بخش 4 کتاب 3

BOOK THREE

THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET

THE HOUSE WITH A SECRET ENTRANCE

AROUND THE MIDDLE of the last century, a presiding judge who wore a magistrate’s hat and sat on the parliament of Paris,1 and who had a mistress and hid the fact, for in those days the grands seigneurs showed off their mistresses and the bourgeois hid them, had “a little house”2 built in the faubourg Saint-Germain in the deserted rue Blomet, which is now called the rue Plumet, not far from the spot then known as the Combat des Animaux.

This house was a detached two-storey villa with two rooms on the ground floor, two bedrooms upstairs, a kitchen downstairs, upstairs a boudoir, and an attic under the roof, the whole thing fronted by a garden with a large gate opening onto the street. This garden was on about an acre of land. It was all passersby could see; but at the rear of the house there was a small yard and at the back of the yard there was a low building consisting of two rooms over a cellar, a “little something” intended to conceal a child and a nursemaid, should the need arise. This building was connected, at the back, via a concealed door that opened with a secret key, to a long narrow passageway that was paved, winding, uncovered, bordered by high walls and hidden so incredibly artfully it was almost lost between the garden walls and the walls of the cultivated plots whose every twist and turn it followed before ending in another door, also with a secret key, that opened a quarter of a mile away, almost in another quartier, at the lonely end of the rue de Babylone.

Monsieur le président, the presiding judge, snuck in this back way so that even those who might have spied on him and followed him and observed that every day Monsieur le président went off somewhere mysteriously, could not have suspected that going off to the rue de Babylone actually meant going off to the rue Blomet. Thanks to the clever buying up of land, the ingenious magistrate was able to get this secret passage to his house built on his own land, and consequently without any monitoring. Later he sold off the plots of land bordering the passage in small allotments for gardens and crops, and the owners of these plots of land on both sides thought they were seeing a single common without for a moment suspecting the existence of this long ribbon of cobblestones snaking between two walls among their flowerbeds and their orchards. Only the birds could see this curiosity. The tits and warblers of last century no doubt gossiped a good deal together about Monsieur le président.

The villa, built in stone in the Mansart style, wainscoted and furnished in the Watteau3 style, all loose rocaille inside, all fuddy-duddy periwig outside, walled about with a triple hedge of flowers, had something discreet, tizzy, and solemn about it, as befits a passing fancy of love and of the bench.

The house and the passageway, which have since disappeared, still existed fifteen years ago or so. In ‘93, a boilermaker bought the house to demolish it, but since he couldn’t pay the asking price, the nation sent him into bankruptcy. So you could say the house demolished the boilermaker. Thereafter the house remained empty and slowly fell into ruin, like all dwellings bereft of people to lend them life. It had remained furnished with its old furniture and was always for sale or to let, and the ten or twelve people who passed through the rue Plumet in the course of a year were notified of this by an illegible yellow sign that had been hanging off the garden gate since 1810.

Toward the end of the Restoration, these same passersby might have noticed that the sign had disappeared and that the shutters on the first floor were even open. The house was, in fact, occupied. The windows had little curtains, a sure sign that there was a woman about.

In the month of October 1829, a man of a certain age had shown up and rented the house as it was, including, of course, the outbuilding at the back and the passageway that ended at the rue de Babylone. He had had secret locks fixed on the two passageway doors. The house, as we said, was still more or less furnished with the old furnishings of the presiding judge. The new tenant had ordered a few repairs, added what was missing here and there, replaced some cobblestones in the courtyard, some bricks on the floor, some steps on the stairs, some strips of wood in the parquet floor and panes of glass in the casement windows, and had finally moved in with a young girl and an old servant, noiselessly, more like someone stealing in than a man entering his own home. The neighbours did not gossip about him for the simple reason that there were no neighbours.

This tenant who created so little stir was Jean Valjean and the young girl was Cosette. The servant was an old maid called Toussaint, or All Saints, whom Jean Valjean had saved from the hospital4 and destitution. She was ancient, provincial, and she stuttered, three qualities that had decided Jean Valjean to take her with him. He had rented the house under the name of Monsieur Fauchelevent, man of private means. In all that was recounted earlier, the reader no doubt recognized Jean Valjean even before Thénardier did.

Why had Jean Valjean left the Petit-Picpus convent? What had happened? Nothing had happened.

As you will recall, Jean Valjean had been happy in the convent, so happy that his conscience had wound up being troubled by it. He saw Cosette every day, he felt a sense of paternity stirring and growing inside him more and more, he protected that child with his soul like a brooding hen, he told himself that she was his, that nothing could take her away from him, that this was how it would be forever; that she would most certainly become a nun, being gently prodded in that direction every day, that accordingly the convent was now the world for her as for him, that he would grow old there and she would grow up there, that she would grow old there and he would die there, that in the end—ravishing hope!—no separation was thinkable. In reflecting upon this, he had ended up falling into a state of great confusion. He questioned himself. He asked himself if all that happiness really did belong to him, if it were not made up of somebody else’s happiness, of the happiness that he was confiscating, that he was stealing, from this child—he, an old man. Wasn’t it a case of theft? He told himself that this child had a right to know life before renouncing it, that cutting her off, in advance and in a sense without consulting her, from all the joys of life on the pretext of sparing her from all of its ordeals, to take advantage of her ignorance and her isolation to plant an artificial vocation in her, was to warp and damage another human being and to lie to God. And who knows if, one day realizing all this and regretting having become a nun, Cosette would not end up hating him for it? A final thought, this one less heroic than the others, almost selfish, but which he found unbearable. He resolved to leave the convent.

He resolved to do it; he recognized with great sorrow that he had to do it. As for objections, there weren’t any. Five years’ sojourn between those four walls as a disappeared man had necessarily vaporized or laid to rest any trace of fear. He could quietly return to live among men. He had aged and everything had changed. Who would recognize him now? And then again, if the worst came to the worst, there was no danger except for himself, and he did not have the right to condemn Cosette to the cloister for the reason that he had been condemned to penal servitude. Besides, what is danger in the face of duty? Lastly, nothing was stopping him from being careful and taking his precautions. As for Cosette’s education, it was almost finished and complete.

Once his decision had been taken, he waited for the right opportunity. It was not long coming. Old Fauchelevent died.

Jean Valjean demanded an audience with the reverend prioress and told her that he had come into a small inheritance at the death of his brother that allowed him to live without working from that point on, and so he was leaving the service of the convent and would take his daughter with him; but that, as it was not fair that Cosette, now that she would not be taking her vows, should have been educated for free, he humbly beseeched the reverend prioress to approve his offer to the community of a sum of five thousand francs as indemnity for the five years that Cosette had spent there.

And that is how Jean Valjean emerged from the Convent of Perpetual Adoration.

On leaving the convent, he stashed under his arm the small suitcase whose key he still kept on him always, not wanting to entrust it to any carrier. This suitcase used to intrigue Cosette because of the smell of embalming that came from it.

Let us say immediately that from that day, this case never left him. He had it always in his room. It was the first and sometimes the only thing he took with him in his various moves. Cosette would laugh about it, calling the suitcase “the inseparable,” and saying, “I’m jealous of it.” Jean Valjean, though, did not appear out in the open again without profound anxiety.

He discovered the house in the rue Plumet and dug in there. He was now in possession of the name Ultime Fauchelevent.

At the same time, he rented two other apartments in Paris, so that he would attract less attention than if he always stayed in the same quartier, so that he could absent himself, if need be, at the slightest concern he might have, and finally, so that he would not find himself caught short again like the night when he had so miraculously escaped from Javert. These two apartments were two extremely rickety run-down dwellings in two quartiers a fair distance apart, one in the rue de l’Ouest, the other in the rue de l’Homme-Armé.5 From time to time he would go either to the rue de l’Homme-Armé or to the rue de l’Ouest to spend a month or six weeks there with Cosette, leaving Toussaint behind. He had himself waited on by the porters there and passed himself off as a man of private means from the suburbs with a pied-à-terre in town. This man of lofty virtue had three domiciles in Paris solely for the purpose of evading the police.

JEAN VALJEAN AS A NATIONAL GUARD

STILL, STRICTLY SPEAKING, he lived in the rue Plumet, and he organized his life there in the following fashion:

Cosette occupied the main house along with the servant; she had the master bedroom with the painted window piers, the boudoir with the gilded mouldings, the presiding judge’s salon furnished with tapestries and vast armchairs; she had the garden. Jean Valjean had a four-poster bed put in Cosette’s bedroom with a canopy of antique damask in three colours and a beautiful old Persian rug bought in the rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul at mother Gaucher’s, and, to balance the severity of these magnificent old things, he had mixed these odds and ends with all the bright and lovely furnishings young girls like, a set of shelves known as a whatnot, a bookcase and some gilt-edged books, stationery, a blotter, a work table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a silver-gilt sewing kit, a washstand of Japanese porcelain. Long damask curtains in three colours on a red background, matching the colours over the bed, hung from the upstairs windows. On the ground floor, tapestry curtains. All winter Cosette’s little house was heated from top to bottom. As for him, he lived in the sort of porter’s lodge at the back of the yard, with a mattress on a bed of webbing, a pinewood table, two straw-bottomed chairs, an earthenware water pitcher, a few books on a board, his precious suitcase in a corner, never a fire. He dined with Cosette and there would be a coarse whole-grain loaf for him on the table. He had said to Toussaint when she entered their service: “Mademoiselle is the mistress of the house.” “What about you, M-m-monsieur?” Toussaint had replied, stunned. “Me, I’m much more than the master, I am the father.” Cosette had been taught housekeeping in the convent and she took care of expenses, which were extremely modest. Every day Jean Valjean took Cosette’s arm and took her out for a stroll. He would walk her to the Luxembourg, to the least frequented allée, and every Sunday he took her to mass, always at Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas because it was far away. As that is a very poor quartier, he was always giving alms there and the downtrodden would swarm around him in the church, which is what earned him the Thénardiers’ epistle: To the benevolent gentleman of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas church. He liked to take Cosette along on visits to the needy and the sick. But no stranger ever entered the house in the rue Plumet. Toussaint brought back the groceries and Jean Valjean himself would go and fetch water from a water hydrant very close by on the boulevard. Wood and wine were kept in a kind of semi-subterranean recess lined with loose stones right next to the door on the rue de Babylone, a space that had once served as a grotto to the presiding judge; for in the days of follies and country cottages, no love affair was complete without a grotto.

In the once-illicit door on the rue de Babylone, there was one of those boxes that look like piggybanks and are designed for letters and newspapers; only, the three inhabitants of the house on the rue Plumet did not receive newspapers or letters, so the entire usefulness of the box, once upon a time a go-between in flings and confidant of a skirt-chasing gownsman, was now limited to the notices of the tax collector and to guard-duty rosters, for Monsieur Fauchelevent, man of means, was in the National Guard;1 he had not been able to slip through the tightly woven net of the 1831 census. The municipal information gathered at the time went back as far as the convent of Petit-Picpus, a sort of impenetrable and holy cloud from which Jean Valjean had emerged venerable in the eyes of his local mairie,2 and, as a result, worthy of mounting guard.

Three or four times a year, Jean Valjean donned his uniform and did his stint of guard duty, and very gladly, too; for him, it was the perfect disguise, which let him mingle with the world at large while leaving him alone. Jean Valjean had just turned sixty, the age of legal exemption, but he didn’t look a day older than fifty; besides, he had no desire to evade his sergeant major or to cavil with the comte de Lobau;3 he had no civil status; he was concealing his name, he was concealing his identity, he was concealing his age, he was concealing everything; and so, as we just said, he was a keen National Guard. To resemble the man in the street who pays his taxes, that was the sum total of his ambition. This man’s ideal, within, was an angel; without, a bourgeois.

We note one detail, though. Whenever Jean Valjean went out with Cosette, he dressed as we have seen and looked very much the part of a retired officer. When he went out alone, and this was usually in the evening, he was always dressed in a worker’s jacket and trousers, with a cap on his head that hid his face. Was it a precaution, or humility? Both at once. Cosette was used to the enigmatic side of her destiny and scarcely noticed her father’s odd ways. As for Toussaint, she venerated Jean Valjean and liked everything he did. One day her butcher, who had just caught sight of Jean Valjean, said to her: “That’s a funny one.” She answered: “That is a-a-a saint.” Neither Jean Valjean, nor Cosette, nor Toussaint ever came in or went out except through the door on the rue de Babylone. Unless you saw them through the garden gate, it would have been hard to guess that they lived in the rue Plumet. This gate always remained shut. Jean Valjean had left the garden wild so that it would not attract attention.

There, perhaps, he got it wrong.

FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS1

THE GARDEN, THUS left to itself for more than half a century, had become extraordinary and charming. Passersby of forty years ago would stop in the street to gaze at it, without suspecting the secrets it concealed behind its fresh green layers. More than one dreamer of the day had many times let his eyes and his thoughts stray indiscreetly through the bars of the antique gate, which was padlocked, warped, rickety, fixed to two pillars that had gone green with moss, and bizarrely crowned with a pediment of indecipherable arabesques.

There was a stone bench in one corner, one or two mouldy statues, a few trellises, their nails loosened by time, rotting against the wall; otherwise, no paths or lawn, just couch grass all over the place. Gardening had gone out the door, nature had returned in all its glory. Weeds flourished, which is a wonderful adventure for a poor patch of dirt. The stocks there were having a field day, riotously splendid. Nothing in the garden opposed the sacred effort of things toward life; venerable growth was very much at home. The trees hung down toward the brambles, the brambles reached up toward the trees, the plant climbed, the branch bowed, what crawls on the ground had gone to look for what blossoms in the air, what floats on the wind had stooped toward what trails in the moss; trunks, limbs, leaves, twigs, tufts, tendrils, shoots, thorns mixed together, crossed, married, merged; in a close and powerful embrace, the vegetation had achieved and celebrated there, under the satisfied eye of the Creator, in this enclosure of three hundred square feet, the sacred mystery of His fraternity, a symbol of human fraternity. This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket, that is, as impenetrable as a forest, as crowded as a town, as tremulous as a nest, as sombre as a cathedral, as fragrant as a bouquet, as lonely as a tomb, as full of life as the teeming multitudes.

In Floréal,2 this enormous bushland, free behind its gate and within its four walls, began to rut in the mute labour of universal germination, quivering in the rising sun almost like an animal gulping in the effluvia of cosmic love and feeling the April sap rise and boil in its veins; it shook its extravagant green hair in the wind, scattered over the wet ground, over the worn statues, over the crumbling steps of the villa and even over the pavement in the deserted street, flowers like stars, dew like pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy, perfume. At noon, a thousand white butterflies took refuge there, and it was a divine spectacle to see this living summer snow swirling there in flakes in the shade. There, in the jaunty gloom of the greenery, a host of innocent voices spoke softly to the soul, and what the warbling forgot to say, the humming completed. At night a dreamy vapour rose from the garden and enveloped it; a shroud of mist, a calm celestial sadness covered it; that intensely intoxicating smell of honeysuckle and wild morning glory wafted up on all sides like an exquisite and subtle poison; you could hear the final calls of the tree creepers and the wagtails dozing off under the branches; you could feel the sacred intimacy of bird and tree; of a day, the wings rejoice the leaves, of a night, the leaves protect the wings.

In winter the thicket was black, wet, bristling, shivering with cold, and it let the house be seen a little. Instead of flowers among the branches and dew on the flowers, you could see the long silver ribbons of slugs on the cold thick carpet of yellow leaves; but in every case, whatever the aspect, whatever the season, spring, winter, summer, autumn, this little enclosure breathed melancholy, contemplation, solitude, freedom, the absence of man, the presence of God; and the old rusty gate looked as if it were saying: This garden is mine.

In vain were the cobblestones of Paris all around, the classical and splendid mansions of the rue de Varenne two feet away, the dome of the Invalides so close, the Chamber of Deputies not much farther; in vain the coaches of the rue de Bourgogne and the rue Saint-Dominique rolled with pomp and circumstance through the neighbourhood, in vain the yellow, brown, white, red omnibuses passed each other at the next intersection along. The rue Plumet was a desert; and the death of the former owners, the passing of a revolution, the collapse of ancient fortunes, absence, oblivion, forty years of abandonment and of widowhood, were all that had been needed to bring back into this privileged place the ferns, the common mullein, the hemlock, the yarrow, the foxglove, the tall grass, the great crinkled plants with broad leaves of pale green brocade, the lizards, the beetles, the anxious quick insects; to flush out from the depths of the earth and put on show between these four walls a magically wild and savage grandeur; and for nature, which upsets the stingy arrangements of man and always offers itself completely wherever it spreads, as much in the ant as in the eagle, came and flourished in a mean little Parisian garden with all the ruggedness and majesty of a virgin forest in the New World.

Nothing is small, actually; anyone who leaves themselves open to nature knows this. Even though no absolute satisfaction is given to philosophy, no more in circumscribing the cause than in limiting the effect, the contemplator falls into endless raptures at all these breakdowns of forces that end in unity. Everything works on everything else.

Algebra applies to the clouds; the radiance of the star benefits the rose. No thinker worth his salt would dare claim that the scent of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who can calculate the trajectory of a molecule? How do we know the creation of worlds is not determined by the falling of grains of sand? Who, after all, knows the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely big and the infinitely small, the reverberation of causes in the chasms of a being, the avalanches of creation? A cheese mite matters; the small is big, the big is small; everything is in equilibrium within necessity—a frightening vision for the mind. There are miraculous relationships between beings and things; in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to aphid, no one looks down on anyone else; everyone needs each other. Light does not carry off earthly perfumes into the blue without knowing what it does with them; night distributes stellar essence to the sleeping flowers. All the birds that fly hold the thread of infinity in their claws. Germination involves the hatching of a meteor and the peck of a swallow’s beak breaking out of its egg, and it brings off at once the birth of an earthworm and the coming of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has greater vision? You choose. A patch of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars. There is the same promiscuity, only even more amazing, between things of the intellect and the facts of substance. Elements and principles mingle, combine, intermarry, multiply, each together, to the point of finally bringing the material world and the moral world to the same clarity. Phenomena are perpetually folded back on themselves. In the vast cosmic exchanges, universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, rolling everything in the invisible mystery of effluvia, putting each thing to work, not losing a single dream, a single bout of sleep, sowing an animalcule here, breaking up a star there, wavering and winding, turning light into a force and thought into an element, one propagated and indivisible, dissolving everything except that geometric point, the self; bringing everything back to the atom of the soul; making everything blossom in God; entangling all activities, from the highest to the lowest, in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, linking the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating, who knows? if only by the sameness of the law, the evolution of the comet in the firmament to the twirling of the infusoria in a drop of water. A machine made of spirit. Enormous gears whose primary motor is the gnat and whose ultimate wheel is the zodiac.

GATE CHANGE

IT SEEMS THAT this garden, created in the days of yore to hide dirty secrets, had transformed itself till it was fit for harbouring chaste secrets. It no longer had either arbors or lawns, bowers or grottoes; there was a magnificent dishevelled gloom falling like a veil everywhere you looked. Paphos1 had turned itself back into Eden. Some indefinable penance had purified the retreat. This particular flower girl now offered her flowers to the soul. The flirtatious garden once highly compromised had retrieved its virginity and modesty. A presiding judge assisted by a gardener, an old man who thought he was a second Lamoignon, and another old man who thought he was a second Le Nôtre,2 had shaped it into complex curves, pruned it, worried it, bedizened it, fashioned it for gallantry; nature had snatched it back, had filled it with shade and straightened it out for love.

There was a heart close at hand in such solitude. Love only had to show its face; there was a temple there, built of foliage, grass, moss, birds’ sighs, soft shadows, waving branches, and a soul made of gentleness, faith, candour, hope, longing, and illusion.

Cosette had emerged from the convent when she was still virtually a child; at little more than fourteen years old, she was “at the difficult age,” as we’ve said. Apart from her eyes, she looked rather more ugly than pretty, and, though she didn’t have any particularly unattractive feature, she was awkward, skinny, timid, and bold at once—in short, a big little girl.

Her education was finished; that is, she had been taught religion and even, and especially, devotion; then “history,” or what passes for history in the convent, geography, grammar, the participles, the kings of France, a bit of music, how to draw a nose, and so on, but otherwise she was ignorant about everything, which is both an asset and a danger. The soul of a young girl should not be left in the dark; later, mirages that are too sudden and too alive spring up in it as in a camera obscura.3 It should be gently and discreetly enlightened, by the reflection of reality rather than by reality’s direct hard light. A helpful and graciously austere half-light that dissipates childish fears and prevents falls from grace. Only maternal instinct, that admirable intuition into which the memories of the virgin and the experience of the woman enter, knows how and with what this half-light should be made. Nothing can replace this instinct. To shape the soul of a young girl, all the nuns in the world are not equal to one mother.

Cosette had never had a mother. She had only had a whole host of mothers, plural. As for Jean Valjean, there was certainly all manner of tenderness in him at once, and all manner of care; but he was just an old man who knew absolutely nothing. Now, in this work of education, in this grave business of preparing a woman for life, how much science you need to do battle with that great ignorance known as innocence!

Nothing prepares a young girl for the passions like the convent. The convent turns thoughts toward the unknown. The heart, thrown back on itself, grows bigger, not being able to pour itself out, and grows deeper, not being able to bloom. Hence visions, suppositions, conjectures, novels sketched out, adventures yearned for, fantastic constructions, whole edifices built in the inner darkness of the mind, sombre and secret abodes where the passions immediately find their dwelling place as soon as the floodgates are opened and they are allowed inside. The convent is a compression chamber that has to keep working for an entire life, if it is to triumph over the human heart.

On leaving the convent, Cosette could not have found anything sweeter or more dangerous than the house in the rue Plumet. It was an extension of solitude coupled with the beginnings of freedom; a walled garden, but with nature sharp, rich, voluptuous, and fragrant; the same dreams as in the convent, but with glimpses of young men; a gate, but one on the street.

Yet, we repeat, when she first arrived, she was still just a child. Jean Valjean delivered to her this uncultivated garden. “Do whatever you like with it,” he told her. This amused Cosette; she foraged around every tuft and every stone, looking for “beasties”; she played there, in anticipation of dreaming there; she loved the garden for the secrets she found in the grass under her feet, in anticipation of loving it for the stars she would see through the branches above her head.

And then again, she loved her father, that is, Jean Valjean, with all her heart, with a naïve filial passion that made of the old man a charming and welcome companion. You will recall that Monsieur Madeleine was an avid reader. Jean Valjean had continued to read; through this he had come to speak well; he had the secret wealth and the eloquence of a genuine and humble intelligence that has cultivated itself spontaneously. There was just enough harshness left in him to season his goodness; he had a rough mind and a gentle heart. At the Luxembourg, in their tête-à-têtes, he gave elaborate explanations of everything, drawing on what he had read, drawing also on what he had been through. While she listened, Cosette’s eyes vaguely wandered.

This simple man was enough for Cosette’s mind, just as this wildly overgrown garden was enough for her eyes. Whenever she had been chasing butterflies, she would run up to him out of breath and say: “Ah! I ran and ran!” He would kiss her on the forehead.

Cosette adored the old man. She was always following at his heels. Wherever Jean Valjean was, there was well-being. As Jean Valjean did not live either in the villa or in the garden, she was happier in the cobbled courtyard out back than in the enclosure full of flowers, and in the little shed furnished with straw chairs than in the grand salon hung with tapestries where you could recline on padded armchairs. Jean Valjean sometimes said to her, smiling with happiness at being pestered: “Go home, for heaven’s sake! Leave me alone for a bit!” She would scold him tenderly in that way that is so lovely coming from the daughter to the father.

“Father, I’m extremely cold at your place. Why don’t you put a rug and a stove in here?”

“Dear child, there are so many people better than I am who don’t even have a roof over their heads.”

“Well, why is there a fire at my place and everything else you could want?”

“Because you are a child and a woman.”

“Bah! Men must all be cold and uncomfortable, in that case.”

“Certain men.”

“All right, I’ll come here so often you’ll be forced to have a fire.”

And she would also say to him: “Father, why do you eat that awful bread?”

“Because, my girl.”

“Well, then, if you eat it, I’ll eat it.”

Then, so that Cosette would not eat black bread, Jean Valjean would switch to white bread.

Cosette only dimly remembered her childhood. She prayed morning and night for the mother she had never known. The Thénardiers had remained for her like two hideous figures from out of a nightmare. She remembered that “one day, after dark” she had been out fetching water in a wood. She thought it was a long way from Paris. It seemed to her that she had begun her life in a black void and that it was Jean Valjean who had pulled her out of it. Her childhood seemed like a time when there was nothing around her but millipedes, spiders, and snakes. When she was musing at night before going off to sleep, as she did not have a very clear sense of being Jean Valjean’s daughter or of his being her father, she imagined that her mother’s soul had passed into this good man and had come to live close by her.

When he was sitting down, she would press her cheek against his white hair and silently shed a tear, telling herself: “He could well be my mother, this man here!”

Cosette, though this is strange to say, in her profound ignorance as a convent-bred girl, and maternity in any case being absolutely unintelligible to virginity, had ended up realizing that she had as little of a mother as it was possible to have, hardly any mother at all. She did not even know this mother’s name. Whenever she happened to ask Jean Valjean, Jean Valjean would clam up. If she asked him twice, he would simply smile by way of reply. Once she had insisted; the smile had ended in a tear.

This silence of Jean Valjean’s buried Fantine under a cover of night. Was it prudence? Was it respect? Was it fear of delivering that name to the hazards of a memory other than his own?

As long as Cosette was little, Jean Valjean had been happy to talk to her about her mother; when she became a young girl, he just could not do it anymore. It seemed to him that he no longer dared. Was this because of Cosette? Was it because of Fantine? He felt a kind of religious horror at letting that shade into Cosette’s thoughts and wheeling in the dead woman as a third party in their shared destiny. The more sacred this shade was to him, the more fearful she seemed. He thought of Fantine and felt himself overwhelmed with silence. He saw dimly in the darkness something like a finger over someone’s lips. Had all that modesty that had been in Fantine and that, during her life, had been forced out of her by violence, come back after her death to land on her and watch, outraged, over the dead woman’s peace and, ferocious, keep her in her grave? Did Jean Valjean, without knowing it, feel its pressure? We who believe in death are not among those who would reject this mysterious explanation. Hence the impossibility of uttering, even for Cosette, the name: Fantine.

One day Cosette said to him: “Father, last night I saw my mother in a dream. She had two big wings. My mother must have come close to sanctity in her lifetime.”

“Through martyrdom,” answered Jean Valjean.

Otherwise, Jean Valjean was happy.

When Cosette went out with him, she leaned on his arm, proud, happy, her heart full to overflowing. Jean Valjean, at all these marks of a tenderness so exclusive and so satisfied with him alone, felt his thoughts melt into delight. The poor man shuddered inside, flooded with an angelic bliss; he told himself in a burst of joy that this would last all his life; he said to himself that he had not really suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness and he thanked God, from the depths of his soul, for having allowed him to be so loved, he, miserable wretch, by this innocent being.

THE ROSE REALIZES SHE IS AN ENGINE OF WAR

ONE DAY COSETTE accidentally looked at herself in the mirror and let out a cry: “Well!” It almost seemed to her that she was pretty. This threw her into a strange turmoil. Till that moment she had not thought about her looks. She saw herself in the mirror, but she did not look at herself. And then again, she had often been told she was ugly. Jean Valjean alone would softly say: “No, you’re not! No, you’re not!” Whatever the case may be, Cosette had always thought she was ugly and had grown up thinking so with the easy resignation of a child. And now suddenly her mirror was chiming in with Jean Valjean and telling her: “No, you’re not!” She could not sleep that night. “What if I were actually pretty?” she thought. “Wouldn’t it be funny if I were pretty!” And she remembered those of her school friends whose beauty had made an impression on the convent, and she said to herself: “Gosh! I’d be like Mademoiselle Thingummy!” The next day she looked at herself, but not by accident, and she doubted: “What gave me that idea?” she said. “No, I’m ugly.” She had quite simply slept badly, she had dark circles under her eyes and she was pale. She had not felt all that deliriously happy the night before in thinking she was beautiful, but she felt sad now that she no longer thought so. She did not look at herself anymore and for a fortnight tried to do her hair with her back to the mirror.

In the evening after dinner, she quite often worked on a tapestry in the salon, or on some other dainty work she’d been taught in the convent, while Jean Valjean sat reading beside her. Once she looked up from her work and was floored by the anxious way her father was looking at her.

Another time, she was walking down the street and it seemed to her that someone she did not see said behind her back: “Nice-looking woman! But badly dressed.” “Bah!” she thought. “It’s not me. I’m well dressed and ugly.” She was wearing her fluffy plush hat and her merino wool dress at the time.

Finally, she was in the garden one day when she heard poor old Toussaint say: “Monsieur, have you noticed how pretty Mademoiselle is becoming?” Cosette did not hear what her father replied, Toussaint’s words sent her into such a spin. She ran out of the garden, raced up to her room, ran to the mirror—she hadn’t looked at herself for three months—and let out a cry. She had dazzled herself.

She was pretty, and beautiful, too; she couldn’t help but agree with Toussaint and the mirror. Her figure was now perfect, her skin had become luminously white, her hair had become lustrous, an unfamiliar sparkle lit up her blue eyes. Her conviction that she was beautiful came to her whole, all at once, in a flash, like daylight suddenly dawning; others noticed it, too. Toussaint said so, and it was obviously her the passerby had been talking about, there could be no more doubt about it. She went back down to the garden, feeling like a queen, hearing the birds sing—this was in winter—seeing the sky all golden, the sun in the trees, flowers among the shrubs, bewildered, wild, giddy with inexpressible rapture.

For his part, Jean Valjean felt a profound and indefinable pang. He had for some little time, in fact, been contemplating with terror this beauty that grew more resplendent every day on Cosette’s sweet face. A radiant dawn for everyone else, gloom for him.

Cosette had been beautiful for quite a while before realizing it. But from the very first day, that unexpected light that slowly rose and gradually enveloped the young girl’s whole person had stung Jean Valjean’s sombre eyes. He felt it as a change in a life that was happy, so happy that he didn’t dare poke about in it for fear of disturbing something. This man, who had been through every form of hardship known to man, who was still bleeding from the wounds of his fate, who had been very nearly vicious and had become very nearly saintly, who, after having dragged around the chain of the galleys, was now dragging around the invisible, but heavy, chain of indefinite infamy, this man whom the law had not been able to let go of, and who might at any moment be seized again and brought back from the obscurity of his virtue into the broad daylight of public opprobrium, this man accepted everything, excused everything, forgave everything, blessed everything, welcomed everything, and asked of Providence, of men, of justice, of society, of nature, of the world, one thing only—that Cosette love him!

That Cosette continue to love him! That God not stop the heart of that child from coming to him, and remaining his! Loved by Cosette, he felt himself healed, rested, soothed, fulfilled, rewarded, crowned. Loved by Cosette, he was happy! He asked for nothing more. If anyone had said to him, “Would you like to be better off?” he would have replied: “No.” If God had said to him: “Would you like heaven itself in exchange?” he would have replied, “I would be the loser.” Anything that could ruffle this situation, if only on the surface, made him quail as if it were the start of something new. He had never really thought about what the beauty of a woman was, but he instinctively understood that it was devastating.

He watched this beauty that bloomed more and more triumphantly and superbly beside him, under his very eyes, on the frank and fearsome forehead of this child, from the depths of his ugliness, of his age, of his misery, of his reprobation, of his devastation, terrified.

He said to himself: “She is so beautiful! What will become of me?”

That, moreover, was the difference between his tenderness and the tenderness of a mother. What he watched in anguish a mother would have watched with joy.

The first symptoms were not long in presenting themselves. From the day after the day when she had said to herself, “No doubt about it, I am beautiful!” Cosette paid attention to her toilette. She recalled what that passerby had said—“Nice-looking but badly dressed”—a blast from an oracle that had whizzed past her and vanished after dropping in her heart one of the two seeds that later fill up a woman’s whole life: coquetry. Love is the other.

With faith in her beauty, the whole soul of femininity blossomed in her. She was horrified by the merino wool frock and ashamed of the fluffy plush hat. Her father had never denied her anything. Right away she knew everything there was to know about the hat, the dress, the short cape, the brodequin, the cuff, the right fabric, the flattering colour, that science that makes the Parisian woman so charming, so deep, and so dangerous. The term captivating woman was invented for the Parisienne.

In less than a month, in that solitary retreat on the rue de Babylone, little Cosette was not only one of the prettiest women in Paris, which is already saying something, but one of the best dressed, which is something else again. She would have liked to run into her passerby now to see what he had to say, and “to show him!” The fact is that she was ravishing in every way and that she had a breathtaking ability to distinguish between a hat by Gérard and a hat by Herbaut.1 Jean Valjean studied these ravages anxiously. He who felt that he could only crawl, at best walk, watched Cosette sprout wings.

Still, by a simple inspection of Cosette’s finery, a woman would have been able to tell that she did not have a mother. Certain little proprieties, certain special conventions, were not observed by Cosette. A mother would have told her, for instance, that a young girl does not wear damask.

The first day that Cosette stepped out in her black damask frock and short hooded cape and her white crepe hat, she came to take Jean Valjean’s arm, gay, radiant, rosy, proud, stunning.

“Father,” she said, “how do you like me in this?”

Jean Valjean answered in a voice very like the bitter voice of envy.

“Charming!”

He was his normal self on the walk, but once they were back home again, he asked Cosette: “Aren’t you going to wear your dress and your hat anymore, you know the ones?”

This occurred in Cosette’s bedroom. Cosette turned to the rail in the wardrobe where her school castoffs were hanging.

“That ridiculous disguise!” she scoffed. “Father, what do you expect me to do with it? Oh, not on your life, no! I’ll never put those horrors on again. With that thing on my head I look like a raving lunatic.” Jean Valjean sighed deeply.

From that moment, he noticed that Cosette, who used to always prefer staying home and would say, “Father, I have more fun here with you,” was now always asking to go out. Indeed, what was the good of having a nice face and a delectable outfit if you don’t show them off?

He also noticed that Cosette was no longer so fond of the backyard. Now, she seemed to want to stick to the front garden, and would stroll in front of the gate apparently quite happily. Jean Valjean, unshakable, never set foot in the garden. He stayed in his backyard, like the dog.

Knowing that she was beautiful, Cosette lost the grace that goes with ignorance; an exquisite grace, for beauty enhanced by artlessness is ineffable and nothing is as adorable as the blossoming innocent who walks along holding the key to paradise in her hand without knowing it. But what she lost in naïve grace, she gained in grave and pensive charm. Her whole person, pervaded by the joys of youth, by innocence and beauty, breathed a splendid melancholy.

It was at this time, when six months had gone by, that Marius saw her again at the Luxembourg.

THE BATTLE BEGINS

COSETTE WAS STANDING in her own shadow, as Marius was in his, all ready to take fire and blaze. Destiny, with its mysterious and fateful patience, was slowly bringing together these two beings all fired up and languishing from the stormy electrical charges of passion; these two souls that carried love like two clouds carrying lightning were about to approach each other and fuse in a glance like clouds in a flash of lightning.

The glance has been so abused in love stories that we have ended up discounting it. Hardly anyone ever dares now say that two beings fell in love because their eyes met. And yet that is the way you fall in love and it is the only way you fall in love. The rest is simply the rest and comes after. Nothing is more real than those great seismic shocks that two souls give each other in exchanging that spark.

At the exact moment that Cosette unwittingly gave Marius the glance that so troubled him, Marius had no idea that he had given Cosette a glance that troubled her. It hurt her and thrilled her in the same way.

For a long time already she had seen and studied him the way girls see and study, looking elsewhere. Cosette had already begun to find Marius handsome when he still regarded her as ugly. But since he took no notice of her, she did not give two hoots about the young man.

Yet she could not help saying to herself that he had beautiful hair, beautiful eyes, beautiful teeth, a lovely voice when she heard him chatting with his friends, that he walked awkwardly, if you like, but with a grace all his own, that he didn’t seem altogether stupid, that his whole bearing was noble, gentle, natural, and proud, and that, when all was said and done, he looked poor, yes, but he looked good.

The day their eyes first met and at last blurted out those first obscure and unspeakable things that a look stammers, Cosette did not at first understand. She went home in a daze to the rue de l’Ouest where Jean Valjean, as he was in the habit of doing, had just come to spend six weeks. The next day, when she woke up, she thought of the unknown young man, for so long icy and indifferent, and how he now seemed to pay attention to her; and his attention did not please her in the least. She was rather angry with this disdainful beau. The first deep rumble of war stirred in her. It seemed to her, and this caused her a feeling of glee still utterly childish, that she was about to get revenge at last.

Knowing that she was beautiful, she felt thoroughly, if indistinctly, that she had a weapon. Women play on their beauty as children play with their knives. And they hurt themselves on it, too.

You will recall Marius’s hesitations, palpitations, terrors. He stayed on his seat and did not come near. Which really piqued Cosette. One day she said to Jean Valjean: “Father, let’s take a stroll down there for a bit.” Seeing that Marius wasn’t coming to her, she decided to go to him. In such cases, every woman is like Mohammed. Then again, oddly enough, the first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity, in a young woman, daring. This never ceases to amaze people and yet nothing could be simpler. It is just the two sexes coming together and each taking on the characteristics of the other.

That particular day, Cosette’s glance drove Marius wild, Marius’s glance made Cosette tremble. Marius went away confident, and Cosette anxious. From that day forth, they adored each other.

The first thing Cosette felt was a confused and deep sadness. It seemed to her that, from one day to the next, her soul had turned black. She no longer recognized it. The whiteness of soul of young girls, which is made of frigidity and gaiety, is like snow. It melts in the glow of love, which is its sun.

Cosette did not know what love was. She had never heard the word uttered in its earthly sense. In the books of profane music that made their way into the convent, amour—love—was replaced by tambour—drum—or pandour—soldier. This made for riddles that exercised the imaginations of the big girls. For instance, “Ah! The tambour is so exciting!” or, “Pity is not a soldier!” But Cosette had left while she was still too young to worry too much about this tambour. So she did not know what to call what she was now feeling. Are you any less sick for not knowing the name of your sickness?

She loved with all the more passion for loving in ignorance. She did not know whether it was good or bad, useful or dangerous, necessary or deadly, eternal or ephemeral, allowed or prohibited—she loved. She would have been truly amazed if you had said to her: Aren’t you sleeping? But that’s forbidden! Aren’t you eating? But that’s really bad! Do you have flutterings and palpitations of the heart? But that’s not done! Do you blush and go white when a certain being dressed in black appears at the end of a certain leafy path? But that’s appalling! She would not have understood and she would have replied: “How can I be blamed for something I can’t help and that I know nothing about?” It turned out that the love that presented itself was exactly the love that best suited the state of her soul. It was a sort of adoration at a distance, mute contemplation, the deification of a stranger. It was adolescence appearing to adolescence, a nightly dream turning into a novel yet remaining a dream, the desired phantom at last realized and made flesh but not yet having a name, or any wrong, or any stain, or any demand, or any defect; in a word, the distant lover remaining ideal, a chimera given shape. Any closer, more physical encounter would have scared Cosette off at this initial stage, half-immersed as she still was in the magnifying mists of the convent. She had all the fears of a convent girl and all the fears of a nun combined. The spirit of the convent, with which she had been imbued for five years, was still only slowly evaporating from her whole person and made everything around her quiver. In this situation, it was not a lover she needed, it was not even an admirer, it was a vision. She began to worship Marius as something enchanting, luminous, and impossible.

As extreme naïveté verges on extreme coquetry, she would smile at him quite openly.

Every day she waited for the walk impatiently, she found Marius there, felt indescribably happy, and sincerely believed that she was expressing her whole thought by saying to Jean Valjean: “What a delicious garden the Luxembourg is!” Marius and Cosette were in the dark in relation to each other. They did not speak to each other, did not greet each other, did not know each other; they saw each other; and like the stars in the sky that are separated by millions of miles, they lived on looking at each other.

This is how Cosette turned little by little into a woman and grew, beautiful and in love, aware of her beauty and ignorant of her love. Coquettish into the bargain—out of innocence.

SADNESS, AND MORE SADNESS

EVERY SITUATION HAS its instincts. Good old eternal mother nature secretly warned Jean Valjean of Marius’s presence. Jean Valjean shuddered in the darkest recesses of his soul. Jean Valjean saw nothing, knew nothing, and yet he studied the darkness where he was with dogged acuity as though he could feel something building on one side and, on the other, falling apart. Marius was also warned, by that same good old mother nature, which is the profound law of God, and he did all he could to hide from “the father.” But it happened that Jean Valjean sometimes caught sight of him. The way Marius behaved was no longer at all natural. He was full of sly caution and clumsy recklessness. He no longer walked close by them as he used to do before; he would sit far away and remain in ecstasy; he would have a book with him and pretend to read it; but who was he pretending for? Before, he came in his old redingote; now, he wore his new redingote every day; you couldn’t say for sure that he didn’t curl his hair, his eyes were all peculiar, he wore gloves. In short, Jean Valjean heartily detested the young man.

Cosette gave nothing away. Without really knowing what was wrong with her, she had the distinct feeling that there was something and that it had to be kept hidden.

Between Cosette’s newly acquired taste for clothes and the habit of wearing new coats that had suddenly taken hold of this unknown young man, there was a worrying parallel for Jean Valjean. It was merely a coincidence, perhaps, no doubt, of course, but a threatening coincidence. He never opened his mouth to Cosette about this stranger. But one day, he could hold back no longer, and with that vague despair that suddenly sounds the depths of a person’s pain, he said to her: “Now, there’s a young man who looks like a real pedant, for you!” A year before, as an oblivious little girl, Cosette would have replied: “No, he doesn’t! He looks charming.” Ten years later, with the love of Marius firmly in her heart, she would have replied: “A pedant and hard on the eyes! How right you are!” At this moment in her life and with her heart in such a state, she limited herself to replying with supreme calm: “That young man there?” As though she were looking at him for the first time in her life.

“What a fool I am!” thought Jean Valjean. “She hadn’t even noticed him yet. Now I’ve gone and pointed him out.”

O, simplicity of the old! knowingness of the young!

It is also a law of these fresh years of torment and worry, of these bracing struggles of first love against first obstacles, that the young woman not let herself be caught in any trap and that the young man fall into every one of them. Jean Valjean had opened a silent war against Marius that Marius, with the sublime stupidity of his passion and his age, had no inkling of. Jean Valjean set out a whole series of snares for him; he changed times, he changed seats, he forgot his handkerchief, he came to the Luxembourg on his own; Marius fell headlong into every trap; and at every question mark planted along his path by Jean Valjean, he guilelessly answered: Yes. Meanwhile Cosette remained immured in her apparent insouciance and her imperturbable tranquillity—so much so that Jean Valjean came to this conclusion: This noodle is madly in love with Cosette, but Cosette doesn’t even know he exists.

That did not make the heartache he felt any less painful, though. Cosette could fall in love from one moment to the next. Doesn’t everything start off with indifference?

Only once did Cosette slip up and frighten him. He was getting up from the seat to leave, after sitting there for three hours, when she said: “So soon!”

Jean Valjean had not cut out the strolls to the Luxembourg, not wanting to do anything out of the ordinary and above all fearing to alert Cosette to what was going on; but during those hours that were so sweet for the two little lovebirds, while Cosette sent her smile to the intoxicated Marius, who saw nothing but that and now no longer saw anything else in this world but that one radiant and adored face, Jean Valjean fixed glittering and terrible eyes on Marius. For a man who had come to think he was now incapable of a malevolent feeling, there were moments, when Marius was there, when he thought he was reverting to his old ferocity, and he felt the old murky depths of his soul, where there had once been so much anger, opening again and rising up against this young man. It almost felt to him as though fresh new craters were forming in him.

What! He was here, that popinjay! What was he doing here? He was here to pirouette, to sniff out, to ogle, to try! He was here to say: Hmmm, why not? He was here to poke around his life, his, Jean Valjean’s, own life! Poke around his happiness, just to take it and make off with it!

Jean Valjean went further: “Yes, that’s it! What’s he come looking for? An adventure! What does he want? A fling! A casual fling! What about me? Heaven forbid! Am I to have first been the most miserable of men and then the most unhappy, am I to have done sixty years of life on my knees, am I to have suffered all a person can suffer, am I to have grown old without ever having been young, am I to have lived without a family, without parents, without friends, without a wife, without children, am I to have left my blood on every stone, on every blackberry bush, on every landmark, along every wall, am I to have been soft even though they were so hard on me, and good even though they were so bad to me, am I to have become an honest man again in spite of everything, am I to have repented of the wrong I’ve done and to have forgiven the wrong done to me, just so that, the moment I’m finally rewarded, the moment it’s all over, the moment I’ve reached the end, the moment I’ve got what I want—which is good, which is only right, I’ve paid for it, I’ve earned it—it all goes, it all evaporates into thin air, and I lose Cosette, and I lose my life, my joy, my soul, because some donkey feels like coming and strutting around the Luxembourg!” Then his eyes filled with a strange and doleful flame. He was no longer a man watching another man; he was not an enemy watching an enemy. He was a mastiff watching a thief.

We know the rest. Marius continued to be careless. One day he followed Cosette to the rue de l’Ouest. Another day he spoke to the porter. The porter also spoke in turn and he spoke to Jean Valjean: “Monsieur, who is that nosy young man who’s been asking after you, then?” The next day Jean Valjean threw Marius the glance Marius finally caught. One week later, Jean Valjean had moved house. He swore to himself that he would never set foot in the Luxembourg again, or in the rue de l’Ouest, and he went back to the rue Plumet.

Cosette did not complain, she did not say a thing, she did not ask any questions, she did not seek any reason why; she had already reached the stage where you fear being found out or giving yourself away. Jean Valjean had no experience of these miseries, the only miseries that are sweet and the only ones that he did not know; this meant he did not understand the grave significance of Cosette’s silence. He only noticed that she had become sad and he became forlorn. On both sides it came down to lack of experience grappling with lack of experience.

One time he set a test. He asked Cosette: “Would you like to go to the Luxembourg?”

A ray of sunshine lit Cosette’s pale face.

“Yes,” she said.

Off they went. Three months had gone by. Marius no longer went there, Marius was not there. The next day Jean Valjean asked Cosette again: “Would you like to go to the Luxembourg?”

She answered softly and sadly: “No.”

Jean Valjean was crushed by this sadness and shattered by this softness.

What was going on in that mind, so young and already so impenetrable? What was coming to fruition there? What was happening to Cosette’s soul? At times, instead of going to bed, Jean Valjean would go on sitting by his cot with his head in his hands. He spent whole nights wondering what was going on in Cosette’s mind and thinking about the things she might be thinking.

Oh, at those times, what painful eyes he turned toward the cloister, that chaste summit, that dwelling place of angels, that inaccessible glacier of virtue! With what despairing ravishment he contemplated that convent garden, full of flowers blooming unseen and incarcerated virgins, where all the perfumes and all the souls wafted straight up to heaven! How he worshipped that Eden shut away forever, which he had left of his own free will and from which he had so foolishly descended! How he regretted his self-sacrifice and his insanity in bringing Cosette back into the world, poor hero of renunciation, seized and felled by his very devotion! How he whipped himself with that: What have I done?

But he didn’t let Cosette see any of this. No bad humour, no rudeness. Always the same serene face full of goodness. Jean Valjean’s manner was more tender and more fatherly than ever. If anything could have given away the fact that there was less joy, it was greater indulgence.

For her part, Cosette sank into black despond. She suffered from Marius’s absence just as she rejoiced in his presence, strangely, without really knowing she did so. When Jean Valjean stopped taking her on the usual walk, a womanly instinct had vaguely murmured from the depths of her heart that she should not appear to set much store by the Luxembourg and that if she really didn’t care about it, her father would take her back there. But days, weeks, months went by. Jean Valjean had tacitly accepted Cosette’s tacit acceptance. She regretted it. It was too late. The day she went back to the Luxembourg, Marius was no longer there. Marius had vanished; it was over, what could she do? Would she ever find him again? She felt a pain in her heart that nothing could ease and that got worse every day; she no longer knew if it was winter or summer, sun or rain, if the birds were singing, if it was the season for dahlias or daisies, if the Luxembourg was lovelier than the Tuileries, if the linen the washerwoman brought back was too starched or not enough, if Toussaint had done her shopping well or badly, and she remained devastated, absorbed, intent on a single thought, her eye vague and staring, just as you look in the dark night at the deep black spot an apparition has vanished into.

But she didn’t let Jean Valjean see any of this, either, except for her pallor. She always put on her sweet face for him. The pallor was more than enough to worry Jean Valjean, though. Sometimes he asked her: “What’s the matter?” She would answer: “Nothing’s the matter.”

And after a pause, as she sensed that he was sad, too, she would ask: “What about you, father, is something the matter?”

“Me? No, nothing,” he would say.

These two beings who had loved each other so exclusively, and with such a touching love, and who had lived for each other for so long, now suffered alongside each other, because of each other, without saying so to each other, without resenting each other for it, and smiling all the while.

THE CHAIN GANG

JEAN VALJEAN WAS THE unhappier of the two. Youth, even in its heartaches, always has a luminosity of its own.

At certain moments, Jean Valjean suffered so much he became infantile. It is the province of pain to bring out the childish side of a man. He felt irresistibly that Cosette was escaping him. He would have liked to fight, to hang on to her, to get her excited about something external and dazzling. These ideas, which were infantile, as we said, and at the same time sterile, gave him, in their very childishness, a fairly just notion of the influence of showy trappings on a young girl’s imagination. He once happened to see passing in the street a general on horseback in full dress, the comte Coutard, commandant of Paris. He envied this golden boy; he said to himself: What happiness it would be to be able to put on that uniform, which was something incontestable, that if Cosette saw him decked out like that, it would bowl her over, that if he were to give Cosette his arm and stroll by the Tuileries gate in that getup, they would present arms to him and that would be all Cosette needed and would put paid to this business of looking at young men.

An unexpected shock cut off these sad thoughts.

In the isolated life they led, and ever since they had come to live in the rue Plumet, they had developed a habit. They sometimes went to watch the sun come up just for the pleasure of it—a sort of gentle joy that suits those entering life and those leaving it.

To stroll around at the break of day, for whoever likes solitude, is the equivalent of strolling around at night, with the gaiety of nature as a bonus. The streets are deserted and the birds sing. Cosette, herself a bird, was happy to wake up so early. These morning trips were arranged the night before. He suggested, she accepted. It was all organized like a conspiracy; they stepped out before first light, and this made it all the merrier for Cosette. Such innocent foibles give the young a thrill.

Jean Valjean’s tendency was, as we know, to head for little-frequented spots, solitary nooks and crannies, forgotten places. In those days, around the barrières of Paris, there were scrubby, stubbly fields that were almost part of the city, where reedy wheat grew thinly in summer and which, in autumn, after harvest, looked not so much harvested as stripped. Jean Valjean haunted them as a predilection. Cosette did not get bored there, either. It meant solitude for him, freedom for her. There, she was a little girl again, she ran around almost frolicking, she took her hat off, sat it on Jean Valjean’s knees, and gathered bouquets of flowers. She looked at the butterflies on the flowers, but did not catch them; compassion and tenderness come with love and the young girl, who has inside her a quivering fragile ideal, takes pity on the butterfly’s wing. She made a chain of poppies which she put on her head and which, shot through and lit up by the sun, turned a flaming dark red and made a crown of glowing embers around that fresh pink face.

Even after their life had taken such a sad turn, they had stuck to their habit of early morning walks.

And so, one October morning, tempted by the perfect serenity of the autumn of 1831, they had gone out and found themselves as day was dawning close to the barrière du Maine. It was not daybreak, it was dawn; a ravishing, wild moment. A few constellations here and there in the pale, deep sky, the earth all black, the sky all white, a shiver rippling through the blades of grass, everywhere the mysterious rush and sudden chill of dawn light. A lark that seemed to be caught up in the stars was singing at an incredible height, and you would have said that this hymn of smallness to the infinite calmed the vastness. In the east, the dark bulk of the Val-de-Grâce stood out, as sharp as steel, on the clear horizon; dazzling Venus was climbing up from behind the dome like a soul escaping from a gloomy building.

All was peace and silence; no one was on the causeway; on the verges, a few scattered workingmen, barely glimpsed, were going off to work.

Jean Valjean had sat down in a side track on some wood piled at the gate of a timber yard. He had his face turned to the road and his back turned to the light; he had forgotten about the sun coming up; he had fallen into one of those profoundly absorbing meditations where the whole mind is concentrated, where even your eyes are trapped—the equivalent of four square walls. There are meditative states that we might call vertical; when you are at the bottom, it takes time to come back up to the surface. Jean Valjean had plunged down into one of those sorts of reveries. He was thinking about Cosette, about the happiness possible if nothing came between her and him, about the light she filled his life with, a light that was the air his soul breathed. He was almost happy in this trance. Cosette, standing next to him, was watching the clouds turn pink.

All of a sudden, Cosette cried: “Father, it looks like someone’s coming over there.” Jean Valjean looked up.

Cosette was right.

The causeway that leads to the old barrière du Maine is an extension, as we know, of the rue de Sèvres, and it is intersected at a right angle by the inner boulevard. At the bend where the roadway turns away from the boulevard, at the point where they diverge, you could hear a sound hard to explain at such an early hour, and a sort of confused jumble appeared. Something amorphous came from the boulevard and turned into the causeway.

It was getting bigger, it seemed to move along in an orderly fashion, and yet it was all spiky and shuddering; it seemed to be a conveyance but you could not make out its load. There were horses, wheels, shouts, cracking whips. By degrees the outlines became more defined, although drowned in shadow. It was, indeed, a conveyance that had just turned off the boulevard and into the road, heading for the barrière where Jean Valjean was sitting; a second one, the same as far as one could see, followed, then a third, then a fourth; seven carts turned at the intersection, one after the other in tight procession, the heads of the horses behind touching the backs of the cars in front. Dark figures were flailing about in the carts; you could see glinting steel in the half-light as though there were drawn swords, you could hear a clanking sound like chains rattling; the whole thing was coming closer, the voices were getting louder, and it was frightening, like the sort of thing that rolls out of the caverns of our dreams.

As it came nearer it took shape, looming from behind the trees with the bleached-out look of an apparition; the bulk turned white; the dawning light pasted a pallid gleam over this swarming mass at once sepulchral and alive, the heads of the silhouettes turned into the faces of cadavers. This is what it was: Seven vehicles were moving in single file along the road. The first six were weirdly built. They looked like coopers’ drays, with long ladders laid over two wheels and forming shafts at the front ends. Each dray or, better still, each ladder was harnessed to four horses in tandem. Strange clusters of men were being drawn along on these ladders. In such light as there was, you couldn’t see the men, you only guessed they were there. Twenty-four to a car, in two rows of twelve on either side sitting back to back, facing the pedestrians, with their legs dangling over the side, these men rolled along like this, and at their backs they had something that rattled and was a chain, and at their necks they had something that glinted and was a yoke, an iron collar, a shackle. Each man had his own shackle, but the chain was shared by everyone; so that if the twenty-four men got down from the dray to walk, they were seized by a sort of inexorable unity and had to snake along the ground with the chain as a backbone, a bit like a centipede. At the front and back of each car, two men, armed with guns, stood, each with one end of the chain underfoot. The collar shackles were square. The seventh car, a huge wagon that had side panels but no cover, had four wheels and six horses, and was carrying a rattling pile of iron boilers, cast-iron melting pots, stoves, and chains and, mixed up in all that, a few men, trussed and laid out flat, who looked to be sick. This wagon, entirely made of latticework, was equipped with dilapidated racks that looked like they might once have been used in torture.

The cars kept to the middle of the pavement. On either side a double row of guards marched, looking pretty scruffy under tricorn hats like those worn by the soldiers of the Directoire, stained, riddled with holes, dirty, decked out in the uniforms of the war disabled and the breeches of undertakers’ assistants, half grey, half blue, practically in tatters, with red epaulets, yellow cross-belts, sheath knives, muskets, and clubs; a ragtag lot of soldier-thugs. These henchmen seemed to combine the abjectness of beggars and the authority of hangmen. The one who looked to be the chief held a horsewhip in his hand. All these details, blurred by the half-light, stood out more clearly as day came on. At the head and rear of the convoy, gendarmes on horseback trotted along gravely, sabres at the ready.

This cortège was so long that the first car had already reached the barrière as the last one was just turning off the boulevard.

A crowd had surfaced from who knows where and gathered in the blink of an eye, as often happens in Paris, pressing in from both sides of the road to gape. You could hear people yelling at each other in the neighbouring lanes and the wooden clogs of the market gardeners as they ran to get a look.

The men piled up on the drays let themselves be jolted along in silence. They were wan with the morning chill. They all had coarse cotton breeches and wooden shoes on their bare feet. The rest of their raiment was whatever dire poverty could devise. Their accessories were hideously ill-matched; nothing is more mournful than the harlequin in rags. Staved-in felt hats, tarred caps, awful woolen beanies, and, alongside a workman’s smock, a black coat gone at the elbows; several of them had women’s hats; others had clapped baskets on their heads; hairy chests were on show and through the tears in their clothing flashed tattoos—temples of love, burning hearts, little cupids. You could also see patches of red or scurfy skin that looked very unsavory. Two or three of them had a straw rope tied to the struts of the wagon, which hung down under them like a stirrup and supported their feet. One of them was holding something in his hand that he brought to his mouth and that looked like a black stone he appeared to bite into; this was bread and he was eating it. There were nothing but dry eyes among them, listless or shining with an ugly glint. The escort troops were grumbling; the men in chains did not breathe a whisper; from time to time you could hear the noise of a club coming down with a whack across shoulder blades or on a head; some of the men yawned; their rags were terrible; their feet dangled, their shoulders rocked; their heads banged together, their irons clanked, their eyes blazed fiercely, their fists clenched or opened, as inert as the hands of the dead; behind the convoy, a troop of children burst out laughing.

This file of cars, whatever it was, was doleful. It was obvious that the next day, in an hour’s time, it might pour with rain, with one shower followed by another shower, and another, and that these ruins of clothes would be soaked through, and once they were wet the men would not dry off again, that once they were frozen, they would not thaw out again, that their canvas trousers would stick to their bones with the rain, that the water would fill their shoes, that the lashes of the whip would not stop their teeth chattering, that the chain would go on holding them by the neck, that their feet would go on dangling over the side; and it was impossible not to shudder on seeing these human beings tied up like this and passive under the cold autumn clouds, and delivered up to the rain, to the icy wind, to all the furies of the air, like trees, like stones.

The whacks of the clubs did not even spare the sick, who groaned, trussed with ropes and motionless, on the seventh car, and who looked as though they’d been thrown there like sacks full of misery.

Suddenly, the sun came out; an immense shaft of sunlight shot out from the east and seemed to set fire to all these fierce heads. Tongues were loosened; a firestorm of jeering and swearing and singing erupted. The broad horizontal light cut the whole field in two, illuminating heads and torsos, leaving feet and wheels in darkness. Thoughts appeared on faces; that was an appalling moment, revealing demons with their masks off, visible, savage souls laid completely bare. Lit up, this mob remained dark. Some of them, the cheery ones, had quill pipes through which they blew vermin at the crowd, singling out the women; dawn exaggerated the lamentable profiles through the blackness of the shadows; there was not one being among them who was not disfigured by misery and this was so monstrous that you would have said it changed the brightness of the sun into a lightning flash. The wagonload that headed the convoy struck up a tune, which they began belting out at the top of their lungs, with frantic joviality; it was “La Vestale,” one of Désaugiers’s1 medleys, famous at the time; the trees shivered forlornly; in the side alleys, the faces of the bourgeois throng were covered in moronic bliss as they listened, riveted, to these bawdy ditties sung by spectres.

Every kind of distress was in that convoy in a tangled heap; every cut of head of all the beasts was there, old men, adolescents, bare skulls, grey beards, cynical monstrosities, aggressive resignation, savage grimacing, insane posturing, muzzles with caps on, heads a bit like young girls’ with corkscrew curls over the temples, faces that were childish and, because of that, horrible, the fleshless faces of skeletons where only death was missing. On the first car, you could see a black man who had once, perhaps, been a slave and could compare chains. That terrifying lowest common denominator, shame, had passed over these foreheads; at this level of debasement, the final transformations were undergone by all in the final depths, absolute rock bottom; and ignorance turned to stupor was indistinguishable from intelligence turned to despair. No choice was possible between these men who appeared to onlookers to be the elite of the gutter, the scum of the earth. It was clear that whoever was in charge of this sordid procession had not bothered to sort them. These creatures had been bound and paired off willy-nilly, probably in alphabetic disorder, and loaded haphazardly onto the carts. But when horrors are lumped together, they always yield a result; every addition to the count of the miserable yields a total; from each chain a common soul emerged and each cartload had its distinctive countenance. Besides the one that was singing, there was one that was shouting; a third was begging; you could see one that was gnashing its teeth; another threatened bystanders, another railed against God in sheer blasphemy; the last kept as silent as the grave. Dante would have thought he was seeing the seven circles of hell on the march.

The march of the damned toward their damnation, undertaken sinisterly, not on the awesome flashing chariot of the Apocalypse but, more sombre still, on the cart of the Gemoniae2—the hangman’s cart.

One of the guards, who had a hook on the end of his club, made a show of stirring this pile of human refuse now and then. An old woman in the crowd pointed them out to a little boy of five and said to him: “That’ll teach you to behave, you little rascal!” As the singing and blaspheming got louder, the man who seemed to be the captain of the escort cracked his whip, and at that signal, a frightening muffled and blind bludgeoning fell on the seven carts with a noise like hail; many roared and foamed at the mouth; which only redoubled the joy of the urchins who had come running, a cloud of flies on these open wounds.

Jean Valjean’s eyes had become frightening. They were no longer eyes; they were the deep window on the soul that replaces gazing eyes in certain long-suffering people; such a look seems oblivious to reality, reflecting past horrors and calamities in a blaze of fierce light. He was not looking at a spectacle; he was enduring a vision. He tried to stand, to run, to escape; he could not move a muscle. Sometimes the things you see grab you and hold you in place. He stayed nailed to the spot, petrified, dumbstruck, wondering, through a confused and inexpressible anguish, what this sepulchral persecution meant and where the pandemonium that was hounding him came from. All of a sudden, he clapped his hand on his forehead, which you usually do when your memory suddenly comes back to you; he remembered that this was in fact the route, that this was the customary detour to avoid royal encounters which were always possible on the Fontainebleau road, and that thirty-five years previously, he had passed by this very same barrière.

Cosette was just as horrified but in a slightly different way. She did not understand; she could not breathe; what she was seeing did not seem possible to her; she finally cried out: “Father! What is in those cars?” Jean Valjean answered: “Convicts.”

“Where are they going?”

“To the galleys.”

At that moment, the bludgeoning, multiplied by a hundred hands, was reaching a crescendo and extended to include whacking with the flats of swords; the galley slaves crouched down, bent double, under this storm of whips and clubs; a ghastly obeisance was produced by the torture and all fell silent, with the look of chained wolves. Cosette was shaking from head to toe; she went on: “Father, are these men?” “At times,” said the wretched man.

It was in fact the chain gang, which had set out before daybreak from Bicêtre, and was taking the Mans road to avoid Fontainebleau, where the king was. This detour made the whole horrifying trip last three or four days longer; but, to spare the royal person the sight of such torture, it was certainly worth prolonging.

Jean Valjean went home shattered. Such encounters are a shock to the system and the memory they leave is like a convulsion.

Yet on the way back to the rue de Babylone with Cosette, Jean Valjean did not notice that she asked him other questions about what they had just seen; maybe he was too absorbed in his own utter dejection to register what she said and to respond. Only that evening, as Cosette was saying good night before going to bed, did he hear her say in a faint little voice as though to herself: “I think that if ever I ran into one of those men in a dark alley, my God! I’d die just seeing him up close!” Luckily chance would have it that the day after this tragic day, there was some kind of official celebration—I don’t remember what was being celebrated exactly—and formal festivities took place all over Paris: a military review in the Champ de Mars, jousting on the Seine, theatricals along the Champs-Élysées, fireworks at L’Étoile, light shows everywhere. Jean Valjean, doing violence to his habits, took Cosette to see the festivities to distract her from the memory of the day before and to erase the abominable thing that had passed before her in the laughing tumult of le Tout-Paris. The review that enlivened the celebrations made the parade of uniforms completely natural; Jean Valjean donned his National Guard uniform with the vague inner feeling of a man taking refuge. But the goal of the outing seemed achieved. Cosette, who made it a rule to please her father and for whom, in any case, all spectacle was fresh and new, accepted the distraction blithely with the good grace of adolescence and did not pout too disdainfully at this joyful romp known as a fête; so much so that Jean Valjean could tell himelf he’d carried it off, and that no trace of the hideous sight remained.

One morning, several days later, they were both sitting on the garden steps in bright sunshine—another infringement of the rules Jean Valjean seemed to impose, and of the habit of keeping to her room that sadness had caused Cosette to adopt. Cosette was standing in her dressing gown, carefree in her early morning negligée, with a casualness that wraps young girls round as adorably as a cloud covering a star; her face all rosy from having slept so well, she stood in the light under the loving gaze of the tender old man, pulling the petals off a daisy. Cosette knew nothing of that delightful little riddle He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, etc.; who would have taught her? She was handling the flower instinctively, innocently, without suspecting that pulling the petals off a daisy is to pluck a heart. If there had been a fourth Grace named Melancholy, who smiled, she would have looked like that Grace. Jean Valjean was spellbound by those little fingers working that little flower, forgetting everything else in the child’s radiance. A red robin was twittering in the bushes beside them. White clouds were scudding across the sky as gaily as if they had just been released from captivity. Cosette continued to pluck her daisies attentively; she seemed to be thinking about something, but it must have been something lovely; all of a sudden she turned her head back over her shoulder as delicately and slowly as a swan and shot Jean Valjean a question: “Father, what are they, actually, these galleys?”