الفصل الفصل 345 · DEPOSIT YOUR MONEY IN A FOREST RATHER THAN WITH A NOTARY

The reader has, no doubt, understood, without necessitating a lengthy

explanation, that Jean Valjean, after the Champmathieu affair, had been

able, thanks to his first escape of a few days’ duration, to come to

Paris and to withdraw in season, from the hands of Laffitte, the sum

earned by him, under the name of Monsieur Madeleine, at

Montreuil-sur-Mer; and that fearing that he might be recaptured,—which

eventually happened—he had buried and hidden that sum in the forest of

Montfermeil, in the locality known as the Blaru-bottom. The sum, six

hundred and thirty thousand francs, all in bank-bills, was not very

bulky, and was contained in a box; only, in order to preserve the box

from dampness, he had placed it in a coffer filled with chestnut

shavings. In the same coffer he had placed his other treasures, the

Bishop’s candlesticks. It will be remembered that he had carried off

the candlesticks when he made his escape from Montreuil-sur-Mer. The

man seen one evening for the first time by Boulatruelle, was Jean

Valjean. Later on, every time that Jean Valjean needed money, he went

to get it in the Blaru-bottom. Hence the absences which we have

mentioned. He had a pickaxe somewhere in the heather, in a hiding-place

known to himself alone. When he beheld Marius convalescent, feeling

that the hour was at hand, when that money might prove of service, he

had gone to get it; it was he again, whom Boulatruelle had seen in the

woods, but on this occasion, in the morning instead of in the evening.

Boulatreulle inherited his pickaxe.

The actual sum was five hundred and eighty-four thousand, five hundred

francs. Jean Valjean withdrew the five hundred francs for himself.—“We

shall see hereafter,” he thought.

The difference between that sum and the six hundred and thirty thousand

francs withdrawn from Laffitte represented his expenditure in ten

years, from 1823 to 1833. The five years of his stay in the convent had

cost only five thousand francs.

Jean Valjean set the two candlesticks on the chimney-piece, where they

glittered to the great admiration of Toussaint.

Moreover, Jean Valjean knew that he was delivered from Javert. The

story had been told in his presence, and he had verified the fact in

the _Moniteur_, how a police inspector named Javert had been found

drowned under a boat belonging to some laundresses, between the Pont au

Change and the Pont-Neuf, and that a writing left by this man,

otherwise irreproachable and highly esteemed by his superiors, pointed

to a fit of mental aberration and a suicide.—“In fact,” thought Jean

Valjean, “since he left me at liberty, once having got me in his power,

he must have been already mad.”