by Victor Hugo
They had the start of him, but a child walks slowly, and he went rapidly. And then the country was well known to him.
Suddenly he stopped and struck his forehead like a man who has forgotten the main thing, and who thinks of retracing his steps.
“I ought to have taken my gun!” said he.
Thénardier was one of those double natures who sometimes appear among us without our knowledge, and disappear without ever being known, because destiny has shown us but one side of them. It is the fate of many men to live thus half submerged. In a quiet ordinary situation, Thénardier had all that is necessary to make—we do not say to be—what passes for an honest tradesman, a good citizen. At the same time, under certain circumstances, under the operation of certain occurrences exciting his baser nature, he had in him all that was necessary to be a villain. He was a shopkeeper in which lay hidden a monster. At times, Satan must have squatted in some corner of the hole in which Thénardier lived and daydreamed at the spectacle of this hideous masterpiece.
After hesitating an instant:
“Bah!” thought he, “they would have time to escape!”
And he continued on his way, going rapidly forward, and almost as if he were certain, with the sagacity of the fox scenting a flock of partridges.
In fact, when he had passed the ponds, and crossed obliquely the large meadow at the right of the avenue de Bellevue, as he reached the grassy path which nearly encircles the hill, and which covers the arch of the old aqueduct of the abbey of Chelles, he perceived above a bush, the hat on which he had already built so many conjectures. It was the man’s hat. The bushes were low. Thénardier perceived that the man and Cosette were seated there. The child could not be seen, she was so short, but he could see the head of the doll.
Thénardier was not mistaken. The man had sat down there to give Cosette a little rest. The tavern-keeper turned aside the bushes, and suddenly appeared before the eyes of those whom he sought.
“Pardon me, excuse me, monsieur,” said he, all out of breath; “but here are your fifteen hundred francs.”
So saying, he held out the three bank bills to the stranger.
The man raised his eyes:
“What does that mean?”
Thénardier answered respectfully: “Monsieur, that means that I’m taking back Cosette.”
Cosette shuddered, and hugged close to the goodman.
He answered, looking Thénardier straight in the eye, and spacing his syllables.
“You‘re—taking—back—Cosette?”
“Yes, monsieur, I’m taking her back. I tell you I have thought it over. Indeed, I haven’t the right to give her to you. I am an honest man, you see. This little girl is not mine. She belongs to her mother. Her mother has confided her to me; I can only give her up to her mother. You will tell me: But her mother is dead. Well. In that case, I can only give up the child to a person who shall bring me a written order, signed by the mother, stating I should deliver the child to him. That is clear.”
The man, without answering, felt in his pocket, and Thénardier saw the pocket-book containing the bank bills reappear.
The tavern-keeper felt a thrill of joy.
“Good!” thought he; “hold on. He is going to bribe me!”
Before opening the pocket-book, the traveller cast a look about him. The place was entirely deserted. There was not a soul either in the wood, or in the valley. The man opened the pocket-book, and drew from it, not the handful of bankbills which Thénardier expected, but a little piece of paper, which he unfolded and presented open to the innkeeper, saying:
“You are right. Read that!”
Thénardier took the paper and read.
“M—sur M—, March 25,1823.
“Monsieur Thénardier:
“You will deliver Cosette to the bearer. He will settle all small debts.
“I have the honour to salute you with consideration.
FANTINE.”
“You know that signature?” replied the man.
It was indeed the signature of Fantine. Thénardier recognised it.
There was nothing to say. He felt doubly enraged, enraged at being compelled to give up the bribe which he hoped for, and enraged at being beaten. The man added:
“You can keep this paper as your receipt.”
Thénardier retreated in good order.
“This signature is very well imitated,” he grumbled between his teeth. “Well, so be it!”
Then he made a desperate effort.
“Monsieur,” said he, “it is all right. Then you are the person. But you must settle‘all small debts.’ There is a large amount due to me.”
The man rose to his feet, and said at the same time, snapping with his thumb and finger some dust from his threadbare sleeve:
“Monsieur Thénardier, in January the mother reckoned that she owed you a hundred and twenty francs; you sent her in February a memorandum of five hundred francs; you received three hundred francs at the end of February, and three hundred at the beginning of March. There has since elapsed nine months which, at fifteen francs per month, the price agreed upon, amounts to a hundred and thirty-five francs. You had received a hundred francs in advance. There remain thirty-five francs due you. I have just given you fifteen hundred francs.”
Thénardier felt what the wolf feels the moment when he finds himself seized and crushed by the steel jaws of the trap.
“What is this devil of a man?” thought he.
He did what the wolf does, he gave a spring. Audacity had succeeded with him once already.
“Monsieur-I-don‘t-know-your-name,” said he resolutely, and putting aside this time all show of respect. “I shall take back Cosette or you must give me a thousand crowns.”bk
The stranger said quietly:
“Come, Cosette.”
He took Cosette with his left hand, and with the right picked up his staff, which was on the ground.
Thénardier noted the enormous size of the cudgel, and the solitude of the place.
The man disappeared in the wood with the child, leaving the tavern-keeper motionless and non-plussed.
As they walked away, Thénardier observed his broad shoulders, a little rounded, and his big fists.
Then his eyes fell back upon his own puny arms and thin hands. “I must have been a fool indeed,” thought he, “not to have brought my gun, as I was going on a hunt.”
However, the innkeeper did not abandon the pursuit.
“I must know where he goes,” said he; and he began to follow them at a distance. There remained two things in his possession, one a bitter mockery, the piece of paper signed Fantine, and the other a consolation, the fifteen hundred francs.
The man was leading Cosette in the direction of Livry and Bondy. He was walking slowly, his head bent down, in an attitude of reflection and sadness. The winter had bereft the wood of foliage, so that Thénardier did not lose sight of them, though remaining at a considerable distance behind. From time to time the man turned, and looked to see if he were followed. Suddenly he perceived Thénardier. He at once entered a coppice with Cosette, and both disappeared from sight. “The devil!” said Thénardier.And he redoubled his pace.
The density of the thicket compelled him to approach them. When the man reached the thickest part of the wood, he turned again. Thénardier had endeavoured to conceal himself in the branches in vain, he could not prevent the man from seeing him. The man cast an uneasy glance at him, then shook his head, and resumed his journey. The innkeeper again took up the pursuit. They walked thus two or three hundred paces. Suddenly the man turned again. He perceived the innkeeper. This time he looked at him so forbiddingly that Thénardier judged it “unprofitable” to go further. Thénardier went home.
11
NUMBER 9430 COMES UP AGAIN, AND COSETTE DRAWS IT
JEAN VALJEAN was not dead.
When he fell into the sea, or rather when he threw himself into it, he was, as we have seen, free from his irons. He swam under water to a shi
p at anchor to which a boat was fastened.
He found means to conceal himself in this boat until evening. At night he betook himself again to the water, and reached the land a short distance from Cape Brun.
There, as he did not lack for money, he could procure clothes. A little public-house in the environs of Balaguier was then the place which supplied clothing for escaped convicts, a lucrative business. Then Jean Valjean, like all those joyless fugitives who are endeavouring to throw off the track the spy of the law and social fatality, followed an obscure and wandering path. He found an asylum first in Pradeaux, near Beausset. Then he went towards Grand Villard near Briançon, in the Hautes Alpes. Groping and restless flight, threading the mazes of the mole whose windings are unknown. There were afterwards found some trace of his passage in Ain, on the territory of Civrieux, in the Pyrenees at Accons, at a place called the Grange-de-Domecq, near the hamlet of Chavailles, and in the environs of Périgneux, at Brunies, a canton of Chapelle Gonaguet. He finally reached Paris. We have just seen him at Montfermeil.
His first care, on reaching Paris, had been to purchase a mourning dress for a little girl of seven years, then to procure lodgings. That done, he had gone to Montfermeil.
It will be remembered that, at the time of his former escape, or near that time, he had made a mysterious journey of which justice had had some glimpse.
Moreover, he was believed to be dead, and that thickened the obscurity which surrounded him. At Paris there fell into his hands a paper which chronicled the fact. He felt reassured, and almost as much at peace as if he really had been dead.
On the evening of the same day that Jean Valjean had rescued Cosette from the clutches of the Thénardiess, he entered Paris again. He entered the city at night-fall, with the child, by the barriere de Monceaux. There he took a cabriolet, which carried him as far as the esplanade of the Observatory. There he got out, paid the driver, took Cosette by the hand, and both in the darkness of the night, through the deserted streets in the vicinity of l‘Ourcine and la Glacière, walked towards the boulevard de l’Hôpital.
The day had been strange and full of emotion for Cosette; they had eaten behind hedges bread and cheese bought at isolated taverns; they had often changed carriages, and had travelled short distances on foot. She did not complain; but she was tired, and Jean Valjean perceived it by her pulling more heavily at his hand while walking. He took her in his arms; Cosette, without letting go of Catharine, laid her head on Jean Valjean’s shoulder, and went to sleep.
BOOK FOUR
THE OLD GORBEAU HOUSE
1
MASTER GORBEAU
FORTY YEARS AGO, the solitary stroller who ventured into the unknown regions of La Salpêtrière and went up along the Boulevard as far as the Barrière d‘Italie, reached certain points where it might be said that Paris disappeared. It was not deserted, for there were people passing; it was not the country, for there were houses and streets; it was not a city, the streets had ruts in them, like the highways, and grass grew along their borders; it was not a village, the houses were too tall. What was it then? It was an inhabited place where there was nobody, it was a deserted place where there was somebody; it was a boulevard of the great city, a street of Paris, wilder, at night, than a forest, and gloomier, by day, than a graveyard.
It was the old quarter of the Horse Market.
Our pedestrian, if he trusted himself beyond the four crumbling walls of this Horse Market, if willing to go even further than the Rue du Petit Banquier, leaving on his right a courtyard shut in by lofty walls, then a meadow studded with stacks of tanbark that looked like the gigantic beaver dams, then an enclosure half filled with lumber and piles of stumps, sawdust and shavings, from the top of which a huge dog was baying, then a long, low, ruined wall with a small dark-coloured and decrepit gate in it, covered with moss, which was full of flowers in spring-time, then, in the loneliest spot, a frightful broken-down structure on which could be read in large letters: POST NO BILLS; this bold promenader, we say, would reach the corner of the Rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel, a latitude not much explored. There, near a manufactory and between two garden walls, could be seen at the time of which we speak an old ruined dwelling that, at first sight, seemed as small as a cottage, yet was, in reality, as vast as a cathedral. It stood with its gable end towards the highway, and hence its apparent diminutiveness. Nearly the whole house was hidden. Only the door and one window could be seen.
This old dwelling had but one story.
On examining it, the peculiarity that first struck the beholder was that the door could never have been anything but the door of a hovel, while the window, had it been cut in quarrystone instead of fieldstone, might have been the casement of a lordly residence.
The door was merely a collection of worm-eaten boards crudely tacked together with cross-pieces that looked like pieces of firewood clumsily split out. It opened directly on a steep staircase with high steps covered with mud, plaster, and dust, and of the same breadth as the door, and which seemed from the street to rise perpendicularly like a ladder, and disappear in the shadow between two walls. The top of the shapeless opening which this door closed upon was disguised by a thin plank, in the middle of which had been sawed a three-cornered orifice that served both for skylight and ventilator when the door was shut. On the inside of the door a brush dipped in ink had, in a couple of strokes of the hand, traced the number 52, and above the plank, the same brush had daubed the number 50, so that a new-comer would hesitate, asking: Where am I?
2
A NEST FOR OWL AND WREN
BEFORE THIS Gorbeau tenement Jean Valjean stopped. Like the birds of prey, he had chosen this lonely place to make his nest.
He fumbled in his waistcoat and took from it a sort of master key, opened the door, entered, then carefully closed it again and ascended the stairway, still carrying Cosette.
At the top of the stairway he drew from his pocket another key, with which he opened another door. The room which he entered and closed again immediately was a sort of garret, rather spacious, furnished only with a mattress spread on the floor, a table, and a few chairs. A stove containing a fire, the coals of which were visible, stood in one corner. The street lamp of the boulevards shed a dim light through this poor interior. At the further extremity there was a little room containing a cot. On this Jean Valjean laid the child without waking her.
He struck a light with a flint and steel and lit a candle, which, with his tinder-box, stood ready, beforehand, on the table; and, as he had done on the preceding evening, he began to gaze upon Cosette with a look of ecstasy, in which the expression of goodness and tenderness went almost to the verge of insanity. The little girl, with that tranquil confidence which belongs only to extreme strength or extreme weakness, had fallen asleep without knowing with whom she was, and continued to slumber without knowing where she was.
Jean Valjean bent down and kissed the child’s hand.
Nine months before, he had kissed the hand of the mother, who also had just fallen asleep.
The same mournful, pious, agonising feeling now filled his heart.
He knelt down by the bedside of Cosette.
It was broad daylight, and yet the child slept on. A pale ray from the December sun struggled through the garret window and traced upon the ceiling long streaks of light and shade. Suddenly a quarry waggon, heavily laden, trundled over the cobble-stones of the boulevard, and shook the old building like the rumbling of a tempest, jarring it from cellar to roof-tree.
“Yes, madame!” cried Cosette, starting up out of sleep, “here I am! here I am!”
And she threw herself from the bed, her eyelids still half closed with the weight of slumber, stretching out her hand towards the comer of the wall.
“Oh! what shall I do? Where is my broom?” said she.
By this time her eyes were fully open, and she saw the smiling face of Jean Valjean.
“Oh! yes—so it is!” said the child. “Good morning, monsieur.”
Children at once accept joy and happiness with quick familiarity, being themselves naturally all happiness and joy.
Cosette noticed Catharine at the foot of the bed, laid hold of her at once, and, playing the while, asked Jean Valjean a thousand questions.—Where was she? Was Paris a big place? Was Madame Thénardier really very far away? Wouldn’t she come back again, etc., etc. All at once she exclaimed, “How pretty it is here!”
It was a frightful hovel, but she felt free.
“Must I sweep?” she continued at length.
“Play!” replied Jean Valjean.
And thus the day passed by. Cosette, without troubling herself with trying to understand anything about it, was inexpressibly happy with her doll and her good friend.
3
TWO MISFORTUNES MINGLED MAKE HAPPINESS
THE DAWN of the next day found Jean Valjean again near the bed of Cosette. He waited there, motionless, to see her wake.
Something new was entering his soul.
Jean Valjean had never loved anything. For twenty-five years he had been alone in the world. He had never been a father, lover, husband, or friend. At the galleys, he was cross, sullen, abstinent, ignorant, and intractable. The old convict had a virginal heart. His sister and her children had left in his memory only a vague and distant impression, which had finally almost entirely vanished. He had made every exertion to find them again, and, not succeeding, had forgotten them. Human nature is thus constituted. The other tender emotions of his youth, if any such he had, were lost in an abyss.
When he saw Cosette, when he had taken her, carried her away, and rescued her, he felt his heart moved. All that he had of feeling and affection was aroused and vehemently attracted towards this child. He would approach the bed where she slept, and would tremble there with delight; he felt inward stirrings, like a mother, and knew not what they were; for it is something very incomprehensible and very sweet, this grand and strange emotion of a heart in its first love.