Les Misérables
“Six hundred thousand francs?” resumed M. Gillenormand.
“Minus fourteen or fifteen thousand francs, possibly,” said Jean
Valjean.
And he laid on the table the package which Mademoiselle Gillenormand
had mistaken for a book.
Jean Valjean himself opened the package; it was a bundle of bank-notes.
They were turned over and counted. There were five hundred notes for a
thousand francs each, and one hundred and sixty-eight of five hundred.
In all, five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.
“This is a fine book,” said M. Gillenormand.
“Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!” murmured the aunt.
“This arranges things well, does it not, Mademoiselle Gillenormand
senior?” said the grandfather. “That devil of a Marius has ferreted out
the nest of a millionaire grisette in his tree of dreams! Just trust to
the love affairs of young folks now, will you! Students find
studentesses with six hundred thousand francs. Cherubino works better
than Rothschild.”
“Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!” repeated Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, in a low tone. “Five hundred and eighty-four! one might
as well say six hundred thousand!”
As for Marius and Cosette, they were gazing at each other while this
was going on; they hardly heeded this detail.
CHAPTER V—DEPOSIT YOUR MONEY IN A FOREST RATHER THAN WITH A NOTARY
The reader has, no doubt, understood, without necessitating a lengthy
explanation, that Jean Valjean, after the Champmathieu affair, had been
able, thanks to his first escape of a few days’ duration, to come to
Paris and to withdraw in season, from the hands of Laffitte, the sum
earned by him, under the name of Monsieur Madeleine, at
Montreuil-sur-Mer; and that fearing that he might be recaptured,—which
eventually happened—he had buried and hidden that sum in the forest of
Montfermeil, in the locality known as the Blaru-bottom. The sum, six
hundred and thirty thousand francs, all in bank-bills, was not very
bulky, and was contained in a box; only, in order to preserve the box
from dampness, he had placed it in a coffer filled with chestnut
shavings. In the same coffer he had placed his other treasures, the
Bishop’s candlesticks. It will be remembered that he had carried off
the candlesticks when he made his escape from Montreuil-sur-Mer. The
man seen one evening for the first time by Boulatruelle, was Jean
Valjean. Later on, every time that Jean Valjean needed money, he went
to get it in the Blaru-bottom. Hence the absences which we have
mentioned. He had a pickaxe somewhere in the heather, in a hiding-place
known to himself alone. When he beheld Marius convalescent, feeling
that the hour was at hand, when that money might prove of service, he
had gone to get it; it was he again, whom Boulatruelle had seen in the
woods, but on this occasion, in the morning instead of in the evening.
Boulatreulle inherited his pickaxe.
The actual sum was five hundred and eighty-four thousand, five hundred
francs. Jean Valjean withdrew the five hundred francs for himself.—“We
shall see hereafter,” he thought.
The difference between that sum and the six hundred and thirty thousand
francs withdrawn from Laffitte represented his expenditure in ten
years, from 1823 to 1833. The five years of his stay in the convent had
cost only five thousand francs.
Jean Valjean set the two candlesticks on the chimney-piece, where they
glittered to the great admiration of Toussaint.
Moreover, Jean Valjean knew that he was delivered from Javert. The
story had been told in his presence, and he had verified the fact in
the _Moniteur_, how a police inspector named Javert had been found
drowned under a boat belonging to some laundresses, between the Pont au
Change and the Pont-Neuf, and that a writing left by this man,
otherwise irreproachable and highly esteemed by his superiors, pointed
to a fit of mental aberration and a suicide.—“In fact,” thought Jean
Valjean, “since he left me at liberty, once having got me in his power,
he must have been already mad.”
CHAPTER VI—THE TWO OLD MEN DO EVERYTHING, EACH ONE AFTER HIS OWN
FASHION, TO RENDER COSETTE HAPPY
Everything was made ready for the wedding. The doctor, on being
consulted, declared that it might take place in February. It was then
December. A few ravishing weeks of perfect happiness passed.
The grandfather was not the least happy of them all. He remained for a
quarter of an hour at a time gazing at Cosette.
“The wonderful, beautiful girl!” he exclaimed. “And she has so sweet
and good an air! she is, without exception, the most charming girl that
I have ever seen in my life. Later on, she’ll have virtues with an odor
of violets. How graceful! one cannot live otherwise than nobly with
such a creature. Marius, my boy, you are a Baron, you are rich, don’t
go to pettifogging, I beg of you.”
Cosette and Marius had passed abruptly from the sepulchre to paradise.
The transition had not been softened, and they would have been stunned,
had they not been dazzled by it.
“Do you understand anything about it?” said Marius to Cosette.
“No,” replied Cosette, “but it seems to me that the good God is caring
for us.”
Jean Valjean did everything, smoothed away every difficulty, arranged
everything, made everything easy. He hastened towards Cosette’s
happiness with as much ardor, and, apparently with as much joy, as
Cosette herself.
As he had been a mayor, he understood how to solve that delicate
problem, with the secret of which he alone was acquainted, Cosette’s
civil status. If he were to announce her origin bluntly, it might
prevent the marriage, who knows? He extricated Cosette from all
difficulties. He concocted for her a family of dead people, a sure
means of not encountering any objections. Cosette was the only scion of
an extinct family; Cosette was not his own daughter, but the daughter
of the other Fauchelevent. Two brothers Fauchelevent had been gardeners
to the convent of the Petit-Picpus. Inquiry was made at that convent;
the very best information and the most respectable references abounded;
the good nuns, not very apt and but little inclined to fathom questions
of paternity, and not attaching any importance to the matter, had never
understood exactly of which of the two Fauchelevents Cosette was the
daughter. They said what was wanted and they said it with zeal. An
_acte de notoriété_ was drawn up. Cosette became in the eyes of the
law, Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent. She was declared an orphan,
both father and mother being dead. Jean Valjean so arranged it that he
was appointed, under the name of Fauchelevent, as Cosette’s guardian,
with M. Gillenormand as supervising guardian over him.
As for the five hundred and eighty thousand francs, they constituted a
legacy bequeathed to Cosette by a dead person, who desired to remain
unknown. The original legacy had consisted of five hundred and
ninety-four thousand francs; but ten thousand francs had been expended
on the education of Mademoiselle Euphrasie, five thousand francs of
that amount having been paid to the convent. This legacy, deposited in
the hands of a third party, was to be turned over to Cosette at her
majority, or at the date of her marriage. This, taken as a whole, was
very acceptable, as the reader will perceive, especially when the sum
due was half a million. There were some peculiarities here and there,
it is true, but they were not noticed; one of the interested parties
had his eyes blindfolded by love, the others by the six hundred
thousand francs.
Cosette learned that she was not the daughter of that old man whom she
had so long called father. He was merely a kinsman; another
Fauchelevent was her real father. At any other time this would have
broken her heart. But at the ineffable moment which she was then
passing through, it cast but a slight shadow, a faint cloud, and she
was so full of joy that the cloud did not last long. She had Marius.
The young man arrived, the old man was effaced; such is life.
And then, Cosette had, for long years, been habituated to seeing
enigmas around her; every being who has had a mysterious childhood is
always prepared for certain renunciations.
Nevertheless, she continued to call Jean Valjean: Father.
Cosette, happy as the angels, was enthusiastic over Father
Gillenormand. It is true that he overwhelmed her with gallant
compliments and presents. While Jean Valjean was building up for
Cosette a normal situation in society and an unassailable status, M.
Gillenormand was superintending the basket of wedding gifts. Nothing so
amused him as being magnificent. He had given to Cosette a robe of
Binche guipure which had descended to him from his own grandmother.
“These fashions come up again,” said he, “ancient things are the rage,
and the young women of my old age dress like the old women of my
childhood.”
He rifled his respectable chests of drawers in Coromandel lacquer, with
swelling fronts, which had not been opened for years.—“Let us hear the
confession of these dowagers,” he said, “let us see what they have in
their paunches.” He noisily violated the pot-bellied drawers of all his
wives, of all his mistresses and of all his grandmothers. Pekins,
damasks, lampas, painted moires, robes of shot gros de Tours, India
kerchiefs embroidered in gold that could be washed, dauphines without a
right or wrong side, in the piece, Genoa and Alençon point lace,
parures in antique goldsmith’s work, ivory bon-bon boxes ornamented
with microscopic battles, gewgaws and ribbons—he lavished everything on
Cosette. Cosette, amazed, desperately in love with Marius, and wild
with gratitude towards M. Gillenormand, dreamed of a happiness without
limit clothed in satin and velvet. Her wedding basket seemed to her to
be upheld by seraphim. Her soul flew out into the azure depths, with
wings of Mechlin lace.
The intoxication of the lovers was only equalled, as we have already
said, by the ecstasy of the grandfather. A sort of flourish of trumpets
went on in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.
Every morning, a fresh offering of bric-à-brac from the grandfather to
Cosette. All possible knickknacks glittered around her.
One day Marius, who was fond of talking gravely in the midst of his
bliss, said, apropos of I know not what incident:
“The men of the revolution are so great, that they have the prestige of
the ages, like Cato and like Phocion, and each one of them seems to me
an antique memory.”
“Moire antique!” exclaimed the old gentleman. “Thanks, Marius. That is
precisely the idea of which I was in search.”
And on the following day, a magnificent dress of tea-rose colored moire
antique was added to Cosette’s wedding presents.
From these fripperies, the grandfather extracted a bit of wisdom.
“Love is all very well; but there must be something else to go with it.
The useless must be mingled with happiness. Happiness is only the
necessary. Season that enormously with the superfluous for me. A palace
and her heart. Her heart and the Louvre. Her heart and the grand
waterworks of Versailles. Give me my shepherdess and try to make her a
duchess. Fetch me Phyllis crowned with corn-flowers, and add a hundred
thousand francs income. Open for me a bucolic perspective as far as you
can see, beneath a marble colonnade. I consent to the bucolic and also
to the fairy spectacle of marble and gold. Dry happiness resembles dry
bread. One eats, but one does not dine. I want the superfluous, the
useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves no purpose. I
remember to have seen, in the Cathedral of Strasburg, a clock, as tall
as a three-story house which marked the hours, which had the kindness
to indicate the hour, but which had not the air of being made for that;