A STROLLER forty years ago penetrating beyond the Salpêtrière, by way of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital as far as the Barrière d’Italie, would have come to a region where Paris seemed to disappear. It was not a wilderness, for there were inhabitants; not country, for there were streets and houses; not town, for the streets were rutted like country roads, and grass grew in them; nor was it a village, for the houses were too high. What, then was it? It was an inhabited place where there was no one, a deserted place where there was someone, a city boulevard, a Paris street, wilder by night than the forest, more melancholy by day than a graveyard. It was the ancient quarter of the horse-market, the Marché-aux-Chevaux.
Should he go beyond the crumbling walls of the market and even beyond the Rue du Petit-Banquier, past a courtyard enclosed in high walls, then an open space with stacks of tanner’s bark looking like giant beaver-dams, then a timber-yard, then a long, ruined, moss-covered wall on which flowers grew in the spring, then a dismally decrepit building bearing the legend Défense d’afficher, our bold explorer, having ventured thus far into the unknown, would find himself in the Rue des Vignes-Saint-Michel. Here, close by a factory and between two garden walls, there stood in those days an ancient building which seemed at first sight to be no bigger than a cottage but was in fact as vast as a cathedral. Only one gabled end was visible from the street, and a single window. The rest was hidden, and it was all on one floor.
A detail which might have struck the observer was that whereas the door was only suited to a cottage, the window, had it been built of shaped stone instead of plastered cob, would have been worthy of a mansion. The door itself was nothing but a makeshift collection of planks held together by crudely cut crossbars. It opened directly on to a steep stairway as wide as itself, with high muddied treads, which from the street looked like a ladder vanishing into the darkness between two walls. At the top of the misshapen door-frame was a thin transverse beam in which a triangular aperture had been cut to allow the passage of light and air when the door was closed. On the inside of the door the figure 52 had been inscribed with an inked brush, but on the outside, above this aperture, was the figure 50, giving rise to some confusion. Where exactly was one? No. 50 on the outside, 52 inside. A few nondescript, dusty-coloured rags served as a curtain over the aperture.
The window was wide and lofty, with large panes and Venetian shutters; but the panes had been damaged in a variety of ways which were both concealed and made manifest by ingenious bandaging with strips of paper, and the shutters, unhinged and hanging loose, were more a threat to the passer-by than a protection to the inmates. A good many of the horizontal slats were missing and had been crudely replaced by boards nailed vertically: what had once been Venetian had ended up more like the conventional shutters.
This contrast in the same house between the squalid door and the respectable if dilapidated shutters had something of the effect of two ill-assorted beggars walking side-by-side, wholly different beneath their tattered garments, one having been a beggar all his life and the other having been once a gentleman.
The stairs led up to a huge building which looked like a converted warehouse. On either side of a long central corridor were a series of compartments of varying sizes, habitable at a pinch and more like cubicles than prison-cells. Such windows as they possessed looked out on to the waste land surrounding the house. The whole place was sepulchral – dark, gloomy, and unpleasant – pierced, according to whether the crevices were in the roof or the door, by chilly rays of sunlight or icy draughts. An interesting and picturesque feature of buildings of this kind is the enormous size of the spiders that infest them.
To the left of the door on the boulevard, at about shoulder height, a small walled-up window formed a recess piled with stones which children threw into it as they passed.
A part of this building has recently been demolished, but enough remains to show what it was originally like. The whole was probably not more than a century old – youth in the case of a church, but old age in the case of an ordinary house. It would seem that man’s dwellings share his brevity and those of God His eternity.
The postmen called the tenement No. 50–52; but it was known in the neighbourhood as the house of Gorbeau. We must explain how this name originated.
The snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, who collect anecdotes as a botanist collects wild flowers and register unimportant dates in their memories, will know that round about the year 1770 there were two leading attorneys practising at the Palais du Châtelet, whose names respectively were Corbeau and Renard – Crow and Fox. The echo of La Fontaine’s fable was too good to be overlooked, and scurrilous verses, parodying La Fontaine, went the rounds of the Palais.
The worthy practitioners, embarrassed by the innuendoes and ruffled in their dignity by the laughter that pursued them, resolved to change their names and applied to the King for permission to do so. The plea was presented to Louis XV on the day when two clerical dignitaries, one the Papal Nuncio and the other the Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon, both on their knees, had in the presence of His Majesty each placed a slipper on the naked foot of Madame Du Barry as she got out of bed. The King, still laughing, moved on from the bishops to the two attorneys who, by his indulgence, were permitted to make trifling alterations to their names. Maître Corbeau was given leave to add a tail to his initial letter, so that he became Gorbeau. Maître Renard was less fortunate, the only concession he obtained was leave to add a ‘P’ to his name, so that Renard the fox became Prenard the grasper, which was scarcely an improvement.
According to local tradition Maître Gorbeau had been the owner of No. 50–52 Boulevard de l’Hôpital and had, moreover, been responsible for its impressive window. Hence the name la maison Gorbeau.
Among the trees lining the boulevard there stands, outside No. 50–52, a tall, moribund elm; almost exactly opposite is the Rue de la Barrière des Gobelins, at that time an unsurfaced roadway in which there were no houses, planted with stunted trees that were green or mud-spattered according to the season, leading directly to the Paris wall. A smell of copper sulphate blew in waves from a near-by factory. The barrier was near by, for in 1823 the City wall still existed.
The barrier itself had macabre associations. It was on the road to Bicêtre, along which, under the Empire and Restoration, criminals condemned to death were brought into Paris on the day of their execution. It was also the scene of the crime known as the ‘Fontainebleau barrier murder’, of which the perpetrators were not discovered, an ugly mystery that has never been resolved. A little further on is the Rue Croulebarbe where Ulbach stabbed the goat-girl from Ivry in a thunderstorm, amid all the trappings of melodrama. Still further on are the polled elms of the Barrière Saint-Jacques, masking the scaffold, that shabby and ignominious place of execution contrived by a bourgeois, shop-keeping society which sought to thrust capital punishment out of sight, being too pusillanimous to abolish it with magnanimity or to maintain it with authority.
Thirty-seven years ago, setting aside the Place Saint-Jacques, which seemed to have been expressly designed for its purpose and was always horrible, the most depressing spot in the whole dreary boulevard, and it is little more attractive today, was the site occupied by the tenement building, No. 50–52.
Respectable dwellings only began to appear some twenty-five years later. The place was utterly dismal. In addition to its own funereal aspect one was conscious of being between the Salpêtrière, part women’s prison and part mad-house, of which the cupola was visible, and Bicêtre with its barrier – between the madness of women and the madness of men. As far as sight could reach there was nothing to be seen but slaughter-houses, the wall, and an occasional factory looking like a barracks or a monastery; shanties and heaps of rubble, strips of old wall black as shrouds and of new wall white as winding-sheets; trees in parallel rows, featureless edifices in long, cold lines, with the monotony of right-angles. No accident of terrain, not an architectural flourish, not a bend or curve: a glacial setting, rectilinear and hideous. Nothing chills the heart like symmetry, for symmetry is ennui and ennui is at the heart of grief, Despair is a yawn. It is possible to conceive of something even more terrible than a hell of suffering, and that is a hell of boredom. If such a hell exists, that stretch of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital might have been the road leading to it.
But at nightfall, particularly in winter, at the time when the last light faded and the wind whipped the last brown leaves off the elms, when the darkness was at its deepest, unrelieved by stars, or when wind and moonlight pierced gaps in the clouds, the boulevard became suddenly frightening. Its straight lines seemed to merge and dissolve in shadow like stretches of infinity. The pedestrian was reminded of the gallows-tradition of that place, and its solitude, which had been the scene of so many crimes, was nightmarish. There seemed to be pitfalls hidden in the dark, every patch of deeper shadow was suspect, the spaces between the trees resembled graves. By day the place was ugly; in the evening it was melancholy; at night it was sinister.
On summer evenings old women might be seen seated under the trees on wooden benches half-rotted by the rain. They were much given to begging.
For the rest, the quarter, which looked more outmoded than antique, was already being transformed. Anyone wanting to see it as it had been needed to make haste, for every day brought some small change. The terminus of the Paris-Orléans railway line, situated only a short distance from the old faubourg, has for the past twenty years contributed to the process. Wherever a railway-station is built on the outskirts of a capital city it leads to the death of a suburb and the growth of the town. It would seem that around these centres of mass-movement, the powerful machines, the huge horses of civilization devouring coal and spewing flame, the polluted earth trembles and splits open to swallow up the ancient dwellings of men and allow new ones to appear.
Since the terminus of the Orléans line invaded the territory of the Salpêtrière, the ancient, narrow streets round the Fosses Saint-Victor and the Jardin des Plantes are being swept away by the stream of coaches, fiacres, and omnibuses which in the course of time have thrust back the houses on either side. These are phenomena which, however improbable they may seem, are nevertheless fact; and just as it may truly be said that the sun causes the southern aspects of city houses to vegetate and grow, so it is undeniable that the press of traffic widens the streets. The signs of a new life become manifest. In the most backward corners of that old, provincial quarter, paving stones made their appearance and sidewalks began to be built even before there were any walkers. On a memorable morning in July 1845, the smoke of tar-wagons was to be seen, and it may be said that on that day civilization reached the Rue Lourcine and Paris spread to the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.
Jean Valjean came to a stop outside the Gorbeau tenement. Like a bird of prey he had sought out the remotest spot he could find for the building of his nest. Still carrying Cosette, he got a sort of passkey out of his waistcoat pocket, opened the door and, after closing it carefully behind him, climbed the stairs.
Arrived at the corridor, he produced another key with which he opened one of the doors. The room he entered, again at once closing the door, was a fair-sized garret furnished with a mattress on the floor, a table, a few chairs, and a lighted stove of which the glow was visible in one corner. A street-lamp on the boulevard cast a faint light into this drab interior. At the far end was a small inner room with a trestle-bed. Jean Valjean laid the child on this without waking her.
A candle stood in readiness on the table, together with flint and steel. After lighting it Valjean stood gazing at Cosette as he had done the night before, with an expression of devoted tenderness that was almost exaltation. With the perfect confidence that denotes the presence of either great strength or extreme weakness she had fallen asleep without knowing whom she was with, and she continued to sleep without knowing where she was. He bent and kissed her hand. Nine months previously he had kissed the hand of her mother, when she, too, had fallen asleep. The same, almost religious feeling, anguished and compassionate, pierced him to the heart. He went on his knees beside the bed.
The new day dawned with Cosette still sleeping, while the pallid beams of December sunshine, filtering through the garret window, traced long patterns of light and shadow on the ceiling. But suddenly the noise of a heavily-laden cart rumbling over the cobbles in the boulevard caused her to start up trembling.
‘Yes, madame!’ she cried. ‘Yes. Yes. I’m coming!’
Still half-asleep, she scrambled out of bed and groped about her.
‘Heavens, where’s my broom?’
Then, with eyes fully opened, she saw the smiling face of Jean Valjean.
‘Why, of course!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s all true! Good morning, monsieur.’
Children instantly and familiarly accept rejoicing and happiness because this is their natural element. Seeing Catherine at the foot of the bed, Cosette picked her up and, while she nursed her, showered Valjean with questions. Where were they? – Was Paris a very huge place? – Was Madame Thénardier a long way off? – Would she come after them? … And suddenly she exclaimed: ‘How lovely it is here!’
It was the most squalid of garrets, but she felt free.
‘Don’t you want me to sweep the floor?’ she presently asked.
‘No,’ said Jean Valjean. ‘You’re to enjoy yourself.’
Thus the day passed. Without caring that she understood nothing of what had occurred, Cosette was inexpressibly happy with her protector and her doll.
At daybreak the next morning Jean Valjean again stood at Cosette’s bedside waiting for her to awake.
Something quite new was taking place within him.
Valjean had never loved anything. For twenty-five years he had been alone in the world, never a father, a lover, husband, or friend. In prison he had been sullen, gloomy, chaste, ignorant, and ferocious. Nothing had ever touched the heart of that ex-convict. The feeling he had once had for his sister and her children had become so remote as to have vanished almost entirely. He had done what he could to find them and, failing, had dismissed them from his mind. Such is the way of human nature. The other affections of his youth, if there had been any, were wholly lost.
But when he had seen Cosette, snatched her up and borne her out of captivity, something had stirred within him. Everything in him that was passionate and capable of affection had been aroused and had flowed out to the child. To stand at her bedside watching while she slept was to experience a shiver of ecstasy. He discovered a mother’s agonized tenderness without knowing what it was, for nothing is deeper or sweeter than the overwhelming impulse of a heart moved suddenly to love – a saddened, ageing heart made new!
But since he was fifty-five years old and Cosette only eight, all the loves that his life might have contained were now merged in a kind of splendour. This was the second of the two visions he had met with. The bishop had taught him the meaning of virtue; Cosette had now taught him the meaning of love. Their first days passed in this bemused state.
Cosette also became a different being, but without knowing it, poor child. She had been so young when her mother left her that she did not remember her. Like all children, like the tendrils of a vine reaching for something to cling to, she had looked for love, but she had not found it. They had all repulsed her, the Thénardiers, their children, and other children. There had been a dog which she had loved, but it had died. Apart from this, nothing had needed her and no one had wanted her. The sad fact was that at the age of eight her heart had been cold and untouched, not through any fault of hers or because she lacked the capacity to love, but because there had been no possibility of loving. But now, from the first day they were together, everything in her that could think and feel went out to this man. She experienced something that she had never known before, a sense of unfolding.
She did not think of Jean Valjean as being old and poor; she found him handsome, just as she found their garret pretty. Such were the effects of youth and happiness, in which change of scene and a new way of life also played their part. Nothing is more charming than the glow of happiness amid squalor. There is a rose-tinted attic in all our lives.
The gulf that nature had created between Valjean and Cosette, the gap of fifty years, was bridged by circumstance. The over-riding force of destiny united these two beings so sundered by the years and so akin in what they lacked. Each fulfilled the other, Cosette with her instinctive need of a father, Valjean with his instinctive need of a child. For them to meet was to find, and in the moment when their hands first touched, they joined. Seeing the other, each perceived the other’s need. In the deepest sense of the words it may be said that in their isolation Jean Valjean had been a widower, as Cosette was an orphan; and in this sense he became her father. Her instant trust of him that evening in the wood, when his hand had clasped her own, was, after all, no delusion. The man’s entry into the life of the child had truly been the coming of God …
Valjean had been careful in his choice of a refuge, and he seemed to have found one which afforded them absolute security. The room and inner-room which they occupied possessed the only window looking on to the boulevard, and since this was so they could not be overlooked by their neighbours, either within the house or across the way.
The lower part of No. 50–52, which was used as a storehouse by market-gardeners, had no communication with the single upper storey, being separated from it by a solid floor in which there was no trap or stairway, as it were the diaphragm of the building. The upper storey, as we have said, consisted of a number of rooms and a few attics. Of these only one was occupied, by an old woman who did Valjean’s housework. The rest were empty.
It was this old woman, who went by the title of ‘chief tenant’ but in fact acted as caretaker, who had let the room to him on Christmas Eve. He had told her that he was a gentleman of private means, ruined by the failure of the Spanish loan, and that he proposed to live there with his granddaughter. He had paid six months in advance and instructed her to furnish the room and its inner chamber in the manner we have described, and it was she who had lit the stove and prepared everything for their arrival.
Weeks passed, and the two lived happily in their drab dwelling. Children sing at daybreak as naturally as the birds, and Cosette laughed, chattered, and sang throughout the day. It happened sometimes that Jean Valjean would take her small, red hand, still roughened by chilblains, and kiss it. More accustomed to being beaten, the poor child did not know what to make of this and was plunged in embarrassment. And at moments she grew serious and reflected on the black dress she wore. She was clad no longer in rags but in mourning, emerging from misery into life.
Valjean was teaching her to read and it sometimes occurred to him, as he listened to her spell out the words, that when he had taught himself to read in prison it had been with the idea of putting it to nefarious use. Instead of which, he was passing it on to a child. This brought a singularly gentle smile to his lips, and it led into wide fields of speculation. He had a sense that it was foreordained, that he was serving the purpose of a Being higher than man. To teach Cosette to read, to help her to be happy, this was becoming the mainspring of his life. He talked to her about her mother and taught her to say her prayers. She called him ‘father’, never any other name.
He was content to spend hours watching her and listening to her chatter as she dressed and undressed her doll. Life now seemed to him full of interest, the world seemed good and just; he harboured no grudge against any man, and saw no reason why he should not live to a ripe old age now that this child loved him. He saw a radiant future enchantingly lighted by Cosette. None of us is wholly free from egotism. There were moments when it pleased him to think that she would never be pretty.
This is a personal opinion, but to be wholly frank we must say that we can see no certainty that Jean Valjean, at the point he had reached when he came to love Cosette, would have been able to continue on the path of virtue without that moral support. He had been confronted by new aspects of the malice of men and the sufferings of society, limited aspects depicting only one side of the truth – the lot of women summed up in Fantine, public authority embodied in Javert. He had been sent back to prison, this time for a good deed. Renewed bitterness had assailed him, disgust and weariness, to the point that even the sacred memory of the bishop was perhaps at moments eclipsed. It must certainly have been reborn later, luminous and triumphant, but at that stage it was greatly diminished. Who can be sure that Jean Valjean had not been on the verge of losing heart and giving up the struggle? In loving he recovered his strength. But the truth is that he was no less vulnerable than Cosette. He protected her and she sustained him. Thanks to him she could go forward into life, and thanks to her he could continue virtuous. He was the child’s support and she his mainstay. Sublime, unfathomable marvel of the balance of destiny!
As a precaution, Jean Valjean never left the house during the day. He walked for an hour or two every evening, sometimes alone but often with Cosette, choosing deserted side-streets, or going into churches after nightfall. The church he visited most often was Saint-Médard, which was the nearest. When he did not take Cosette she stayed with the old woman, the ‘chief tenant’; but nothing delighted her more than to be allowed to go with him. They walked hand-in-hand and he talked quietly to her, enchanted by her gaiety.
The old woman cleaned and cooked and did their shopping. They lived modestly, always with a little fire but like people who are hard-pressed for money. Valjean had added nothing to the furnishings of their apartment, but he had replaced the glass-paned door of Cosette’s inner room with a solid one.
He still wore his yellow coat, black breeches, and battered hat. The people of the neighbourhood supposed him to be very poor, and now and then, when he was out walking, a good-natured housewife would stop and offer him a sou. He accepted it, bowing. But it also sometimes happened that, encountering some poor wretch begging for charity, he would look cautiously about him, furtively thrust a coin into his hand, often silver, and then hurriedly walk on. This was unwise. He became known in the neighbourhood as ‘the beggar who gives alms’.
The ‘chief tenant’, a soured old creature consumed with envious curiosity concerning her neighbours, took a great interest in Jean Valjean without his realizing it. She was hard of hearing, which made her talkative, and she had retained only two of her teeth, one on the upper jaw and one on the lower, which she constantly clicked together. She asked Cosette endless questions which the child could not answer, knowing nothing except that she came from Montfermeil. One day the old woman caught sight of Valjean entering one of the empty rooms on the corridor in what seemed to her a suspicious manner. She crept after him like a cat and watched through a chink in the door, which he had closed. No doubt as an added precaution, he was standing with his back to the doorway. She saw him reach into his pocket and take out a case containing scissors and thread. He then unstitched a part of the lining of his tail-coat and brought out a yellowed piece of paper which he unfolded. The old woman saw to her amazement that it was a thousand-franc note, only the second or third that she had seen in her whole life. She fled in great alarm.
A few minutes later Valjean came up to her and asked her to be so good as to change the note, saying that it was the quarterly instalment of his income which he had drawn the day before. Where had he drawn it? she wondered. He had not left the house until six, by which time the State savings bank would be closed. She set off on her errand turning the matter over in her mind, and the thousand-franc note, embroidered and multiplied, became the subject of many excited conversations among the housewives of the Rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel.
It happened a few days later that Jean Valjean, in his shirtsleeves, was sawing firewood in the corridor, while the old woman tidied his room. She was there alone, Cosette being in the corridor with Valjean. The yellow coat was hanging from a nail and the old woman examined it. The lining had been re-stitched. Prodding it carefully with her fingers she seemed to feel thicknesses of paper in the tails and lapels – undoubtedly more thousand-franc notes!
She also discovered that there were a great many things in the pockets, not only the scissors, needle and thread that she had already seen, but also a fat wallet, a very large clasp-knife and, highly suspect, several wigs of different colours. Every pocket in the coat seemed to contain some kind of provision against a possible emergency.
Meanwhile the winter was drawing to a close.
There was a beggar with a pitch beside a condemned public well near the church of Saint-Médard on whom Jean Valjean bestowed alms, rarely passing the spot without giving him a few sous. Sometimes he talked to him. But there were those who said that the beggar was a police informer. He was a one-time beadle, aged seventy-five, who constantly intoned prayers.
On a certain evening Valjean went that way unaccompanied by Cosette. The beggar was in his usual place, hard by a street-lamp that had just been lighted, squatting as usual with his body bent forward, apparently praying. Valjean stopped and thrust the customary gift into his hand. As he did so the beggar looked up and gazed searchingly at him, then quickly bowed his head. It had happened in an instant, but it gave Valjean a shock. He seemed to have caught a glimpse, by the light of the street-lamp, not of the vacant, devotional countenance of the beggar, but of quite another face that was already known to him. It was like suddenly encountering a tiger in the dark. He stepped back, frozen with alarm, not knowing whether to stay or run, to speak or be silent, and stared at the beggar who, with his head now hidden beneath a tattered covering, seemed to have forgotten his existence. In that critical moment some instinct of self-preservation restrained Jean Valjean from speaking a word. The beggar looked precisely as usual, the same huddled figure, the same rags. ‘I’m mad,’ thought Valjean. ‘I’m dreaming. The thing’s impossible.’ Nevertheless he returned home in a state of profound disquiet, scarcely daring to admit, even to himself, that the face he thought he had glimpsed was that of Javert.
Pondering the matter that night, he regretted not having spoken to the man so as to oblige him to raise his head again. The next evening he went back and found him there as usual. ‘Good evening, old man,’ he said resolutely and handed him a sou. The beggar looked up and said in a quavering voice, ‘Thank you, thank you, kind sir.’ It was unquestionably the old beadle.
Valjean was so entirely reassured that he could laugh at himself. ‘How the deuce could I have mistaken him for Javert? I’m beginning to see things.’ And he thought no more about it.
At about eight o’clock a few evenings later, when he was giving Cosette a reading-lesson in his room, he heard the street door of the house open and close. This was unusual. The old woman, the house’s only other inhabitant, always went to bed at nightfall to save candles. Jean Valjean signed to Cosette to keep quiet. Someone was coming up the stairs. It was possible that the old woman, feeling unwell, had gone out to the apothecary. The footsteps on the stairs sounded like those of a man; but she wore heavy shoes, and nothing sounds more like the footsteps of a man than those of an old woman. Nevertheless, Valjean blew out his candle.
He sent Cosette to her room, telling her in a low voice to go quietly, and as he was in the act of kissing her on the forehead the footsteps ceased. Jean Valjean stayed silent and motionless, still seated in his chair with his back to the door and holding his breath. After a while, having heard nothing more, he turned cautiously round and saw through a crevice in the door a gleam of light that was like a sinister star in the surrounding darkness. Someone with a candle was outside.
Several minutes passed and then the light vanished. But there was no sound of footsteps, which suggested that the person listening at the door had removed his shoes. Valjean flung himself fully clad on his bed and did not close his eyes all night.
At daybreak, when he was on the verge of falling asleep, he was aroused by the creaking of a door along the corridor; then he heard footsteps sounding like those of the person who had climbed the stairs the night before. He leapt up and put an eye to his keyhole, which was a large one, hoping to catch a glimpse of the intruder. It was a man, as he had suspected, and this time he went past Valjean’s room without stopping. The corridor was too dark for his face to be visible, but as he reached the top of the stairs he was silhouetted against the light coming from outside and Valjean had a full view of him from behind. He saw a tall man clad in a long tail-coat with a cudgel under his arm. A man with the formidable outline of Javert.
Valjean might have tried to get a better look at him through the window overlooking the boulevard, but this would have entailed opening the window, which he was afraid to do. Clearly the man had used a key to enter the house. But who had provided him with a key? What did it mean?
When the old woman came in at seven to do the room, Valjean looked hard at her but asked no questions. Her manner was unchanged. As she was sweeping the floor she said:
‘Did monsieur hear someone come in last night?’
To a person of her age, living on that boulevard, eight o’clock was the same as midnight.
‘Now you mention it, I did,’ he answered casually. ‘Who was it?’
‘It was the new tenant. He has just moved in.’
‘What is his name?’
‘I don’t exactly remember. A Monsieur Dumont or Daumont – something like that.’
‘And what kind of man is he, this Monsieur Dumont?’
She looked at him with her small, foxy eyes and said:
‘He’s a rentier – like you.’
The words may have had no especial intention, but Valjean believed that the discerned one.
When the old woman had left, he made a roll of the coins he kept in a drawer, about a hundred francs, and put it in his pocket. Although he did this with care, so that the chink of money should not be heard, a five-franc piece fell out of his hand and rolled noisily across the floor.
At dusk he went downstairs and looked cautiously up and down the boulevard. It seemed to be entirely deserted, although there could be people hidden behind the trees.
He went upstairs again and said to Cosette, ‘Come along.’
He took her hand and they left the house together.