But Fauchelevent was too anxious to proclaim the happy ending to pay much attention to the regrettable aspects of his triumph. He marched in saying:
‘I’ve brought back your pick and shovel.’
Gribier was staring at him in astonishment.
‘It’s you, countryman!’
‘And you’ll find your card at the keeper’s lodge.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Gribier.
‘Simple enough. The card must have fallen out of your pocket. I picked it up after you’d left. And then I filled in the grave. I’ve done the job for you, the keeper will give you back your card and you won’t have to pay the fifteen francs. That’s all.’
‘Thank you, thank you, countryman!’ cried Gribier, clasping him warmly by the hand. ‘I’ll pay for drinks next time.’
VIII
Successful interview
An hour later, when it was quite dark, the two men, with Cosette, knocked at the door of No. 62, Petite Rue Picpus.
They had fetched Cosette from the fruit-shop in the Rue du Chemin-Vert where Fauchelevent had taken her the evening before. Cosette had passed those twenty-four hours in a state of terrified bewilderment, understanding nothing and trembling so much that she had not once cried. Nor had she eaten or slept. The good-hearted woman of the shop had asked her countless questions to which the only reply was a mute, mournful stare. Cosette had told her nothing at all of what she had seen or heard during the past two days. She realized that something terrible had happened and was profoundly conscious of the need to ‘be good’. Who does not know the effect of those words spoken in a certain tone of voice into a small, frightened ear? ‘You mustn’t say a word!’ Fear is a deaf-mute. Moreover, no one can keep a secret better than a child. But when, after those miserable twenty-four hours, Jean Valjean returned to her, she welcomed him with such a cry of delight that any discerning person might have guessed the state she had been in.
Thus the twofold problem had been solved, of getting Valjean out of the convent and bringing him back again. The porter, who had his orders, unlocked the small service door leading from the outer yard to the garden, which twenty years ago was still to be seen from the street, in the wall facing the main door. They went through and made their way to the small inner parlour where on the previous day Fauchelevent had received his instructions from the prioress.
She was seated, rosary in hand, with the veiled figure of one of the chantry-mothers standing beside her. A single taper lighted the parlour, or made a pretence of lighting it.
The prioress examined Jean Valjean. Nothing is more penetrating than the gaze of a downcast eye. She asked:
‘You are the brother?’
‘Yes, Reverend Mother,’ replied Fauchelevent.
‘What is your name?’
Again it was Fauchelevent who replied.
‘Ultime Fauchelevent.’ He had had a brother of that name who had died.
‘Where do you come from?’
Fauchelevent replied:
‘From Picquigny, near Amiens.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Fifty.’
‘And what is your trade?’
‘Gardener.’
‘Are you a good Christian?’
‘All the family are good Christians.’
‘This child belongs to you?’
‘Yes, Reverend Mother.’
‘You are her father?’
‘Her grandfather.’
The chantry-mother murmured to the prioress:
‘He answers well.’
In fact, Jean Valjean had not spoken a word.
The prioress was looking attentively at Cosette. She murmured to the chantry-mother:
‘She’ll be plain.’
The two women conferred softly for some minutes in the corner of the room. Then the prioress turned to Fauchelevent and said:
‘Père Fauvent, you will have to get another knee-strap and bell. We shall now need two.’
So next morning two bells were to be heard tinkling in the garden, and the nuns could not resist the temptation to lift a corner of their veils. They saw two men working side by side under the trees. It was a tremendous happening, and a whisper broke the silence, ‘There’s an assistant-gardener.’ To which the chantry-mothers added: ‘He’s the brother of Père Fauvent.’
In short, Jean Valjean with his knee-strap and bell was now installed as a recognized member of the establishment under the name of Ultime Fauchelevent.
What had principally decided the matter was the prioress’s remark about Cosette, ‘She will be plain.’ Having reached this conclusion she took an instant liking to the little girl and made a place for her as a charity pupil in the school. And this was entirely logical. There may be no mirrors in a convent, but every woman is conscious of her appearance. The girl who knows herself to be pretty is less likely to become a nun, the sense of vocation varying inversely with the degree of beauty. So the plain ones are much preferred.
The affair greatly enhanced the standing of old Fauchelevent, who indeed had achieved a threefold success – with Jean Valjean, whom he had rescued and sheltered, with Gribier, who believed that he had saved him a fine, and with the convent, which thanks to him had defied Caesar in the service of God. There was now an occupied coffin in the Petit-Picpus vault and an empty one in the Cimetière Vaugirard, a breach of regulations which would have outraged Public Order had Public Order known about it. The convent’s sense of obligation to Fauchelevent was great; he became the best of servants and the most treasured of gardeners. On the archbishop’s next visit the prioress told his Grace the story, making it partly a confession and partly a boast. The archbishop related it, with approval but in confidence, to M. de Latil, confessor to Monsieur, the king’s brother. Indeed Fauchelevent’s renown travelled as far as Rome. We have ourselves seen a letter written by the reigning pope, Leo XII, to one of his relatives, then serving under the papal nuncio in Paris, in which his Holiness says: ‘It seems that in one of the Paris convents there is a most excellent gardener named Fauvan, a saintly man.’ But none of this reached Fauchelevent in his cottage. He continued to hoe and graft and straw his melons in ignorance of his excellence and saintliness, no more conscious of fame than the pedigree bull whose picture appears in the Illustrated London News with the legend, ‘Prize-winner at the Cattle Show’.
IX
Seclusion
Cosette in the convent continued to keep silent. She thought of herself, very naturally, as Jean Valjean’s child. Knowing no more than this, there was no more for her to say. But in any event she would have said nothing. Nothing makes a child more secretive than unhappiness, and she had suffered so much that she was afraid of everything, of talking and almost of breathing. An incautious word had so often brought down an avalanche on her head! The time she had been with Valjean had not been long enough to give her a complete sense of security, but she quickly adapted herself to the convent. Her only regret was that she no longer had Catherine. This was something that she could not mention, although she did once say to Valjean, ‘If I’d known I’d have brought her with me.’
As a pupil she had to wear the school uniform. Jean Valjean kept the clothes she discarded, the mourning garments he had brought her when he took her away from the Thénardiers, and which were still comparatively new. He packed them, the black dress, the woollen stockings and the shoes, together with a great deal of camphor and the other aromatics so plentiful in convents, in a small valise that he managed to procure, and this he kept on a chair by his bed, with the key always in his pocket. Cosette once asked him: ‘Father, what is in that box that smells so nice?’
Old Fauchelevent, unconscious though he remained of his celebrity, was well rewarded for his good deed: in the first place, because it gave him great satisfaction; secondly because he had much less work to do; and thirdly because he was able to smoke three times as much as in the past, and with a particular relish, since it was Monsieur Madeleine who paid for the tobacco. B
ut the nuns never adopted the name ‘Ultime’; they referred to Valjean as ‘the other Fauvent’.
Had those saintly ladies possessed the acuity of a Javert they might have been struck by the fact that whenever there was any errand to be run, outside the convent walls, it was always the old, crippled Fauvent who went, and never his brother. But, perhaps because eyes intent upon God are blind to earthly things, or perhaps because they were too interested in watching one another, they never noticed this.
It may be added that Jean Valjean was wise in his policy of lying low. Javert kept the district under close observation for an entire month. For Valjean the convent was an island in a hostile sea, his world was bounded by its walls. He saw enough of the sky to ensure his peace of mind and enough of Cosette to ensure his happiness. A new and tranquil life began for him.
He lived with Fauchelevent in the shanty at the bottom of the garden. The ramshackle building, which was still standing in 1845, consisted, as we have said, of three rooms with bare plaster walls. The largest of them was given to Monsieur Madeleine on the insistence of Fauchelevent, although Jean Valjean protested. The only adornment of this room, apart from the two nails on which hung his gardener’s hod and his knee-strap, was a royalist bank-note for ten livres, issued in La Vendée in 1793 and nailed to the wall by Fauchelevent’s predecessor, a former chouan who had died in the convent.
Valjean was an excellent gardener. Having started life as a tree-pruner he had no difficulty in returning to this trade. It will be recalled that he knew many secrets of country lore. The trees in the orchard were mostly of mixed strain; by pruning and grafting he greatly improved their yield.
Cosette was allowed to spend an hour with him every day, and since he was very much better company than the nuns, she adored him. She would come running to the cottage when the hour struck, filling it with her presence, and Valjean would glow with a pleasure heightened by the pleasure he gave her. It is a charming quality of the happiness we inspire in others that, far from being diminished like a reflection, it comes back to us enhanced. At times when she was playing with the other children he would watch them at a distance and he could always distinguish her laughter from the rest.
For she learned to laugh, and as she did so her whole appearance changed, its darkness was dispelled. Laughter is a sun that drives out winter from the human face. She was still not pretty but she was becoming a delightful little girl, capable of saying most sensible things in her soft, childish voice. When she went indoors at the end of the recreation period Valjean would gaze at the classroom windows, and he would get up at night to look at the windows of her dormitory.
God works in His own way. The convent itself, with Cosette, sustained and completed the transformation of Jean Valjean which the bishop had begun. It is certain that one of the paths of virtue leads to the sin of Pride, a bridge built by the devil himself. Jean Valjean had been tending in this direction when Providence brought him to Petit-Picpus. When he compared himself with the bishop he felt humble and unworthy; but as the years passed he had begun to compare himself with other men, and pride crept in. Perhaps, who knows, he would have lapsed again into hatred.
The convent had put a stop to this. It was his second place of confinement. In his youth, at what for him had been the beginning of life, and later, all too recently, he had known another, an ugly, terrible place whose harshness seemed to him an iniquitous distortion of justice, a crime on the part of the law. After prison, a convent: from being an inmate of the one he had become an observer of the other, and he scrupulously compared them in his mind.
At times, leaning on his spade, he would let his thoughts drift in meditation. He would recall the wretchedness of his former companions. They rose at dawn and worked till dark, such sleep as they were allowed being on plank-beds with the thinnest of mattresses in rooms warmed only during the harshest winter months. They wore hideous red caps and, as a concession, cotton trousers in the hot season and a woollen cloak in the cold. They drank no wine and were allowed meat only when on hard labour. They lived without names, were known only by numbers and to some extent turned into numbers themselves, eyes and voices lowered, hair cropped, subject to the lash and to constant humiliation.
Then his thoughts would turn to this other community. These women, too, had cropped hair, eyes and voices lowered, not in humiliation but under the mockery of the world, and their shoulders bore the marks not of the lash but of the scourging of their self-inflicted discipline. They too had discarded their worldly names, but in favour of others more austere. Never did they eat meat or drink wine, and they often went without food until evening. They were clad, not in red but in black woollen robes like shrouds, oppressive in summer and insufficient in winter, nothing added or subtracted according to the season, no comfort of linen in summer or wool in winter; and for six months in the year they wore hair-shirts which induced fever. They lived in unrelieved cold, in cells where no fire was ever lighted, and they slept, not on mattresses but on straw. Nor were they allowed to sleep in peace after the day’s work but must rise out of the first warmth of slumber to pray in the ice-cold, gloomy chapel, kneeling on its stones. And each must take her share in the ritual of atonement, kneeling for twelve hours on end, or prostrate with her head on her crossed arms.
Those others had been men, these were women. The men had been criminals – thieves and murderers, bandits, fire-raisers, patricides. And what crime had these women committed? They had committed none.
On the one side, outrage, sacrilege, violence, all the forms that evil can take; on the other side perfect innocence almost risen above the world in a mysterious Assumption, holding to earth only through virtue and holding to Heaven through sanctity. On one side the whispered avowal of crimes committed; on the other side, the open confession of faults – such faults! – and such crimes! On the one side a stench, and on the other an ineffable perfume. On the one side a moral distemper, kept out of sight and isolated under the law, which slowly destroyed its victims; on the other side a chaste seclusion of souls inhabiting the same dwelling. There utter darkness and here shadow; but a shadow filled with light, a light filled with radiance.
Two places of slavery, but in the first a possible end, the legal limit of the sentence, the hope of escape; in the second perpetuity, with no other aspiration than, in the distant future, that light of liberty that men call death. In the first, only chains of metal, in the second the chains of faith.
And what came out of these places? From the first a vast malediction, a gnashing of teeth, in hatred, the evil of despair, a rage against all human kind, and a mockery of Heaven; from the second, blessedness and love. Yet in both places, so alike and so unlike, two sets of utterly different beings were accomplishing the same task, a work of expiation.
In the case of the first, Jean Valjean could understand this – personal expiation, expiation of oneself. But he was hard put to it to understand the second, being beyond reproach, beyond blemish, and he asked himself, trembling – expiation of what, and for what? The voice of his conscience answered him: the most godlike of human bounties, expiation on behalf of others.
Here we refrain from all personal reflections. We are simply the narrator, putting ourself in the place of Jean Valjean and seeking to convey what was in his thoughts. He was witness of the sublime height of self-abnegation, the highest possible peak of virtue – innocence which forgives the faults of men and expiates them in their stead; servitude accepted, suffering endured, torment sought after by souls that have not sinned in order to spare those that have; the love of mankind lost in the love of God, yet still preserved and suppliant; weak and gentle souls, bearing the affliction of those who are punished and smiling with those who are recompensed.
He thought of this and remembered that he had dared to pity himself! Often he would rise in the night and listen to the hymns of thanksgiving of those innocent beings bowed down by austerity, and the blood ran cold in his veins as he reflected that the voices of the justly chastised wer
e raised only in blasphemy, and that he himself, no better than the rest, had shaken his fist at God.
Thinking of the events of his own life, he was moved to profound reflection, as though hearing the deep voice of Providence itself. The escapes, the barriers surmounted, the chances taken at the risk of death, the hard and difficult climb, the struggles to escape from one place of expiation which in the end had brought him to this other? Was not this an allegory of his life?
This house, too, was a prison, dismally resembling the one from which he had escaped, though it had been conceived with no such thought in mind. He was again confronted by locks and bars, but these protected angels. The high walls he had seen caging tigers here enclosed lambs. This was a place of expiation, but not of chastisement; yet it was more austere, more sombre and relentless than the other. These virgins were more harshly subdued than the convicts. A cold, rough wind, the wind that had frozen his youth, had blown through the nest of vultures; but the wind blowing through this dovecote was keener and more piercing still.
Why?
When he thought of these things his whole being was abased before the mystery of the Sublime. All pride left him; he looked unsparingly at himself, felt his weakness and often wept. Everything that had entered his life in the past six months brought him back to the saintly injunctions of the bishop, Cosette through love, the convent through humility.
Sometimes in the dark of evening, when the garden was deserted, he was to be seen on his knees on the pathway bordering the chapel, outside the window he had peered through on the night of his arrival and turned towards the place where he knew the sister who was making atonement would be prostrate in prayer. Thus kneeling to her, he too prayed. It seemed that he dared not kneel directly to God.
The things that now surrounded him, the peace of the garden, the scent of the flowers, the gaiety and laughter of the children, the grave simplicity of the nuns, the silence of the cloister, these things possessed his being until by degrees his very soul was informed with them, peace and silence and simplicity, the scent of flowers and of happiness. And he thought that at two critical moments in his life two of God’s houses had taken him in, the first when all other doors were closed and human society rejected him, and the second when society was again his enemy and the prison gates were again open: without the first he would have drifted into a life of crime, without the second into a life of torment. His whole heart was melted in gratitude and his love was magnified.
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