Les Misérables
Jean Valjean was, in fact, regularly installed; he had his belled
knee-cap; henceforth he was official. His name was Ultime Fauchelevent.
The most powerful determining cause of his admission had been the
prioress’s observation upon Cosette: “She will grow up ugly.”
The prioress, that pronounced prognosticator, immediately took a fancy
to Cosette and gave her a place in the school as a charity pupil.
There is nothing that is not strictly logical about this.
It is in vain that mirrors are banished from the convent, women are
conscious of their faces; now, girls who are conscious of their beauty
do not easily become nuns; the vocation being voluntary in inverse
proportion to their good looks, more is to be hoped from the ugly than
from the pretty. Hence a lively taste for plain girls.
The whole of this adventure increased the importance of good, old
Fauchelevent; he won a triple success; in the eyes of Jean Valjean,
whom he had saved and sheltered; in those of grave-digger Gribier, who
said to himself: “He spared me that fine”; with the convent, which,
being enabled, thanks to him, to retain the coffin of Mother
Crucifixion under the altar, eluded Cæsar and satisfied God. There was
a coffin containing a body in the Petit-Picpus, and a coffin without a
body in the Vaugirard cemetery, public order had no doubt been deeply
disturbed thereby, but no one was aware of it.
As for the convent, its gratitude to Fauchelevent was very great.
Fauchelevent became the best of servitors and the most precious of
gardeners. Upon the occasion of the archbishop’s next visit, the
prioress recounted the affair to his Grace, making something of a
confession at the same time, and yet boasting of her deed. On leaving
the convent, the archbishop mentioned it with approval, and in a
whisper to M. de Latil, Monsieur’s confessor, afterwards Archbishop of
Reims and Cardinal. This admiration for Fauchelevent became widespread,
for it made its way to Rome. We have seen a note addressed by the then
reigning Pope, Leo XII., to one of his relatives, a Monsignor in the
Nuncio’s establishment in Paris, and bearing, like himself, the name of
Della Genga; it contained these lines: “It appears that there is in a
convent in Paris an excellent gardener, who is also a holy man, named
Fauvent.” Nothing of this triumph reached Fauchelevent in his hut; he
went on grafting, weeding, and covering up his melon beds, without in
the least suspecting his excellences and his sanctity. Neither did he
suspect his glory, any more than a Durham or Surrey bull whose portrait
is published in the _London Illustrated News_, with this inscription:
“Bull which carried off the prize at the Cattle Show.”
CHAPTER IX—CLOISTERED
Cosette continued to hold her tongue in the convent.
It was quite natural that Cosette should think herself Jean Valjean’s
daughter. Moreover, as she knew nothing, she could say nothing, and
then, she would not have said anything in any case. As we have just
observed, nothing trains children to silence like unhappiness. Cosette
had suffered so much, that she feared everything, even to speak or to
breathe. A single word had so often brought down an avalanche upon her.
She had hardly begun to regain her confidence since she had been with
Jean Valjean. She speedily became accustomed to the convent. Only she
regretted Catherine, but she dared not say so. Once, however, she did
say to Jean Valjean: “Father, if I had known, I would have brought her
away with me.”
Cosette had been obliged, on becoming a scholar in the convent, to don
the garb of the pupils of the house. Jean Valjean succeeded in getting
them to restore to him the garments which she laid aside. This was the
same mourning suit which he had made her put on when she had quitted
the Thénardiers’ inn. It was not very threadbare even now. Jean Valjean
locked up these garments, plus the stockings and the shoes, with a
quantity of camphor and all the aromatics in which convents abound, in
a little valise which he found means of procuring. He set this valise
on a chair near his bed, and he always carried the key about his
person. “Father,” Cosette asked him one day, “what is there in that box
which smells so good?”
Father Fauchelevent received other recompense for his good action, in
addition to the glory which we just mentioned, and of which he knew
nothing; in the first place it made him happy; next, he had much less
work, since it was shared. Lastly, as he was very fond of snuff, he
found the presence of M. Madeleine an advantage, in that he used three
times as much as he had done previously, and that in an infinitely more
luxurious manner, seeing that M. Madeleine paid for it.
The nuns did not adopt the name of Ultime; they called Jean Valjean
_the other Fauvent_.
If these holy women had possessed anything of Javert’s glance, they
would eventually have noticed that when there was any errand to be done
outside in the behalf of the garden, it was always the elder
Fauchelevent, the old, the infirm, the lame man, who went, and never
the other; but whether it is that eyes constantly fixed on God know not
how to spy, or whether they were, by preference, occupied in keeping
watch on each other, they paid no heed to this.
Moreover, it was well for Jean Valjean that he kept close and did not
stir out. Javert watched the quarter for more than a month.
This convent was for Jean Valjean like an island surrounded by gulfs.
Henceforth, those four walls constituted his world. He saw enough of
the sky there to enable him to preserve his serenity, and Cosette
enough to remain happy.
A very sweet life began for him.
He inhabited the old hut at the end of the garden, in company with
Fauchelevent. This hovel, built of old rubbish, which was still in
existence in 1845, was composed, as the reader already knows, of three
chambers, all of which were utterly bare and had nothing beyond the
walls. The principal one had been given up, by force, for Jean Valjean
had opposed it in vain, to M. Madeleine, by Father Fauchelevent. The
walls of this chamber had for ornament, in addition to the two nails
whereon to hang the knee-cap and the basket, a Royalist bank-note of
’93, applied to the wall over the chimney-piece, and of which the
following is an exact facsimile:—
This specimen of Vendean paper money had been nailed to the wall by the
preceding gardener, an old Chouan, who had died in the convent, and
whose place Fauchelevent had taken.
Jean Valjean worked in the garden every day and made himself very
useful. He had formerly been a pruner of trees, and he gladly found
himself a gardener once more. It will be remembered that he knew all
sorts of secrets and receipts for agriculture. He turned these to
advantage. Almost all the trees in the orchard were ungrafted, and
wild. He budded them and made them produce excellent fruit.
Cosette had permission to pass an hour with him every day. As the
sisters were melancholy and he was kind, the child made comparisons and
adored him. At the appointed hour she flew to the hut. When she entered
the lowly cabin, she filled it with paradise. Jean Valjean blossomed
out and felt his happiness increase with the happiness which he
afforded Cosette. The joy which we inspire has this charming property,
that, far from growing meagre, like all reflections, it returns to us
more radiant than ever. At recreation hours, Jean Valjean watched her
running and playing in the distance, and he distinguished her laugh
from that of the rest.
For Cosette laughed now.
Cosette’s face had even undergone a change, to a certain extent. The
gloom had disappeared from it. A smile is the same as sunshine; it
banishes winter from the human countenance.
Recreation over, when Cosette went into the house again, Jean Valjean
gazed at the windows of her class-room, and at night he rose to look at
the windows of her dormitory.
God has his own ways, moreover; the convent contributed, like Cosette,
to uphold and complete the Bishop’s work in Jean Valjean. It is certain
that virtue adjoins pride on one side. A bridge built by the devil
exists there. Jean Valjean had been, unconsciously, perhaps, tolerably
near that side and that bridge, when Providence cast his lot in the
convent of the Petit-Picpus; so long as he had compared himself only to
the Bishop, he had regarded himself as unworthy and had remained
humble; but for some time past he had been comparing himself to men in
general, and pride was beginning to spring up. Who knows? He might have
ended by returning very gradually to hatred.
The convent stopped him on that downward path.
This was the second place of captivity which he had seen. In his youth,
in what had been for him the beginning of his life, and later on, quite
recently again, he had beheld another,—a frightful place, a terrible
place, whose severities had always appeared to him the iniquity of
justice, and the crime of the law. Now, after the galleys, he saw the
cloister; and when he meditated how he had formed a part of the
galleys, and that he now, so to speak, was a spectator of the cloister,
he confronted the two in his own mind with anxiety.
Sometimes he crossed his arms and leaned on his hoe, and slowly
descended the endless spirals of reverie.
He recalled his former companions: how wretched they were; they rose at
dawn, and toiled until night; hardly were they permitted to sleep; they
lay on camp beds, where nothing was tolerated but mattresses two inches
thick, in rooms which were heated only in the very harshest months of
the year; they were clothed in frightful red blouses; they were
allowed, as a great favor, linen trousers in the hottest weather, and a
woollen carter’s blouse on their backs when it was very cold; they
drank no wine, and ate no meat, except when they went on “fatigue
duty.” They lived nameless, designated only by numbers, and converted,
after a manner, into ciphers themselves, with downcast eyes, with
lowered voices, with shorn heads, beneath the cudgel and in disgrace.
Then his mind reverted to the beings whom he had under his eyes.
These beings also lived with shorn heads, with downcast eyes, with
lowered voices, not in disgrace, but amid the scoffs of the world, not
with their backs bruised with the cudgel, but with their shoulders
lacerated with their discipline. Their names, also, had vanished from
among men; they no longer existed except under austere appellations.
They never ate meat and they never drank wine; they often remained
until evening without food; they were attired, not in a red blouse, but
in a black shroud, of woollen, which was heavy in summer and thin in
winter, without the power to add or subtract anything from it; without
having even, according to the season, the resource of the linen garment
or the woollen cloak; and for six months in the year they wore serge
chemises which gave them fever. They dwelt, not in rooms warmed only
during rigorous cold, but in cells where no fire was ever lighted; they
slept, not on mattresses two inches thick, but on straw. And finally,
they were not even allowed their sleep; every night, after a day of
toil, they were obliged, in the weariness of their first slumber, at
the moment when they were falling sound asleep and beginning to get
warm, to rouse themselves, to rise and to go and pray in an ice-cold
and gloomy chapel, with their knees on the stones.
On certain days each of these beings in turn had to remain for twelve
successive hours in a kneeling posture, or prostrate, with face upon
the pavement, and arms outstretched in the form of a cross.
The others were men; these were women.
What had those men done? They had stolen, violated, pillaged, murdered,