Les Misérables
he followed Cosette to the Rue de l’Ouest. Another day he spoke to the
porter. The porter, on his side, spoke, and said to Jean Valjean:
“Monsieur, who is that curious young man who is asking for you?” On the
morrow Jean Valjean bestowed on Marius that glance which Marius at last
perceived. A week later, Jean Valjean had taken his departure. He swore
to himself that he would never again set foot either in the Luxembourg
or in the Rue de l’Ouest. He returned to the Rue Plumet.
Cosette did not complain, she said nothing, she asked no questions, she
did not seek to learn his reasons; she had already reached the point
where she was afraid of being divined, and of betraying herself. Jean
Valjean had no experience of these miseries, the only miseries which
are charming and the only ones with which he was not acquainted; the
consequence was that he did not understand the grave significance of
Cosette’s silence.
He merely noticed that she had grown sad, and he grew gloomy. On his
side and on hers, inexperience had joined issue.
Once he made a trial. He asked Cosette:—
“Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?”
A ray illuminated Cosette’s pale face.
“Yes,” said she.
They went thither. Three months had elapsed. Marius no longer went
there. Marius was not there.
On the following day, Jean Valjean asked Cosette again:—
“Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?”
She replied, sadly and gently:—
“No.”
Jean Valjean was hurt by this sadness, and heart-broken at this
gentleness.
What was going on in that mind which was so young and yet already so
impenetrable? What was on its way there within? What was taking place
in Cosette’s soul? Sometimes, instead of going to bed, Jean Valjean
remained seated on his pallet, with his head in his hands, and he
passed whole nights asking himself: “What has Cosette in her mind?” and
in thinking of the things that she might be thinking about.
Oh! at such moments, what mournful glances did he cast towards that
cloister, that chaste peak, that abode of angels, that inaccessible
glacier of virtue! How he contemplated, with despairing ecstasy, that
convent garden, full of ignored flowers and cloistered virgins, where
all perfumes and all souls mount straight to heaven! How he adored that
Eden forever closed against him, whence he had voluntarily and madly
emerged! How he regretted his abnegation and his folly in having
brought Cosette back into the world, poor hero of sacrifice, seized and
hurled to the earth by his very self-devotion! How he said to himself,
“What have I done?”
However, nothing of all this was perceptible to Cosette. No ill-temper,
no harshness. His face was always serene and kind. Jean Valjean’s
manners were more tender and more paternal than ever. If anything could
have betrayed his lack of joy, it was his increased suavity.
On her side, Cosette languished. She suffered from the absence of
Marius as she had rejoiced in his presence, peculiarly, without exactly
being conscious of it. When Jean Valjean ceased to take her on their
customary strolls, a feminine instinct murmured confusedly, at the
bottom of her heart, that she must not seem to set store on the
Luxembourg garden, and that if this proved to be a matter of
indifference to her, her father would take her thither once more. But
days, weeks, months, elapsed. Jean Valjean had tacitly accepted
Cosette’s tacit consent. She regretted it. It was too late. So Marius
had disappeared; all was over. The day on which she returned to the
Luxembourg, Marius was no longer there. What was to be done? Should she
ever find him again? She felt an anguish at her heart, which nothing
relieved, and which augmented every day; she no longer knew whether it
was winter or summer, whether it was raining or shining, whether the
birds were singing, whether it was the season for dahlias or daisies,
whether the Luxembourg was more charming than the Tuileries, whether
the linen which the laundress brought home was starched too much or not
enough, whether Toussaint had done “her marketing” well or ill; and she
remained dejected, absorbed, attentive to but a single thought, her
eyes vague and staring as when one gazes by night at a black and
fathomless spot where an apparition has vanished.
However, she did not allow Jean Valjean to perceive anything of this,
except her pallor.
She still wore her sweet face for him.
This pallor sufficed but too thoroughly to trouble Jean Valjean.
Sometimes he asked her:—
“What is the matter with you?”
She replied: “There is nothing the matter with me.”
And after a silence, when she divined that he was sad also, she would
add:—
“And you, father—is there anything wrong with you?”
“With me? Nothing,” said he.
These two beings who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so
touching an affection, and who had lived so long for each other now
suffered side by side, each on the other’s account; without
acknowledging it to each other, without anger towards each other, and
with a smile.
CHAPTER VIII—THE CHAIN-GANG
Jean Valjean was the more unhappy of the two. Youth, even in its
sorrows, always possesses its own peculiar radiance.
At times, Jean Valjean suffered so greatly that he became puerile. It
is the property of grief to cause the childish side of man to reappear.
He had an unconquerable conviction that Cosette was escaping from him.
He would have liked to resist, to retain her, to arouse her enthusiasm
by some external and brilliant matter. These ideas, puerile, as we have
just said, and at the same time senile, conveyed to him, by their very
childishness, a tolerably just notion of the influence of gold lace on
the imaginations of young girls. He once chanced to see a general on
horseback, in full uniform, pass along the street, Comte Coutard, the
commandant of Paris. He envied that gilded man; what happiness it would
be, he said to himself, if he could put on that suit which was an
incontestable thing; and if Cosette could behold him thus, she would be
dazzled, and when he had Cosette on his arm and passed the gates of the
Tuileries, the guard would present arms to him, and that would suffice
for Cosette, and would dispel her idea of looking at young men.
An unforeseen shock was added to these sad reflections.
In the isolated life which they led, and since they had come to dwell
in the Rue Plumet, they had contracted one habit. They sometimes took a
pleasure trip to see the sun rise, a mild species of enjoyment which
befits those who are entering life and those who are quitting it.
For those who love solitude, a walk in the early morning is equivalent
to a stroll by night, with the cheerfulness of nature added. The
streets are deserted and the birds are singing. Cosette, a bird
herself, liked to rise early. These matutinal excursions were planned
on the preceding evening. He proposed, and she agreed. It was arranged
like a plot, they set out before daybreak, and these trips were so many
small delights for Cosette. These innocent eccentricities please young
people.
Jean Valjean’s inclination led him, as we have seen, to the least
frequented spots, to solitary nooks, to forgotten places. There then
existed, in the vicinity of the barriers of Paris, a sort of poor
meadows, which were almost confounded with the city, where grew in
summer sickly grain, and which, in autumn, after the harvest had been
gathered, presented the appearance, not of having been reaped, but
peeled. Jean Valjean loved to haunt these fields. Cosette was not bored
there. It meant solitude to him and liberty to her. There, she became a
little girl once more, she could run and almost play; she took off her
hat, laid it on Jean Valjean’s knees, and gathered bunches of flowers.
She gazed at the butterflies on the flowers, but did not catch them;
gentleness and tenderness are born with love, and the young girl who
cherishes within her breast a trembling and fragile ideal has mercy on
the wing of a butterfly. She wove garlands of poppies, which she placed
on her head, and which, crossed and penetrated with sunlight, glowing
until they flamed, formed for her rosy face a crown of burning embers.
Even after their life had grown sad, they kept up their custom of early
strolls.
One morning in October, therefore, tempted by the serene perfection of
the autumn of 1831, they set out, and found themselves at break of day
near the Barrière du Maine. It was not dawn, it was daybreak; a
delightful and stern moment. A few constellations here and there in the
deep, pale azure, the earth all black, the heavens all white, a quiver
amid the blades of grass, everywhere the mysterious chill of twilight.
A lark, which seemed mingled with the stars, was carolling at a
prodigious height, and one would have declared that that hymn of
pettiness calmed immensity. In the East, the Val-de-Grâce projected its
dark mass on the clear horizon with the sharpness of steel; Venus
dazzlingly brilliant was rising behind that dome and had the air of a
soul making its escape from a gloomy edifice.
All was peace and silence; there was no one on the road; a few stray
laborers, of whom they caught barely a glimpse, were on their way to
their work along the side-paths.
Jean Valjean was sitting in a cross-walk on some planks deposited at
the gate of a timber-yard. His face was turned towards the highway, his
back towards the light; he had forgotten the sun which was on the point
of rising; he had sunk into one of those profound absorptions in which
the mind becomes concentrated, which imprison even the eye, and which
are equivalent to four walls. There are meditations which may be called
vertical; when one is at the bottom of them, time is required to return
to earth. Jean Valjean had plunged into one of these reveries. He was
thinking of Cosette, of the happiness that was possible if nothing came
between him and her, of the light with which she filled his life, a
light which was but the emanation of her soul. He was almost happy in
his reverie. Cosette, who was standing beside him, was gazing at the
clouds as they turned rosy.
All at once Cosette exclaimed: “Father, I should think some one was
coming yonder.” Jean Valjean raised his eyes.
Cosette was right. The causeway which leads to the ancient Barrière du
Maine is a prolongation, as the reader knows, of the Rue de Sèvres, and
is cut at right angles by the inner boulevard. At the elbow of the
causeway and the boulevard, at the spot where it branches, they heard a
noise which it was difficult to account for at that hour, and a sort of
confused pile made its appearance. Some shapeless thing which was
coming from the boulevard was turning into the road.
It grew larger, it seemed to move in an orderly manner, though it was
bristling and quivering; it seemed to be a vehicle, but its load could
not be distinctly made out. There were horses, wheels, shouts; whips
were cracking. By degrees the outlines became fixed, although bathed in
shadows. It was a vehicle, in fact, which had just turned from the
boulevard into the highway, and which was directing its course towards
the barrier near which sat Jean Valjean; a second, of the same aspect,
followed, then a third, then a fourth; seven chariots made their
appearance in succession, the heads of the horses touching the rear of
the wagon in front. Figures were moving on these vehicles, flashes were
visible through the dusk as though there were naked swords there, a
clanking became audible which resembled the rattling of chains, and as
this something advanced, the sound of voices waxed louder, and it
turned into a terrible thing such as emerges from the cave of dreams.
As it drew nearer, it assumed a form, and was outlined behind the trees