Les Misérables
by the new grave-digger, and it was necessary to make this offer, but
the old gardener left the proverbial quarter of an hour named after
Rabelais in the dark, and that not unintentionally. As for himself,
Fauchelevent did not wish to pay, troubled as he was.
The grave-digger went on with a superior smile:—
“One must eat. I have accepted Father Mestienne’s reversion. One gets
to be a philosopher when one has nearly completed his classes. To the
labor of the hand I join the labor of the arm. I have my scrivener’s
stall in the market of the Rue de Sèvres. You know? the Umbrella
Market. All the cooks of the Red Cross apply to me. I scribble their
declarations of love to the raw soldiers. In the morning I write love
letters; in the evening I dig graves. Such is life, rustic.”
The hearse was still advancing. Fauchelevent, uneasy to the last
degree, was gazing about him on all sides. Great drops of perspiration
trickled down from his brow.
“But,” continued the grave-digger, “a man cannot serve two mistresses.
I must choose between the pen and the mattock. The mattock is ruining
my hand.”
The hearse halted.
The choir boy alighted from the mourning-coach, then the priest.
One of the small front wheels of the hearse had run up a little on a
pile of earth, beyond which an open grave was visible.
“What a farce this is!” repeated Fauchelevent in consternation.
CHAPTER VI—BETWEEN FOUR PLANKS
Who was in the coffin? The reader knows. Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean had arranged things so that he could exist there, and he
could almost breathe.
It is a strange thing to what a degree security of conscience confers
security of the rest. Every combination thought out by Jean Valjean had
been progressing, and progressing favorably, since the preceding day.
He, like Fauchelevent, counted on Father Mestienne. He had no doubt as
to the end. Never was there a more critical situation, never more
complete composure.
The four planks of the coffin breathe out a kind of terrible peace. It
seemed as though something of the repose of the dead entered into Jean
Valjean’s tranquillity.
From the depths of that coffin he had been able to follow, and he had
followed, all the phases of the terrible drama which he was playing
with death.
Shortly after Fauchelevent had finished nailing on the upper plank,
Jean Valjean had felt himself carried out, then driven off. He knew,
from the diminution in the jolting, when they left the pavements and
reached the earth road. He had divined, from a dull noise, that they
were crossing the bridge of Austerlitz. At the first halt, he had
understood that they were entering the cemetery; at the second halt, he
said to himself:—
“Here is the grave.”
Suddenly, he felt hands seize the coffin, then a harsh grating against
the planks; he explained it to himself as the rope which was being
fastened round the casket in order to lower it into the cavity.
Then he experienced a giddiness.
The undertaker’s man and the grave-digger had probably allowed the
coffin to lose its balance, and had lowered the head before the foot.
He recovered himself fully when he felt himself horizontal and
motionless. He had just touched the bottom.
He had a certain sensation of cold.
A voice rose above him, glacial and solemn. He heard Latin words, which
he did not understand, pass over him, so slowly that he was able to
catch them one by one:—
_“Qui dormiunt in terræ pulvere, evigilabunt; alii in vitam æternam, et
alii in approbrium, ut videant semper.” _
A child’s voice said:—
_“De profundis.” _
The grave voice began again:—
_“Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine.” _
The child’s voice responded:—
_“Et lux perpetua luceat ei.” _
He heard something like the gentle patter of several drops of rain on
the plank which covered him. It was probably the holy water.
He thought: “This will be over soon now. Patience for a little while
longer. The priest will take his departure. Fauchelevent will take
Mestienne off to drink. I shall be left. Then Fauchelevent will return
alone, and I shall get out. That will be the work of a good hour.”
The grave voice resumed
_“Requiescat in pace.” _
And the child’s voice said:—
_“Amen.” _
Jean Valjean strained his ears, and heard something like retreating
footsteps.
“There, they are going now,” thought he. “I am alone.”
All at once, he heard over his head a sound which seemed to him to be a
clap of thunder.
It was a shovelful of earth falling on the coffin.
A second shovelful fell.
One of the holes through which he breathed had just been stopped up.
A third shovelful of earth fell.
Then a fourth.
There are things which are too strong for the strongest man. Jean
Valjean lost consciousness.
CHAPTER VII—IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE ORIGIN OF THE SAYING: DON’T LOSE
THE CARD
This is what had taken place above the coffin in which lay Jean
Valjean.
When the hearse had driven off, when the priest and the choir boy had
entered the carriage again and taken their departure, Fauchelevent, who
had not taken his eyes from the grave-digger, saw the latter bend over
and grasp his shovel, which was sticking upright in the heap of dirt.
Then Fauchelevent took a supreme resolve.
He placed himself between the grave and the grave-digger, crossed his
arms and said:—
“I am the one to pay!”
The grave-digger stared at him in amazement, and replied:—
“What’s that, peasant?”
Fauchelevent repeated:—
“I am the one who pays!”
“What?”
“For the wine.”
“What wine?”
“That Argenteuil wine.”
“Where is the Argenteuil?”
“At the _Bon Coing_.”
“Go to the devil!” said the grave-digger.
And he flung a shovelful of earth on the coffin.
The coffin gave back a hollow sound. Fauchelevent felt himself stagger
and on the point of falling headlong into the grave himself. He shouted
in a voice in which the strangling sound of the death rattle began to
mingle:—
“Comrade! Before the _Bon Coing_ is shut!”
The grave-digger took some more earth on his shovel. Fauchelevent
continued.
“I will pay.”
And he seized the man’s arm.
“Listen to me, comrade. I am the convent grave-digger, I have come to
help you. It is a business which can be performed at night. Let us
begin, then, by going for a drink.”
And as he spoke, and clung to this desperate insistence, this
melancholy reflection occurred to him: “And if he drinks, will he get
drunk?”
“Provincial,” said the man, “if you positively insist upon it, I
consent. We will drink. After work, never before.”
And he flourished his shovel briskly. Fauchelevent held him back.
“It is Argenteuil wine, at six.”
“Oh, come,” said the grave-digger, “you are a bell-ringer. Ding dong,
ding dong, that’s all you know how to say. Go hang yourself.”
And he threw in a second shovelful.
Fauchelevent had reached a point where he no longer knew what he was
saying.
“Come along and drink,” he cried, “since it is I who pays the bill.”
“When we have put the child to bed,” said the grave-digger.
He flung in a third shovelful.
Then he thrust his shovel into the earth and added:—
“It’s cold to-night, you see, and the corpse would shriek out after us
if we were to plant her there without a coverlet.”
At that moment, as he loaded his shovel, the grave-digger bent over,
and the pocket of his waistcoat gaped. Fauchelevent’s wild gaze fell
mechanically into that pocket, and there it stopped.
The sun was not yet hidden behind the horizon; there was still light
enough to enable him to distinguish something white at the bottom of
that yawning pocket.
The sum total of lightning that the eye of a Picard peasant can
contain, traversed Fauchelevent’s pupils. An idea had just occurred to
him.
He thrust his hand into the pocket from behind, without the
grave-digger, who was wholly absorbed in his shovelful of earth,
observing it, and pulled out the white object which lay at the bottom
of it.
The man sent a fourth shovelful tumbling into the grave.
Just as he turned round to get the fifth, Fauchelevent looked calmly at
him and said:—
“By the way, you new man, have you your card?”
The grave-digger paused.
“What card?”
“The sun is on the point of setting.”
“That’s good, it is going to put on its nightcap.”
“The gate of the cemetery will close immediately.”
“Well, what then?”
“Have you your card?”
“Ah! my card?” said the grave-digger.
And he fumbled in his pocket.
Having searched one pocket, he proceeded to search the other. He passed
on to his fobs, explored the first, returned to the second.
“Why, no,” said he, “I have not my card. I must have forgotten it.”
“Fifteen francs fine,” said Fauchelevent.
The grave-digger turned green. Green is the pallor of livid people.
“Ah! Jésus-mon-Dieu-bancroche-à-bas-la-lune!”17 he exclaimed. “Fifteen
francs fine!”
“Three pieces of a hundred sous,” said Fauchelevent.
The grave-digger dropped his shovel.
Fauchelevent’s turn had come.
“Ah, come now, conscript,” said Fauchelevent, “none of this despair.
There is no question of committing suicide and benefiting the grave.
Fifteen francs is fifteen francs, and besides, you may not be able to
pay it. I am an old hand, you are a new one. I know all the ropes and
the devices. I will give you some friendly advice. One thing is clear,
the sun is on the point of setting, it is touching the dome now, the
cemetery will be closed in five minutes more.”
“That is true,” replied the man.
“Five minutes more and you will not have time to fill the grave, it is
as hollow as the devil, this grave, and to reach the gate in season to
pass it before it is shut.”
“That is true.”
“In that case, a fine of fifteen francs.”
“Fifteen francs.”
“But you have time. Where do you live?”
“A couple of steps from the barrier, a quarter of an hour from here.
No. 87 Rue de Vaugirard.”
“You have just time to get out by taking to your heels at your best
speed.”
“That is exactly so.”
“Once outside the gate, you gallop home, you get your card, you return,
the cemetery porter admits you. As you have your card, there will be
nothing to pay. And you will bury your corpse. I’ll watch it for you in
the meantime, so that it shall not run away.”
“I am indebted to you for my life, peasant.”
“Decamp!” said Fauchelevent.
The grave-digger, overwhelmed with gratitude, shook his hand and set
off on a run.
When the man had disappeared in the thicket, Fauchelevent listened
until he heard his footsteps die away in the distance, then he leaned
over the grave, and said in a low tone:—
“Father Madeleine!”
There was no reply.
Fauchelevent was seized with a shudder. He tumbled rather than climbed
into the grave, flung himself on the head of the coffin and cried:—
“Are you there?”
Silence in the coffin.
Fauchelevent, hardly able to draw his breath for trembling, seized his
cold chisel and his hammer, and pried up the coffin lid.
Jean Valjean’s face appeared in the twilight; it was pale and his eyes
were closed.
Fauchelevent’s hair rose upright on his head, he sprang to his feet,
then fell back against the side of the grave, ready to swoon on the
coffin. He stared at Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean lay there pallid and motionless.
Fauchelevent murmured in a voice as faint as a sigh:—
“He is dead!”
And, drawing himself up, and folding his arms with such violence that
his clenched fists came in contact with his shoulders, he cried:—
“And this is the way I save his life!”
Then the poor man fell to sobbing. He soliloquized the while, for it is
an error to suppose that the soliloquy is unnatural. Powerful emotion
often talks aloud.