Les Misérables
you won’t have my chamber! What have I done to you? Has anything
happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Well then?”
“Everything is as usual.”
“Why do you change your name?”
“You have changed yours, surely.”
He smiled again with the same smile as before and added:
“Since you are Madame Pontmercy, I certainly can be Monsieur Jean.”
“I don’t understand anything about it. All this is idiotic. I shall ask
permission of my husband for you to be ‘Monsieur Jean.’ I hope that he
will not consent to it. You cause me a great deal of pain. One does
have freaks, but one does not cause one’s little Cosette grief. That is
wrong. You have no right to be wicked, you who are so good.”
He made no reply.
She seized his hands with vivacity, and raising them to her face with
an irresistible movement, she pressed them against her neck beneath her
chin, which is a gesture of profound tenderness.
“Oh!” she said to him, “be good!”
And she went on:
“This is what I call being good: being nice and coming and living
here,—there are birds here as there are in the Rue Plumet,—living with
us, quitting that hole of a Rue de l’Homme Armé, not giving us riddles
to guess, being like all the rest of the world, dining with us,
breakfasting with us, being my father.”
He loosed her hands.
“You no longer need a father, you have a husband.”
Cosette became angry.
“I no longer need a father! One really does not know what to say to
things like that, which are not common sense!”
“If Toussaint were here,” resumed Jean Valjean, like a person who is
driven to seek authorities, and who clutches at every branch, “she
would be the first to agree that it is true that I have always had ways
of my own. There is nothing new in this. I always have loved my black
corner.”
“But it is cold here. One cannot see distinctly. It is abominable, that
it is, to wish to be Monsieur Jean! I will not have you say ‘you’ to
me.
“Just now, as I was coming hither,” replied Jean Valjean, “I saw a
piece of furniture in the Rue Saint Louis. It was at a cabinet-maker’s.
If I were a pretty woman, I would treat myself to that bit of
furniture. A very neat toilet table in the reigning style. What you
call rosewood, I think. It is inlaid. The mirror is quite large. There
are drawers. It is pretty.”
“Hou! the villainous bear!” replied Cosette.
And with supreme grace, setting her teeth and drawing back her lips,
she blew at Jean Valjean. She was a Grace copying a cat.
“I am furious,” she resumed. “Ever since yesterday, you have made me
rage, all of you. I am greatly vexed. I don’t understand. You do not
defend me against Marius. Marius will not uphold me against you. I am
all alone. I arrange a chamber prettily. If I could have put the good
God there I would have done it. My chamber is left on my hands. My
lodger sends me into bankruptcy. I order a nice little dinner of
Nicolette. We will have nothing to do with your dinner, Madame. And my
father Fauchelevent wants me to call him ‘Monsieur Jean,’ and to
receive him in a frightful, old, ugly cellar, where the walls have
beards, and where the crystal consists of empty bottles, and the
curtains are of spiders’ webs! You are singular, I admit, that is your
style, but people who get married are granted a truce. You ought not to
have begun being singular again instantly. So you are going to be
perfectly contented in your abominable Rue de l’Homme Armé. I was very
desperate indeed there, that I was. What have you against me? You cause
me a great deal of grief. Fi!”
And, becoming suddenly serious, she gazed intently at Jean Valjean and
added:
“Are you angry with me because I am happy?”
Ingenuousness sometimes unconsciously penetrates deep. This question,
which was simple for Cosette, was profound for Jean Valjean. Cosette
had meant to scratch, and she lacerated.
Jean Valjean turned pale.
He remained for a moment without replying, then, with an inexpressible
intonation, and speaking to himself, he murmured:
“Her happiness was the object of my life. Now God may sign my
dismissal. Cosette, thou art happy; my day is over.”
“Ah, you have said _thou_ to me!” exclaimed Cosette.
And she sprang to his neck.
Jean Valjean, in bewilderment, strained her wildly to his breast. It
almost seemed to him as though he were taking her back.
“Thanks, father!” said Cosette.
This enthusiastic impulse was on the point of becoming poignant for
Jean Valjean. He gently removed Cosette’s arms, and took his hat.
“Well?” said Cosette.
“I leave you, Madame, they are waiting for you.”
And, from the threshold, he added:
“I have said _thou_ to you. Tell your husband that this shall not
happen again. Pardon me.”
Jean Valjean quitted the room, leaving Cosette stupefied at this
enigmatical farewell.
CHAPTER II—ANOTHER STEP BACKWARDS
On the following day, at the same hour, Jean Valjean came.
Cosette asked him no questions, was no longer astonished, no longer
exclaimed that she was cold, no longer spoke of the drawing-room, she
avoided saying either “father” or “Monsieur Jean.” She allowed herself
to be addressed as _you_. She allowed herself to be called Madame.
Only, her joy had undergone a certain diminution. She would have been
sad, if sadness had been possible to her.
It is probable that she had had with Marius one of those conversations
in which the beloved man says what he pleases, explains nothing, and
satisfies the beloved woman. The curiosity of lovers does not extend
very far beyond their own love.
The lower room had made a little toilet. Basque had suppressed the
bottles, and Nicolette the spiders.
All the days which followed brought Jean Valjean at the same hour. He
came every day, because he had not the strength to take Marius’ words
otherwise than literally. Marius arranged matters so as to be absent at
the hours when Jean Valjean came. The house grew accustomed to the
novel ways of M. Fauchelevent. Toussaint helped in this direction:
“Monsieur has always been like that,” she repeated. The grandfather
issued this decree:—“He’s an original.” And all was said. Moreover, at
the age of ninety-six, no bond is any longer possible, all is merely
juxtaposition; a newcomer is in the way. There is no longer any room;
all habits are acquired. M. Fauchelevent, M. Tranchelevent, Father
Gillenormand asked nothing better than to be relieved from “that
gentleman.” He added:—“Nothing is more common than those originals.
They do all sorts of queer things. They have no reason. The Marquis de
Canaples was still worse. He bought a palace that he might lodge in the
garret. These are fantastic appearances that people affect.”
No one caught a glimpse of the sinister foundation. And moreover, who
could have guessed such a thing? There are marshes of this description
in India. The water seems extraordinary, inexplicable, rippling though
there is no wind, and agitated where it should be calm. One gazes at
the surface of these causeless ebullitions; one does not perceive the
hydra which crawls on the bottom.
Many men have a secret monster in this same manner, a dragon which
gnaws them, a despair which inhabits their night. Such a man resembles
other men, he goes and comes. No one knows that he bears within him a
frightful parasitic pain with a thousand teeth, which lives within the
unhappy man, and of which he is dying. No one knows that this man is a
gulf. He is stagnant but deep. From time to time, a trouble of which
the onlooker understands nothing appears on his surface. A mysterious
wrinkle is formed, then vanishes, then reappears; an air-bubble rises
and bursts. It is the breathing of the unknown beast.
Certain strange habits: arriving at the hour when other people are
taking their leave, keeping in the background when other people are
displaying themselves, preserving on all occasions what may be
designated as the wall-colored mantle, seeking the solitary walk,
preferring the deserted street, avoiding any share in conversation,
avoiding crowds and festivals, seeming at one’s ease and living poorly,
having one’s key in one’s pocket, and one’s candle at the porter’s
lodge, however rich one may be, entering by the side door, ascending
the private staircase,—all these insignificant singularities, fugitive
folds on the surface, often proceed from a formidable foundation.
Many weeks passed in this manner. A new life gradually took possession
of Cosette: the relations which marriage creates, visits, the care of
the house, pleasures, great matters. Cosette’s pleasures were not
costly, they consisted in one thing: being with Marius. The great
occupation of her life was to go out with him, to remain with him. It
was for them a joy that was always fresh, to go out arm in arm, in the
face of the sun, in the open street, without hiding themselves, before
the whole world, both of them completely alone.
Cosette had one vexation. Toussaint could not get on with Nicolette,
the soldering of two elderly maids being impossible, and she went away.
The grandfather was well; Marius argued a case here and there; Aunt
Gillenormand peacefully led that life aside which sufficed for her,
beside the new household. Jean Valjean came every day.
The address as _thou_ disappeared, the _you_, the “Madame,” the
“Monsieur Jean,” rendered him another person to Cosette. The care which
he had himself taken to detach her from him was succeeding. She became
more and more gay and less and less tender. Yet she still loved him
sincerely, and he felt it.
One day she said to him suddenly: “You used to be my father, you are no
longer my father, you were my uncle, you are no longer my uncle, you
were Monsieur Fauchelevent, you are Jean. Who are you then? I don’t
like all this. If I did not know how good you are, I should be afraid
of you.”
He still lived in the Rue de l’Homme Armé, because he could not make up
his mind to remove to a distance from the quarter where Cosette dwelt.
At first, he only remained a few minutes with Cosette, and then went
away.
Little by little he acquired the habit of making his visits less brief.
One would have said that he was taking advantage of the authorization
of the days which were lengthening, he arrived earlier and departed
later.
One day Cosette chanced to say “father” to him. A flash of joy
illuminated Jean Valjean’s melancholy old countenance. He caught her
up: “Say Jean.”—“Ah! truly,” she replied with a burst of laughter,
“Monsieur Jean.”—“That is right,” said he. And he turned aside so that
she might not see him wipe his eyes.
CHAPTER III—THEY RECALL THE GARDEN OF THE RUE PLUMET
This was the last time. After that last flash of light, complete
extinction ensued. No more familiarity, no more good-morning with a
kiss, never more that word so profoundly sweet: “My father!” He was at
his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his
happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after
having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to
lose her again in detail.
The eye eventually becomes accustomed to the light of a cellar. In
short, it sufficed for him to have an apparition of Cosette every day.
His whole life was concentrated in that one hour.
He seated himself close to her, he gazed at her in silence, or he
talked to her of years gone by, of her childhood, of the convent, of
her little friends of those bygone days.
One afternoon,—it was on one of those early days in April, already warm
and fresh, the moment of the sun’s great gayety, the gardens which
surrounded the windows of Marius and Cosette felt the emotion of
waking, the hawthorn was on the point of budding, a jewelled garniture
of gillyflowers spread over the ancient walls, snapdragons yawned