ROUND ABOUT the middle of the last century a Judge of the High Court and member of the Parliament of Paris, having a mistress and preferring to conceal the fact – for in those days great aristocrats were accustomed to parade their mistresses, but lesser mortals kept quiet about them – built himself a small house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the unfrequented Rue Blomet, now the Rue Plumet.
The house was a two-storey villa, with two reception rooms and a kitchen on the ground-floor, two bedrooms and a sitting-room on the first floor, an attic under the roof and in the front a garden with a wide wrought-iron gate to the street. The garden was about an acre in extent, and this was all that could be seen from the street; but behind the villa there was a narrow courtyard, with, on its far side, a two-room cottage with a cellar, designed, if the need arose, to harbour a nurse and child. This cottage communicated, by a concealed door, with a very long, narrow, winding passageway, enclosed in high walls and open to the sky, so skilfully hidden that it seemed lost in the tangle of small-holdings of which it followed the many twists and turns, until eventually it emerged, by another concealed door, at the deserted end of the Rue de Babylone, in what was virtually another quarter, half-a-mile away.
This was the entrance used by the villa’s original owner, so cunningly contrived that even had anyone troubled to follow him on his frequent visits to the Rue de Babylone, they could not have guessed that his ultimate destination was the Rue Blomet. By shrewd purchases of land the ingenious magistrate had gained possession of the whole area and was thus able to construct his secret passage without anyone being the wiser. When, later, he had divided up the land and sold it for vegetable-plots and the like, the new owners had supposed that their boundary-wall was also that of their neighbour on the other side, never suspecting that in fact there were two walls with a narrow, flagged footpath between them. Only the birds had observed this curiosity, which doubtless was the subject of much interested speculation among the sparrows and finches of a century ago.
The villa, built of stone in the style of Mansart and wainscoted and furnished in the manner of Watteau, rococo within and austere without, enclosed in a triple flowering hedge, was a blend of discretion, coyness, and solemnity such as befitted an amorous diversion of the magistrature. Both it and its passage have now vanished, but it was still standing fifteen years ago. In 1793 it was bought by a speculator who intended to pull it down, but being unable to complete the purchase he was forced into bankruptcy, so that in a sense it was the house that pulled down the speculator. Thereafter it remained uninhabited, crumbling slowly to ruins as any house does that has no human occupants to keep it alive. But it still had its original furnishings and was still offered for sale or rent, as the very rare passers-by along the Rue Plumet were informed by the faded billboard fixed in 1810 to the garden gate. And towards the end of the Restoration these same observers might have noted that the billboard had been taken down and that the ground-floor shutters were no longer closed. The house was again occupied, and the fact that there were double curtains in the windows suggested the presence of a woman.
In October 1829, a gentleman getting on in life had rented the property as it stood, including, of course, the cottage at the back of the villa and the passage leading to the Rue de Babylone, and had restored the two concealed doorways. As we say, the villa was already more or less furnished. The new tenant, having made good certain deficiencies, and put in hand repairs to the stairs and parquet flooring, the windows and the square tiling of the yard, had quietly moved in with a young girl and an elderly servant, more in the manner of an interloper than a man taking possession of his own house. The event had occasioned no gossip among the neighbours for the excellent reason that there were no neighbours.
This unobtrusive tenant was Jean Valjean, and the girl was Cosette. The servant was an unmarried woman named Toussaint whom Jean Valjean had saved from the workhouse, and who was old and provincial and talked with a stammer, three attributes which had predisposed him in her favour. He had rented the property under the name of Monsieur Fauchelevent, of private means. In the events that have already been related the reader will no doubt have been even more quick to recognize Jean Valjean than was Thénardier.
But why had Jean Valjean left the Petit-Picpus convent? What had happened?
The answer is that nothing had happened.
Jean Valjean, as we know, was happy at the convent, so much so that in the end it troubled his conscience. Seeing Cosette every day, and with the sense of paternal responsibility growing in him, he brooded over her spiritual well-being, saying to himself that she was his and that nothing could take her from him, that certainly she would become a nun, being surrounded by soft inducements to do so; that the convent must henceforth be the whole world for both of them, where he would grow old while she grew into womanhood, until eventually he died and she grew old; and that, ecstatic thought, there would be no other separation between them. But as he thought about this he began to have misgivings, asking himself whether he was entitled to so much happiness, whether in fact it would not be gained at the expense of another person, a child, whereas he was already an old man; whether, in short, it was not an act of theft. He told himself that the child had a right to know something about the world before renouncing it; that to deny her in advance, without consulting her, all the joys of life on the pretext of sparing her its trials, to take advantage of her ignorance and isolated state to prompt her to adopt an artificial vocation, was to do outrage to a human being and tell a lie to God. It might be that eventually, realizing all this and finding that she regretted her vows, Cosette would come to hate him. It was this last thought, almost a selfish one and certainly less heroic than the others, that he found intolerable. He resolved to leave the convent.
He resolved upon it, recognizing with despair that it must be done. There was no serious obstacle. Five years of retreat and disappearance within those four walls had dispelled all cause for alarm, so that he could now return to the world of men with an easy mind. He had aged and everything had changed. Who would now recognize him? Moreover the risk, at the worst, was only to himself, and he had no right to condemn Cosette to imprisonment in the convent because he himself had incurred a life-sentence. What did the risk matter, anyway, compared with his duty? Finally, there was nothing to prevent him from being prudent and taking precautions. As for Cosette’s education, it was now virtually complete.
Having made up his mind he awaited a favourable opportunity, and this soon came. Old Fauchelevent died.
Jean Valjean applied to the Prioress for an audience and told her that, his brother’s death having brought him a modest legacy sufficient to enable him to live without working, he wished to leave the convent, taking his daughter with him; but since it was unjust that Cosette should have been brought up free of charge for five years without taking her vows, he begged the Reverend Mother to allow him to pay the community an indemnity of 5,000 francs. In this fashion he and Cosette departed from the Convent of the Perpetual Adoration.
When they did so he himself carried, not caring to entrust it to any other person, the small valise of which he had always kept the key in his possession. The little case had always intrigued Cosette because of the odour of embalming which emanated from it. We may add that thereafter Valjean was never separated from it. He kept it always in his bedroom, and it was the first and sometimes the only thing he took with him when he changed his abode. Cosette laughed at it, calling it ‘the inseparable’ and saying that it made her jealous.
For the rest, Valjean did not return to the outside world without profound apprehension. He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet and hid himself in it, going by the name of Ultime Fauchelevent. But at the same time he rented two apartments in Paris, partly so that he might not attract attention by always remaining in the same quarter, but also so as to have a place of retreat if he should need one and, above all, not be taken at a loss as he had been on the night when he had so miraculously escaped from Javert. Both apartments were modest and of poor appearance and were situated in widely separated parts of the town, one being in the Rue de l’Ouest and the other in the Rue de l’Homme-Armé.
Every now and then he would go to live in one or the other for a month or six weeks, taking Cosette with him but not their housekeeper, Toussaint. They were waited on by the porters of the two apartment-houses, and he let it be known that he was a gentleman of private means living outside Paris who found it convenient to keep a pied-à-terre for his use in the town. Thus this high-principled man had three homes in Paris for the purpose of evading the police.
Properly speaking, his home was in the Rue Plumet, and he had arranged matters as follows:
Cosette and the servant occupied the villa. The main bedroom with its painted pillars, the boudoir with its gilt mouldings, the late magistrate’s salon hung with tapestries and furnished with huge armchairs – all these were hers; and she also had the garden. Valjean had installed in the bedroom a bed with a canopy of ancient damask in three colours and a very fine old Persian rug bought in the Rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul, but he had enlivened these austere antique splendours with gay and elegant furnishings suited to a young girl, a whatnot, a bookcase with gold-embossed volumes, a work-table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a brightly decorated dressing-table, and a washstand of Japanese porcelain. Long damask curtains in three colours on a red background, matching the bed-canopy, draped the first-floor windows; and there were tapestry curtains on the ground floor. In winter Cosette’s little house was heated from top to bottom. Valjean himself lived in the sort of porter’s lodge across the yard, with a mattress on a truckle-bed, a plain wooden table, two rush-bottomed chairs, an earthenware water-jug, a few books on a shelf and never any fire. He dined with Cosette, and there was a loaf of black bread for him on the table. He had said to Toussaint when she first entered their employment, ‘You must understand that Mademoiselle is the mistress of the house.’ ‘But w-what about you, Monsieur?’ asked Toussaint in astonishment … ‘I am something better than the master – I am the father.’
Cosette had been taught the rudiments of housekeeping at the convent and she had charge of the household budget, which was extremely modest. Jean Valjean took her for a walk every day, always to the Luxembourg Garden and to its least frequented alleyway, and on Sundays they attended Mass, always at Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, since it was a long way from their home. That is a very poor neighbourhood and he was generous with alms, which made him well-known to the beggars haunting the church. This it was that had prompted Thénardier to address him as ‘The benevolent gentleman of the Church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas’. He liked to take Cosette with him when he visited the poor and the sick, but no visitor ever came to the house in the Rue Plumet. Toussaint did the shopping and Valjean himself etched water from a near-by pump in the boulevard. Their store of wine and firewood was kept in a sort of semi-underground cellar near the Porte-de-Babylone door, of which the walls were carved in the semblance of a cave. It had served the late magistrate as a grotto: for without a grotto, in that time of follies and petites-maisons, no clandestine love-affair had been complete.
In the Rue de Babylone door there was a box designed for the reception of letters and newspapers; but since the present occupants of the villa were accustomed to receive neither, the only use of this former receptacle of billets-doux was for the reception of tax-demands and notices concerned with guard-duty. For Monsieur Fauchelevent, gentleman of private means, was a member of the Garde Nationale, not having been able to slip through the meshes of the census of 1831. The municipal inquiries undertaken at that time had penetrated even into the Petit-Picpus convent, a hallowed institution which had endowed Ultime Fauchelevent with an aura of respectability, so that when he left it he was considered worthy to join the Garde.
Accordingly, three or four times a year Jean Valjean donned his uniform and did his spell of duty – very readily, it may be said, because this was a trapping of orthodoxy which enabled him to mingle with the outside world without otherwise emerging from his solitude. Valjean had in fact just turned sixty, the age of legal exemption, but he did not look more than fifty and had no desire in any case to escape the sergeant-major or fail the Comte de Lobau. He had no standing in the community; he was concealing his true name and identity as well as his age; but, as we say, he was very willing to be a National Guard. His whole ambition was to appear like any other man who pays his taxes; his ideal was to be an angel in private and, in public, a respectable citizen.
One detail, however, must be noted. When Valjean went out with Cosette he dressed in the manner we have described and could easily be mistaken for a retired officer. But when he went out alone, which was generally at night, he always wore workman’s clothes and a peaked cap which hid his face. Was this from caution or humility? It was from both. Cosette, accustomed by now to the strangeness of his life, scarcely noticed her father’s eccentricities. As for Toussaint, she held him in veneration and approved of everything he did. When their butcher, having caught a glimpse of him, remarked, ‘He’s a queer customer, isn’t he?’ she answered, ‘He’s a s-saint.’
None of them ever used the door on the Rue de Babylone. Except for an occasional glimpse of them through the wrought-iron gate, it would have been difficult for anyone to guess that they lived in the Rue Plumet. That gate was always locked, and Valjean left the garden untended in order that it might not attract notice.
In this, perhaps, he was mistaken.
This garden, left to its own devices for more than half a century, had become unusual and charming. Pedestrians of forty years ago stopped in the street to peer into it through the grille, having no notion of the secrets concealed behind its dense foliage. More than one dreamer in those days allowed his gaze and his thoughts to travel beyond the twisted bars of that ancient, padlocked gate hung between two moss-grown stone pillars and grotesquely crowned with a pattern of intricate arabesques.
There was an old stone bench in one corner, one or two lichen-covered statues, a few rotting remains of trellis-work that had blown off the wall; but there were no lawns or garden paths, and couch-grass grew everywhere. Gardeners had deserted it and Nature had taken charge, scattering it with an abundance of weeds, a fortunate thing to happen to any patch of poor soil. The gillyflowers in bloom were splendid. Nothing in that garden hindered the thrust of things towards life, and the sacred process of growth found itself undisturbed. The trees leaned down to the brambles, and the brambles rose up into the trees; plants had climbed and branches had bent; creepers spreading on the ground had risen to join flowers blossoming in the air, and things stirred by the wind had stooped to the level of things lingering in the moss. Trunks and branches, leaves, twigs, husks, and thorns had mingled, married and cross-bred; vegetation in a close and deep embrace had celebrated and performed, under the satisfied eye of the Creator, the holy mystery of its consanguinity, a symbol of human fraternity in that enclosure some three hundred feet square. It was no longer a garden but one huge thicket, that is to say, something as impenetrable as a forest and as populous as a town, quivering like a bird’s nest, dark as a cathedral, scented as a bouquet, solitary as a tomb, and as living as a crowd.
In the spring this giant thicket, untrammelled behind its iron gate and four walls, went on heat in the universal labour of seeding and growth, trembled in the warmth of the rising sun like an animal which breathes the scent of cosmic love and feels the April sap rise turbulent in its veins, and, shaking its tangled green mane, sprinkles over the damp earth, the crumbling statues, the steps of the villa, and even the empty street outside, a star-shower of blossom, of dew-like pearls, fruitfulness, beauty, life, rapture and fragrance. At midday a host of white butterflies hovered about it, and their fluttering in its shadows, like flakes of summer snow, was a heavenly sight. Under that gay canopy of verdure a host of innocent voices was raised, and what the twitter of birds neglected to say the buzz of insects supplied. In the evening a dreamlike haze rose up from it and enveloped it, a shroud of mist, a calm, celestial sadness covered it, and the intoxicating scent of honeysuckle and columbine emanated from it like an exquisite and subtle poison. The last calls could be heard of pigeon and wagtail nesting in the branches, and that secret intimacy of bird and tree could be felt: by day the flutter of wings rejoiced the leaves, and by night the leaves sheltered the wings.
In winter the house could just be seen through the bare, shivering tangle of the thicket. Instead of blossom and dewdrops there were the long, silvery trails of slugs winding over the thick carpet of dead leaves; but in any event, in all its aspects and in every season, that little enclosure breathed out an air of melancholy and contemplation, solitude and liberty, the absence of man and the presence of God. The rusty iron gate seemed to be saying: ‘This garden belongs to me.’
It mattered little that the streets of Paris lay all around it, the classic, stately mansions of the Rue de Varenne no more than a stone’s throw away, the dome of the Invalides very near and the Chamber of Deputies not far distant. Carriages might roll majestically along the Rue de Bourgogne and the Rue Saint-Dominique; yellow, brown, white and red omnibuses might pass at the nearby intersection; but the Rue Plumet remained deserted. The death of former house-owners, the passage of a revolution, the collapse of ancient fortunes, forty years of abandonment and neglect had restored to that favoured spot fern and hemlock, clover and foxglove, tall plants with pallid leaves, lizards, blindworms, beetles and all manner of insects, so that within those four walls there had risen from the depths of the earth an indescribable wildness and grandeur. Nature, which disdains the contrivances of men and gives her whole heart wherever she gives at all, whether in the ant-hill or the eagle’s nest, had reproduced in this insignificant Paris garden the savage splendour of a virgin forest in the New World.
Nothing is truly small, as anyone knows who has peered into the secrets of Nature. Though philosophy may reach no final conclusion as to original cause or ultimate extent, the contemplative mind is moved to ecstasy by this merging of forces into unity. Everything works upon everything else.
The science of mathematics applies to the clouds; the radiance of starlight nourishes the rose; no thinker will dare to say that the scent of hawthorn is valueless to the constellations. Who can predict the course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who can measure the action and counter-action between the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the play of causes in the depths of being, the cataclysms of creation? The cheese-mite has its worth; the smallest is large and the largest is small; everything balances within the laws of necessity, a terrifying vision for the mind. Between living things and objects there is a miraculous relationship; within that inexhaustible compass, from the sun to the grub, there is no room for disdain; each thing needs every other thing. Light does not carry the scents of earth into the upper air without knowing what it is doing with them; darkness confers the essence of the stars upon the sleeping flowers. Every bird that flies carries a shred of the infinite in its claws. The process of birth is the shedding of a meteorite or the peck of a hatching swallow on the shell of its egg; it is the coming of an earthworm or of Socrates, both equally important to the scheme of things. Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision? You may choose. A patch of mould is a galaxy of blossom; a nebula is an ant-heap of stars. There is the same affinity, if still more inconceivable, between the things of the mind and material things. Elements and principles are intermingled; they combine and marry and each increases and completes the other, so that the material and the moral world both are finally manifest. The phenomenon perpetually folds in upon itself. In the vast cosmic changes universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, borne by the mysterious flow of invisible currents, making use of everything, wasting not a single sleeper’s dream, sowing an animalcule here and shattering a star there, swaying and writhing, turning light into a force and thought into an element; disseminated yet indivisible, dissolving all things except that geometrical point, the self; reducing all things to the core which is the soul, and causing all things to flower into God; all activities from the highest to the humblest – harnessing the movements of the earth and the flight of an insect – to the secret workings of an illimitable mechanism; perhaps – who can say? – governing, if only by the universality of the law, the evolution of a comet in the heavens by the circling of infusoria in a drop of water. A machine made of spirit A huge meshing of gears of which the first motive force is the gnat and the largest wheel the zodiac.
It seemed that this garden, having been first created for the concealment of libertine mysteries, had deliberately transformed itself so as to render it suited to the harbouring of mysteries of a chaster kind. It no longer contained bowers or trim lawns, arbours or grottos, but was a place of magnificently ragged greenery that veiled it on all sides. Paphos, the town of Venus, had been turned into Eden, as though purged by some sort of repentance, and the coy retreat, so suspect in its purpose, had become a place of innocence and modesty. Nature had rescued it from the artifices of gallantry, filled it with shade and redesigned it for true love.
And in this solitude a ready heart was waiting. Love had only to show itself, and there to receive it was a temple, composed of verdure and grasses, birdsong, swaying branches, and soft shadow, and a spirit that was all tenderness and trust, candour, hopefulness, yearning, and illusion.
Cosette when she left the convent had been still not much more than a child, a little over fourteen and, as we have seen, at the ‘awkward age’. Except for her eyes she was more plain than pretty. Although she had no feature that was ugly, she was uncouth and skinny, at once shy and over-bold – in a word, a big little girl.
Her education was concluded. That is to say, she had been instructed in religion, above all in the arts of devotion; also in history, or what passed for history in the convent, geography, grammar and the parts of speech, the Kings of France, a little music and drawing, and housekeeping. But she was ignorant of all other matters, which is both a charm and a peril. A young girl’s mind must not be left too much in darkness or else too startling and too vivid imaginings may arise in it, as in a curtained room. She needs to be gently and cautiously enlightened, more by the reflection of reality than by its direct, harsh glare, a serviceable and gently austere half-light which dispels the terrors of youth and safeguards it against pitfalls. Only a mother’s instinct, that intuitive blend of maiden recollection and womanly experience, can understand the composition and the shedding of that half-light; there is no substitute for this. In the forming of a young girl’s soul not all the nuns in the world can take the place of a mother.
Cosette had had no mother, only a numerous assortment of mothers. As for Jean Valjean, with all his overflowing love and deep concern he was still no more than an elderly man who knew nothing at all.
But in this work of education, this most serious business of preparing a woman for life, how much wisdom is needed, how much skill in combating that state of profound ignorance that we call innocence! Nothing renders a girl more ripe for passion than a convent. It impels thought towards the unknown. The heart, turned in upon itself, shrinks, being unable to reach outwards, and probes more deeply, being unable to spread elsewhere. Hence the visions and fancies, the speculations, the tales invented and adventures secretly longed for, the castles of fantasy built solely in the mind, vacant and secret dwelling-places where passion may instal itself directly the door is opened. The convent is a prison which, if it is to confine the human heart, must endure for a lifetime.
Nothing could have been more delightful to Cosette when she left the convent, or more dangerous, than that house in the Rue Plumet.
It was at once the continuation of solitude and the beginning of freedom; an enclosed garden filled with a heady riot of nature; the same dream as in the convent, but with young men actually to be seen; a gate like the convent grille but giving on to the street.
Nevertheless, as we have said, when she came there Cosette was still a child. Jean Valjean made her a present of that untended garden. ‘Do what you like with it,’ he said. Cosette was at first amused by it. She explored the undergrowth and lifted stones in a search for ‘little creatures’, playing in the garden before she began to dream in it, loving it for the insects she found in the grass before she learned to love it for the stars shining through the branches above her head.
And then she wholeheartedly loved her father – that is to say, Jean Valjean – with an innocent, confiding love which made of him the most charming and desirable of companions. Monsieur Madeleine, we may recall, had read a great deal. Jean Valjean continued to do so, and had in consequence become an excellent talker, displaying the stored riches and eloquence of a humble and honest self-taught mind. His was a tough and gentle spirit, retaining just enough ruggedness to season its natural kindness. During their visits to the Luxembourg he discoursed upon whatever came into his head, drawing upon his wide reading and his past suffering. And Cosette listened while she gazed about her.
She adored him. She constantly sought him out. Where Jean Valjean was, there was contentment; and since he did not frequent the villa or the garden she was happier in the paved back-yard than in the blossoming enclosure, happier in the cottage with its rush-seated chairs than in her own tapestry-hung and richly furnished drawing-room. Jean Valjean would sometimes say, delighted at being thus pursued, ‘Now run along and leave me in peace.’
She gently chided him, with that especial charm which graces the scolding of a devoted daughter.
‘Father, it’s cold in here. Why don’t you have a carpet and a stove?’
‘Dear child, there are so many people more deserving than I who have not even a roof over their heads.’
‘Then why should I have a fire and everything else I want?’
‘Because you’re a woman and a child.’
‘What nonsense! Do you mean that men ought to be cold and uncomfortable?’
‘Some men.’
‘Very well then. I shall come here so often that you’ll have to have a fire.’
She also asked:
‘Father, why do you eat that horrid bread?’
‘For reasons, my dear.’
‘Well, if you eat it, so shall I.g’
So to prevent Cosette eating black bread Valjean changed to white.
Cosette had only vague recollections of her childhood. She prayed morning and night for the mother she had never known. The Thénardiers haunted her memory like figures in a nightmare. She remembered that one day, ‘after dark’, she had gone into the wood for water, in some place which she thought must have been far distant from Paris. It seemed to her that she had begun her life in a kind of limbo from which Jean Valjean had rescued her, and that childhood had been a time of beetles, snakes, and spiders. Drowsily meditating at night before she fell asleep, she concluded, since she had no positive reason to believe that she was Valjean’s daughter and he her father, that her mother’s soul had passed into him and come to live with her. Sometimes when he was seated she would rest her cheek on his white head and shed a silent tear upon it, thinking to herself, ‘Perhaps after all this man is my mother!’
It sounds strange, but in her profound ignorance as a convent-bred child, and since in any case maternity is totally incomprehensible to virginity, she had come to believe that her mother had been almost non-existent. She did not even know her name, and when she asked Valjean he would not answer. If she repeated the question he merely smiled, and once, when she persisted, the smile was followed by a tear. Thus did Valjean by his silence hide the figure of Fantine in darkness. Was it from instinctive prudence, from respect for the dead, or from fear of surrendering that name to the hazards of any memory other than his own?
While Cosette had been still a child Valjean had talked to her readily enough about her mother, but now that she was a grown girl he found it impossible to do so. It seemed to him that he dared not. Whether because of Cosette herself, or because of Fantine, he experienced a kind of religious horror at the thought of introducing that shade into her thoughts, and of constituting the dead a third party of their lives. The more he held that shade in reverence, the more awesome did it seem. Thinking of Fantine he was compelled to silence as though amid her darkness he discerned the shape of a finger pressed to the lips. Could it be that all the shame of which Fantine was capable, which had been so savagely driven out of her by the events of her life, had furiously returned to mount fierce guard over her in death? We who have faith in death are not among those who would reject that mystical theory. Hence the impossibility he found in himself of uttering the name of Fantine, even to Cosette.
‘Father, last night I saw my mother in a dream. She had two big wings. She must have come near to sainthood in her life.’
‘Through martyrdom,’ said Jean Valjean.
Otherwise Valjean was content. When he took Cosette out she hung proudly on his arm, happy with a full heart, and at the tokens of affection which she reserved so exclusively for himself and which he alone could inspire, his whole being was suffused with tenderness. In his rapture he told himself, poor man, that this was a state of things that would last as long as he lived; he told himself that he had not suffered enough to warrant such radiant happiness, and he thanked God from the depths of his heart for having caused him, unworthy wretch that he was, to be so loved by a creature so innocent.
One day Cosette, glancing in her mirror, exclaimed, ‘Well!’ It struck her that she was almost pretty, and the discovery threw her into a strange state of perturbation. Until that moment she had given no thought to her looks. She had seen herself in the glass but without really looking. She had been told so often that she was plain, and Jean Valjean was the only person who said, ‘It’s not true.’ Despite this she had always considered herself plain, accustoming herself to the thought with the easy acceptance of childhood. And suddenly her mirror had confirmed what Jean Valjean said. She did not sleep that night. ‘Suppose I were pretty?’ she thought. ‘How strange to be pretty!’ She thought of girls whose looks had attracted notice in the convent, and she thought, ‘Can I really be like them?’
The next day she carefully studied herself and had doubts. ‘What can have got into me?’ she thought. ‘I’m quite ugly.’ The fact was simply that she had slept badly; there were shadows under her eyes and her face was pale. It had caused her no great delight on the previous evening to think that she might be a beauty, but now she was sorry that she could not think it. She no longer looked in the glass and for more than two weeks tried to do her hair with her back to the mirror.
She was accustomed in the evenings to do embroidery, or some other kind of convent work, in the salon while Jean Valjean sat reading beside her. Looking up on one occasion, she was dismayed to find her father gazing at her with a troubled expression. And on another occasion when they were out together she thought she heard a man’s voice behind her say, ‘A pretty girl, but badly dressed’ … ‘It can’t be me,’ she thought. ‘I’m well dressed and ugly.’ She was wearing her plush hat and woollen dress.
Finally, one day when she was in the garden she heard old Toussaint say: ‘Has Monsieur noticed how pretty Mademoiselle is growing?’ She did not hear her father’s reply, but Toussaint’s words filled her with amazement. She ran up to her bedroom and, for the first time in three months, looked hard at herself in the glass. She uttered a cry, delighted by what she saw.
She was beautiful as well as pretty; she could no longer doubt the testimony of Toussaint and her mirror. Her figure had filled out, her skin was finer, her hair more lustrous, and there was a new splendour in her blue eyes. The conviction of her beauty came to her in a single instant, like a burst of sunshine; besides, other people had noticed it, Toussaint had said so and the man in the street must, after all, have been talking about her. She ran downstairs and out into the garden feeling like a queen, seeing a golden sun stream through the branches, blossom on the bough, and hearing the song of birds, in a state of dizzy rapture.
Jean Valjean, for his part, had a sense of profound, indefinable unease. For some time he had been apprehensively watching this growing radiance of Cosette’s beauty, a bright dawn to others but to himself a dawn of ill-omen. She had been beautiful for a long time without realizing it; but he had known it from the first, and the glow which enveloped her represented a threat in his possessive eyes. He saw it as a portent of change in their life together, a life so happy that any change could only be for the worse. He was a man who had endured all the forms of suffering and was still bleeding from the wounds inflicted upon him by life. He had been almost a villain and had become almost a saint; and after being chained with prison irons he was still fettered with a chain that was scarcely less onerous although invisible, that of his prison record. The law had never lost its claim on him. It might at any moment lay hands on him and drag him out of his honourable obscurity into the glare of public infamy. He accepted this, bore no resentment, wished all men well and asked nothing of Providence, of mankind or society or of the law, except one thing – that Cosette should love him.
That Cosette should continue to love him! That God would not prevent her child’s heart from being and remaining wholly his! To be loved by Cosette was enough; it was rest and solace, the healing of all wounds, the only recompense and guerdon that he craved. It was all he wanted. Had any man asked him if he wished to be better off he would have answered, ‘No.’ Had God offered him Heaven itself he would have said, ‘I should be the loser.’
Anything that might affect this situation, even ruffle the surface, caused him to tremble as at a portent of something new. He had never known much about the beauty of women, but he knew by instinct that it could be terrible. And across the gulf of his own age and ugliness, his past suffering and ignominy, he watched in dismay the superb and triumphant growth of beauty in the innocent features of this child. ‘Such loveliness!’ he thought. ‘So what will become of me?’
It was in this that the difference lay between his devotion and that of a mother. What caused him anguish would have brought a mother delight.
The first signs of change were not slow to appear.
From the morrow of the day on which she had said to herself ‘After all, I am beautiful!’ Cosette began to give thought to her appearance. The words of that unknown man in the street, that unregarded oracle, ‘Pretty, but badly dressed,’ had implanted in her heart one of the two germs that fill the life of every woman, the germ of coquetry. The other germ is love.
Being now confident of her beauty, her woman’s nature flowered within her. Wool and plush were thrust aside. Her father had never refused her anything. Instantly she knew all that there was to know about hats and gowns, cloaks, sleeves and slippers, the material that suits and the colour that matches: all that recondite lore that makes the women of Paris so alluring, so deep and so dangerous. The phrase ‘divine charmer’ was invented for the Parisienne.
In less than a month little Cosette, in her solitude off the Rue de Babylone, was not merely one of the prettiest women in Paris, which is saying a great deal, but one of the best dressed, which is saying even more. She wished that she could meet that man in the street again, just to ‘show him’ and hear what he had to say. The truth is that she was ravishing in all respects and wonderfully able to distinguish between a hat by Gérard and one by Herbaut. And Jean Valjean observed this transformation with the utmost misgiving. He who felt that he could never do more than crawl, or at the best walk, watched while Cosette grew wings.
It may be added that any woman glancing at Cosette would have known at once that she had no mother. There were small proprieties and particular conventions which she did not observe. A mother would have told her, for instance, that a young girl does not wear damask.
The first time Cosette went out in her dress and cape of black damask and her white crèpe hat, she clung to Jean Valjean’s arm in a pink glow of pride. ‘Do you like me like this?’ she asked, and he answered in a tone that was almost surly, ‘You’re charming.’
During their walk he behaved much as usual, but when they were back home he asked:
‘Are you never going to wear the other dress and hat again?’
They were in Cosette’s bedroom. She turned to the wardrobe where her school clothes were hanging.
‘Those old things! Father, what do you expect? Of course I shall never wear them again. With that monstrosity on my head I looked like a scarecrow!’
Jean Valjean sighed deeply.
From then on he found that Cosette, who had hitherto been quite content to stay at home, now constantly wanted to be taken out and about. What is the good, after all, of having a pretty face and delightful clothes if no one ever sees them? He also found that she had lost her fondness for the cottage and the back-yard. She now preferred the garden, and it did not displease her to stroll by the wrought-iron gate. Valjean, always the hunted man, never set foot in the garden. He stayed in the back-yard, like the dog.
Cosette, knowing herself to be beautiful, lost the grace of un-awareness: an exquisite grace, for beauty enhanced by innocence is incomparable, and nothing is more enchanting than artless radiance that unwittingly holds the key to a paradise. But what she lost in this respect she gained in meditative charm. Her whole being, suffused with the joy of youth, innocence, and beauty, breathed a touching earnestness.
It was at this point that Marius, after a lapse of six months, again saw her in the Luxembourg.
Cosette in her solitude, like Marius in his, was ready to be set alight. Fate, with its mysterious and inexorable patience, was slowly bringing together these two beings charged, like thunder-clouds, with electricity, with the latent forces of passion, and destined to meet and mingle in a look as clouds do in a lightning-flash.
So much has been made in love-stories of the power of a glance that we have ended by undervaluing it. We scarcely dare say in these days that two persons fell in love because their eyes met. Yet that is how one fells in love and in no other way. What remains is simply what remains, and it comes later. Nothing is more real than the shock two beings sustain when that spark flies between them.
At the moment when something in Cosette’s gaze of which she was unaware so deeply troubled Marius, she herself was no less troubled by something in his eyes of which he was equally unconscious, and each sustained the same hurt and the same good.
She had noticed him long before and had studied him in the way a girl does, without seeming to look. She had thought him handsome when he still thought her plain, but since he took no notice of her she had felt no particular interest in him. Nevertheless she could not prevent herself from noting that he had good hair, fine eyes, white teeth, and a charming voice when he talked to his friends; that although he carried himself badly, if you cared to put it that way, he walked with a grace peculiar to himself; that he seemed to be not at all stupid; that his whole aspect was one of gentle simplicity and pride; and finally that he looked poor but honest.
On the day when their eyes met and at length exchanged those first wordless avowals that a glance haltingly conveys, Cosette did not at once understand. She returned pensively to the house in the Rue de l’Ouest where Jean Valjean, as his custom was, was spending six weeks; and when, next morning, she awoke and remembered the strange young man who after treating her for so long with perfect indifference seemed now disposed to take notice of her, she was by no means sure that she welcomed the change. If anything she was inclined to resent the condescension. With something like defiance astir within her she felt, with a childlike glee, that she was about to take her revenge. Knowing that she was beautiful she perceived, however indistinctly, that she was armed. Women play with their beauty like children with a knife, and sometimes cut themselves.
We may recall Marius’s hesitation, his tremors and uncertainties. He stayed on his bench and did not venture to approach. And this provoked Cosette. She said to Valjean, ‘Let us walk that way for a change.’ Seeing that Marius did not come to her, she went to him. Every woman in these circumstances resembles Muhammad’s mountain. And besides, although shyness is the first sign of true love in a youth, boldness is its token in a maid. This may seem strange, but nothing could be more simple. The sexes are drawing close, and in doing so each assumes the qualities of the other.
On that day Cosette’s gaze drove Marius wild with delight, while his gaze left her trembling. He went away triumphant while she was filled with disquiet. From that day on they adored each other.
Cosette’s first feeling was one of confused, profound melancholy. It seemed to her that overnight her soul had turned black, so that she could no longer recognize it. The whiteness of a young girl’s soul, compound of chill and gaiety, resembles snow: it melts in the warmth of love, which is its sun.
Cosette did not know what love was. She had never heard the word spoken in an earthly sense. In the volumes of profane music which were admitted into the convent it was always replaced by some scarcely adequate synonym such as ‘dove’ or ‘treasure trove’, which had caused the older girls to puzzle over such cryptic lines as ‘Ah, the delights of treasure trove’ or ‘Pity is akin to the dove’. But Cosette when she left had been still too young to ponder these riddles. She had, in short, no word to express what she was now feeling. Is one the less ill for not knowing the name of the disease?
She loved the more deeply because she did so in ignorance. She did not know if what had happened to her was good or bad, salutary or perilous, permitted or forbidden; she simply loved. She would have been greatly astonished if anyone had said to her: ‘You don’t sleep at nights? But that is against the rules. You don’t eat? But that’s very bad! You have palpitations of the heart? How disgraceful! You blush and turn pale at the sight of a figure in a black suit in a green arbour? But that is abominable!’ She would have been bewildered and could only have replied: ‘How can I be at fault in a matter in which I am powerless and about which I know nothing?’
And it happened that love had come to her in precisely the form that best suited her state of mind, in the form of worship at a distance, silent contemplation, the deification of an unknown. It was youth calling to youth, the night-time dream made manifest while still a dream, the longed-for ghost made flesh but still without a name, without a flaw and making no demands; in a word, the lover of fantasy given a shape but still remote. Any closer contact at that early stage would have frightened Cosette, half plunged as she still was in the mists of the convent. She had a child’s terrors and all the terrors of a nun, and both still assailed her. The spirit of the convent, in which she had been bathed for five years, was only slowly evaporating from her person, and setting all the world outside aquiver. What she needed in this situation was not a lover or even a suitor but a vision. It was in this sense that she loved Marius, as something charming, dazzling and impossible. And since utmost innocence goes hand-in-hand with coquetry she smiled quite openly at him.
She looked forward throughout their walks to the moment when she would see Marius; she had a sense of inexpressible happiness; and she believed she was truly expressing all that was in her mind when she said to Jean Valjean: ‘How delightful the Luxembourg Garden is!’
Those two young people were still sundered, each in their own darkness. They did not speak or exchange greetings. They did not know each other. They saw each other, and like stars separated by the measureless spaces of the sky, they lived on the sight of one another.
Thus did Cosette gradually grow into womanhood, beautiful and ardent, conscious of her beauty but ignorant of her love. And, for good measure, a coquette by reason of her innocence.
All situations produce instinctive responses. Eternal Mother Nature obscurely warned Jean Valjean of the approach of Marius, and he trembled in the depths of his mind. He saw and knew nothing precise, but was yet fixedly conscious of an encroaching shadow, seeming to perceive something in process of growth and something in process of decline. Marius, no less on his guard, and warned according to God’s immutable law by that same Mother Nature, did his best to hide from the ‘father’. Nevertheless it happened now and then that Valjean caught a glimpse of him. Marius’s demeanour was anything but natural, he was awkward in his concealments and clumsy in his boldness. He no longer walked casually past as he had once done, but stayed seated at a distance from them with a book which he pretended to read. For whose benefit was he pretending? At one time he had worn his everyday clothes but now he always wore his best. It looked even as though he had had his hair trimmed. His expression was strange and he wore gloves. In short, Jean Valjean took a hearty dislike to the young man.
Cosette, for her part, was giving nothing away. Without knowing precisely what was happening to her, she knew that something had happened and that it must be kept secret. But her sudden interest in clothes, coming at the same time as the young man’s suddenly improved appearance, was a coincidence that struck Valjean. It was pure accident, no doubt – indeed, what could it be but accident? – but it was none the less ominous. For a long time he said nothing to her about the stranger, but eventually he could restrain himself no longer, and in a kind of desperation, like the tongue that explores an aching tooth, he remarked: ‘That looks a very dull young man.’
A year previously Cosette, still an untroubled child, might have murmured, ‘Well, I think he looks rather nice,’ and a few years later, with the love of Marius rooted in her heart, she might have said, ‘Dull and not worth looking at. I quite agree.’ But at that particular moment in her life and in the present state of her feelings, she merely replied, with surpassing calm, ‘You mean, that one over there?’ as though she had never set eyes on him before. Which caused Jean Valjean to reflect on his own clumsiness. ‘She’d never even noticed him,’ he thought. ‘And now I’ve pointed him out to her!’
The simplicity of the old and the cunning of the young! … And there is another law applying to those youthful years of agitation and turmoil, those frantic struggles of first love against first impediments: it is that the girl never falls into any trap and the young man falls into all of them. Jean Valjean opened a secret campaign against Marius which Marius, in the spell of his youthful passion, quite failed to perceive. Valjean devised countless snares. He changed the time of their visits, changed the bench, came to the garden alone, dropped his handkerchief; and Marius was caught out every time. To every question-mark planted under his nose by Valjean he responded with an ingenuous ‘yes’. Meanwhile Cosette remained so solidly fenced in with apparent indifference and un-shakeable calm that Valjean ended by concluding, ‘The young fool’s head over heels in love with her, but she doesn’t even know he exists!’
Nevertheless he was acutely apprehensive. Cosette might at any moment fall in love. Do not these things always start with indifference? And on one occasion she let slip a word that frightened him. He rose to leave the bench, where they had been sitting for well over an hour, and she exclaimed: ‘So soon?’
Still he did not discontinue their visits to the Luxembourg, not wishing to do anything out-of-the-way and fearing above all things to arouse her suspicions; but during those hours which were so sweet to the lovers, while Cosette covertly smiled at Marius, who in his state of entrancement saw nothing in the world except her smile, he darted fierce and threatening glances at the young man. He who had thought himself no longer capable of any malice now felt the return of an old, wild savagery, a stirring in the depths of a nature that once had harboured much wrath. What the devil did the infernal youth think he was up to, breaking in upon the life of Jean Valjean, prying, peering at his happiness, seeming to calculate his chances of making off with it?
‘That’s it,’ thought Valjean. ‘He’s looking for an adventure, a love-affair. A love-affair! And I? I who have been the most wretched of men am to be made the most deprived. After living for sixty years on my knees, suffering everything that can be suffered, growing old without having ever been young, living without a family, without wife or children or friends; after leaving my blood on every stone and every thorn, on every milepost and every wall; after returning good for evil and kindness for cruelty; after making myself an honest man in spite of everything, repenting of my sins and forgiving those who have sinned against me – after all this, when at last I have received my reward, when I have got what I want and know that it is good and that I have deserved it – now it is to be snatched from me! I am to lose Cosette and with her my whole life, all the happiness I have ever had, simply because a young oaf chooses to come idling in the Luxembourg!’
At these moments a strange and sinister light shone in his eyes, not that of a man looking at a man, or an enemy facing an enemy, but of a watchdog confronting a thief.
We know what followed. Marius continued to act absurdly. He followed Cosette along the Rue de l’Ouest, and the next day he spoke to the porter, who spoke to Jean Valjean. ‘There’s a young man been asking about you, Monsieur.’ It was on the day after this that Valjean gave Marius the cold glance which even he could not fail to notice, and a week later he moved out of the Rue de l’Ouest, swearing never again to set foot in that street or in the Luxembourg. They returned to the Rue Plumet.
Cosette uttered no complaint. She said nothing, asked no questions, seemed not to wish to know his reasons; she was at the stage when our greatest fear is of discovery and self-betrayal. Jean Valjean had had no experience of those particular troubles, the only attractive ones and the only ones he had never known. That is why he did not grasp the true gravity of Cosette’s silence. But he did see that she was unhappy, and this perturbed him. It was a case of inexperience meeting with inexperience.
He tried once to sound her. He asked:
‘Would you like to go to the Luxembourg?’
A flush rose on her pale cheek.
‘Yes.’
They went there but Marius was not to be seen. Three months had passed, and he had given up going there. When on the following day Valjean again asked if she would like to go there Cosette said sadly and resignedly, ‘No.’
He was shocked by her sadness and dismayed by her submissiveness. What was going on in her heart, that was so young but already so inscrutable? What changes were taking place? Sometimes instead of sleeping Valjean would sit for hours by his truckle-bed with his head in his hands; he would spend whole nights wondering what her thoughts might be, what they could possibly be. At these times his own thoughts went back despairingly to the convent, that sheltered Eden with its neglected blossoms and imprisoned virgins, where all scents and all aspirations rose straight to Heaven. How he now longed for it, that Paradise from which he had voluntarily exiled himself; how he now regretted the mood of self-abnegation and folly which had prompted him to bring Cosette out into the world! He was his own sacrificial offering, the victim of his own devotion, and he thought to himself as he sat pondering, ‘What have I done?’
But none of this was disclosed to Cosette, never the least illhumour or unkindness. For her he wore always the same gentle, smiling countenance. If there was any change to be discerned in him it took the form of greater devotion.
And Cosette languished. She missed Marius as she had rejoiced in the sight of him, in her own private fashion, without being fully aware of it. When Valjean changed the order of their daily walk, deep-seated feminine instinct suggested to her that if she displayed no particular interest in the Luxembourg Garden he would perhaps take her there again. But he seemed to accept her tacit consent, and as the weeks became months she regretted it. But too late. When at length they returned to the Luxembourg Marius was no longer there. It seemed that he had vanished from her life. That tale was over and there was nothing to be done. Could she hope ever to see him again? There was a weight in her heart that every day grew heavier, so that she no longer knew or cared whether it was winter or summer, rain or shine, whether the birds still sang, whether it was the season of primroses or dahlias, whether the Luxembourg was any different from the Tuileries, whether the laundry brought by the washerwoman was well or badly ironed, whether Toussaint had conscientiously done the day’s shopping. She had become indifferent to all everyday matters, her mind occupied with a single thought, as she gazed about her with lack-lustre eyes that saw only the emptiness from which a presence had vanished.
But of this nothing was apparent‘ to Jean Valjean except her pallor. Her manner towards him was unchanged. But the pallor worried him, and now and then he would ask, ‘Are you not well?’ and she would answer, ‘I’m quite well, father.’ Then there would come a pause, and feeling his own unhappiness she would ask, ‘But you. Are you quite well?’ and he would answer, ‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’
Thus those two beings, so exclusively and touchingly devoted, who had lived so long for each other alone, came to suffer side by side, each through the other, without ever speaking of the matter, without reproaches, each wearing a smile.
Jean Valjean was the more unhappy of the two. Youth, whatever its griefs, still has its consolations. There were moments when he suffered to the point of becoming childish, and indeed it is the quality of suffering that it brings out the childish side of a man. He felt overwhelmingly that Cosette was escaping from him, and he sought to combat this, to keep his hold on her, by providing her with dazzling distractions. This notion, childish, as we have said, but at the same time doting, by its very childishness gave him some insight into the effect of gaudy trappings on a girl’s imagination. It happened once that he saw a general in full uniform riding along the street, the Comte Coutard, military commander of Paris. He greatly envied that braided, ornate figure, and he thought to himself how splendid it would be to be dressed with a similar magnificence, how it would delight Cosette, so that when they strolled arm-in-arm past the gates of the Tuileries Palace, and the guard presented arms, she would be far too much impressed to take any interest in young men.
An unexpected shock came to dispel these pathetic fancies. They had formed the habit, since coming to live their solitary lives in the Rue Plumet, of going out to watch the sun rise, a quiet pleasure suited to those who are at the beginning of life and those who are approaching its end. To any lover of solitude, a stroll in the early morning is as good as a stroll after dark, with the added attraction of the brightness of nature. The streets are deserted and the birds in full song. Cosette, herself a bird, enjoyed getting up early. They planned these little outings the night before, he proposing and she agreeing. It was a conspiracy between them; they were out before daybreak and this was an especial pleasure to Cosette. Such harmless eccentricities delight the young.
Jean Valjean, as we know, had an especial fondness for unfrequented places, neglected nooks and corners. At this time there were many of these just beyond the Paris barriers, sparse fields that had been almost absorbed into the town, in which crops of stunted corn grew in summer and which, after reaping, looked more shaved than harvested. They were the places Valjean preferred, and Cosette did not dislike them. For him they represented solitude and for her, liberty. She could become a child again, run and frolic, leave her hat on Valjean’s knees and fill it with bunches of wild flowers. She could watch the butterflies, although she never tried to catch them; tenderness and compassion are a part of loving, and a girl cherishing something equally fragile in her heart is mindful of the wings of butterflies. She made poppy-wreaths and put them on her head where, red-glowing in the sunshine, they set off her flushed face like a fiery crown.
They kept up this habit of early morning outings even after their lives had become overcast, and so it happened that, on an October morning, in the perfect serenity of the autumn of 1831, they found themselves at daybreak near the Barrière du Maine. It was the first flush of dawn, a still, magical moment, with a few stars yet to be seen in the pale depths of the sky, the earth still dark and a shiver running over the grass. A lark, seeming at one with the stars, was singing high in the heavens, and this voice of littleness, hymning the infinite, seemed to narrow its immensity. To the east the black mass of the Val-de-Grâce rose against a steel-bright sky, with the planet Venus shining above it like a soul escaped from darkness. Everywhere was silence and peace. Nothing stirred on the high road, and on the side-lanes only occasional labourers were to be glimpsed in passing on their way to work.
Jean Valjean had seated himself on a pile of logs at the side of a lane, by the gateway of a timber-yard. He was looking towards the high road, seated with his back to the sunrise, which he was ignoring, being absorbed in one of those moments of concentrated thought by which even the eyes are imprisoned, as though in enclosing walls. There are states of meditation which may be termed vertical: when one has plunged into their depths it takes time to return to the surface. Valjean was thinking about Cosette and the happiness which might be theirs if nothing came between them, about the light with which she filled his life, enabling his soul to breathe. He was almost happy in this daydream, while Cosette, standing beside him, watched the clouds turn pink. Suddenly she exclaimed:
‘Father, I think something’s coming.’
Valjean looked up. The high road leading to the Barrière du Maine is joined at a right angle by the inner boulevard. Sounds were coming from the point of intersection which at that hour were not easy to account for. A strange object appeared, turning the corner into the high road. It seemed to be moving in an orderly fashion, although by fits and starts, and it appeared to be some kind of conveyance, although its load was not distinguishable. There were horses and wheels, shouting voices and the cracking of whips. By degrees, as it emerged from the half-light, it could be seen to be a vehicle of sorts heading for the barrier near which Jean Valjean was sitting. It was followed by a second cart, similar in aspect, and by a third and fourth; altogether seven of these long carts rounded the corner, forming a tight procession with the horses’ heads almost touching the back of the vehicle in front. Heads became visible, and here and there a gleam like that of a drawn sabre; there was a sound like the rattle of chains, and as the procession drew nearer, with sounds and outlines growing more distinct, it was like the approach of something in a dream. Bit by bit the details became clear, and the darkly silhouetted heads, bathed in the pallid glow of the rising sun, came to resemble the heads of corpses.
This is what it was. Of the seven vehicles proceeding in line along the high road the first six were of a singular design. They were like coopers’ drays, long ladders on wheels with shafts at the forward end. Each of these drays, or ladders, was drawn by four horses in single file and their load consisted of tight clusters of men, twenty-four to each dray, seated in two rows of twelve, back to back with their legs dangling over the side; and the thing rattling at their backs was a chain, and the thing gleaming round their necks was a yoke or collar of iron. Each had his own collar, but the chain was shared by all of them, so that when they descended from the vehicle these parties of twenty-four men had to move in concert like a body with a single backbone, a sort of centipede. Pairs of men armed with muskets stood at the front and rear end of each vehicle, with their feet on the ends of the chain. The iron collars were square. The seventh vehicle, a large four-wheeled wagon with high sides but no roof, was drawn by six horses and carried a clattering load of iron cook-pots, stoves, and chains among which lay a few men with bound wrists and ankles who seemed to be ill. The sides of this wagon were constructed of rusty metal frames which looked as though they might once have served as whipping-blocks.
The procession, moving along the middle of the high road, was escorted on either side by a line of troops of infamous aspect wearing the three-cornered hats of soldiers under the Directory, dirty and bedraggled pensioners’ tunics, tattered trousers, something between grey and blue, like those of funeral mutes, red epaulettes and yellow bandoliers; and they were armed with axes, muskets, and clubs. Mercenary soldiers bearing themselves with the abjectness of beggars and the truculence of prison-guards. The man who seemed to be their commander carried a horsewhip. These details, shrouded at first in the half-light, became steadily clearer as the light increased. At the front and rear of the procession rode parties of mounted gendarmes, grim-faced men with drawn sabres.
The procession was so long that by the time its head reached the barrier the last vehicle had only just turned into the high road. A crowd of spectators, sprung up in an instant as so commonly happens in Paris, had gathered on either side of the road to stand and stare. Voices could be heard of men calling to their mates to come and look, followed by the clatter of clogs as they came hurrying in from the fields.
The chained men in the drays, pallid in the chill of the morning, bore the lurching journey in silence. They were all clad in cotton trousers, with clogs on their bare feet. The rest of their attire was a dismally variegated picture of misery, a harlequinade in tatters, with shapeless headgear of felt or tarred cloth, while a few wore women’s hats, or even baskets, on their heads and out-at-elbows workers’ smocks or black jackets open to uncover hairy chests. Through the rents in their clothing tattoo-marks were visible – temples of love, bleeding hearts, cupids – and also the sores and blotches of disease. One or two had a rope slung from the side of the dray which supported their feet like a stirrup, and one was conveying a hard, black substance to his mouth which looked like rock but was in fact bread. Eyes were expressionless, apathetic or gleaming with an evil light. The men of the escort cursed them but drew not a murmur in reply. Now and then there was the sound of a cudgel thudding on shoulder-blades or on a head. Some of the prisoners yawned while their bothes lurched and swayed, heads knocked together and the chains rattled; others darted venomous looks. Some fists were clenched and others hung limply like the hands of dead men. A party of jeering children followed in the rear of the convoy.
Whatever else it was, this procession of carts was a most melancholy sight. It was certain that sooner or later, within an hour or a day, rain would fall, one shower succeeding another, and that with their miserable garments soaked the poor wretches would have no chance to get dry. Chilled to the bone, they would have no hope of getting warm; the chain would still hold them by the neck, their feet would still dangle in waterlogged clogs; and the thud of cudgels and the crack of whips would do nothing to still the chattering of their teeth. It was impossible to contemplate without a shiver these human creatures exposed like trees or stones to all the fury of the elements.
But suddenly the sun came out, a broad beam of light spread from the east and it was as though it set all those dishevelled heads on fire. Tongues were loosed, and there was an explosion of mocking laughter, oaths, and songs. The horizontal glow cut the picture in two, illuminating heads and torsos and leaving legs and the wheels of the carts in shadow. This was a terrible moment, for awareness returned to the faces like an unmasking of demons, wild spirits nakedly exposed. But lighted though it was, the picture was still one of darkness. Some of the livelier spirits had quills in their mouths through which they blew spittle at the spectators, for preference at the women. The dawn light threw their haggard faces into relief, not one that was not malformed by misery; and the effect was monstrous, as though the warmth of sunlight had been transformed into the cold brightness of a lightning-flash. The men in the first cart were bellowing the chorus of an old popular song, while the trees shivered and the respectable onlookers in the side-lanes listened with imbecile satisfaction to this rousing clamour of ghosts.
Every aspect of misery was to be seen in that procession, as though it were a depiction of chaos; every animal face was there represented, old men and youths, grey beards and hairless cheeks, cynical monstrosity, embittered resignation, savage leers, half-wit grins, gargoyles wearing caps, faces like those of girls with locks of hair straying over their temples, faces like those of children and the more horrible on that account, fleshless skeleton faces lacking only death. There was a Negro in the first cart who perhaps had been a slave and so was familiar with chains. All bore the stamp of ignominy, that dreadful leveller; all had reached that lowest depth of abasement where ignorance changed to witlessness is the equal of intelligence changed to despair. There was no choosing between these men who seemed, from their appearance, to be the scum of the underworld, and it was evident that whoever had organized this procession had made no attempt to distinguish between them. They had been chained together haphazard, probably in alphabetical order, and loaded haphazard on to the carts. But even horror assembled in groups acquires a common denominator, every aggregation of miseries results in a total: each of the separate chain-gangs had a character of its own, each cartload bore its own countenance. Besides the one that sang there was one that merely shouted, one that begged for money, one that ground its teeth, one that uttered threats, one that blasphemed, and the last was silent as the grave. Dante might have seen in them the seven circles of Hell on the move.
It was a march of the condemned on the way to torment, borne not on the flaming chariots of the Apocalypse but on the shabby tumbrils of the damned. One of the guards who had a hook on the end of his club gesticulated with it as though to plunge it into that heap of human garbage. Among the onlookers a woman with a five-year-old boy shook a warning finger at him and said: ‘Perhaps that’ll teach you to behave!’ As the roar of singing and blasphemy increased the man who seemed to be in command of the escort cracked his whip, and at this signal a rain of blows fell on the passengers in the carts, some of whom bellowed while others foamed at the mouth, to the delight of the urchins swarming round the procession like flies round an open wound.
The look in Jean Valjean’s eyes was dreadful to behold. They were eyes no longer, but had become those fathomless mirrors which in men who have known the depths of suffering may replace the conscious gaze, so that they no longer see reality but reflect the memory of past events. Valjean was not observing the present scene but was gripped by a vision. He wanted to jump to his feet and run, but could not move. There are times when the thing we see holds us paralysed. He stayed dazedly seated, wondering, in indescribable anguish, what was the meaning of this hideous spectacle and the pandemonium that accompanied it. And presently he clapped a hand to his forehead in a gesture of sudden recollection; he remembered that this was the convoy’s usual itinerary, that it was accustomed to make this detour in order to avoid any encounter with royal personages, always possible on the road to Fontainebleau; and he remembered that he himself had passed through that barrier thirty-five years before.
Cosette was no less shaken, although for other reasons. She was staring in breathless bewilderment, scarcely able to believe her eyes. She cried:
‘Father, what are those men?’
‘Felons condemned to hard labour,’ said Valjean.
‘Where are they going?’
‘To the galleys.’
At this moment the lashing and cudgelling reached its climax, with the flat of swords now being used. The prisoners, yielding to punishment, fell silent, glaring about them like captive wolves. Cosette was trembling. She asked:
‘Father, are they still human?’
‘Sometimes,’ the wretched man replied.
It was in fact the chain-gang from Bicêtre, which was travelling by way of Le Mans to avoid Fontainebleau where the king was in residence. The detour lengthened the unspeakable journey by three or four days, but this was a small matter if thereby the royal susceptibilities could be spared.
Jean Valjean returned home deeply oppressed. The shock of encounters such as this may cause a profound revulsion of the spirit. So absorbed was he in his thoughts that he paid little attention, on their way home, to Cosette’s further questions about what they had seen, and perhaps he did not even hear much of what she said. But that evening, when she was about to take leave of him and go to bed, he heard her murmur as though to herself: ‘I believe if I were to meet a man like that in the street I should the of fright just from seeing him so close.’
It happened fortunately that on the next day some sort of official celebration was held in Paris, the occasion being marked by a military parade on the Champ de Mars, water-jousting on the Seine, fireworks, festivities and illuminations everywhere. Contrary to his general practice, Valjean took Cosette out to see the sights, hoping thus to efface from her mind the nightmare she had witnessed the previous day, and since the military review was the main event, and the wearing of uniforms was proper to the occasion, he wore his National Guard uniform, partly from an instinctive desire to escape notice. Their outing seemed to be successful. Cosette, who made a point of always seeking to please her father, and for whom in any case every show was a novelty, joined in the fun with the eager, lighthearted acceptance of youth, and gave no sign of despising that hotch-potch of organized rejoicing which is known as a ‘public festival’ – so much so that Valjean could feel that she had forgotten the previous day’s events entirely.
But a few days later they happened to stand together on the steps leading to the garden, warming themselves in the sunshine of a fine morning. This was another departure from Valjean’s general rule, and from Cosette’s habit, in her unhappy state, of staying indoors. Cosette was wearing a peignoir, one of those gauzy morning garments which adorn a girl like the mist surrounding a star, and, bathed in sunlight, her cheeks still rosy after a sound night’s sleep, was playing with a daisy while her father tenderly watched her. Cosette knew nothing of the old children’s game, ‘He loves me … he don’t … he’ll have me …he won’t …’ – when had she had the chance to learn it? She was innocently and instinctively picking off the petals, not knowing that the daisy stands for a heart. If to those Graces a fourth could be added bearing the name of Melancholy, but smiling, she might well have played the role. Valjean watched her, fascinated by the contemplation of her slim fingers as she toyed with the little flower, forgetful of all else in the delight of her presence. A redbreast was chirruping on a branch above their heads. White clouds were sailing across the sky, so gaily that one might suppose they had only just been released from confinement. Cosette continued to play with the flower but absently, as though she were thinking of something else – surely it must be something charming. But suddenly, with the slow, graceful movement of a swan, her head turned on her shoulders and she asked:
‘Father, that place, the galleys. What does it mean?’