Les Misérables
pearl, a silver-gilt dressing-case, a toilet service in Japanese
porcelain. Long damask curtains with a red foundation and three colors,
like those on the bed, hung at the windows of the first floor. On the
ground floor, the curtains were of tapestry. All winter long, Cosette’s
little house was heated from top to bottom. Jean Valjean inhabited the
sort of porter’s lodge which was situated at the end of the back
courtyard, with a mattress on a folding-bed, a white wood table, two
straw chairs, an earthenware water-jug, a few old volumes on a shelf,
his beloved valise in one corner, and never any fire. He dined with
Cosette, and he had a loaf of black bread on the table for his own use.
When Toussaint came, he had said to her: “It is the young lady who is
the mistress of this house.”—“And you, monsieur?” Toussaint replied in
amazement.—“I am a much better thing than the master, I am the father.”
Cosette had been taught housekeeping in the convent, and she regulated
their expenditure, which was very modest. Every day, Jean Valjean put
his arm through Cosette’s and took her for a walk. He led her to the
Luxembourg, to the least frequented walk, and every Sunday he took her
to mass at Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, because that was a long way off.
As it was a very poor quarter, he bestowed alms largely there, and the
poor people surrounded him in church, which had drawn down upon him
Thénardier’s epistle: “To the benevolent gentleman of the church of
Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.” He was fond of taking Cosette to visit the
poor and the sick. No stranger ever entered the house in the Rue
Plumet. Toussaint brought their provisions, and Jean Valjean went
himself for water to a fountain nearby on the boulevard. Their wood and
wine were put into a half-subterranean hollow lined with rock-work
which lay near the Rue de Babylone and which had formerly served the
chief-justice as a grotto; for at the epoch of follies and “Little
Houses” no love was without a grotto.
In the door opening on the Rue de Babylone, there was a box destined
for the reception of letters and papers; only, as the three inhabitants
of the pavilion in the Rue Plumet received neither papers nor letters,
the entire usefulness of that box, formerly the go-between of a love
affair, and the confidant of a love-lorn lawyer, was now limited to the
tax-collector’s notices, and the summons of the guard. For M.
Fauchelevent, independent gentleman, belonged to the national guard; he
had not been able to escape through the fine meshes of the census of
1831. The municipal information collected at that time had even reached
the convent of the Petit-Picpus, a sort of impenetrable and holy cloud,
whence Jean Valjean had emerged in venerable guise, and, consequently,
worthy of mounting guard in the eyes of the town-hall.
Three or four times a year, Jean Valjean donned his uniform and mounted
guard; he did this willingly, however; it was a correct disguise which
mixed him with every one, and yet left him solitary. Jean Valjean had
just attained his sixtieth birthday, the age of legal exemption; but he
did not appear to be over fifty; moreover, he had no desire to escape
his sergeant-major nor to quibble with Comte de Lobau; he possessed no
civil status, he was concealing his name, he was concealing his
identity, so he concealed his age, he concealed everything; and, as we
have just said, he willingly did his duty as a national guard; the sum
of his ambition lay in resembling any other man who paid his taxes.
This man had for his ideal, within, the angel, without, the bourgeois.
Let us note one detail, however; when Jean Valjean went out with
Cosette, he dressed as the reader has already seen, and had the air of
a retired officer. When he went out alone, which was generally at
night, he was always dressed in a workingman’s trousers and blouse, and
wore a cap which concealed his face. Was this precaution or humility?
Both. Cosette was accustomed to the enigmatical side of her destiny,
and hardly noticed her father’s peculiarities. As for Toussaint, she
venerated Jean Valjean, and thought everything he did right.
One day, her butcher, who had caught a glimpse of Jean Valjean, said to
her: “That’s a queer fish.” She replied: “He’s a saint.”
Neither Jean Valjean nor Cosette nor Toussaint ever entered or emerged
except by the door on the Rue de Babylone. Unless seen through the
garden gate it would have been difficult to guess that they lived in
the Rue Plumet. That gate was always closed. Jean Valjean had left the
garden uncultivated, in order not to attract attention.
In this, possibly, he made a mistake.
CHAPTER III—FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS
The garden thus left to itself for more than half a century had become
extraordinary and charming. The passers-by of forty years ago halted to
gaze at it, without a suspicion of the secrets which it hid in its
fresh and verdant depths. More than one dreamer of that epoch often
allowed his thoughts and his eyes to penetrate indiscreetly between the
bars of that ancient, padlocked gate, twisted, tottering, fastened to
two green and moss-covered pillars, and oddly crowned with a pediment
of undecipherable arabesque.
There was a stone bench in one corner, one or two mouldy statues,
several lattices which had lost their nails with time, were rotting on
the wall, and there were no walks nor turf; but there was enough grass
everywhere. Gardening had taken its departure, and nature had returned.
Weeds abounded, which was a great piece of luck for a poor corner of
land. The festival of gilliflowers was something splendid. Nothing in
this garden obstructed the sacred effort of things towards life;
venerable growth reigned there among them. The trees had bent over
towards the nettles, the plant had sprung upward, the branch had
inclined, that which crawls on the earth had gone in search of that
which expands in the air, that which floats on the wind had bent over
towards that which trails in the moss; trunks, boughs, leaves, fibres,
clusters, tendrils, shoots, spines, thorns, had mingled, crossed,
married, confounded themselves in each other; vegetation in a deep and
close embrace, had celebrated and accomplished there, under the
well-pleased eye of the Creator, in that enclosure three hundred feet
square, the holy mystery of fraternity, symbol of the human fraternity.
This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket, that is
to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as peopled as a city,
quivering like a nest, sombre like a cathedral, fragrant like a
bouquet, solitary as a tomb, living as a throng.
In Floréal34 this enormous thicket, free behind its gate and within its
four walls, entered upon the secret labor of germination, quivered in
the rising sun, almost like an animal which drinks in the breaths of
cosmic love, and which feels the sap of April rising and boiling in its
veins, and shakes to the wind its enormous wonderful green locks,
sprinkled on the damp earth, on the defaced statues, on the crumbling
steps of the pavilion, and even on the pavement of the deserted street,
flowers like stars, dew like pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy,
perfumes. At midday, a thousand white butterflies took refuge there,
and it was a divine spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling
about there in flakes amid the shade. There, in those gay shadows of
verdure, a throng of innocent voices spoke sweetly to the soul, and
what the twittering forgot to say the humming completed. In the
evening, a dreamy vapor exhaled from the garden and enveloped it; a
shroud of mist, a calm and celestial sadness covered it; the
intoxicating perfume of the honeysuckles and convolvulus poured out
from every part of it, like an exquisite and subtle poison; the last
appeals of the woodpeckers and the wagtails were audible as they dozed
among the branches; one felt the sacred intimacy of the birds and the
trees; by day the wings rejoice the leaves, by night the leaves protect
the wings.
In winter the thicket was black, dripping, bristling, shivering, and
allowed some glimpse of the house. Instead of flowers on the branches
and dew in the flowers, the long silvery tracks of the snails were
visible on the cold, thick carpet of yellow leaves; but in any fashion,
under any aspect, at all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn, this
tiny enclosure breathed forth melancholy, contemplation, solitude,
liberty, the absence of man, the presence of God; and the rusty old
gate had the air of saying: “This garden belongs to me.”
It was of no avail that the pavements of Paris were there on every
side, the classic and splendid hotels of the Rue de Varennes a couple
of paces away, the dome of the Invalides close at hand, the Chamber of
Deputies not far off; the carriages of the Rue de Bourgogne and of the
Rue Saint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously, in vain, in the vicinity, in
vain did the yellow, brown, white, and red omnibuses cross each other’s
course at the neighboring crossroads; the Rue Plumet was the desert;
and the death of the former proprietors, the revolution which had
passed over it, the crumbling away of ancient fortunes, absence,
forgetfulness, forty years of abandonment and widowhood, had sufficed
to restore to this privileged spot ferns, mulleins, hemlock, yarrow,
tall weeds, great crimped plants, with large leaves of pale green
cloth, lizards, beetles, uneasy and rapid insects; to cause to spring
forth from the depths of the earth and to reappear between those four
walls a certain indescribable and savage grandeur; and for nature,
which disconcerts the petty arrangements of man, and which sheds
herself always thoroughly where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant
as well as in the eagle, to blossom out in a petty little Parisian
garden with as much rude force and majesty as in a virgin forest of the
New World.
Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound and
penetrating influence of nature knows this. Although no absolute
satisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe the cause
or to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into those unfathomable
ecstasies caused by these decompositions of force terminating in unity.
Everything toils at everything.
Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profits the
rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of the
hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the
course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not
determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal ebb
and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, the
reverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanches
of creation? The tiniest worm is of importance; the great is little,
the little is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming
vision for the mind. There are marvellous relations between beings and
things; in that inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing
despises the other; all have need of each other. The light does not
bear away terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing
what it is doing; the night distributes stellar essences to the
sleeping flowers. All birds that fly have round their leg the thread of
the infinite. Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a
meteor and with the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places
on one level the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates.
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two
possesses the larger field of vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a
pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars. The same
promiscuousness, and yet more unprecedented, exists between the things