بخش 2 کتاب 8

BOOK EIGHT

CEMETERIES TAKE WHAT THEY ARE GIVEN

IN WHICH THE WAY TO ENTER A CONVENT IS DEALT WITH

IT IS INTO this house that Jean Valjean had, as Fauchelevent said, “fallen from the sky.” He had climbed over the garden wall at the rue Polonceau corner, the hymn of angels that he had heard in the middle of the night was the nuns singing matins; the room he had glimpsed in the dark was the chapel; the ghost he had seen stretched out on the ground was a sister making atonement; the little bell whose ringing had so strangely startled him was the gardener’s bell tied around father Fauchelevent’s knee.

Once Cosette had been put to bed, Jean Valjean and Fauchelevent had, as we saw, made a meal of a glass of wine and a lump of cheese in front of a good blazing fire; then, the only bed in the shed being occupied by Cosette, they had each thrown themselves on a bale of straw. Before shutting his eyes, Jean Valjean had said: “I have to stay here from now on.” Fauchelevent had not been able to get those words out of his head all night. To tell the truth, neither of them got any sleep.

Jean Valjean, feeling that he’d been seen and that Javert was on his trail, realized that Cosette and he were finished if they went back to Paris. Since this latest blast of wind to blow over him had just swept him into this cloister, Jean Valjean had only one thought, to stay put. Now, for an unhappy man in his position, the convent was at once the most dangerous and the safest place to be; the most dangerous, because no man could get into it, so if he were discovered there, it would be in flagrante delicto, and being caught in the act for Jean Valjean meant just a skip and a jump from the convent to the clink; the safest, because if he managed to get himself accepted and to stay, who would think of looking for him there? To live in a place that was out of bounds—that was salvation.

Fauchelevent also racked his brains. He started out by telling himself he just didn’t get it. How come Monsieur Madeleine had managed to get in, with the walls that were there? You don’t just step over cloister walls. How come he managed to get in with a kid? You don’t just scale a high wall with a kid in your arms. Who the hell was this kid, anyway? Where had they both sprung from?

Since Fauchelevent had been at the convent, he hadn’t heard another word about Montreuil-sur-mer and he knew nothing about what had happened. Father Madeleine had that look that discourages questions and, anyway, Fauchelevent told himself that you don’t question a saint. For him Monsieur Madeleine had kept all his prestige. Only, from a few words Jean Valjean had let slip, the gardener thought he gathered that Monsieur Madeleine had gone bankrupt on account of the hard times and that he was being pursued by his creditors, or else that he had been compromised in some political affair and had gone into hiding; which did not at all worry Fauchelevent who, like a lot of our northern peasants, was an old Bonapartist at heart. Being in hiding, Monsieur Madeleine holed up in the convent and it was only natural that he wanted to stay there. But the thing Fauchelevent couldn’t explain, and that he kept going back to and was racking his brains over, was that Monsieur Madeleine was there, and that he was there with this little girl. Fauchelevent saw them, touched them, spoke to them, and didn’t believe it. The incomprehensible had just made its entrance in Fauchelevent’s shack. Fauchelevent was madly groping around in surmise and there was only one thing he could see clearly anymore: “Monsieur Madeleine saved my life.” This single certainty was enough and made up his mind for him. He took himself aside and said to himself: “Now it’s my turn.” In his conscience, he added: “Monsieur Madeleine didn’t spend much time making up his mind when it was a question of getting under the cart to pull me out.” So he decided he’d save Monsieur Madeleine.

And yet he put various questions to himself and gave himself various answers.

“After all he’s meant to me, if he was a thief, would I save him? I would. If he was a murderer, would I save him? I would. Since he’s a saint, would I save him? I would.” But to somehow keep him in the convent, now that was a problem! Faced with this almost fantastic prospect, Fauchelevent did not back down; this poor peasant from Picardy, with no ladder other than his devotion, his goodwill, and a bit of good old country cunning placed, for once, at the service of a generous intention, undertook to scale the impossibilities of the cloister and the craggy escarpments of the rule of Saint Benedict. Father Fauchelevent was an old man who had been selfish all his life but who, at the end of his days, lame, infirm, and with no further interest in the world, found it sweet to be grateful, and seeing a virtuous deed to be done, threw himself into it like a man about to die who suddenly sees a glass of good wine he’s never tasted within reach and tosses it back with relish. We might add that the air he had been breathing for the past few years in the convent had already destroyed his personality and ended up making a good deed necessary to him, whatever it might be.

So he formed his resolution; to devote himself to Monsieur Madeleine.

We have just described him as a poor peasant from Picardy. The description is fair, but incomplete. At the point in the story where we now are, a glimpse of father Fauchelevent’s makeup might come in handy. He was a peasant, but he had been a tabellion,1 a scrivener, which added a bit of chicanery to his cunning and perspicacity to his gullibility. Having for various reasons failed in his affairs, he had fallen from being a scrivener to a carter and labourer. But despite the cursing and cracks of the whip that horses need, it seems he remained something of a lawyer deep down. He had some natural wit; he did not say “I is,” or “I has” either; he spoke well, which was a rare thing in the village; and the other peasants said of him: “He talks just like a gent with a hat.” Fauchelevent belonged, in fact, to that breed that the impertinent and flippant vocabulary of last century termed “half burgher, half boor,” and that metaphors raining down from the château onto the humble thatched cottage labelled, in the pigeonhole of commoner, “a bit of a hick, a bit of a city slicker”; or “salt and pepper.” Though badly used and abused by fate and showing the wear and tear, Fauchelevent was nevertheless an impulsive man and incredibly spontaneous—a precious quality that stops you from ever being bad. His defects and his vices, for he had a few, were entirely superficial; in short, his physiognomy was of the kind that passes the test up close to the observer. That old face had none of those unfortunate wrinkles at the top of the forehead that signify meanness or stupidity.

At daybreak, having racked his brains, father Fauchelevent opened his eyes and saw Monsieur Madeleine sitting on his bale of straw watching Cosette sleep. Fauchelevent sat up and said: “Now you’re here, how are you going to get in?” This question summed up the situation and woke Jean Valjean out of his reverie.

The two good old codgers put their heads together.

“First,” said Fauchelevent, “you’ll begin by not setting foot outside this room. Neither the little girl nor you. One step in the garden and we’ve had it.” “Fair enough.”

“Monsieur Madeleine,” Fauchelevent went on, “you arrived at a good moment, I mean a very bad moment, one of the ladies is very sick. That means no one will be taking much notice of what’s going on over our way. It appears she’s dying. They’re saying the forty-hour prayers. The whole community’s worked up. It keeps them busy. The one who’s about to fly off is a saint. Actually, they’re all saints here. The whole difference between them and me is that they say ‘our cell’ and I say ‘my digs.’ There’s going to be the prayer for the dying and then the prayer for the dead. For today we’ll be all right here; but I can’t say what’ll happen tomorrow.” “But,” observed Jean Valjean, “this old shack is in the recess in the wall, it’s hidden by a kind of ruin, there are trees, you can’t see it from the convent.” “And I might add that the nuns never come near it.”

“Well, then?” said Jean Valjean.

The question mark that underlined that “well, then?” signified: It seems to me that a person could live hidden here. It is to this question mark that Fauchelevent responded: “There are the little girls.” “What little girls?” asked Jean Valjean.

As Fauchelevent opened his mouth to explain what he meant, a bell rang suddenly.

“The nun’s dead,” he said. “That’s the death knell.”

And he signalled Jean Valjean to listen.

The bell rang for the second time.

“That is the death knell, Monsieur Madeleine. The bell will go on tolling every minute on the dot for the next twenty-four hours until the body’s taken from the church. You see, they come out to play. At playtime, all it takes is for a ball to roll over this way and over they come, despite the ban, to look for it and they poke around here everywhere. They’re little devils, those cherubs.” “Who?” asked Jean Valjean.

“The little girls. You’d be spotted in no time, you know. They’d sing out: ‘Look! A man!’ But there’s no danger today. There won’t be any playtime. The day’ll be all taken up with prayers. You hear the bell. As I told you, one ring a minute. That’s the death knell.” “I understand, father Fauchelevent. There are boarders.” And Jean Valjean thought to himself: “Look no further for Cosette’s education.” Fauchelevent cried out: “Lord! You wouldn’t believe how many little girls there are! Twittering all around a person! And then skedaddling! Here, being a man is like having the plague. You see how they’ve stuck a bell on my shank as if I was some kind of wild beast.” Jean Valjean was more and more pensive.

“This convent will be our salvation,” he murmured. Then he raised his voice: “Yes, the hard thing is staying in.” “No,” said Fauchelevent, “it’s getting out.”

Jean Valjean felt the blood rush to his heart.

“Getting out!”

“Yes, Monsieur Madeleine, to come back in, you have to get out.” And after waiting while the knell sounded again, Fauchelevent went on: “They can’t find you here like this. Where did you come from? For me, you fell out of the sky, because I know you; but the nuns, they need you to come through the door.” All of a sudden, they heard the rather complicated ringing of another bell.

“Ah!” said Fauchelevent. “They’re ringing for the vocal mothers. They’re going in to the chapter. They always hold a chapter when someone’s died. She died at daybreak. It’s usually daybreak that you die. But can’t you get out the way you got in? Look, I don’t mean to ask, but where did you get in?” Jean Valjean went white. The very idea of going back down into that dreadful street made him shudder. Imagine getting out of a forest full of tigers and then, once you are out, a friend advises you to steel yourself and go back in. Jean Valjean conjured up all the police still swarming over the area, officers on the lookout, sentries all over the place. Hideous fists reaching for his collar, maybe Javert at the corner of the square.

“Not possible!” he said. “Father Fauchelevent, let’s just say I fell from on high.” “But I believe you, I believe you,” Fauchelevent replied. “You don’t need to tell me that. The good Lord would’ve taken you in hand to get a closer look at you and then let go his hold. Only, he meant to put you in a convent for men and he got it wrong. There, another ring. This one’s to alert the porter to go and notify the mairie so they can go and alert the doctor of the dead and he can come and see that there is a dead woman. All that, that’s the ceremony of dying. They don’t much like that visit, these good ladies. A doctor, he doesn’t believe in anything. He lifts the veil. Sometimes he even lifts something else. They’ve certainly been in a hurry to notify the doctor this time! What’s up, I wonder? Your little girl is still asleep. What’s her name?” “Cosette.”

“Is she your little girl? What I mean is, are you her grandfather?” “Yes.”

“For her, getting out of here will be easy. I’ve got my tradesman’s entrance that opens onto the courtyard. I knock. The porter opens. I have my basket on my back, the little one’s inside. Out I go. Father Fauchelevent’s off with his basket, it’s as simple as that. You tell the little one to stay nice and quiet. She’ll be under the lid. I’ll drop her off as fast as I can at a good old friend of mine’s, a woman who sells fruit in the rue du Chemin-Vert, who’s hard of hearing and who’s got a little bed at her place. I’ll shout in the fruit seller’s ear that it’s one of my nieces and to mind her for me till tomorrow. Then the little one can come back with you. For I’ll get you back in. I have to. But what about you, how are you going to get out?” Jean Valjean nodded.

“No one must see me. That’s the rub, father Fauchelevent. Find a way of getting me out like Cosette in a basket and under a lid.” Fauchelevent scratched his earlobe with the middle finger of his left hand, a sure sign of serious confusion.

A third ring of the bell offered a diversion.

“That’s the death doctor leaving,” said Fauchelevent. “He’s looked and he’s said: ‘She’s dead, too right.’ When the doctor has stuck a visa for paradise in the passport, the undertakers send in a coffin. If it’s a mother, the mothers lay her out; if it’s a sister, the sisters lay her out. After that, I nail it up. It’s all part of my gardening. A gardener is a bit of a gravedigger. They put her in a low room in the church where there’s a connecting door with the street and where the only man who can go in is the doctor of the dead. I don’t count the undertaker’s assistants or myself as men. It’s in that room that I nail the coffin. The undertaker’s assistants come and pick it up and Bob’s your uncle! That’s how you go off to heaven. They bring a box with nothing in it and they take it away with something in it. That’s what a funeral’s all about. De profundis.” A horizontal ray of sunlight brushed the face of the sleeping Cosette, who opened her mouth a little and looked like an angel drinking the light. Jean Valjean was watching her again. He had stopped listening to Fauchelevent.

Not being listened to is no reason to keep quiet. The good old gardener went on calmly repeating himself: “They dig the hole at the Vaugirard Cemetery. They say they’re going to get rid of it, this Vaugirard Cemetery. It’s an old cemetery that’s in breach of the regulations, it doesn’t have the uniform and it’s going to take retirement. It’s a shame because it’s nice and handy. I’ve got a friend there, old father Mestienne, the gravedigger. The nuns from here have a special privilege, which is being carted off to the cemetery at nightfall. There is a decree of the prefecture, just for them. But what a lot has happened since yesterday! Mother Crucifixion is dead and father Madeleine—” “Is buried,” said Jean Valjean, with a sad smile.

Fauchelevent made the word ricochet.

“Buried—! Christ! If you were here for good it would be a real burial.” The bell rang out for the fourth time. Fauchelevent swiftly grabbed the knee pad with the little bell and buckled it round his knee again.

“This time, it’s me. The mother prioress is asking for me. Don’t move, Monsieur Madeleine. Wait for me. Something’s happened. If you’re hungry, there’s wine and bread and cheese.” And he beetled out of the shack, saying: “I’m coming! I’m coming!” Jean Valjean saw him running across the garden, as fast as his bad leg would let him, all the while casting sidelong glances at his melon beds.

Less than ten minutes later, father Fauchelevent, whose bell put the nuns to flight as he passed, knocked softly on a door and a soft voice answered: “Forever. Forever.” That is, “Come in.” The door was the one in the visitors’ room reserved for the gardener in the course of his duties. The visitors’ room was adjacent to the chapter hall. The prioress was sitting on the only chair in the visitors’ room, waiting for Fauchelevent.

FAUCHELEVENT CONFRONTED WITH A PROBLEM

TO LOOK BOTH agitated and grave in critical situations is peculiar to certain personalities and certain professions, notably priests and nuns. The moment Fauchelevent came in, this dual sign of preoccupation was stamped on the physiognomy of the prioress, who was the charming and learned Mademoiselle de Blemeur, Mother Innocent, normally so gay.

The gardener gave a frightened bow and remained standing at the threshold of the cell. The prioress, who was saying her rosary, looked up and said: “Ah, it’s you, father Fauvent.” This abbreviation had been adopted in the convent.

Fauchelevent began to bow once more.

“Father Fauvent, I had you called.”

“Here I am, Reverend Mother.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“And I, for my part,” said Fauchelevent with a recklessness that frightened him inside, “I have something to say to the most reverend mother.” The prioress looked at him.

“Ah, you have some communication to make to me.”

“A request.”

“Well, then, speak.”

The good Fauchelevent, ex-scrivener, belonged to that category of peasants who have aplomb. A certain canny ignorance is a strength; you don’t suspect it and it grabs you. For a little over two years, since he had lived in the convent, Fauchelevent had done well in the community. Always on his own, even while he went about his business in the garden, he scarcely had anything else to do but be curious. At a remove as he was from all these veiled women coming and going, he scarcely saw anything before him but bustling shadows. By dint of attention and perspicacity, he had managed to put some flesh back into all these phantoms, and for him these dead women were alive. He was like a deaf man whose sight is enhanced or like a blind man whose hearing is sharpened. He had applied himself to unravelling the meaning of all the different bells and he had managed to do so, to the point where this enigmatic and glum cloister held no secrets for him; it was a sphinx that blurted out all its secrets in his ear. Knowing everything, Fauchelevent hid everything. That was his art. The whole convent thought he was stupid. A great merit in religion. The vocal mothers prized Fauchelevent. He was a curious mute. He inspired confidence. On top of this, he was regular in his habits, and went out only for the demonstrable necessities of the orchard and the vegetable garden. This discretion in his conduct was chalked up to his credit. Though that had not stopped him from getting two men to spill the beans: in the convent, the porter, who knew all about the peculiarities of the visitors’ room; and, in the cemetery, the gravedigger, who knew all about the singularities of the sepulchre; accordingly, when it came to the nuns, he was doubly informed, about their lives, on the one hand, and on the other, about their deaths. But he did not abuse this knowledge in any way. The congregation thought a lot of him. Old, lame, blind as a bat, probably a bit deaf—so many good qualities! He’d have been hard to replace.

So, with the assurance of a man who feels himself to be appreciated, the dear old man stood before the reverend prioress and launched into a bucolic address that was fairly rambling and extremely deep. He went on at length about his age, his infirmities, the weight of the years now bearing down on him. The growing demands of his work, the size of the garden, nights to be spent, like last night for instance, when he had had to put straw mats over the melon beds because of the moon … And he finished off by saying: that he had a brother (the prioress gave a start)—a brother who was not young (second start of the prioress, but a reassured start)—that, if they liked, this brother could come and move in with him and help him, that he was an excellent gardener, that the community would get good work out of him, much more than he himself could give; and that, otherwise, if his brother was not accepted, as he, the eldest, felt himself to be broken down and no longer up to the job, he would be obliged, with much regret, to pack up and go … And that his brother had a little girl he would bring with him, who would be raised in God here in the house and who might, who knows? one day make a nun.

When he had finished speaking, the prioress interrupted the slipping of her rosary beads through her fingers and said to him: “Can you, between now and this evening, get hold of a strong iron bar?” “What for?”

“To be used as a lever.”

“Yes, Reverend Mother,” answered Fauchelevent.

The prioress got up without saying another word and walked into the neighbouring room, which was the chapter hall where the vocal mothers were probably assembled. Fauchelevent was left to his own devices.

MOTHER INNOCENT

ABOUT A QUARTER of an hour elapsed. The prioress came back and resumed her seat.

Both parties seemed preoccupied. We have copied down the exchange between them as best we could.

“Father Fauvent?”

“Reverend Mother?”

“You are familiar with the chapel?”

“I’ve got a little box there to hear mass and the offices in.” “And you’ve gone into the choir for your work?”

“Two or three times.”

“There’s a stone there that has to be lifted up.”

“Heavy?”

“The flagstone from the pavement next to the altar.”

“The stone over the burial chamber?”

“Yes.”

“This is one time when it’d be good to have two men.”

“Mother Ascension is as strong as a man—she’ll help you.” “A woman is never a man.”

“We only have a woman to help you. Everyone does what they can. Because Dom Mabillon gives four hundred and seventeen epistles of Saint Bernard and Merlonus Horstius gives only three hundred and sixty-seven, I do not look down on Merlonus Horstius.” “Me neither.”1

“Merit consists in working according to your strength. A cloister is not a building site.” “And a woman is not a man. My brother’s the strong one!” “And then, you’ll have a lever.”

“That’s the only sort of key that fits that sort of door.” “There is a ring in the stone.”

“I’ll put the lever through it.”

“And the stone is set up to pivot.”

“That’s good, Reverend Mother. I’ll open up the vault.”

“And the four cantor mothers will assist you.”

“And when the vault is open?”

“It will have to be shut again.”

“Will that be all?”

“No.”

“Give me your orders, most Reverend Mother.”

“Fauvent, we have confidence in you.”

“I’m here to take care of everything.”

“And to keep quiet about everything.”

“Yes, Reverend Mother.”

“When the vault is open—”

“I’ll shut it again.”

“But before that—”

“What, Reverend Mother?”

“Something has to be lowered into it.”

There was a pause. The prioress thrust out her lower lip in a pout that looked like hesitation, then broke the silence.

“Father Fauvent?”

“Reverend Mother?”

“You know that a mother died this morning.”

“No.”

“Didn’t you hear the bell, then?”

“You can’t hear a thing down at the bottom of the garden.” “Really?”

“I can hardly make out my own ring.”

“She died at daybreak.”

“And then, this morning the wind wasn’t blowing my way.” “It was Mother Crucifixion. One of the blessed.”

The prioress stopped talking, moved her lips for a moment as though mouthing a mental sermon, and resumed: “Three years ago, a Jansenist, Madame de Béthune,2 only had to see Mother Crucifixion praying and she turned orthodox.” “Ah, yes, I can hear the knell now, Reverend Mother.”

“The mothers have carried her to the room of the dead that opens into the church.” “I know.”

“No man other than you can or should enter that room. You make sure of that. That would be a pretty sight, to see a man go into the room of the dead!” “More often!”

“What!”

“More often!”

“What do you say?”

“I say more often.”

“More often what?”

“Reverend Mother, I don’t say more often what, I say more often.” “I don’t understand you. Why do you say more often?”

“To say what you say, Reverend Mother.”

“But I didn’t say more often.”

“You didn’t say it, but I said it to say what you say.”

Just then, the clock struck nine.

“At nine o’clock in the morning and at any hour, praised and adored be the most Blessed Sacrament of the altar,” said the prioress.

“Amen,” said Fauchelevent.

The hour had sounded in the nick of time. It cut short that “more often.” Without it it is likely that the prioress and Fauchelevent would never have got out of this tangle.

Fauchelevent wiped his forehead.

The prioress gave another little interior murmur, probably holy, then spoke up.

“While she was alive, Mother Crucifixion made conversions; after her death, she will make miracles.” “She will, at that!” replied Fauchelevent, following her lead and making an effort to stick with it from now on.

“Father Fauvent, the community has been blessed in Mother Crucifixion. No doubt it is not given to everyone to die like Cardinal de Bérulle, saying the holy mass and exhaling his soul toward God, uttering these words: Hanc igitur oblationem.3 But without attaining such happiness, Mother Crucifixion had a most beautiful death. She was conscious right up until the last. She talked to us, then she talked to the angels. She gave us her last commands. If you had a bit more faith, and if you had been able to be in her cell, she would have cured your leg for you just by touching it. She was smiling. You could feel that she was being born again in God. There was a touch of paradise in that death.” Fauchelevent felt that this was a sermon gearing up.

“Amen,” he said.

“Father Fauvent, we must do what the dead want us to do.” The prioress counted a few beads on her rosary. Fauchelevent kept quiet. She went on.

“I have consulted on this question several ecclesiastics working in Our Lord who are engaged in the exercise of the clerical life and who have produced wonderful fruit.” “Reverend Mother, you can hear the knell much better from here than in the garden.” “Besides, she is more than a dead woman, she is a saint.” “Like you, Reverend Mother.”

“She slept in her coffin for twenty years, with the express permission of our holy father, Pius VII.” “The one who crowned the emp—Buonaparte.”4

For a clever man like Fauchelevent, the memory was untoward. Luckily the prioress was lost in thought and did not hear him. She continued: “Father Fauvent?” “Reverend Mother?”

“Saint Diodorus, archbishop of Cappadocia, wanted this single word to be written on his tomb: Acarus, which means earthworm. This was done. Is that not true?” “Yes, Reverend Mother.”

“The blessed Mezzocane, abbé of Aquila, wanted to be buried beneath the gallows; that was done.” “That is true.”

“Saint Terence, bishop of Ostia, where the Tiber meets the sea, asked that his tombstone be engraved with the sign that used to be put on the graves of parricides, in the hope that passersby would spit on his grave. That was done. We must obey the dead.” “So be it.”

“The body of Bernard Guidonis, born in France near Roche-Abeille, was, as he had ordered and in spite of the king of Castile, carried into the church of the Dominicans of Limoges, although Bernard Guidonis was bishop of Tuy in Spain. Can this be denied?” “No, it cannot, Reverend Mother.”

“The fact is testified to by Plantavit de la Fosse.”

A few more rosary beads were silently said. The prioress went on: “Father Fauvent, Mother Crucifixion will be buried in the coffin in which she slept for twenty years.” “That is only right.”

“Death is merely a prolongation of sleep.”

“So I’ll have to nail her in that particular coffin?”

“Yes.”

“And we’ll set aside the undertaker’s coffin?”

“Exactly.”

“I am at the orders of the most reverend community.”

“The four cantor mothers will help you.”

“To nail the coffin? I don’t need them.”

“No. To lower it down.”

“Where?”

“Into the vault.”

“What vault?”

“Under the altar.”

Fauchelevent gave a start.

“The vault under the altar!”

“Under the altar.”

“Yes, but—”

“You’ll lever up the stone with the bar, using the ring.” “But—”

“We must obey the dead. To be buried in the vault under the altar of the chapel, not to go into profane ground, to remain in death where she had prayed in life, this was Mother Crucifixion’s last wish. She asked us, that is, she ordered us.” “But it is forbidden.”

“Forbidden by men, ordered by God.”

“If word got out?”

“We have confidence in you.”

“Oh, as for me, I’m a stone in your wall.”

“The chapter has assembled. The vocal mothers, whom I have just consulted again and who are deliberating as we speak, have decided that Mother Crucifixion will be buried in her coffin under our altar, according to her wish. You’ll see if there won’t be miracles galore here, Father Fauvent! What glory in God for the community! Miracles spring from graves.” “But Reverend Mother, if the officer from the health department—” “Saint Benedict II, on the question of burial, resisted Constantine Pogonatus.” “Yet the police commissioner—”

“Chonodemaire, one of the seven German kings who joined the Gauls in the reign of Constantius, expressly recognized the right of the religious to be buried in religion, that is, under the altar.” “But the inspector from the prefecture—”

“The world is nothing in the face of the cross. Martin, eleventh general of the Carthusians, gave his order his motto: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis.”5 “Amen,” said Fauchelevent, who stuck imperturbably to this way of extricating himself whenever he heard Latin.

The most mediocre listener will do for someone who has been silent far too long. The day the rhetorician Gymnastoras got out of jail, having held inside so many dilemmas and syllogisms, he stopped at the first tree he came to and harangued it, making great efforts to win it over. The prioress, usually dammed up by silence, and now having a surplus in her reservoir, stood and shouted with the loquacity of an opened sluice gate: “On my right, I have Benedict and on my left, Bernard. Who is Bernard? He is the first abbé of Clairvaux. Fontaine in Burgundy is blessed for having been the place of his birth. His father’s name was Técelin and his mother’s Alèthe. He began at Cîteaux only to end up at Clairvaux; he was ordained an abbé by the bishop of Chalon-sur-Saône, Guillaume de Champeaux; he had seven hundred novices and founded one hundred and sixty monasteries; he brought down Abelard at the Council of Sens6 in 1140, and Pierre de Bruys and Henry his disciple, and another lot of strays known as the Apostolicals; he confounded Arnaud de Bresce, dumbfounded the monk Raoul, the Jew-slayer, took over the Council of Rheims in 1148, had Gilbert de la Porée, bishop of Poitiers, condemned, had Éon de l’Étoile condemned, sorted out the disputes between the princes, enlightened King Louis the Young,7 counselled Pope Eugenius III,8 regulated the Temple, preached the Crusade, performed two hundred and fifty miracles in his lifetime and up to thirty-nine in one day. Who is Benedict? He is the patriarch of Monte Cassino;9 he is the second founder of Claustral Holiness, he is the Basil of the West.10 His order has produced forty popes, two hundred cardinals, fifty patriarchs, sixteen hundred archbishops, four thousand six hundred bishops, four emperors, twelve empresses, forty-six kings, forty-one queens, and three thousand six hundred canonized saints, and has existed for fourteen hundred years. On one side, Saint Bernard; on the other, the health inspector! On one side, Saint Benedict, on the other, the other inspector from the department of roads! The government, the department of roads, the funeral parlour, the regulations, the administration—what do we know of all that? No one worries about how we are treated. We don’t even have the right to give our dust to Jesus Christ! Your sanitation is an invention of the Revolution. God subordinated to the police commissioner. That’s the age we live in. Silence, Fauvent!” Fauchelevent was not terribly comfortable under this barrage. The prioress continued.

“No one questions the right of a monastery to bury their dead themselves. Only fanatics and lunatics deny it. We are living in times of terrible confusion. People don’t know what they should know and know things they should not. People are crass and ungodly. These days, there are those who can’t distinguish between the mighty Saint Bernard and the Bernard known as “of the Catholic Poor,” a certain good-hearted ecclesiastic who lived in the thirteenth century. Others blaspheme as far as to compare the scaffold of Louis XVI to the cross of Jesus Christ. Louis XVI was a mere king. Let us then watch out for God! There is no just or unjust anymore. Everyone knows Voltaire’s name and no one knows the name of Caesar de Bus. And yet Caesar de Bus is one of the blessed and Voltaire is a sorry soul. The last archbishop, the cardinal de Périgord, did not even know that Charles de Condren succeeded Bérulle, and François Bourgoin, Condren, and Jean-François Senault, Bourgoin, and the father of Saint Martha, Jean-François Senault. People know the name of Father Coton, not because he was one of the three who pushed for the foundation of the Oratory, but because the Huguenot king Henri IV11 swore at him. What makes Saint François de Sales popular with worldly types is that he cheated at cards. And then they attack religion. Why? Because there have been bad priests, because Sagittarius, bishop of Gap, was a brother of Salone, bishop of Embrun, and both were followers of Mommol. What does that matter? Does it stop Martin of Tours12 from being a saint and from having given half the coat off his back to a pauper? They persecute the saints. They shut their eyes to the truth. They are used to getting around in the dark. The wildest beasts are blind beasts. No one takes hell seriously anymore. Oh, the wicked people! “In the name of the king” now means “in the name of the Revolution.” No one knows anymore what they owe either to the living or to the dead. Dying a holy death is now forbidden. Burial is a civil affair. It is horrifying. Saint Leo II wrote two letters expressly, one to Pierre Notaire, the other to the king of the Visigoths, opposing and rejecting, in matters touching on the dead, the authority of the exarch and the supremacy of the emperor. Gautier, bishop of Châlons, stood up to Othon, duc de Bourgogne, on the matter. The former Bench agreed on it. Once we even voted in the chapter on worldly concerns. The abbé of Cîteaux, general of the order, was hereditary councillor to the parliament of Burgundy. We do what we like with our dead. Is the body of Saint Benedict himself not in France in the abbey of Fleury, known as Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, even though he died in Italy at Monte Cassino, one Saturday, on the twenty-first day of the month of March in the year 543? All this is incontestable. I abhor the Psallants, I hate the priors, I loathe heretics, but I would detest even more anyone who tried to contradict what I say. You only have to read Arnoul Wion, Gabriel Bucelin, Trithemius, Maurolicus, or Dom Luc d’Achery.” The prioress took a breath, then turned to Fauchelevent: “Father Fauvent, is it agreed?” “It is agreed, Reverend Mother.”

“Can we count on you?”

“I will obey.”

“Good.”

“I am completely devoted to the convent.”

“Enough said. You will close the coffin. The sisters will carry it into the chapel. They will say the funeral service. Then they will go back to the cloister. Between eleven o’clock and midnight, you will come with your iron bar. It will all be done in the greatest secrecy. There will be only the four cantor mothers, Mother Ascension, and you in the chapel.” “And the sister at the post.”

“She will not turn round.”

“But she’ll hear.”

“She will not listen. Besides, what the cloister knows, the world knows nothing about.” There was another pause. The prioress went on: “You will take off your bell. There is no point in letting the sister at the post know you’re there.” “Reverend Mother?”

“What, father Fauvent?”

“Has the doctor of the dead been?”

“He’s coming at four o’clock today. We rang the bell that calls the doctor of the dead. So you really don’t hear any of the bells?” “I only take notice of my own.”

“A good thing, father Fauvent.”

“Reverend Mother, the lever’ll need to be at least six feet long.” “Where will you get it?”

“Where there’s no shortage of iron gates, there’s no shortage of iron bars. I’ve got my scrap heap at the bottom of the garden.” “About three quarters of an hour before midnight. Don’t forget.” “Reverend Mother?”

“What?”

“If ever you have other work like this, my brother’s the one who’s strong. A real Turk!” “You will do it as quickly as possible.”

“I can’t go all that fast. I’m none too steady on my pins; that’s why I need help. I limp.” “There’s nothing wrong with limping—it may even be a blessing. The emperor Henri II, who fought the antipope Gregory and reestablished Benedict VIII, has two nicknames: the Saint and the Limper.” “It’s a good thing to have two surnames,” mumbled Fauchelevent, who was, in fact, a little hard of hearing.

“Father Fauvent, now I think about it, let’s take a whole hour. Be at the high altar with your iron bar at eleven o’clock. The service begins at midnight. Everything has to be over a good quarter of an hour beforehand.” “I’ll do all I can to prove my zeal to the community. This is what we’ve agreed. I’ll nail up the coffin. At eleven o’clock sharp I’ll be in the chapel. The cantor mothers will be there, Mother Ascension will be there. Two of me would be better. But, never mind! I’ll have my lever. We’ll open the vault, we’ll drop the coffin down into it, and we’ll seal the vault up again. After which, there won’t even be a trace. The government won’t suspect a thing. Reverend Mother, does that about cover it?” “No.”

“What else is there?”

“There’s still the empty coffin.”

This gave them pause for thought. Fauchelevent pondered. The prioress pondered.

“Father Fauvent, what will we do with the empty coffin?” “We’ll put it in the ground.”

“Empty?”

Another silence. Fauchelevent made the sort of gesture with his left hand that puts to rest any disturbing question.

“Reverend Mother, I’ll nail the empty coffin in the back room of the church. No one else but me can get in, and I’ll cover the coffin with the pall.” “Yes, but when the pallbearers put it in the hearse and when they lower it in the ground, they will certainly feel there’s nothing in it.” “Ah, Chri—” cried Fauchelevent.

The prioress began to make the sign of the cross and stared hard at the gardener. The “-st” stuck in his throat.

He swiftly sought to come up with an expedient to make her forget his bout of blasphemy.

“Reverend Mother, I’ll put some dirt in the coffin. Then it will seem like there’s a person.” “You’re right. Dirt is the same thing as man. So you’ll fix up the empty coffin?” “I’ll make it my business.”

The prioress’s face, till then worried and dark, became once more serene. She waved him away, a superior dismissing an inferior. Fauchelevent headed for the door. As he was about to step out, the prioress gently raised her voice: “Father Fauvent, I am happy with you; tomorrow, after the funeral, bring your brother to me and tell him to bring his daughter.” IN WHICH JEAN VALJEAN LOOKS AS THOUGH HE HAS READ AUSTIN CASTILLEJO THE STRIDES OF the lame are like the winks of the one-eyed; they don’t go straight to the point. Moreover, Fauchelevent was puzzled. It took him nearly a quarter of an hour to get back to the garden shed. Cosette was awake. Jean Valjean had sat her next to the fire. As Fauchelevent came in the door, Jean Valjean was showing her the gardener’s basket hanging on the wall; he told her: “Listen carefully, my little Cosette. We have to leave this house and go away, but we’ll be back and we’ll be as happy as can be here. This good man here will carry you on his back in that. You’ll wait for me at a lady’s place. I’ll come and get you there. Above all, if you don’t want mother Thénardier to take you away again, do what you’re told and don’t say a thing!” Cosette nodded, looking grave.

At the sound of Fauchelevent pushing the door, Jean Valjean whipped round.

“Well?”

“Everything’s arranged—and nothing is,” said Fauchelevent. “I’ve got permission to bring you in; but before I can bring you in, I’ve got to get you out. That’s where we come unstuck. For the little one, it’s as easy as pie.” “You’ll carry her out?”

“Will she keep quiet?”

“I can vouch for that.”

“But what about you, father Madeleine?”

After a silence that was a trifle anxious, Fauchelevent went on to exclaim: “I know! You go out the way you came in!” Jean Valjean answered the same way he did the first time: “Not possible.” Fauchelevent, talking more to himself than to Jean Valjean, grumbled: “There’s something else that’s tormenting me. I said I’d put some dirt in it. Trouble is, I don’t think dirt instead of a body inside is going to do the trick; it won’t work, it’ll move around, it’ll shake. The men will feel it. You see, father Madeleine, the government will be onto it.” Jean Valjean looked him in the eye and decided he was delirious.

Fauchelevent went on: “How in Chri—stmas are you going to get out of here? Because everything has to be done tomorrow! It’s tomorrow that I’ll be bringing you in. The prioress is expecting you.” Then he explained to Jean Valjean that it was payment for a service that he, Fauchelevent, was doing for the community. That it was one of his duties to take part in burials, to nail coffins and assist the gravedigger at the cemetery. That the nun who had died that morning had asked to be buried in the coffin that served her as a bed and to be interred in the vault under the chapel altar. That this was prohibited by police regulations, but that she was one of those dead women who always get their way. That the prioress and the vocal mothers meant to carry out the deceased’s wishes. That it was too bad for the government. That he, Fauchelevent, would nail the coffin in the cell, lift up the stone in the chapel, and lower the dead woman into the vault. And that, to thank him, the prioress would admit his brother into the house as a gardener and his niece as a boarder. That this brother of his was Monsieur Madeleine and his niece, Cosette. That the prioress had told him to bring his brother along tomorrow evening, after the sham burial in the cemetery. But that he couldn’t bring Monsieur Madeleine in from outside if Monsieur Madeleine was not outside. That was the first hitch. And after, that there was another hitch: the empty coffin.

“What is this empty coffin?” Jean Valjean asked.

Fauchelevent replied: “The coffin from the administration.” “What coffin? What administration?”

“A nun dies. The municipal doctor comes along and says: There is a dead nun. The government sends in a coffin. The next day it sends a hearse and undertakers to pick up the coffin and take it to the cemetery. The undertakers will come and lift up the coffin and there won’t be anything in it.” “Put something in it.”

“A dead body? I don’t have one.”

“No.”

“What then?”

“A live body.”

“What live body?”

“Me,” said Jean Valjean.

Fauchelevent, who had sat down, shot up as though a firecracker had gone off under his chair.

“You!”

“Why not?”

Jean Valjean gave one of those rare smiles that came over him like a ray of sunshine in a winter sky.

“You know, Fauchelevent, how you said, Mother Crucifixion is dead, and I added, and father Madeleine is buried. Well, that’s how it’s going to be.” “Ah, right, you’re having a laugh. You’re not serious.”

“I’m perfectly serious. Don’t I have to get out of here?” “Of course.”

“I told you to get a basket and a lid for me as well.”

“Well?”

“The basket will be made of pine and the lid will be a black sheet.” “To start with, it’s a white sheet. Nuns are buried in white.” “A white sheet, then.”

“You’re not like other men, father Madeleine.”

To see such imagination at work, devising schemes that are nothing more than the wild and reckless inventions of the galleys, to surface from his peaceful surroundings and get mixed up in what he called the “quiet chugging along of the convent” was as amazing to Fauchelevent as it would be to a person out walking if he saw a seagull fishing in the gutter of the rue Saint-Denis.

Jean Valjean went on: “The question is how to get out of here without being seen. This is one way to do it. But first, give me the full picture. What happens? Where is this coffin?” “The one that’s empty?”

“Yes.”

“Down in what they call the room of the dead. It’s on two trestles under a pall.” “How long is the coffin?”

“Six feet.”

“What is this room of the dead?”

“It’s a room on the ground floor that has a grated window looking on the garden, which is shut from outside with a shutter, and two doors; one going to the convent, the other going to the church.” “What church?”

“The church on the street, the church for everyone.”

“Do you have the keys to these two doors?”

“No. I have the key to the convent door; the concierge has the key to the church door.” “When does the concierge open that door?”

“Only to let the undertakers in when they come for the coffin. Once the coffin’s out, the door is shut again.” “Who puts the nails in the coffin?”

“I do.”

“Who puts the cloth over it?”

“I do.”

“Are you alone?”

“No other man, apart from the police doctor, can go into the room of the dead. It’s even written on the wall.” “Could you, tonight, when everyone in the convent is asleep, hide me in that room?” “No. But I can hide you in a little dark cubbyhole that opens into the room of the dead, where I put my burial tools and which I look after and have the key for.” “What time will the hearse come to pick up the coffin tomorrow?” “Around three in the afternoon. The burial takes place at the Vaugirard Cemetery just before nightfall. It’s quite a way away.” “I’ll stay hidden in your toolshed all night and all morning. What about food? I’ll be hungry.” “I’ll bring you something.”

“You can come and nail me into the coffin at two o’clock.” Fauchelevent took a step back and cracked his knuckles.

“But I can’t do that!”

“Bah! Just grab a hammer and hammer the nails in a floorboard!” What struck Fauchelevent as unbelievable was, we repeat, simple for Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean had been in direr straits than this. Anyone who has ever been a prisoner knows the art of shrinking to fit the size of the escape hatch. The prisoner is prone to flight the same way a sick person is prone to the crisis that cures or kills him. An escape is a cure. What won’t we do to be cured? To have yourself nailed in and carted away in a box like a parcel, to live in a box for some little time, to find air where there is none, to cut down your breathing for hours on end, to know how to suffocate without dying—this was one of the dark talents of Jean Valjean.

In any case, a coffin in which there is a living being, this expedient of the convict, is also the expedient of the emperor. If the monk Austin Castillejo is to be believed, this was the means Charles V, wanting to see the woman known as La Plombes again one last time after his abdication, employed to get her into the monastery of Saint-Just and get her out again.

Fauchelevent, recovering a little, cried: “But how will you manage to breathe?” “I’ll breathe.”

“In that box! I’m suffocating just thinking about it.”

“Surely you must have a gimlet, you can put a few small holes here and there around the mouth and you can nail it without making the lid too tight.” “Right! And what if you should cough or sneeze?”

“An escapee never coughs or sneezes.”

And Jean Valjean added: “Father Fauchelevent, I have to decide; either get caught here or take my chances going out in the hearse.” Everyone knows how cats like to stop and dawdle wherever a door is half open. Who has not said to a cat: “Well, come in, then!” There are men who, when faced with an opportunity cracking open in front of them, also have a tendency to waver between two different solutions, at the risk of being crushed by fate’s suddenly closing the door again. The overly cautious, thorough cats that they are, and because they are cats, sometimes take more risks than the bold. Fauchelevent was of such a hesitant character. Yet Jean Valjean’s coolness won him over in spite of himself. He grumbled: “Indeed, there is no other way.” Jean Valjean went on: “The only thing that worries me is what happens in the cemetery.” “That is just what doesn’t bother me,” cried Fauchelevent. “If you’re sure you can get out of the coffin, I’m sure I can get you out of the grave. The gravedigger’s a drunk and a friend of mine. Name of father Mestienne. A good old stick, one of the old school. The gravedigger puts the dead in the grave and I put the gravedigger in my pocket. I’ll tell you what will happen. We’ll arrive a bit before sundown, three quarters of an hour before they shut the gates of the cemetery. The hearse will drive right up to the grave. I’ll follow behind it; that’s my job. I’ll have a hammer, a chisel, and some pliers in my pocket. The hearse stops, the undertakers tie a rope around your coffin for you and lower you down. The priest says the prayers, makes the sign of the cross, chucks some holy water in, and clears off. I remain alone with father Mestienne. He’s my friend, like I told you. Either he’ll be plastered or he won’t be plastered—it’s all the same. If he’s not plastered, I say to him: ‘Come and have a drink while the Bon Coing’s still open.’ I drag him away, I get him drunk—it doesn’t take long to get father Mestienne drunk, he’s always halfway there—I drink him under the table for you, I take his pass to get back into the cemetery, and I come back without him. Then you’ll only have me to deal with. If he’s plastered, I say to him: ‘Off you go, I’ll stand in for you.’ Off he goes and I pull you out of the hole.” Jean Valjean put out his hand and Fauchelevent fell on it with touching peasant-style emotion.

“Agreed, father Fauchelevent. It will all be all right.” “Provided nothing goes wrong,” thought Fauchelevent. “What if it all goes horribly wrong?!” IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO BE A DRUNK TO BE IMMORTAL

THE NEXT DAY, as the sun was going down, the people going up and down the boulevard du Maine took their hats off as an old-model hearse went by, decorated with death’s-heads, crossbones, and teardrops. Inside the hearse was a coffin covered with a white sheet on which a huge black cross spread out like a great dead woman with her arms hanging out. A draped coach, in which a priest in a surplice and a choirboy in a red skullcap could be seen, followed behind. Two undertakers in grey uniforms with black trim were walking to the left and right of the hearse. Bringing up the rear came an old man in the clothes of a labourer, limping. This cortège was heading for the Vaugirard Cemetery.

You could see sticking out of the old man’s pocket the handle of a hammer, the blade of a cold chisel, and the double handle of a pair of pliers.

Vaugirard Cemetery was an exception among the cemeteries of Paris. It had its own peculiar customs, just as it had its porte cochère and its double gate that the old people in the quartier, holding fast to the old words, called the bridle gate and the pedestrian gate. The Bernardine-Benedictines of Petit-Picpus had obtained, as we said, the right to be buried apart in a corner and at night, this ground having once belonged to their community. The gravediggers accordingly had to work in the evening in summer and at night in winter and were kept to a peculiar discipline. In those days the gates of the cemeteries of Paris were shut at sunset, and, since this was a regulation made by the municipality, Vaugirard Cemetery was subject to it like the rest. The bridle gate and the pedestrian gate were two iron gates standing side by side next to a gate-house built by the architect Perronet, where the cemetery gatekeeper lived. These gates thus turned inexorably on their hinges the instant the sun disappeared behind the dome of the Invalides.1 If any gravedigger was caught lagging behind at that moment, his only resort for getting out was his gravedigger’s pass, provided by the administration of the funeral parlour. A kind of letter box had been cut into the shutter of the gatekeeper’s window. The gravedigger dropped his pass into this box, the gatekeeper heard it fall, pulled the cord, and the pedestrian gate opened. If the gravedigger did not have his pass, he called out his name and the gatekeeper, who was sometimes in bed asleep, would get up, go to identify the gravedigger, and open the gate with his key; the gravedigger would then go out—after paying a fifteen-franc fine.

This cemetery, with its novel practices outside the general run of things, disturbed the symmetry of the administration. It was closed down soon after 1830. Montparnasse Cemetery,2 known as the East Cemetery, has taken over from it, inheriting the famous watering hole bordering the Vaugirard Cemetery that used to have a wooden signboard over it with a quince painted on it; it had an L-shaped bar, with the tables of drinkers on one side and the graves on the other, and this sign: AU BON COING—At the Good Quince.

Vaugirard Cemetery was what we might describe as a cemetery that had lost its bloom. It was falling into decay. Mould was invading it, the flowers were departing. Well-heeled bourgeois didn’t think much of being buried in Vaugirard; it reeked of poverty. Père-Lachaise, and don’t spare the horses! To be buried at Père-Lachaise was like having mahogany furniture. It was a sign of elegance for all to see. Vaugirard Cemetery was a venerable paddock, planted in the style of an old French garden. Straight paths, box hedges, cedars, holly, old graves under old yews, very tall grass. Night there was dramatic. There were some very lugubrious shapes and shadows there.

The sun had not yet set when the hearse with the white sheet and the black cross turned into the avenue that led to the Vaugirard Cemetery. The lame old man who was following it was, of course, none other than Fauchelevent.

The burial of Mother Crucifixion in the vault under the altar, the removal of Cosette, the smuggling of Jean Valjean into the room of the dead—all had gone smoothly and without a snag.

We might note in passing that the inhumation of Mother Crucifixion under the convent altar is a perfectly venial sin to our way of thinking. It is one of those sins that look very much like a duty. The nuns had carried it off, not only without any qualms but to the applause of their consciences. In the cloister, what is known as “the government” is merely an interference with their authority, an interference that was always questionable. The rule comes first; as for the civil code, we’ll see. Men, you can make as many laws as you like, but keep them to yourselves. Caesar’s toll is never anything more than what is left over from God’s toll. A prince is nothing next to a principle.

Fauchelevent limped along behind the hearse, happy as can be. His two mysteries, his two twin plots, one in league with the nuns, the other with Monsieur Madeleine, one for the convent, the other against, had succeeded together, one after the other. Jean Valjean’s calmness was one of those powerful tranquilizers that are contagious. Fauchelevent was no longer worried about whether they would bring it off. What remained to be done was nothing. For the past two years, he had got the gravedigger, good old father Mestienne, drunk a dozen times. He could do what he liked with him. The man was putty in his hands. Mestienne’s head changed shape to fit Fauchelevent’s cap. Fauchelevent felt completely secure.

As the convoy entered the avenue leading to the cemetery, Fauchelevent looked at the hearse, happy, and rubbed his big hands together, muttering to himself: “Not a bad joke!” Suddenly the hearse stopped; they had reached the gate. The burial permit had to be shown. The man from the funeral parlour went and had a word with the cemetery gatekeeper. During this conversation, which always involves a wait of one or two minutes, someone, a stranger, came and stood behind the hearse next to Fauchelevent. He was some sort of labourer in a jacket with big pockets and a pick under his arm.

Fauchelevent looked at the stranger.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The man replied: “The gravedigger.”

If you’d survived a cannon blast full in the chest, you’d look like Fauchelevent.

“The gravedigger!”

“Yep.”

“You!”

“Me.”

“Father Mestienne is the gravedigger.”

“Was.”

“What do you mean, was?”

“He’s dead.”

Fauchelevent had been ready for anything, except that, that a gravedigger could die. And yet it is true; gravediggers themselves die. By dint of digging the graves of others, they open up their own.

Fauchelevent remained speechless. He barely had the strength to stammer: “But he can’t be!” “He is.”

“But,” he repeated feebly, “father Mestienne is the gravedigger.” “After Napoléon, Louis XVIII. After Mestienne, Gribier. Peasant, my name is Gribier.” Fauchelevent, white as a sheet, studied this Gribier.

He was a long, skinny, pallid man, perfectly dismal. He looked like a doctor who had missed his calling and turned to gravedigging.

Fauchelevent burst out laughing.

“Ah, it’s funny, the things that happen! Father Mestienne is dead. Little father Mestienne is dead, but long live little father Lenoir! You know what little father Lenoir is? It’s the small jug of red at six a shot. It’s the jug of Suresnes, for heaven’s sake! Real Paris Suresnes! Ah, old Mestienne’s dead, eh! I’m sorry to hear that; he was a real bon vivant. But you’re a bon vivant, too. Isn’t that right, friend? We’ll go and have a drink together, in a tick.” The man replied: “I’ve been to school; I’ve done third year. I never drink.” The hearse had started off again and was rolling along down the main path of the cemetery.

Fauchelevent had slackened his pace. He was limping, even more from anxiety than infirmity.

The gravedigger was walking ahead of him.

Fauchelevent was giving the unexpected Gribier the once-over again.

He was one of those men who look old when they’re still young and who are skinny but very strong.

“Hey, friend!” cried Fauchelevent.

The man turned round.

“I’m the gravedigger from the convent.”

“My colleague,” said the man.

Fauchelevent was illiterate but sharp as a tack and he knew right away that he was dealing with a formidable species, a smooth talker.

He grumbled: “So father Mestienne died, just like that.” The man replied: “Exactly. The good Lord consulted his book of due dates. It was father Mestienne’s turn. So father Mestienne died.” Fauchelevent repeated mechanically: “The good Lord …”

“The good Lord,” said the man with authority. “For the philosophers, the Eternal Father; for the Jacobins, the Supreme Being.”3 “Aren’t we going to get to know each other?” stammered Fauchelevent.

“We already do. You’re a peasant, I’m a Parisian.”4

“We don’t know each other until we’ve drunk together. The man who empties his glass, empties his heart. You’ll come and have a drink with me. You can’t refuse.” “The job comes first.”

Fauchelevent thought: “I’m finished. We were only a few turns of the wheel from the little path that leads to the nuns’ corner.” The gravedigger went on: “Peasant, I’ve got seven little nippers to feed. Since they have to eat, I can’t drink.” And he added with the satisfaction of a serious soul, pontificating: “Their hunger is the enemy of my thirst.” The hearse turned past a stand of cypresses, left the main path, took a small path, drove into the grounds, and bored into a thicket. This indicated the immediate proximity of the sepulchre. Fauchelevent slowed down again but could not slow down the hearse. Luckily the ground was loose and wet with all the winter rains and it stuck to the wheels, bogging the wheels down and making the going hard.

He caught up with the gravedigger.

“They have such a good little Argenteuil wine,” mumured Fauchelevent.

“Villager,” the man resumed, “I really should not be a gravedigger. My father was a porter at the Prytanée.5 He intended me for Literature. But he had a run of bad luck. He lost money on the stock exchange. I was forced to give up the profession of author. But I am still a public letter-writer.” “So you’re not a gravedigger, then?” Fauchelevent shot back, clutching at straws, however weak.

“One doesn’t rule out the other. I’m holding two jobs concurrently.” Fauchelevent did not understand this last word.

“Let’s go and have a drink,” he said.

Here, an observation is necessary. Fauchelevent, whatever his anguish, was proposing a drink but forgot to say who was paying. Normally, Fauchelevent made the proposal, and father Mestienne paid. The offer of a drink was obviously the result of the new situation created by the new gravedigger and this offer had to be made, but the old gardener, not unintentionally, had left the proverbial hour of reckoning in the dark. When it came down to it, he, Fauchelevent, however nervous he might be, was not keen to cough up the money.

The gravedigger went on with a superior smile: “You’ve got to eat. I agreed to take on father Mestienne’s obligations. When you’ve almost finished school, you are a philosopher. On top of working with my hands, I have added working with my arms. I have my writer’s stall in the market in the rue de Sèvres. You know? The Marché-aux-Parapluies. All the women who are cooks in the Croix-Rouge6 turn to me. I tart up their declarations to their true loves. In the morning I write love letters, in the afternoon I dig graves. That’s life, hayseed.” The hearse advanced. Fauchelevent, at the peak of anxiety, looked all around him. Great beads of sweat were running down his forehead.

“Yet,” the gravedigger continued, “you cannot serve two mistresses. I have to choose between the pen and the pick. The pick is ruining my hands.” The hearse pulled up. The choirboy got down from the draped car, followed by the priest. One of the small front wheels was up a bit on a pile of dirt beyond which an open grave could be seen.

“Not a bad joke!” Fauchelevent repeated, aghast.

BETWEEN FOUR PLANKS

WHO WAS IN the coffin? We know. Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean had arranged himself to stay alive in there and he was more or less still breathing.

It is a funny thing how a secure conscience makes everything else secure. The whole scheme Jean Valjean had cooked up beforehand was working, and working well, from the start the night before. He was counting, like Fauchelevent, on father Mestienne. He had no doubt about the end result. Never was there a more critical situation, never more complete calm.

The four planks of the coffin gave off a kind of terrible peace. It was as though something of the repose of the dead had entered into Jean Valjean’s tranquillity. From the depths of this bier he had been able to follow and was following all the phases of the formidable drama that he was playing with death.

Not long after Fauchelevent had finished nailing on the top plank, Jean Valjean felt himself being carted out, then rolling along. At the decrease in jolts, he felt that they had gone from the cobblestones to hard ground, that is, that they were leaving the streets and getting onto the boulevards. At a dull thump, he guessed they were crossing the pont d’Austerlitz. At the first stop, he had understood they were going into the cemetery; at the second stop, he said to himself: “Here’s the grave.” Suddenly he felt hands grabbing the coffin, then a harsh scraping against the planks; he realized that this was a rope being tied around the coffin to lower it down into the freshly dug hole. Then he had a kind of dizzy spell. The undertakers and the gravedigger had probably tipped the coffin and let it down head-first. He swiftly got his bearings back, feeling himself to be horizontal again and immobile. He had just touched bottom. He felt a certain chill.

A voice rose above him, icy and solemn. He heard, so slowly he could grasp them one after the other, Latin words that he could not understand rising and falling away: “Qui dormiunt terrae pulvere, evigilabunt; alii in vitam aeternam, et alii in opprobrium, ut videant semper.”1 A child’s voice said: “De profundis.”2

The grave voice started again: “Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine.”3 The child’s voice responded: “Et lux perpetua luceat ei.”4 He heard something like the gentle patter of a few drops of rain on the plank that covered him. It was probably holy water. He thought: “This will soon be over. Hang on a bit longer. The priest is going to go away. Fauchelevent will take Mestienne for a drink. They’ll leave me alone. Then Fauchelevent will come back alone, and I’ll get out of here. This will all take a good hour.” The grave voice resumed: “Requiescat in pace.”5

And the child’s voice said: “Amen.”

Jean Valjean cocked an ear and heard something like footsteps receding.

“There they go,” he thought. “I’m on my own.”

Suddenly he heard over his head a noise that sounded like a clap of thunder. It was a shovelful of dirt falling on the coffin.

A second shovelful of dirt fell. One of the holes through which he was breathing blocked up. A third shovelful of dirt fell. Then a fourth. Some things are stronger than the strongest of men. Jean Valjean passed out.

IN WHICH WE FIND THE ORIGINS OF THE SAYING: DON’T LOSE YOUR PASS HERE IS WHAT happened above the coffin in which Jean Valjean lay.

When the hearse had driven away, when the priest and the choirboy had climbed back into the carriage and gone, Fauchelevent, who didn’t take his eyes off the gravedigger, saw him bend down and grab hold of his shovel, which was sticking straight up in the pile of dirt.

So then Fauchelevent made an extreme resolution.

He stood between the grave and the gravedigger, crossed his arms, and said: “I’m paying!” The gravedigger looked at him in amazement and replied: “What’s that, peasant?” Fauchelevent repeated: “I’m paying!”

“What for?”

“The wine.”

“What wine?”

“The Argenteuil.”

“Where is this Argenteuil?”

“Au Bon Coing.”

“Leave it alone!” said the gravedigger.

And he threw another shovelful of dirt on the coffin.

The coffin made a hollow sound. Fauchelevent felt himself teeter and almost fell into the grave himself. In a voice in which the rattling sound of choking could be heard, he yelled: “Come on, friend, before the Bon Coing closes!” The gravedigger filled his shovel with another load of dirt. Fauchelevent went on: “I’m paying!” And he grabbed the gravedigger’s arm.

“Listen to me, friend. I’m the convent gravedigger. I’m here to help you. It’s a job that can be done at night. So let’s start by having a drink.” And while he continued to talk, while he clung to this desperate gambit, he had a gloomy thought: “And what happens even if he does have a drink? Will he even get tipsy?” “Provincial,” said the gravedigger, “if you insist, I consent. We’ll have a drink. After the work’s done, not a moment before.” And he set his shovel in motion once more. Fauchelevent held him back.

“It’s Argenteuil at six sous a pop!”

“For heaven’s sake,” said the gravedigger, “you’re like a bell-ringer. Ding-dong, ding-dong; same thing over and over. Shove off, will you.” And he launched a second shovelful.

Fauchelevent had reached the point where you no longer have a clue what you are saying.

“Oh, come on! Come and have a drink,” he yelled, “since I’m the one that’s paying!” “When we’ve put the baby to bed,” said the gravedigger.

He chucked in the third shovelful.

Then he stuck the shovel in the ground and added: “You see, it’s going to be a cold night tonight and the dead woman’s going to give us a piece of her mind if we plant her here without a cover.” At that moment, while he loaded his shovel, the gravedigger bent down and the pocket of his jacket gaped wide open.

Fauchelevent’s wild eyes went automatically to this pocket and stayed there.

The sun was not yet hidden below the horizon; there was enough light to make out something white at the bottom of this gaping pocket.

The entire load of lightning that the eyes of a peasant from Picardy can hold flashed in Fauchelevent’s pupils. An idea had just occurred to him.

Without the gravedigger’s noticing, busy as he was with his shovelful of dirt, he slipped his hand in the pocket from behind and withdrew the white thing at the bottom.

The gravedigger sent the fourth shovelful into the grave.

The moment he turned back to get a fifth shovelful, Fauchelevent gave him a profoundly calm look and said: “By the way, newcomer, have you got your pass?” The gravedigger stopped in his tracks.

“What pass?”

“The sun’s going down.”

“Good for him, let him put his nightcap on.”

“The cemetery gate’s about to shut.”

“So what?”

“Have you got your pass?”

“Ah, my pass!” said the gravedigger.

And he fumbled in his pocket.

When he’d fumbled in one pocket, he fumbled in the other. He went on to his watch pockets, explored the first, turned the second inside out.

“Oh, no!” he said, “I don’t have my card. I must have forgotten it.” “Fifteen francs fine,” said Fauchelevent.

The gravedigger turned green. Green is what pallid people turn when they go pale.

“Jesus wept!” he cried. “Fifteen francs fine!”

“Three hundred sous,” said Fauchelevent.

The gravedigger dropped his shovel.

Fauchelevent’s turn had come.

“Oh, well,” said Fauchelevent, “despair not, conscript. No need to slit your wrists and put the grave to use. Fifteen francs is fifteen francs and besides, you can always not pay. I’m an old hand, you’re new. I know the tricks of the trade, the traps, the ins and outs. Let me give you a word of friendly advice. One thing is clear, and that is that the sun’s going down, it’s hit the dome, the cemetery is going to close in five minutes.” “That’s true,” replied the gravedigger.

“Five minutes starting from now is not enough time for you to fill up the grave—it’s as deep as the devil, this hole—and get out before they shut the gates.” “You’re right.”

“In which case, there’s the fifteen-franc fine.”

“Fifteen francs.”

“But you have time—where do you live?”

“A stone’s throw from the barrière. A quarter of an hour from here, rue de Vaugirard, number eighty-seven.” “You have time, if you run as fast as your pins will go, to get out now.”

“Quite right.”

“Once you’re through the gate, you scurry home, grab your pass, come back, the cemetery gatekeeper’ll open up for you and then you won’t have to pay, because you’ll have your pass. And then you can bury your dead. Me, I’ll keep an eye on her for you to make sure she doesn’t run away.” “I owe you my life, peasant!”

“Get cracking,” said Fauchelevent.

The gravedigger, overcome with gratitude, shook his hand and turned on his heel and ran.

When the gravedigger had disappeared through the bushes, Fauchelevent listened until his footsteps died away, then he bent over the grave and said in a low voice: “Father Madeleine!” No answer.

Fauchelevent gave a shudder. He rolled into the grave more than he scrambled down into it, threw himself at the head of the coffin and cried: “Are you there?” Silence in the coffin.

Fauchelevent could no longer breathe he was shaking so hard; he took his cold chisel and his hammer and wrenched the top plank off. Jean Valjean’s face appeared in the twilight, eyes closed, pale.

Fauchelevent’s hair stood on end, he shot to his feet, then fell with his back against the wall of the grave, ready to collapse on top of the coffin. He looked at Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean lay there lifeless, ashen and still.

Fauchelevent murmured in a voice so low it was barely a breath: “He’s dead!”

He straightened himself up, crossed his arms so violently he whacked his shoulders with his clenched fists and cried: “This is how I save him!” Then the poor man began to sob. Carrying on a monologue, for it is a mistake to think the monologue is not a natural phenomenon. Extreme emotions often speak out loud.

“It’s all father Mestienne’s fault. Why did he have to die, the idiot? Why did he croak the very moment we weren’t expecting it? He’s the one who’s killed Monsieur Madeleine. Father Madeleine! He’s in the coffin. He’s already been carted here. It’s all over … But, things like this just don’t make any sense, do they? God Almighty! He’s dead! And what about the little girl? What am I to do with her? What’s the fruit-hawker woman going to say? How in Christ’s name can a man like that die like this? When I think how he got under my cart! Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine! Of course, he suffocated, I told him he would. He wouldn’t listen. Here’s a pretty turnup for you, indeed! He’s dead, that good man, the best man there was of all the good ones God made! What about his little girl! Ah! To start with, I’m not going back there. I’m staying put. Imagine pulling a stunt like this! A lot of good it’s done being two old men if all we are is two old lunatics. But to start with, how did he manage to get into the convent? That was how it all started. You’re not supposed to do that sort of thing. Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine! Madeleine! Monsieur Madeleine! Monsieur le maire! He can’t hear me. How are you going to get yourself out of this one, I ask you!” And he tore his hair.

In the distance, a harsh grating sound could be heard. It was the cemetery gates closing.

Fauchelevent leaned over Jean Valjean, and suddenly he sort of bounced up and leaped back—as far as you can leap back in a grave. Jean Valjean had his eyes open and was looking at him.

To see a dead person is frightening, to see a person resurrected is almost as bad. Fauchelevent turned to stone, pale, wild-eyed, overwhelmed by all these extreme emotions, not knowing whether he was dealing with the living or the dead, looking at Jean Valjean who was looking back at him.

“I almost went to sleep,” said Jean Valjean.

And he sat up.

Fauchelevent fell on his knees.

“Holy Mother of God! You gave me a fright!”

Then he stood up and shouted: “Thank you, father Madeleine!”

Jean Valjean had merely passed out. The open air had revived him.

Joy is the backward surge of terror. Fauchelevent had almost as much work to do as Jean Valjean to recover.

“So you’re not dead! Oh, you’ve got your wits about you! I called out to you so much that you came back. When I saw your eyes closed, I said: ‘That’s it! He’s suffocated.’ I’d have gone stark raving mad, mad enough for a straitjacket. They’d have stuck me in Bicêtre. What was I supposed to do if you had died? What about your little girl! The barrow woman would never have been able to make head or tail of it! There is the kid, plonked in her arms, and then the grandfather ups and dies! What a turnup for the books! By all the saints above, what a turnup for the books! Ah, but you’re alive—that’s the best part about it!” “I’m cold,” said Jean Valjean.

Those words brought Fauchelevent completely back to reality, and to its urgency. Both these men, even when they had fully recovered, felt troubled in their souls without realizing it, along with something strange inside that was the sinister wildness of the place creeping in.

“Let’s get out of here, and fast,” said Fauchelevent.

He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a flask he had packed.

“But first, a little drop!” he said.

The flask finished off what the unfettered air had started. Jean Valjean took a swig of brandy and felt thoroughly restored.

He climbed out of the coffin and helped Fauchelevent nail the lid back on.

Three minutes later, they were out of the grave.

After that, Fauchelevent was calm. He took his time. The cemetery was closed. There was no need to fear that Gribier, the gravedigger, would pop up. That “conscript” was at home, busy hunting around for his pass and not very likely to find it, since it was in Fauchelevent’s pocket. Without a pass, he could not get back into the cemetery.

Fauchelevent grabbed the shovel and Jean Valjean the pick and together they buried the empty coffin.

When the grave was filled in, Fauchelevent said to Jean Valjean: “Come on and we’ll get going. I’ll keep the shovel and you take the pick.” Night was falling.

Jean Valjean had some trouble moving and walking. He had gone stiff in the coffin and turned into a bit of a corpse. The numbness of death had taken hold of him between those four planks. He needed, so to speak, to thaw out of the sepulchre.

“You’re stiff,” said Fauchelevent. “What a shame I’m lame, we’d step up the pace, otherwise.” “Bah!” replied Jean Valjean, “I’ll soon get my legs loosened up.”

They walked off down the paths the hearse had taken. When they got to the closed gate and the gatekeeper’s pavilion, Fauchelevent, who was holding the gravedigger’s pass in his hand, dropped it into his box; the gatekeeper pulled the cord, the gate opened and they walked through.

“That was a breeze!” said Fauchelevent. “What a brainwave you had, father Madeleine!”

They got past the barrière Vaugirard without any trouble. In the neighbourhood of a cemetery, a pick and a shovel are a couple of passports.

The rue de Vaugirard was deserted.

“Father Madeleine,” said Fauchelevent as he trotted along, glancing up at the houses, “your eyes are better than mine. Show me where number eighty-seven is.” “Right here, actually,” said Jean Valjean.

“There’s no one around,” Fauchelevent went on. “Give me the pick and let me have a couple of minutes.” Fauchelevent went into no. 87, climbed to the top of the stairs, guided by the instinct that always leads the poor man to the attic, and knocked in the gloom on the door of a garret. A voice answered: “Come in.” It was the voice of Gribier.

Fauchelevent pushed the door open. The gravedigger’s dwelling was, like all such downtrodden abodes, a dump, unfurnished and cluttered. A packing case—perhaps a coffin—served as a console, a butter pot served as a drinking fountain, a straw mat served as a bed, the tiles served as table and chairs. In a corner, on top of a ragged scrap of old carpet, a thin woman and any number of children were huddled in a heap. The whole destitute interior showed traces of being turned inside out. You’d have said that it was the site of a one-man earthquake. Lids were thrown around, rags scattered, a pitcher broken, the mother had been in tears, the children had probably been beaten—traces of a furious and relentless search. It was clear that the gravedigger had desperately tried to track down his pass and had taken his frustration at losing it out on everything in the dump, including his pitcher and his wife. He looked utterly distraught.

But Fauchelevent was racing too fast toward the episode’s denouement to notice this sad side to his triumph.

He stepped in and said: “I thought I’d bring back your pick and shovel.”

Gribier watched him, stunned.

“And tomorrow morning at the cemetery gatekeeper’s you’ll find your pass.”

With that, he put the pick and the shovel down on the tiles.

“What’s the meaning of this?” asked Gribier.

“What the meaning of this is, is that you dropped your pass out of your pocket and I found it on the ground after you’d gone. I buried the dead woman, I filled in the grave, I did your work for you, the gatekeeper will give you back your pass, and you won’t have to pay fifteen francs. There you go, conscript.” “Thank you, villager!” cried Gribier, dazed. “Next time, it’s my treat.”

A SUCCESSFUL INTERROGATION

ONE HOUR LATER, in the dead of night, two men and a child presented themselves at no. 62, petite rue Picpus. The elder of the men lifted the door-knocker and knocked. This was Fauchelevent, Jean Valjean, and Cosette.

The two old men had gone and got Cosette from the fruit-hawker in the rue du Chemin-Vert, where Fauchelevent had dropped her off the night before. Cosette had spent the last twenty-four hours not knowing what to think and trembling silently. She trembled all the more as she had not wept. She hadn’t eaten either, or slept. The worthy fruit-hawker had put a hundred questions to her without getting more for an answer than the same mournful glance. Cosette did not let on for a second anything of all she had heard and seen over the last two days. She gathered that they were going through a crisis. She felt to her marrow that she had “to be good.” Who has not experienced the ultimate power of these three words delivered in a certain tone in the ear of a frightened child: “Not a word!” Fear is mute. Besides, no one can keep a secret the way a child can.

Only when, after this grim twenty-four hours, she clapped eyes on Jean Valjean again, did she let out a yelp of joy in which any thoughtful soul who had overheard her would have picked up the sense of an escape from a bottomless chasm.

Fauchelevent was from the convent and he knew the passwords. Every door opened. And thus the terrifying twin problem was solved: how to get out, how to get in.

The porter, who had his instructions, opened the little door of the tradesman’s entrance that was connected to the garden courtyard and that you could still see from the street twenty years ago, standing opposite the porte cochère. The porter let all three of them in through this door, and from there they reached the inner private visitors’ room where Fauchelevent had received the prioress’s orders the night before.

The prioress was waiting for them, rosary beads in hand. One of the vocal mothers was standing by her side with her veil down. A discreet candle lit up, we might almost say pretended to light up, the visitors’ room.

The prioress gave Jean Valjean the once-over. No eye can scrutinize as thoroughly as a downcast eye. Then she questioned him: “You are the brother?” “Yes, Reverend Mother,” replied Fauchelevent.

“What is your name?”

Fauchelevent answered: “Ultime Fauchelevent.”

He had, in fact, had a brother named Ultime who was dead.

“What part of the country are you from?”

Fauchelevent answered: “From Picquigny, near Amiens.”

“How old are you?”

Fauchelevent answered: “Fifty.”

“What is your profession?”

Fauchelevent answered: “Gardener.”

“Are you a good Christian?”

Fauchelevent answered: “Everyone in the family is.”

“Is this little girl yours?”

Fauchelevent answered: “Yes, Reverend Mother.”

“You are her father?”

Fauchelevent answered: “Her grandfather.”

The vocal mother whispered to the prioress: “He answers well.”

Jean Valjean had not uttered a word. The prioress examined Cosette closely and whispered to the vocal mother: “She will be ugly.” The two mothers chatted for a few minutes in voices barely above a whisper in a corner of the visitors’ room, then the prioress turned back and said: “Father Fauvent, you will have another knee pad and bell. We need two now.” The next day, in fact, two little bells could be heard in the garden, and the nuns could not resist lifting a corner of their veils. At the bottom, under the trees, two men could be seen digging side by side, Fauvent and another man. Obviously an enormous event. The silence was broken long enough to say: “That’s the assistant gardener.” The vocal mothers added: “He’s one of father Fauvent’s brothers.”

Jean Valjean was in fact properly fitted out; he had the leather knee pad and the bell; he was now officially accepted. His name was Ultime Fauchelevent.

The strongest determining argument for admission had been the prioress’s observation about Cosette: “She will be ugly.” This prognostic declared, the prioress immediately took Cosette to her heart and gave her a place in the boarding school as a charity case.

The move was only strictly logical. A lot of good it has done not having any mirrors in a convent, when women are so conscious of their appearance. Now, girls who feel they are pretty do not readily become nuns; luckily vocations declare themselves in inverse proportion to beauty, so hopes are higher for the ugly than for the beautiful. Hence the keen preference for ugly ducklings.

The whole episode greatly enhanced Fauchelevent’s standing. He had had a triple success: with Jean Valjean, whom he had saved and sheltered; with Gribier, the gravedigger, who said to himself, “He saved me that fine”; with the convent, which, thanks to him, kept Mother Crucifixion’s coffin under the altar, thereby eluding Caesar and satisfying God. There was a coffin with a corpse in Petit-Picpus and a coffin without a corpse in Vaugirard Cemetery; no doubt public order was profoundly disturbed, but it did not know it. As for the convent, its gratitude to Fauchelevent was great. Fauchelevent became the best of its servants and the most treasured of gardeners. At the very next visit of the archbishop, the prioress told the story to His Grace, half by way of a confession, half by way of a boast. When he left the convent, the archbishop spoke of it, very quietly, with approval to Monsieur de Latil, confessor to Monsieur, brother to the king,1 and, subsequently, to the archbishop of Rheims and a cardinal. Admiration for Fauchelevent travelled far and wide, for it got as far as Rome. We have actually seen a note addressed by the then-reigning pope, Leo XII,2 to one of his relatives, a monsignor in the nuncio’s residence in Paris with the same name as himself, Della Genga; in it can be read these lines: “It appears that in a convent in Paris there is an excellent gardener who is a saintly man, known as Fauvent.” Not a whiff of this triumph reached Fauchelevent in his shed; he continued to graft cuttings, to weed, and to cover his melon beds, without being brought up to speed on his excellence and his saintliness. He had no more suspicion of his splendid reputation than has a steer from Durham or Surrey whose portrait is published in the Illustrated London News with this caption: “The steer that won first prize in the cattle show.” ENCLOSURE

AT THE CONVENT Cosette continued to keep silent.

Cosette quite naturally thought she was Jean Valjean’s daughter. Besides, not knowing anything, she could not say anything and then, in any case, she would not have said anything. We have just noted that nothing teaches children silence like calamity. Cosette had been through so much that she was afraid of everything, even to open her mouth, even to breathe. A word had so often brought an avalanche down on top of her! She had only just begun to feel safe since she had been in Jean Valjean’s hands. She got used to the convent quite quickly. Only, she longed for Catherine, but did not dare say so. One time, though, she said to Jean Valjean: “Father, if I’d known, I’d have brought her along.” In becoming a boarder at the convent, Cosette had to adopt the uniform worn by the students of the house. Jean Valjean obtained permission to keep the clothes she was stripped of. This was the same mourning outfit he had made her wear when she left the Thénardiers’ pothouse. It had not yet had much wear. Jean Valjean packed this outfit, plus her woolen stockings and her shoes, with ample camphor and all the aromatics convents abound in, in a little suitcase that he managed to procure himself. He put the suitcase on a chair by his bed and he carried the key to it on him always. “Father,” Cosette asked him one day, “what is that box over there, then, that smells so good?” Father Fauchelevent, apart from the glory we have just recounted and of which he was completely ignorant, was rewarded for his good deed; first, he was glad he’d done it, it made him happy; and then, he had a lot less work to do now he was sharing the load. Last, he really loved tobacco, and he found Monsieur Madeleine’s presence made it possible for him to take three times as much tobacco as in the past and with infinitely more relish, since Monsieur Madeleine paid for it.

The nuns did not adopt the name of Ultime; they called Jean Valjean “the other Fauvent.” If those holy old maids had had a fraction of Javert’s perceptiveness, they would have wound up noticing that, whenever there was some errand to run outside for the maintenance of the garden, it was always the elder Fauchelevent, the old one, the infirm one, the lame one, who went out, and never the other man; but, either because eyes forever fixed on God don’t know how to spy, or because they were, out of preference, busy watching each other, they noticed nothing.

And Jean Valjean did well to keep quiet and not to move. Javert watched the quartier for a good long month or more.

The convent was for Jean Valjean like an island surrounded by sheer cliffs. Those four walls were now the world for him. He saw enough of the sky from there to be serene and enough of Cosette to be happy.

A very sweet life began for him once more.

He lived with old Fauchelevent in the shed at the bottom of the garden. This shack, built out of rubble and still standing in 1845, consisted, as we have already said, of three rooms, all of which were completely bare. Father Fauchelevent had insisted Monsieur Madeleine have the main room, and he was forced to accept it, for Jean Valjean had resisted in vain. The walls of this room, apart from two nails for hanging up the knee pad and the basket, were adorned only with an example of the royalist paper money of ‘931 stuck on the wall over the mantelpiece. Here is an exact replica: This assignat from La Vendée3 had been nailed to the wall by the previous gardener, an old member of the Chouan party4 who had died in the convent and been replaced by Fauchelevent.

Jean Valjean worked all day in the garden and was extremely useful there. He had once been a pruner, after all, and was glad to find himself a gardener again. You will recall that he was full of all kinds of agricultural secrets and recipes for growing things. He put them to good use. Nearly all the trees in the orchard were wildings; he budded them and got them to yield excellent fruit.

Cosette had permission to go and spend an hour each day with him. As the sisters were sad and he was good, the child compared him with them and worshipped the ground he walked on. At the appointed hour she would run to the shed. When she entered this hovel, she filled it with paradise. Jean Valjean flourished and felt his happiness growing from the happiness he gave Cosette. The joy we inspire has this wonderful feature, which is that, far from dimming like any reflection, it comes back to us more radiant. At playtime, Jean Valjean would watch Cosette playing and running around from a distance and he could distinguish her laughter from the laughter of the other girls.

For Cosette now laughed.

Even the way Cosette looked had changed to a certain extent. All gloominess had vanished. Laughter is like sunshine; it chases winter away from the human face.

Cosette was still not pretty, but she had become charming regardless. She had a way of coming out with quite grown-up little notions in her sweet infantile voice.

When playtime was over and Cosette had gone back in, Jean Valjean would watch the windows of her classroom and at night he would get out of bed to watch the windows of the dormitory where she slept.

Besides, God has His ways; the convent, like Cosette, contributed to keeping up and completing the work of the bishop inside Jean Valjean. There is no doubt that one side of virtue leads to pride. There lies a bridge built by the devil. Jean Valjean had perhaps been, without knowing it, fairly close to both that side and that bridge, when Providence threw him into the Petit-Picpus convent. While he had compared himself only to the bishop, he had found himself unworthy and he had stayed humble; but for some little time he had been comparing himself to other men and pride had reared its ugly head. Who knows? He might well have ended up quietly returning to hate.

The convent stopped him on that slippery slope.

This was the second place of captivity he had seen. In his youth, in what had been for him the beginning of life, and then later, still only recently, he had seen another, an appalling and terrible place, whose austerities had always struck him as the iniquity of justice and the crime of the law. Today, after the galleys, he was seeing the cloister and thinking how he had been part of the prison system and was now a spectator, so to speak, of the cloister, and he compared them anxiously in his mind.

Sometimes he would lean on his spade and slowly descend the endless spirals of his thoughts.

He remembered his old companions and how miserable they were: they’d get up at the crack of dawn and work till nightfall; they were scarcely left enough time to shut their eyes; they slept on camp beds where mattresses no more than two thumbs thick were the only ones allowed in rooms that were only heated in the rawest months of the year; they were dressed in hideous red smocks; they were allowed, as a favour, to wear burlap trousers in heatwaves and had a scrap of wool to slap on their backs in the coldest days of winter; they only drank wine and only ate meat when they were “on hard labour.” They lived without names, designated only by numbers and in some way reduced to mere figures, their eyes lowered, their voices lowered, their hair shorn, under the rod, in shame.

Then his mind reverted to the creatures he now had before his eyes.

These beings, too, lived with their hair shorn, their eyes lowered, their voices lowered, not in shame but in the full force of the world’s scorn, their backs not bruised by the rod but their shoulders lacerated by discipline.5 Their names had also vanished from among men and they only existed now under the most austere appellations. They never ate meat and never drank wine; they were dressed, not in red vests, but in black shrouds made of wool, heavy in summer, light in winter, without being able to take anything off or put anything on, without even being able to resort to cotton clothing or a woolen overcoat, according to the season; and for six months of the year they wore hair shirts that gave them fever. They lived not in rooms heated only in the worst days of winter, but in cells where fires were never lit; they slept not on mattresses only two inches thick but on straw. Last, they were not even allowed to sleep; every night, after a day of toil, as they sank with exhaustion into first sleep, the very moment when they were dozing off, scarcely warming up a little, they had to wake up, get up, and go and pray in the icy dark chapel, with both knees on the stone.

On certain days, every one of these beings took a turn putting in twelve hours at a stretch kneeling on the flagstones or prostrate face down on the ground, arms out on both sides like a cross.

The first lot were men; these were women.

What had these men done? They had stolen, raped, looted, killed, murdered. They were bandits, forgers, poisoners, arsonists, murderers, parricides. What had these women done? They had done nothing.

On one side, armed robbery, fraud, theft, violence, lechery, homicide, every known form of sacrilege, every variety of assault; on the other, one thing only: innocence. Perfect innocence, almost lifted aloft in some mysterious assumption, still tethered to the ground through virtue, already tethered to heaven through holiness.

On one side, the whispered mutual avowal of crimes; on the other, the confession of sins said out loud. And what crimes! And what sins!

On one side, primeval sludge; on the other, an ineffable perfume. On one side, a moral pestilence, kept in custody, penned in under cannon and slowly devouring the plague-addled victims; on the other, a chaste kindling of all souls at the same hearth. There, darkness; here, shadow, but shadow full of flashes of light, and flashes of light full of radiance.

Two places of slavery; but in the first, deliverance is possible, a legal limit is always in sight, and there’s always escape. In the second, perpetuity; the only hope, in the extremely distant future, that glimmer of freedom mankind calls death.

In the first, you were chained up in mere chains; in the other, you were chained by your faith.

What emerged from the first? Endless malediction, the gnashing of teeth, hate, a desperate depravity, a cry of rage against human association, utter contempt for heaven. What issued from the second? Benediction and love. And in these two places, so similar and yet so different, these two species of being, so very different, accomplished the same duty, atonement.

Jean Valjean understood perfectly well the atonement involved in the first, personal atonement, atonement for oneself. But he did not understand atonement for others, that suffered by these creatures, blameless and without stain, and he asked himself with a shudder: Atonement for what? What atonement?

A voice in his conscience answered him: the most divine form of human generosity, atonement for others.

Here we will refrain from adding our personal theories, we are merely the narrator, putting ourselves in Jean Valjean’s shoes, seeing with his eyes and translating his impressions.

He had before his very eyes the sublime summit of self-abnegation, the highest peak of virtue possible—that innocence that forgives men for their sins and atones in their stead; servitude endured, torture accepted, torment sought out by souls who have not sinned in order to exempt from such torment souls that have faltered; the love of humanity losing itself in the love of God, yet remaining there, distinct and imploring; gentle weak creatures taking on the misery of those who are punished and the smile of those who are rewarded. And he remembered that he had dared to feel sorry for himself!

Often in the middle of the night, he would get up to listen to the grateful chanting of these innocent creatures overwhelmed by austerities, and he felt the blood run cold in his veins to think that those who were justly punished did not raise their voices to the heavens except to blaspheme and that he, miserable bastard, had shaken his fist at God.

One thing was striking and gave him pause for profound thought, like a warning whispered by Providence itself: The walls scaled, fences hurdled, luck tried to the death, the long hard climb uphill, all these same efforts he had made to get out of the other place of atonement, he had made to get into this one here. Was this an emblem of his fate?

This house was a prison, too, and looked horribly like the other abode he had fled, and yet he had never imagined anything remotely like it.

He saw, once more, grates, bolts, iron bars—to guard whom? Angels. These high walls that he had seen around tigers, he saw them once more around sheep.

This was a place of atonement and not of punishment; and yet it was even more austere, more mournful, and more merciless than the other one. These virgins were more savagely beaten down than the convicts. A cold, harsh wind, the wind that had frozen his childhood, swept through that grated, padlocked pit of vultures; an even more bitter and painful blast blew in this cage of doves.

Why?

When he thought of these things, everything in him became deeply absorbed in this mystery of sublimeness. In these meditations, pride evaporated. He circled himself, over and over again; he felt himself to be puny and he wept many times. All that had entered his life in the last six months brought him back to the holy injunctions of the bishop—Cosette, through love, the convent, through humility.

Sometimes, in the evening, at dusk, at the hour when the garden was deserted, he could be seen on his knees in the middle of the path that ran alongside the chapel, in front of the window he had looked in the night he arrived, turned to face the place where he knew that the sister making atonement lay in prostration and in prayer. He prayed, kneeling like this before this sister. It seemed that he did not dare kneel directly before God.

All that surrounded him, the peaceful garden, the fragrant flowers, the children letting out joyful cries, these grave and simple women, the silent cloister, slowly penetrated him, and little by little his soul filled with silence like the cloister, with perfume like the flowers, with peace like the garden, with simplicity like the women, with joy like the children. And then he reflected that it was two houses of God that had taken him in, one after the other, at the two critical moments of his life, the first when all doors had shut in his face and human society had pushed him away, the second at the moment when human society had set off after him again and when jail was once more opening its doors; and that without the first, he would have lapsed into crime again, and without the second, into torment.

His whole heart melted in gratitude and he felt more and more love.

Several years went by this way; Cosette was growing up.