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FEARS OF COSETTE
IN THE FIRST FORTNIGHT in April, Jean Valjean went on a journey. This, we know, happened with him from time to time, at very long intervals. He remained absent one or two days at the most. Where did he go? nobody knew, not even Cosette. Once only, on one of these trips, she had accompanied him in a fiacre as far as the corner of a little cul-de-sac, on which she read: Impasse de la Planchette. There he got out, and the fiacre took Cosette back to the Rue de Babylone. It was generally when money was needed for the household expenses that Jean Valjean made these little journeys.
Jean Valjean then was absent. He had said: “I shall be back in three days.”
In the evening, Cosette was alone in the parlour. To amuse herself, she had opened her piano and began to sing, playing an accompaniment, the chorus from
Euryanthe: Hunters wandering in the woods! which is perhaps the finest piece in all music.
ehAll at once it seemed to her that she heard a step in the garden.
It could not be her father, he was absent; it could not be Toussaint, she was in bed. It was ten o‘clock at night.
She went to the window shutter which was closed and put her ear to it.
It appeared to her that it was a man’s step, and that he was treading very softly.
She ran immediately up to the first story, into her room, opened a slide in her blind, and looked into the garden. The moon was full. She could see as plainly as in broad day.
There was nobody there.
She opened the window. The garden was absolutely silent and all that she could see of the street was as deserted as it always was.
Cosette thought she had been mistaken. She had imagined she heard this noise. It was a hallucination produced by Weber’s sombre and majestic chorus, which opens before the mind startling depths, which trembles before the eye like a bewildering forest, and in which we hear the crackling of the dead branches beneath the anxious step of the hunters dimly seen in the twilight.
She thought no more about it.
Moreover, Cosette by nature was not easily startled. There was in her veins the blood of the gipsy and of the adventuress who goes barefoot. It must be remembered she was rather a lark than a dove. She was wild and brave at heart.
The next day, not so late, at nightfall, she was walking in the garden. In the midst of the confused thoughts which filled her mind, she thought she heard for a moment a sound like the sound of the evening before, as if somebody were walking in the darkness under the trees, not very far from her, but she said to herself that nothing is more like a step in the grass than the rustling of two limbs against each other, and she paid no attention to it. Moreover, she saw nothing.
She left “the bush;” she had to cross a little green grass-plot to reach the steps. The moon, which had just risen behind her, projected, as Cosette came out from the shrubbery, her shadow before her upon this grass-plot.
Cosette stood still, terrified.
By the side of her shadow, the moon marked out distinctly upon the sward another shadow singularly frightful and terrible, a shadow with a round hat.
It was like the shadow of a man who might have been standing in the edge of the shrubbery, a few steps behind Cosette.
For a moment she was unable to speak, or cry, or call, or stir, or turn her head.
At last she summoned up all her courage and resolutely turned round.
There was nobody there.
She looked upon the ground. The shadow had disappeared.
She returned into the shrubbery, boldly hunted through the corners, went as far as the gate, and found nothing.
She felt her blood run cold. Was this also a hallucination? What! two days in succession? One hallucination may pass, but two hallucinations? What made her most anxious was that the shadow was certainly not a phantom. Phantoms never wear round hats.
The next day Jean Valjean returned. Cosette narrated to him what she thought she had heard and seen. She expected to be reassured, and that her father would shrug his shoulders and say: “You are a foolish little girl.”
Jean Valjean became anxious.
“It may be nothing,” said he to her.
He left her under some pretext and went into the garden, and she saw him examining the gate very closely.
In the night she awoke; now she was certain, and she distinctly heard somebody walking very near the steps under her window. She ran to her slide and opened it. There was in fact a man in the garden with a big club in his hand. Just as she was about to cry out, the moon lighted up the man’s face. It was her father!
She went back to bed, saying: “So he is really anxious!”
Jean Valjean passed that night in the garden and the two nights following. Cosette saw him through the hole in her shutter.
The third night the moon was smaller and rose later, it might have been one o‘clock in the morning, she heard a loud burst of laughter and her father’s voice calling her:
“Cosette!”
She sprang out of bed, threw on her dressing-gown, and opened her window.
Her father was below on the grass-plot.
“I woke you up to show you,” said he. “Look, here is your shadow in a round hat.” And he pointed to a shadow on the sward made by the moon, and which really bore a close resemblance to the appearance of a man in a round hat. It was a figure produced by a sheet-iron stove-pipe with a cap, which rose above a neighbouring roof.
Cosette also began to laugh, all her gloomy suppositions fell to the ground, and the next day, while breakfasting with her father, she made merry over the mysterious garden haunted by shadows of stove-pipes.
Jean Valjean became entirely calm again; as to Cosette, she did not notice very carefully whether the stove-pipe was really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen, or thought she saw, and whether the moon was in the same part of the sky. She made no question about the oddity of a stove-pipe which is afraid of being caught in the act, and which retires when you look at its shadow, for the shadow had disappeared when Cosette turned round, and Cosette had really believed that she was certain of that. Cosette was fully reassured. The demonstration appeared to her complete, and the idea that there could have been anybody walking in the garden that evening, or that night, no longer entered her head.
A few days afterwards, however, a new incident occurred.