take her thither once more. But
days, weeks, months, elapsed. Jean Valjean had tacitly accepted
Cosette’s tacit consent. She regretted it. It was too late. So Marius
had disappeared; all was over. The day on which she returned to the
Luxembourg, Marius was no longer there. What was to be done? Should she
ever find him again? She felt an anguish at her heart, which nothing
relieved, and which augmented every day; she no longer knew whether it
was winter or summer, whether it was raining or shining, whether the
birds were singing, whether it was the season for dahlias or daisies,
whether the Luxembourg was more charming than the Tuileries, whether
the linen which the laundress brought home was starched too much or not
enough, whether Toussaint had done “her marketing” well or ill; and she
remained dejected, absorbed, attentive to but a single thought, her
eyes vague and staring as when one gazes by night at a black and
fathomless spot where an apparition has vanished.

However, she did not allow Jean Valjean to perceive anything of this,
except her pallor.

She still wore her sweet face for him.

This pallor sufficed but too thoroughly to trouble Jean Valjean.
Sometimes he asked her:—

“What is the matter with you?”


She replied: “There is nothing the matter with me.”


And after a silence, when she divined that he was sad also, she would
add:—

“And you, father—is there anything wrong with you?”


“With me? Nothing,” said he.

These two beings who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so
touching an affection, and who had lived so long for each other now
suffered side by side, each on the other’s account; without
acknowledging it to each other, without anger towards each other, and
with a smile.






Jean Valjean was the more unhappy of the two. Youth, even in its
sorrows, always possesses its own peculiar radiance.

At times, Jean Valjean suffered so greatly that he became puerile. It
is the property of grief to cause the childish side of man to reappear.
He had an unconquerable conviction that Cosette was escaping from him.
He would have liked to resist, to retain her, to arouse her enthusiasm
by some external and brilliant matter. These ideas, puerile, as we have
just said, and at the same time senile, conveyed to him, by their very
childishness, a tolerably just notion of the influence of gold lace on
the imaginations of young girls. He once chanced to see a general on
horseback, in full uniform, pass along the street, Comte Coutard, the
commandant of Paris. He envied that gilded man; what happiness it would
be, he said to himself, if he could put on that suit which was an
incontestable thing; and if Cosette could behold him thus, she would be
dazzled, and when he had Cosette on his arm and passed the gates of the
Tuileries, the guard would present arms to him, and that would suffice
for Cosette, and would dispel her idea of looking at young men.

An unforeseen shock was added to these sad reflections.

In the isolated life which they led, and since they had come to dwell
in the Rue Plumet, they had contracted one habit. They sometimes took a
pleasure trip to see the sun rise, a mild species of enjoyment which
befits those who are entering life and those who are quitting it.

For those who love solitude, a walk in the early morning is equivalent
to a stroll by night, with the cheerfulness of nature added. The
streets are deserted and the birds are singing. Cosette, a bird
herself, liked to rise early. These matutinal excursions were planned
on the preceding evening. He proposed, and she agreed. It was arranged
like a plot, they set out before daybreak, and these trips were so many
small delights for Cosette. These innocent eccentricities please young
people.

Jean Valjean’s inclination led him, as we have seen, to the least
frequented spots, to solitary nooks, to forgotten places. There then
existed, in the vicinity of the barriers of Paris, a sort of poor
meadows, which were almost confounded with the city, where grew in
summer sickly grain, and which, in autumn, after the harvest had been
gathered, presented the appearance, not of having been reaped, but
peeled. Jean Valjean loved to haunt these fields. Cosette was not bored
there. It meant solitude to him and liberty to her. There, she became a
little girl once more, she could run and almost play; she took off her
hat, laid it on Jean Valjean’s knees, and gathered bunches of flowers.
She gazed at the butterflies on the flowers, but did not catch them;
gentleness and tenderness are born with love, and the young girl who
cherishes within her breast a trembling and fragile ideal has mercy on
the wing of a butterfly. She wove garlands of poppies, which she placed
on her head, and which, crossed and penetrated with sunlight, glowing
until they flamed, formed for her rosy face a crown of burning embers.

Even after their life had grown sad, they kept up their custom of early
strolls.

One morning in October, therefore, tempted by the serene perfection of
the autumn of 1831, they set out, and found themselves at break of day
near the Barrière du Maine. It was not dawn, it was daybreak; a
delightful and stern moment. A few constellations here and there in the
deep, pale azure, the earth all black, the heavens all white, a quiver
amid the blades of grass, everywhere the mysterious chill of twilight.
A lark, which seemed mingled with the stars, was carolling at a
prodigious height, and one would have declared that that hymn of
pettiness calmed immensity. In the East, the Val-de-Grâce projected its
dark mass on the clear horizon with the sharpness of steel; Venus
dazzlingly brilliant was rising behind that dome and had the air of a
soul making its escape from a gloomy edifice.

All was peace and silence; there was no one on the road; a few stray
laborers, of whom they caught barely a glimpse, were on their way to
their work along the side-paths.

Jean Valjean was sitting in a cross-walk on some planks deposited at
the gate of a timber-yard. His face was turned towards the highway, his
back towards the light; he had forgotten the sun which was on the point
of rising; he had sunk into one of those profound absorptions in which
the mind becomes concentrated, which imprison even the eye, and which
are equivalent to four walls. There are meditations which may be called
vertical; when one is at the bottom of them, time is required to return
to earth. Jean Valjean had plunged into one of these reveries. He was
thinking of Cosette, of the happiness that was possible if nothing came
between him and her, of the light with which she filled his life, a
light which was but the emanation of her soul. He was almost happy in
his reverie. Cosette, who was standing beside him, was gazing at the
clouds as they turned rosy.

All at once Cosette exclaimed: “Father, I should think some one was
coming yonder.” Jean Valjean raised his eyes.

Cosette was right. The causeway which leads to the ancient Barrière du
Maine is a prolongation, as the reader knows, of the Rue de Sèvres, and
is cut at right angles by the inner boulevard. At the elbow of the
causeway and the boulevard, at the spot where it branches, they heard a
noise which it was difficult to account for at that hour, and a sort of
confused pile made its appearance. Some shapeless thing which was
coming from the boulevard was turning into the road.

It grew larger, it seemed to move in an orderly manner, though it was
bristling and quivering; it seemed to be a vehicle, but its load could
not be distinctly made out. There were horses, wheels, shouts; whips
were cracking. By degrees the outlines became fixed, although bathed in
shadows. It was a vehicle, in fact, which had just turned from the
boulevard into the highway, and which was directing its course towards
the barrier near which sat Jean Valjean; a second, of the same aspect,
followed, then a third, then a fourth; seven chariots made their
appearance in succession, the heads of the horses touching the rear of
the wagon in front. Figures were moving on these vehicles, flashes were
visible through the dusk as though there were naked swords there, a
clanking became audible which resembled the rattling of chains, and as
this something advanced, the sound of voices waxed louder, and it
turned into a terrible thing such as emerges from the cave of dreams.

As it drew nearer, it assumed a form, and was outlined behind the trees
with the pallid hue of an apparition; the mass grew white; the day,
which was slowly dawning, cast a wan light on this swarming heap which
was at once both sepulchral and living, the heads of the figures turned
into the faces of corpses, and this is what it proved to be:—

Seven wagons were driving in a file along the road. The first six were
singularly constructed. They resembled coopers’ drays; they consisted
of long ladders placed on two wheels and forming barrows at their rear
extremities. Each dray, or rather let us say, each ladder, was attached
to four horses harnessed tandem. On these ladders strange clusters of
men were being drawn. In the faint light, these men were to be divined
rather than seen. Twenty-four on each vehicle, twelve on a side, back
to back, facing the passers-by, their legs dangling in the air,—this
was the manner in which these men were travelling, and behind their
backs they had something which clanked, and which was a chain, and on
their necks something which shone, and which was an iron collar. Each
man had his collar, but the chain was for all; so that if these four
and twenty men had occasion to alight from the dray and walk, they were
seized with a sort of inexorable unity, and were obliged to wind over
the ground with the chain for a backbone, somewhat after the fashion of
millepeds. In the back and front of each vehicle, two men armed with
muskets stood erect, each holding one end of the chain under his foot.
The iron necklets were square. The seventh vehicle, a huge rack-sided
baggage wagon, without a hood, had four wheels and six horses, and
carried a sonorous pile of iron boilers, cast-iron pots, braziers, and
chains, among which were mingled several men who were pinioned and
stretched at full length, and who seemed to be ill. This wagon, all
lattice-work, was garnished with dilapidated hurdles which appeared to
have served for former punishments. These vehicles kept to the middle
of the road. On each side marched a double hedge of guards of infamous
aspect, wearing three-cornered hats, like the soldiers under the
Directory, shabby, covered with spots and holes, muffled in uniforms of
veterans and the trousers of undertakers’ men, half gray, half blue,
which were almost hanging in rags, with red epaulets, yellow shoulder
belts, short sabres, muskets, and cudgels; they were a species of
soldier-blackguards. These myrmidons seemed composed of the abjectness
of the beggar and the authority of the executioner. The one who
appeared to be their chief held a postilion’s whip in his hand. All
these details, blurred by the dimness of dawn, became more and more
clearly outlined as the light increased. At the head and in the rear of
the convoy rode mounted gendarmes, serious and with sword in fist.

This procession was so long that when the first vehicle reached the
barrier, the last was barely debauching from the boulevard. A throng,
sprung, it is impossible to say whence, and formed in a twinkling, as
is frequently the case in Paris, pressed forward from both sides of the
road and looked on. In the neighboring lanes the shouts of people
calling to each other and the wooden shoes of market-gardeners
hastening up to gaze were audible.

The men massed upon the drays allowed themselves to be jolted along in
silence. They were livid with the chill of morning. They all wore linen
trousers, and their bare feet were thrust into wooden shoes. The rest
of their costume was a fantasy of wretchedness. Their accoutrements
were horribly incongruous; nothing is more funereal than the harlequin
in rags. Battered felt hats, tarpaulin caps, hideous woollen nightcaps,
and, side by side with a short blouse, a black coat broken at the
elbow; many wore women’s headgear, others had baskets on their heads;
hairy breasts were visible, and through the rent in their garments
tattooed designs could be descried; temples of Love, flaming hearts,
Cupids; eruptions and unhealthy red blotches could also be seen. Two or
three had a straw rope attached to the cross-bar of the dray, and
suspended under them like a stirrup, which supported their feet. One of
them held in his hand and raised to his mouth something which had the
appearance of a black stone and which he seemed to be gnawing; it was
bread which he was eating. There were no eyes there which were not
either dry, dulled, or flaming with an evil light. The escort troop
cursed, the men in chains did not utter a syllable; from time to time
the sound of a blow became audible as the cudgels descended on
shoulder-blades or skulls; some of these men were yawning; their rags
were terrible; their feet hung down, their shoulders oscillated, their
heads clashed together, their fetters clanked, their eyes glared
ferociously, their fists clenched or fell open inertly like the hands
of corpses; in the rear of the convoy ran a band of children screaming
with laughter.

This file of vehicles, whatever its nature was, was mournful. It was
evident that to-morrow, that an hour hence, a pouring rain might
descend, that it might be followed by another and another, and that
their dilapidated garments would be drenched, that once soaked, these
men would not get dry again, that once chilled, they would not again
get warm, that their linen trousers would be glued to their bones by
the downpour, that the water would fill their shoes, that no lashes
from the whips would be able to prevent their jaws from chattering,
that the chain would continue to bind them by the neck, that their legs
would continue to dangle, and it was impossible not to shudder at the
sight of these human beings thus bound and passive beneath the cold
clouds of autumn, and delivered over to the rain, to the blast, to all
the furies of the air, like trees and stones.

Blows from the cudgel were not omitted even in the case of the sick
men, who lay there knotted with ropes and motionless on the seventh
wagon, and who appeared to have been tossed there like sacks filled
with misery.

Suddenly, the sun made its appearance; the immense light of the Orient
burst forth, and one would have said that it had set fire to all those
ferocious heads. Their tongues were unloosed; a conflagration of grins,
oaths, and songs exploded. The broad horizontal sheet of light severed
the file in two parts, illuminating heads and bodies, leaving feet and
wheels in the obscurity. Thoughts made their appearance on these faces;
it was a terrible moment; visible demons with their masks removed,
fierce souls laid bare. Though lighted up, this wild throng remained in
gloom. Some, who were gay, had in their mouths quills through which
they blew vermin over the crowd, picking out the women; the dawn
accentuated these lamentable profiles with the blackness of its
shadows; there was not one of these creatures who was not deformed by
reason of wretchedness; and the whole was so monstrous that one would
have said that the sun’s brilliancy had been changed into the glare of
the lightning. The wagon-load which headed the line had struck up a
song, and were shouting at the top of their voices with a haggard
joviality, a pot-pourri by Desaugiers, then famous, called _The
Vestal_; the trees shivered mournfully; in the cross-lanes,
countenances of bourgeois listened in an idiotic delight to these
coarse strains droned by spectres.

All sorts of distress met in this procession as in chaos; here were to
be found the facial angles of every sort of beast, old men, youths,
bald heads, gray beards, cynical monstrosities, sour resignation,
savage grins, senseless attitudes, snouts surmounted by caps, heads
like those of young girls with corkscrew curls on the temples,
infantile visages, and by reason of that, horrible thin skeleton faces,
to which death alone was lacking. On the first cart was a negro, who
had been a slave, in all probability, and who could make a comparison
of his chains. The frightful leveller from below, shame, had passed
over these brows; at that degree of abasement, the last transformations
were suffered by all in their extremest depths, and ignorance,
converted into dulness, was the equal of intelligence converted into
despair. There was no choice possible between these men who appeared to
the eye as the flower of the mud. It was evident that the person who
had had the ordering of that unclean procession had not classified
them. These beings had been fettered and coupled pell-mell, in
alphabetical disorder, probably, and loaded hap-hazard on those carts.
Nevertheless, horrors, when grouped together, always end by evolving a
result; all additions of wretched men give a sum total, each chain
exhaled a common soul, and each dray-load had its own physiognomy. By
the side of the one where they were singing, there was one where they
were howling; a third where they were begging; one could be seen in
which they were gnashing their teeth; another load menaced the
spectators, another blasphemed God; the last was as silent as the tomb.
Dante would have thought that he beheld his seven circles of hell on
the march. The march of the damned to their tortures, performed in
sinister wise, not on the formidable and flaming chariot of the
Apocalypse, but, what was more mournful than that, on the gibbet cart.

One of the guards, who had a hook on the end of his cudgel, made a
pretence from time to time, of stirring up this mass of human filth. An
old woman in the crowd pointed them out to her little boy five years
old, and said to him: “Rascal, let that be a warning to you!”


As the songs and blasphemies increased, the man who appeared to be the
captain of the escort cracked his whip, and at that signal a fearful
dull and blind flogging, which produced the sound of hail, fell upon
the seven dray-loads; many roared and foamed at the mouth; which
redoubled the delight of the street urchins who had hastened up, a
swarm of flies on these wounds.

Jean Valjean’s eyes had assumed a frightful expression. They were no
longer eyes; they were those deep and glassy objects which replace the
glance in the case of certain wretched men, which seem unconscious of
reality, and in which flames the reflection of terrors and of
catastrophes. He was not looking at a spectacle, he was seeing a
vision. He tried to rise, to flee, to make his escape; he could not
move his feet. Sometimes, the things that you see seize upon you and
hold you fast. He remained nailed to the spot, petrified, stupid,
asking himself, athwart confused and inexpressible anguish, what this
sepulchral persecution signified, and whence had come that pandemonium
which was pursuing him. All at once, he raised his hand to his brow, a
gesture habitual to those whose memory suddenly returns; he remembered
that this was, in fact, the usual itinerary, that it was customary to
make this detour in order to avoid all possibility of encountering
royalty on the road to Fontainebleau, and that, five and thirty years
before, he had himself passed through that barrier.

Cosette was no less terrified, but in a different way. She did not
understand; what she beheld did not seem to her to be possible; at
length she cried:—

“Father! What are those men in those carts?”


Jean Valjean replied: “Convicts.”


“Whither are they going?”


“To the galleys.”


At that moment, the cudgelling, multiplied by a hundred hands, became
zealous, blows with the flat of the sword were mingled with it, it was
a perfect storm of whips and clubs; the convicts bent before it, a
hideous obedience was evoked by the torture, and all held their peace,
darting glances like chained wolves.

Cosette trembled in every limb; she resumed:—

“Father, are they still men?”


“Sometimes,” answered the unhappy man.

It was the chain-gang, in fact, which had set out before daybreak from
Bicêtre, and had taken the road to Mans in order to avoid
Fontainebleau, where the King then was. This caused the horrible
journey to last three or four days longer; but torture may surely be
prolonged with the object of sparing the royal personage a sight of it.

Jean Valjean returned home utterly overwhelmed. Such encounters are
shocks, and the memory that they leave behind them resembles a thorough
shaking up.

Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not observe that, on his way back to the
Rue de Babylone with Cosette, the latter was plying him with other
questions on the subject of what they had just seen; perhaps he was too
much absorbed in his own dejection to notice her words and reply to
them. But when Cosette was leaving him in the evening, to betake
herself to bed, he heard her say in a low voice, and as though talking
to herself: “It seems to me, that if I were to find one of those men in
my pathway, oh, my God, I should die merely from the sight of him close
at hand.”


Fortunately, chance ordained that on the morrow of that tragic day,
there was some official solemnity apropos of I know not what,—fêtes in
Paris, a review in the Champ de Mars, jousts on the Seine, theatrical
performances in the Champs-Élysées, fireworks at the Arc de l’Étoile,
illuminations everywhere. Jean Valjean did violence to his habits, and
took Cosette to see these rejoicings, for the purpose of diverting her
from the memory of the day before, and of effacing, beneath the smiling
tumult of all Paris, the abominable thing which had passed before her.
The review with which the festival was spiced made the presence of
uniforms perfectly natural; Jean Valjean donned his uniform of a
national guard with the vague inward feeling of a man who is betaking
himself to shelter. However, this trip seemed to attain its object.
Cosette, who made it her law to please her father, and to whom,
moreover, all spectacles were a novelty, accepted this diversion with
the light and easy good grace of youth, and did not pout too
disdainfully at that flutter of enjoyment called a public fête; so that
Jean Valjean was able to believe that he had succeeded, and that no
trace of that hideous vision remained.

Some days later, one morning, when the sun was shining brightly, and
they were both on the steps leading to the garden, another infraction
of the rules which Jean Valjean seemed to have imposed upon himself,
and to the custom of remaining in her chamber which melancholy had
caused Cosette to adopt, Cosette, in a wrapper, was standing erect in
that negligent attire of early morning which envelops young girls in an
adorable way and which produces the effect of a cloud drawn over a
star; and, with her head bathed in light, rosy after a good sleep,
submitting to the gentle glances of the tender old man, she was picking
a daisy to pieces. Cosette did not know the delightful legend, _I love
a little, passionately, etc_.—who was there who could have taught her?
She was handling the flower instinctively, innocently, without a
suspicion that to pluck a daisy apart is to do the same by a heart. If
there were a fourth, and smiling Grace called Melancholy, she would
have worn the air of that Grace. Jean Valjean was fascinated by the
contemplation of those tiny fingers on that flower, and forgetful of
everything in the radiance emitted by that child. A red-breast was
warbling in the thicket, on one side. White cloudlets floated across
the sky, so gayly, that one would have said that they had just been set
at liberty. Cosette went on attentively tearing the leaves from her
flower; she seemed to be thinking about something; but whatever it was,
it must be something charming; all at once she turned her head over her
shoulder with the delicate languor of a swan, and said to Jean Valjean:
“Father, what are the galleys like?”





