بخش 2 کتاب 4

BOOK FOUR

THE OLD GORBEAU SLUM

MAÎTRE GORBEAU

FORTY YEARS AGO, the solitary walker who ventured into the back of beyond around La Salpêtrière and took the boulevard as far as the barrière d’Italie1 came to places where you could well have claimed Paris had disappeared. It was not isolation, there were people walking by; it was not the countryside, there were houses and streets; it was not a town, the streets were as rutted as highways and grass grew over them; it was not a village, the houses were too tall. So just what was it? It was an inhabited area where there was no one, it was a deserted area where there was someone; it was a big city boulevard, a Paris street, wilder at night than any forest, more dismal in the daytime than any cemetery.

It was the old quartier of the Marché-aux-Chevaux, the horse markets.

This walker, if he ventured beyond the four crumbling walls of the decommissioned Marché-aux-Chevaux, and even opted to go past the rue du Petit-Banquier, after leaving behind on his right a courtyard protected by high walls, then a meadow where stacks of tan bark stood looking like gigantic beavers’ dams, then an enclosure full of timber with a heap of stumps, sawdust, and wood shavings on top of which a huge dog barked, then a long low wall all in ruins, with a little gate that was black and decrepit, groaning with moss covered with flowers in spring, and then, at the most deserted point, a horribly dilapidated building on which could be read the words POST NO BILLS, this dubious walker would come to the corner of the rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel—little-known parts. Here, near a factory and between two garden walls, you could in those days see a slum that, at first glance, looked as small as a cottage but that was in reality as big as a cathedral. It stood with its gabled end to the public thoroughfare; whence the impression that it was small. Practically the whole house was hidden. All you could see of it was the door and one window.

This slum had only one story.

On closer examination, the detail that first leaped out at you was that the door could only ever have been the door of a slum, whereas the casement window, had it been set into hewn stone instead of rubble-stone, could have been the window of a mansion.

The door was nothing more than a motley collection of worm-eaten planks crudely tacked together with crosspieces that looked like roughly sawn logs. It opened directly onto a steep staircase with high treads covered in mud, plaster, and dust, which was the same width as the door and which seemed, from the street, to shoot straight up like a ladder only to disappear in the shadows between two walls. The top of the lopsided opening where the door swung was masked by a narrow board in the middle of which a triangular aperture had been hacked, both skylight and transom when the door was shut. On the inside of the door a brush dipped in ink had drawn the number 52 in a couple of strokes, and above the board the same brush had daubed the number 50; so that you hesitated. Where were you? Over the door it said, at number 50; the inside replied, no, at number 52. Indescribable rags the colour of dust hung by way of curtains at the triangular transom.

The window was wide, quite high, furnished with louvered shutters and sash windows with large panes; only, these large windowpanes had various wounds, at once hidden and betrayed by ingenious paper bandages, and the shutters, coming off their hinges and hanging loose, threatened passersby more than they shielded the inhabitants. Horizontal slats were missing here and there and had been crudely replaced by boards nailed on vertically; so that what started out as venetians ended up as plain panels.

Seen together like this in the same house, the door, looking so sordid, and the window, looking so respectable, if dilapidated, had the effect of two mismatched beggars, meeting up and travelling along side by side, apparently completely different beneath the same tatters, one having been a derelict all his life, the other having once been a gentleman.

The stairs led up to the main body of the building, which was extremely spacious, like a warehouse that had been converted into a house. The bowels of the building consisted of a long corridor that opened, to left and right, onto apartments of various sizes, habitable at a pinch and closer to booths than prison cells. These rooms looked out on the surrounding wastelands. The whole setup was dark and distressing, washed out, melancholy, sepulchral; shot through by cold rays of sunlight or icy gusts of wind, depending on whether the cracks were in the ceiling or the door. An interesting and picturesque feature of this type of residence is the enormous size of the spiders.

To the left of the front door, on the boulevard, at the height of an average man, a small walled-up window made a square niche full of stones that children threw in passing.

Part of the building has recently been demolished. What remains of it today can still give you an idea of what it was like. The building as a whole is scarcely more than a hundred years old. A hundred years—that is young for a church and old for a house. It seems that man’s abode partakes of his own brief existence and God’s abode of His eternal life.

Postmen called the tumbledown building no. 50–52; but it was known in the neighbourhood as the Gorbeau House. We should say how it got that name.

Trivia fiends, who collect anecdotes the way herbalists collect dried flowers and prick fleeting dates on their memories with a pin, know that in the last century, in Paris, around 1770, there were two public prosecutors at Châtelet,2 one known as Corbeau, the Crow, the other, Renard, the Fox. Two names anticipated by La Fontaine.3 The opportunity was too good for the legal fraternity attached to the law courts not to have a good laugh about it, and a parody immediately made the rounds of the galleries of the Palais de Justice, in somewhat lame verse: Maître Corbeau, perched on a file,

Held a seizure of goods in his beak;

Maître Renard, lured by the smell,

Made trouble for him in a tweak:

Hey, there! Hello! Hello! etc.4

The two respectable practitioners, embarrassed by the taunts and impeded in their dignified bearing by the roars of laughter that followed them, resolved to shed their names and decided to appeal to the king. The petition was presented to Louis XV the very same day that the papal nuncio, on one side, and Cardinal de La Roche-Aymon, on the other, both devoutly kneeling, had, in the presence of His Majesty, put one slipper each on the two naked feet of Madame Du Barry5 as she climbed out of bed. The king, who was laughing, went on laughing, passing merrily from the two bishops to the two attorneys and agreeing to let these men of the robe off their names, or almost. It was granted to Maître Corbeau, in the name of the king, to add a tail to the first letter of his surname and so call himself Gorbeau; Maître Renard didn’t come off so well, for he only received permission to put a P before the R and so call himself Prenard, the Taker, this second name being scarcely any less true to life than the first.

Now, according to local tradition, this Maître Gorbeau had been the owner of the building at no. 50–52, boulevard de l’Hôpital. He was even responsible for the monumental window. Hence the name Gorbeau House bestowed upon the place.

Facing no. 50–52, among the groves of trees planted along the boulevard, stands a great elm three-quarters dead; and almost directly opposite lies the rue de la barrière des Gobelins, a street in those days with no houses and no cobblestones, planted with scrawny trees and covered in grass or mud according to the season. It ended smack bang against the outer wall encircling Paris. A stench of vitriol gusted out of the roofs of a neighbouring factory.

The barrière was very close. In 1823, the outer wall of the city was still standing.

This barrière itself filled the mind with gloomy images. It was on the way to Bicêtre.6 It was the road taken by those sentenced to death under the Empire and the Restoration when they came into Paris on the day of their execution. It is here that, somewhere around 1829, the mysterious homicide known as “the murder of the barrière de Fontainebleau”7 occurred, the perpetrators of which the law has never found, a woeful issue that has never been cleared up, a terrible riddle that has never been solved. Just a bit farther on you come to that fateful street, the rue Croulebarbe, where Ulbach stabbed the girl from Ivry who minded goats, as the thunder roared, just like in a melodrama. A few steps farther still and you come to the awful pollarded elm trees of the barrière Saint-Jacques, that expedient of philanthropists for hiding the scaffold, the mean and shameful place de Grève8 dreamed up by a society of shopkeepers and bourgeois, who preferred to sweep capital punishment under the carpet, daring neither to abolish it with any greatness of spirit nor to maintain it with any semblance of authority.

Thirty-seven years ago, leaving aside the place Saint-Jacques, which seemed fated to be what it was and which has always been horrible, perhaps the most mournful point of the whole mournful boulevard was the spot, still so unattractive today, where you came to the slum at 50–52.

Middle-class houses only came to be built there twenty-five years later. The place was incredibly bleak. On top of the gloomy thoughts that seized you there, you felt yourself caught between La Salpêtrière, whose dome you could catch a glimpse of, and Bicêtre, whose barrière you could practically touch—that is, between the madness of women and the madness of men. As far as the eye could see there was nothing but abattoirs, the outer city wall, and a few rare factory fronts looking like barracks or monasteries; everywhere, shanties and mounds of rubble, old walls as black as shrouds, new walls as white as winding sheets; everywhere, parallel rows of trees, perfectly aligned houses, flat structures in long, cold lines, and the grim misery of right angles. Not a single uneven patch of ground, not a single architectural caprice, not a single wrinkle. It was a glacial, regular, and hideous array. Nothing is as harrowing as symmetry. The reason is that symmetry spells boredom and boredom is the very essence of grief. Despair yawns. It is possible to conceive of something more terrible than a hell where one suffers and that is a hell where one is bored. If such a hell were to exist, this stretch of the boulevard de l’Hôpital could well serve as its approach.

Yet at nightfall, at the moment when the light went and in winter especially, at the hour when the icy evening breeze ripped the last red leaves off the elms, when the gloom was deep and starless, or when the moon and the wind punched holes in the clouds, the boulevard suddenly became terrifying. The straight lines fell apart and merged with the darkness like fragments of infinity. The person on foot could not prevent himself from thinking of the innumerable sinister traditions of the place. The solitude of a place where so many crimes had been committed had something awful about it. You felt you could sense traps laid in the darkness; every indistinct shadow seemed suspect and the long square gaps you could make out between each tree looked like graves. In the day, it was ugly; in the evening, it was gloomy; in the night, it was sinister.

In summer, at dusk, you usually saw a few old women sitting around under the elms on benches that had gone mouldy in the rain. Those old crones would put their hands out for alms at any opportunity.

Otherwise the quartier, which looked more antiquated than ancient, was starting to change. From that point in time, anyone who wanted to see it needed to be quick about it. Every day some detail went, changing the overall picture. Today and for the past twenty years, the terminus of the Orléans railway line has been located there, alongside the old faubourg, and it has strained it. Wherever a railway station has been set on the edge of a capital city, it has spelled the death of a local neighbourhood and the birth of a township. It seems that around these great centres of the movement of people, at the rolling of these powerful machines, at the breathing of these monstrous horses of civilization that eat coal and vomit fire, the seed-filled earth trembles and opens in order to swallow up the former dwellings of men and let the new ones out. The old houses crumble, the new houses sprout.

Since the Orléans railway station9 has invaded the grounds of La Salpêtrière, the ancient narrow streets that line the fossés Saint-Victor and the Jardin des Plantes have started shifting, brutally traversed three or four times a day as they are by these streams of diligences, fiacres, and omnibuses that, in the course of time, push back the houses on either side; for there are things that sound bizarre and yet are strictly correct, and just as it is true to say that in big cities the sun causes the façades of houses facing south to vegetate and grow, it is a fact that the frequent passage of vehicles widens streets. The symptoms of new life are obvious. In this old provincial quartier, in the wildest nooks and crannies, cobblestones are showing themselves, the footpaths are beginning to creep and stretch, even where there are no pedestrians yet. One morning, a memorable morning in July 1845, black drums of asphalt were seen smoking; that day, you could say that civilization had reached the rue de Lourcine and that Paris had come to the faubourg Saint-Marceau.

NEST FOR OWL AND WARBLER

IT WAS IN front of the Gorbeau slum that Jean Valjean stopped. Like a wild bird, he had chosen the most deserted place to build his nest in.

He fumbled in his waistcoat, took out a sort of skeleton key, opened the door, went in, then carefully closed it behind him and mounted the stairs, still carrying Cosette. At the top of the stairs, he pulled another key from his pocket and opened another door with it. The room he entered, once more immediately shutting the door, was a kind of attic, spacious enough and furnished with a mattress on the floor, a table, and a few chairs. There was a stove in one corner burning away with glowing embers you could see. The streetlamp out on the boulevard cast a dim light over this wretched interior. At the back, there was a small room with a camp bed. Jean Valjean carried the child to this bed and laid her down on it without her waking up.

He struck a light using flint and steel and lit a candle; all these things had been set up in advance on the table, and he began to study Cosette, as he had done the night before, with a gaze full of ecstasy in which goodness and tenderness combined almost to the point of distraction. The little girl, with that quiet confidence that belongs only to extreme strength or extreme weakness, had fallen asleep without knowing who she was with and she went on sleeping without knowing where she was.

Jean Valjean bent down and kissed the little girl’s hand. Nine months before, he had kissed the mother’s hand when she, too, had just fallen asleep. The same feeling—painful, religious, poignant—filled his heart. He knelt close to Cosette’s bed.

It was broad daylight and yet the child slept on. A pale ray of December sunlight came through the casement window of the attic and trailed long filaments of light and shade across the ceiling. All of a sudden a carrier’s cart, heavily loaded, rattled past on the boulevard and shook the old hovel like a roll of thunder, causing it to shudder from top to bottom.

“Yes, Madame,” cried Cosette, waking with a start from her sleep. “Here I am! Here I am!”

And she threw herself out of bed, her eyelids still half-shut with the heaviness of sleep, and shot her arm out toward the corner of the room.

“Oh, God! My broom!” she said.

She opened her eyes completely then and saw the smiling face of Jean Valjean.

“Oh, yes, that’s right!” she said. “Hello, Monsieur.”

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

Cosette spotted Catherine at the foot of the bed and grabbed her, and while she was playing, she asked Jean Valjean any number of questions: Where was she? Was it big, Paris? Was Madame Thénardier well out of the way? Would she come back again? And so on and so forth. Suddenly she let fly with this: “It’s so nice here!” It was a ghastly dump, but she felt free.

“Don’t I have to sweep?” she finally asked.

“Play,” said Jean Valjean.

And the day went by in this way. Cosette did not bother to try and understand a thing and was happy beyond words, between the doll and the man.

MIX TWO UNHAPPY PEOPLE TOGETHER AND YOU GET HAPPINESS

AT DAYBREAK THE next day, Jean Valjean was still by Cosette’s bed. He stood waiting there, motionless, watching her wake up.

Something new entered his soul.

Jean Valjean had never loved anything. For twenty-five years he had been alone in the world. He had never been a father, lover, husband, friend. In jail, he had been rotten, glum, chaste, ignorant, and savage. The heart of this old convict was virginal in so many ways. His sister and his sister’s children were merely a dim and distant memory to him, one that had ended up evaporating almost entirely. He had made all those efforts to find them again and then, not having been able to find them again, he had forgotten them. That is how it goes with human nature. The other tender emotions of his youth, if he had any, had been sucked into an abyss.

When he saw Cosette, when he had taken her, carried her away and saved her, he felt stirred to the depths of his soul. All that he possessed of passion and affection sprang to life and rushed toward that child. He went over to the bed where she was sleeping and he trembled with joy; he felt the pangs of a mother and he did not know what they were; for it is so extremely obscure and so extremely sweet, this grand and strange lurch of the heart when it begins to love.

Poor old heart, all new!

Only, as he was fifty-five years old and Cosette was eight, all of the love that he might have felt over his whole life melted into a sort of ineffable incandescence.

This was the second white apparition he had encountered: The bishop had caused virtue to dawn on his horizon; Cosette brought the dawning of love.

The first few days flowed by in this bedazzlement.

On her side, Cosette, too, had changed, unwittingly, poor little lamb! She was so little when her mother had left her that she no longer remembered her. Like all children who, like the young tendrils of a vine, cling to everything, she had tried to love. She had not succeeded. Everyone had pushed her away—the Thénardiers, their children, other children. She had loved the dog, who had died. After that, nothing and no one had wanted her. It is an awful thing to say but, as we have already indicated, at eight her heart was cold. It was not her fault, it was not the capacity to love that was lacking; alas! it was the opportunity. And so now, from the first day, all that could feel and dream in her began to love this good man. She felt what she had never felt before, a sensation of blossoming.

The man no longer even seemed old to her, or poor. She found Jean Valjean handsome just as she found the dump nice.

Such are the effects of dawn, of childhood, of youth, of joy. The newness of the earth and of life has something to do with it. Nothing is as wonderful as the reflection of happiness colouring the attic. We all have a rose-coloured garret in our past.

Nature had placed a huge gap between Jean Valjean and Cosette—fifty years’ difference in age; but destiny had closed the gap. The irresistible force of destiny promptly plighted and united these two rootless existences, different in age, similar in loss. One in fact completed the other. Cosette instinctively sought a father and Jean Valjean instinctively sought a child. To meet was to find each other. At the mysterious moment their hands first touched, they were welded together. When these two souls saw each other, they knew that each was what the other needed and they hugged each other tight.

In the broadest and most absolute sense of the words, you could say that, cut off from everything by tomb walls, Jean Valjean was a widower just as Cosette was a little orphan girl. This situation meant that Jean Valjean became Cosette’s father, heaven-sent. And, in truth, the mysterious impression produced on Cosette, deep in the Chelles wood, by Jean Valjean’s hand grabbing her own in the dark, was not an illusion but a reality. The entry of that man into this child’s life had been the coming of God.

On top of this, Jean Valjean had chosen a good safe refuge. It gave him a sense of security that seemed almost total.

The room with the little room off it that he occupied with Cosette was the one whose window looked out on the boulevard. This was the only window in the house, so there was no neighbour’s gaze to fear, either to the side or directly opposite.

The ground floor of no. 50–52, a sort of dilapidated lean-to, was used by market gardeners as a shed and was not connected to the upper floor. It was separated from it by a solid floor that had neither trapdoor nor stairwell and which was like the building’s diaphragm. The top floor, as we said, contained several rooms and a few attics, of which only one was occupied—by an old woman who did Jean Valjean’s housework for him. All the rest were uninhabited.

It was this old woman, decorated with the title of “chief tenant” and in reality lumbered with the job of caretaker, who had let his place to him on Christmas Eve. He had passed himself off to her as a man of means ruined by the Spanish loan affair, who intended to move in there with his granddaughter. He had paid six months up front and gave the old woman the task of furnishing the room and side room as we have seen. It was this good woman who had lit the stove and got everything ready the night they arrived.

The weeks flew by. The pair led a happy existence in that miserable hole. From break of day, Cosette laughed, jabbered away, sang. Children are their own dawn chorus just like birds.

It sometimes happened that Jean Valjean took her little hand, all red and chapped with chilblains, and kissed it. Being used to being hit, the poor child did not know what to make of this and would run away covered in shame.

At times she would become serious and would study her little black dress. Cosette was no longer in rags, she was in mourning. She had left poverty behind and was embarking on life.

Jean Valjean had begun teaching her how to read. Sometimes, while getting the little girl to spell, he remembered that it was with the idea of doing wrong in mind that he had learned to read in jail. That idea had turned into showing a child how to read. At that the old galley slave would smile with the thoughtful smile of the angels.

In this, he could feel the impulse of premeditation from on high, the will of someone not man, and he would become lost in thought. Good thoughts have their bottomless pits just as bad ones do.

To teach Cosette to read, and let her play, was more or less the sum total of Jean Valjean’s life. After that, he would tell her about her mother and get her to pray.

She called him father, knew him by no other name.

He spent hours watching her dress and undress her doll and listening to her chirping away. Life now seemed to him full of interest, people seemed good and just; in his mind he no longer held anything against anyone, he saw no reason not to live to a ripe old age now that this child loved him. He saw a whole future for himself lit up by Cosette as though by a magic lantern. The best are not exempt from selfish thoughts. At times he felt with a sort of joy that she would turn out ugly.

This is just a personal opinion, but to come completely clean, at the point Jean Valjean had reached when he began to love Cosette, we have no proof that he did not need this refuelling to stay on the straight and narrow. He had just been given a new purchase on the meanness of men and the misery of society—an incomplete view that only showed one side of the truth, disastrously, with the fate of woman summed up in Fantine, public authority personified in Javert; he had gone back to jail, this time for having done good; fresh bitterness had swamped him, disgust and weariness took hold of him again; even the memory of the bishop was at certain moments eclipsed, only to reappear later luminous and triumphant; but in the end, this sacred memory was growing fainter. Who knows if Jean Valjean was not on the verge of losing heart and falling again? He loved, and he got his strength back. Alas! He was hardly any less shaky than Cosette. He protected her and she strengthened him. Thanks to him, she could hold her head up and walk into life; thanks to her, he could continue on the path of virtue. He was the child’s support and the child was his fulcrum. O, unfathomable and divine mystery of the balancing of destiny.

WHAT THE CHIEF TENANT NOTED

JEAN VALJEAN WAS CAREFUL never to go out in the daytime. Every evening at dusk, he would walk for an hour or two, sometimes on his own, often with Cosette, seeking out the most deserted side streets off the boulevard, or going into churches after nightfall. He liked to go to Saint-Médard, the nearest church. When he did not take Cosette, she stayed with the old woman; but nothing thrilled the little girl more than to go out with the man. She preferred an hour with him to her ravishing tête-à-têtes with Catherine. He walked along holding her by the hand and saying sweet things to her.

It turned out that Cosette was extremely spirited.

The old woman did the housework and the cooking and the shopping.

They lived modestly, as people do when they are in dire straits financially, although they always had a small fire. Jean Valjean made no changes to the furniture that was there the first day; only, he had replaced the glass door of Cosette’s small side room with a solid door.

He still had his yellow redingote, his black breeches, and his old hat. In the street he was taken for a pauper. It sometimes happened that respectable women would turn round after him and give him a sou. Jean Valjean would take the sou and bow deeply. It also sometimes happened that he met some miserable wretch begging for charity, and when he did he would look around to see if anyone was watching, furtively go up to the poor derelict and thrust a coin in his hand, often a silver coin, before swiftly moving on. This had its drawbacks. They were beginning to know him in the quartier as “the beggar who gives alms.” The old “chief tenant,” a crabby old bag, highly endowed with the nosiness of the envious in relation to her neighbour, studied Jean Valjean thoroughly, unbeknownst to him. She was a bit deaf, which made her talkative. All she had left from her past was two teeth, an upper one and a lower one, which she constantly knocked together. She had put some questions to Cosette, who could not say anything because she did not know anything, except that she came from Montfermeil. One morning, the old spy spotted Jean Valjean going, with a look that seemed shifty to the old busybody, into one of the uninhabited reaches of the building. She followed him as stealthily as an old cat and managed to see him, without being seen, through the crack in the door directly opposite. Jean Valjean had turned his back to the door, no doubt as an added precaution. The old woman saw him fumble around in his pocket and take out a sewing kit, scissors, and thread; he proceeded to unpick the lining of one of the tails of his redingote and pulled out of the opening a piece of yellowing paper, which he then straightened out. The old woman realized with horror that it was a one-thousand-franc note. It was only the second or third she had ever seen in her life. She took to her heels, very frightened.

A moment later, Jean Valjean approached her and begged her to go and change the thousand-franc note, adding that it was his half-yearly annuity that he had withdrawn the day before.

“Where?” the old woman wondered. “He didn’t go out till six in the evening and the state bank’s certainly not open at that hour.”

The old woman went and changed the note and scratched her old head. This thousand-franc note, embroidered and multiplied, produced a welter of alarmed chatter among the gossips of the rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel.

Some days later, Jean Valjean happened to be sawing wood in the hall in his shirtsleeves. The old woman was in the room doing the cleaning. She was on her own, since Cosette was busy admiring the wood being sawn; the old woman saw the redingote hanging on a nail and examined it: the lining had been sewn up again. The old biddy felt around carefully and thought she could feel wads of paper in the tails and around the armholes. More thousand-franc notes, no doubt!

She also noted that there were all sorts of things in the pockets, not just the needles, scissors, and thread that she had seen, but a fat wallet, a very big knife, and, a most suspect detail, several wigs of various colours. Every pocket of the redingote seemed to hold supplies for use in unexpected emergencies.

The residents of the slum thus came to the last days of winter.

WHEN IT FALLS ON THE GROUND A FIVE-FRANC COIN MAKES A RACKET

BY THE SIDE of Saint-Médard there was a poor man who would squat on the rim of a condemned communal well and to whom Jean Valjean liked to give charity. He hardly ever passed the man without giving him a few sous. Sometimes he spoke to him. Those who were envious of the beggar reckoned he was from the police. He was a former beadle, seventy-five years old, who was always mumbling prayers.

One evening when Jean Valjean was passing by that way, without Cosette, he saw the beggar at his usual spot under the lamp that had just been lit. As usual, the man seemed to be praying and was all hunched over. Jean Valjean went over to him and placed his usual alms in his hand. The beggar suddenly looked up, stared hard at Jean Valjean, then swiftly dropped his head. The movement was like a flash of lightning. Jean Valjean flinched. He felt as though he had just seen, by the light of the streetlamp, not the placid and blissful face of the old beadle, but a face that was frightening and familiar. He had the impression you would have if you had suddenly come face-to-face with a tiger in the dark. He leaped back, frightened stiff, not daring to breathe, or speak, or remain, or flee, and studied the beggar, who hung his rag-covered head and no longer seemed to register that he was there. In that strange moment, an instinct, perhaps the mysterious instinct of self-preservation, stopped Jean Valjean from uttering a sound. The beggar had the same shape, the same rags, the same appearance as every other day. “Bah!” Jean Valjean said to himself. “I must be going mad! I’m dreaming! It’s not possible!” And he went home deeply disturbed.

He scarcely dared admit to himself that the face he thought he had seen was the face of Javert.

That night, as he thought about it, he regretted not questioning the man and forcing him to raise his head again.

The next day, at nightfall, he went back. The beggar was in position. “Hello, my good man,” said Jean Valjean resolutely, handing him a sou. The beggar raised his head and answered in a doleful voice: “Thank you, my good sir.” It was, indeed, the old beadle.

Jean Valjean felt completely reassured, and he started to laugh.

“Why in hell did I think it was Javert?” he asked himself. “Don’t tell me I’m seeing things now!”

He thought no more about it.

A few days later, it might have been about eight at night, he was in his room getting Cosette to spell out loud, when he heard the street door open and then shut again. That seemed odd to him. The old woman, who was the only other person besides him in the house, always went to bed as soon as it was dark to save on candles. Jean Valjean signalled to Cosette to be quiet. Someone was coming up the stairs. At a pinch, it could be the old woman who might have felt sick and gone to the apothecary’s. Jean Valjean listened. The tread was heavy and reverberated like a man’s tread, but the old woman wore thick shoes and nothing sounds more like a man’s tread than the tread of an old woman. Still, Jean Valjean blew out his candle.

He sent Cosette to bed, telling her in a very low voice: “Hop into bed without a sound,” and as he was giving her a kiss on the forehead, the footsteps stopped. Jean Valjean remained silent and motionless, with his back to the door, sitting in his chair without moving, holding his breath in the dark. After quite a while, not hearing another sound, he turned round without making any noise and, just as he was raising his eyes to the door of his room, he saw a light through the keyhole. This light made a kind of sinister star against the blackness of the door and the wall. There was clearly someone there holding a candle in their hand and listening.

A few minutes passed and the light went away. But he did not hear any further sound of footsteps, which seemed to indicate that whoever had come to listen at the door had taken their shoes off.

Jean Valjean threw himself fully dressed onto his bed and did not sleep a wink all night.

At first light, just as he was dozing off from tiredness, he was jolted awake by the creaking of a door of some mansard at the end of the hall, and then he heard the same man’s footsteps that had come up the stairs the night before. The footsteps got nearer. He leaped out of bed and put his eye to the keyhole, which was fairly large, hoping to catch a glimpse of whoever it was that had stolen into the building in the night and listened at his door. It was, indeed, a man who went past Jean Valjean’s room, this time without stopping. The hall was still too dark to make out his face; but when the man reached the stairs, a ray of light from outside highlighted his silhouette and Jean Valjean got a complete view from the back. The man was tall, dressed in a long redingote, and he had a cudgel under his arm. He had Javert’s bull neck.

Jean Valjean could have tried to get a good look at him from his window on the boulevard. But he would have had to open the window and he did not dare.

It was clear that the man had let himself in with a key, as though he were at home there. Who had given him this key? And what did it mean?

At seven o’clock that morning, when the old woman came to clean, Jean Valjean threw her a penetrating look, but he did not question her. The old woman’s manner was the same as always.

While she was sweeping, she said to him: “Monsieur perhaps heard someone come in last night?”

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

“I did, as a matter of fact,” he replied, in the most natural tone. “So who was it?”

“A new tenant,” said the old woman, “that’s moved in.”

“And what’s his name?”

“I can’t really remember. Monsieur Dumont or Daumont. Something like that.”

“And what is he, this Monsieur Dumont?”

The old woman studied him with her little weasel’s eyes and answered: “He’s a tenant, like you.”

She may have intended nothing by this, but Jean Valjean thought he could detect that she did. When the old woman had gone, he made a roll of a hundred one-franc coins he had in a cupboard and stuffed it in his pocket. Despite the care he had taken so that the money would not be heard rattling around, a hundred-sou coin slipped out of his hands and rolled noisily across the tiles.

At dusk, he went downstairs and looked carefully up and down the boulevard. He saw no one. The boulevard seemed absolutely deserted. It was true that someone could be hiding behind a tree.

He went back upstairs.

“Come,” he said to Cosette.

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