Chapter Chapter 147 · CLOISTERED

Cosette continued to hold her tongue in the convent.

It was quite natural that Cosette should think herself Jean Valjean’s

daughter. Moreover, as she knew nothing, she could say nothing, and

then, she would not have said anything in any case. As we have just

observed, nothing trains children to silence like unhappiness. Cosette

had suffered so much, that she feared everything, even to speak or to

breathe. A single word had so often brought down an avalanche upon her.

She had hardly begun to regain her confidence since she had been with

Jean Valjean. She speedily became accustomed to the convent. Only she

regretted Catherine, but she dared not say so. Once, however, she did

say to Jean Valjean: “Father, if I had known, I would have brought her

away with me.”

Cosette had been obliged, on becoming a scholar in the convent, to don

the garb of the pupils of the house. Jean Valjean succeeded in getting

them to restore to him the garments which she laid aside. This was the

same mourning suit which he had made her put on when she had quitted

the Thénardiers’ inn. It was not very threadbare even now. Jean Valjean

locked up these garments, plus the stockings and the shoes, with a

quantity of camphor and all the aromatics in which convents abound, in

a little valise which he found means of procuring. He set this valise

on a chair near his bed, and he always carried the key about his

person. “Father,” Cosette asked him one day, “what is there in that box

which smells so good?”

Father Fauchelevent received other recompense for his good action, in

addition to the glory which we just mentioned, and of which he knew

nothing; in the first place it made him happy; next, he had much less

work, since it was shared. Lastly, as he was very fond of snuff, he

found the presence of M. Madeleine an advantage, in that he used three

times as much as he had done previously, and that in an infinitely more

luxurious manner, seeing that M. Madeleine paid for it.

The nuns did not adopt the name of Ultime; they called Jean Valjean

_the other Fauvent_.

If these holy women had possessed anything of Javert’s glance, they

would eventually have noticed that when there was any errand to be done

outside in the behalf of the garden, it was always the elder

Fauchelevent, the old, the infirm, the lame man, who went, and never

the other; but whether it is that eyes constantly fixed on God know not

how to spy, or whether they were, by preference, occupied in keeping

watch on each other, they paid no heed to this.

Moreover, it was well for Jean Valjean that he kept close and did not

stir out. Javert watched the quarter for more than a month.

This convent was for Jean Valjean like an island surrounded by gulfs.

Henceforth, those four walls constituted his world. He saw enough of

the sky there to enable him to preserve his serenity, and Cosette

enough to remain happy.

A very sweet life began for him.

He inhabited the old hut at the end of the garden, in company with

Fauchelevent. This hovel, built of old rubbish, which was still in

existence in 1845, was composed, as the reader already knows, of three

chambers, all of which were utterly bare and had nothing beyond the

walls. The principal one had been given up, by force, for Jean Valjean

had opposed it in vain, to M. Madeleine, by Father Fauchelevent. The

walls of this chamber had for ornament, in addition to the two nails

whereon to hang the knee-cap and the basket, a Royalist bank-note of

’93, applied to the wall over the chimney-piece, and of which the

following is an exact facsimile:—

[Illustration: Royalist Bank-note]

This specimen of Vendean paper money had been nailed to the wall by the

preceding gardener, an old Chouan, who had died in the convent, and

whose place Fauchelevent had taken.

Jean Valjean worked in the garden every day and made himself very

useful. He had formerly been a pruner of trees, and he gladly found

himself a gardener once more. It will be remembered that he knew all

sorts of secrets and receipts for agriculture. He turned these to

advantage. Almost all the trees in the orchard were ungrafted, and

wild. He budded them and made them produce excellent fruit.

Cosette had permission to pass an hour with him every day. As the

sisters were melancholy and he was kind, the child made comparisons and

adored him. At the appointed hour she flew to the hut. When she entered

the lowly cabin, she filled it with paradise. Jean Valjean blossomed

out and felt his happiness increase with the happiness which he

afforded Cosette. The joy which we inspire has this charming property,

that, far from growing meagre, like all reflections, it returns to us

more radiant than ever. At recreation hours, Jean Valjean watched her

running and playing in the distance, and he distinguished her laugh

from that of the rest.

For Cosette laughed now.

Cosette’s face had even undergone a change, to a certain extent. The

gloom had disappeared from it. A smile is the same as sunshine; it

banishes winter from the human countenance.

Recreation over, when Cosette went into the house again, Jean Valjean

gazed at the windows of her class-room, and at night he rose to look at

the windows of her dormitory.

God has his own ways, moreover; the convent contributed, like Cosette,

to uphold and complete the Bishop’s work in Jean Valjean. It is certain

that virtue adjoins pride on one side. A bridge built by the devil

exists there. Jean Valjean had been, unconsciously, perhaps, tolerably

near that side and that bridge, when Providence cast his lot in the

convent of the Petit-Picpus; so long as he had compared himself only to

the Bishop, he had regarded himself as unworthy and had remained

humble; but for some time past he had been comparing himself to men in

general, and pride was beginning to spring up. Who knows? He might have

ended by returning very gradually to hatred.

The convent stopped him on that downward path.

This was the second place of captivity which he had seen. In his youth,

in what had been for him the beginning of his life, and later on, quite

recently again, he had beheld another,—a frightful place, a terrible

place, whose severities had always appeared to him the iniquity of

justice, and the crime of the law. Now, after the galleys, he saw the

cloister; and when he meditated how he had formed a part of the

galleys, and that he now, so to speak, was a spectator of the cloister,

he confronted the two in his own mind with anxiety.

Sometimes he crossed his arms and leaned on his hoe, and slowly

descended the endless spirals of reverie.

He recalled his former companions: how wretched they were; they rose at

dawn, and toiled until night; hardly were they permitted to sleep; they

lay on camp beds, where nothing was tolerated but mattresses two inches

thick, in rooms which were heated only in the very harshest months of

the year; they were clothed in frightful red blouses; they were

allowed, as a great favor, linen trousers in the hottest weather, and a

woollen carter’s blouse on their backs when it was very cold; they

drank no wine, and ate no meat, except when they went on “fatigue

duty.” They lived nameless, designated only by numbers, and converted,

after a manner, into ciphers themselves, with downcast eyes, with

lowered voices, with shorn heads, beneath the cudgel and in disgrace.

Then his mind reverted to the beings whom he had under his eyes.

These beings also lived with shorn heads, with downcast eyes, with

lowered voices, not in disgrace, but amid the scoffs of the world, not

with their backs bruised with the cudgel, but with their shoulders

lacerated with their discipline. Their names, also, had vanished from

among men; they no longer existed except under austere appellations.

They never ate meat and they never drank wine; they often remained

until evening without food; they were attired, not in a red blouse, but

in a black shroud, of woollen, which was heavy in summer and thin in

winter, without the power to add or subtract anything from it; without

having even, according to the season, the resource of the linen garment

or the woollen cloak; and for six months in the year they wore serge

chemises which gave them fever. They dwelt, not in rooms warmed only

during rigorous cold, but in cells where no fire was ever lighted; they

slept, not on mattresses two inches thick, but on straw. And finally,

they were not even allowed their sleep; every night, after a day of

toil, they were obliged, in the weariness of their first slumber, at

the moment when they were falling sound asleep and beginning to get

warm, to rouse themselves, to rise and to go and pray in an ice-cold

and gloomy chapel, with their knees on the stones.

On certain days each of these beings in turn had to remain for twelve

successive hours in a kneeling posture, or prostrate, with face upon

the pavement, and arms outstretched in the form of a cross.

The others were men; these were women.

What had those men done? They had stolen, violated, pillaged, murdered,

assassinated. They were bandits, counterfeiters, poisoners,

incendiaries, murderers, parricides. What had these women done? They

had done nothing whatever.

On the one hand, highway robbery, fraud, deceit, violence, sensuality,

homicide, all sorts of sacrilege, every variety of crime; on the other,

one thing only, innocence.

Perfect innocence, almost caught up into heaven in a mysterious

assumption, attached to the earth by virtue, already possessing

something of heaven through holiness.

On the one hand, confidences over crimes, which are exchanged in

whispers; on the other, the confession of faults made aloud. And what

crimes! And what faults!

On the one hand, miasms; on the other, an ineffable perfume. On the one

hand, a moral pest, guarded from sight, penned up under the range of

cannon, and literally devouring its plague-stricken victims; on the

other, the chaste flame of all souls on the same hearth. There,

darkness; here, the shadow; but a shadow filled with gleams of light,

and of gleams full of radiance.

Two strongholds of slavery; but in the first, deliverance possible, a

legal limit always in sight, and then, escape. In the second,

perpetuity; the sole hope, at the distant extremity of the future, that

faint light of liberty which men call death.

In the first, men are bound only with chains; in the other, chained by

faith.

What flowed from the first? An immense curse, the gnashing of teeth,

hatred, desperate viciousness, a cry of rage against human society, a

sarcasm against heaven.

What results flowed from the second? Blessings and love.

And in these two places, so similar yet so unlike, these two species of

beings who were so very unlike, were undergoing the same work,

expiation.

Jean Valjean understood thoroughly the expiation of the former; that

personal expiation, the expiation for one’s self. But he did not

understand that of these last, that of creatures without reproach and

without stain, and he trembled as he asked himself: The expiation of

what? What expiation?

A voice within his conscience replied: “The most divine of human

generosities, the expiation for others.”

Here all personal theory is withheld; we are only the narrator; we

place ourselves at Jean Valjean’s point of view, and we translate his

impressions.

Before his eyes he had the sublime summit of abnegation, the highest

possible pitch of virtue; the innocence which pardons men their faults,

and which expiates in their stead; servitude submitted to, torture

accepted, punishment claimed by souls which have not sinned, for the

sake of sparing it to souls which have fallen; the love of humanity

swallowed up in the love of God, but even there preserving its distinct

and mediatorial character; sweet and feeble beings possessing the

misery of those who are punished and the smile of those who are

recompensed.

And he remembered that he had dared to murmur!

Often, in the middle of the night, he rose to listen to the grateful

song of those innocent creatures weighed down with severities, and the

blood ran cold in his veins at the thought that those who were justly

chastised raised their voices heavenward only in blasphemy, and that

he, wretch that he was, had shaken his fist at God.

There was one striking thing which caused him to meditate deeply, like

a warning whisper from Providence itself: the scaling of that wall, the

passing of those barriers, the adventure accepted even at the risk of

death, the painful and difficult ascent, all those efforts even, which

he had made to escape from that other place of expiation, he had made

in order to gain entrance into this one. Was this a symbol of his

destiny? This house was a prison likewise and bore a melancholy

resemblance to that other one whence he had fled, and yet he had never

conceived an idea of anything similar.

Again he beheld gratings, bolts, iron bars—to guard whom? Angels.

These lofty walls which he had seen around tigers, he now beheld once

more around lambs.

This was a place of expiation, and not of punishment; and yet, it was

still more austere, more gloomy, and more pitiless than the other.

These virgins were even more heavily burdened than the convicts. A

cold, harsh wind, that wind which had chilled his youth, traversed the

barred and padlocked grating of the vultures; a still harsher and more

biting breeze blew in the cage of these doves.

Why?

When he thought on these things, all that was within him was lost in

amazement before this mystery of sublimity.

In these meditations, his pride vanished. He scrutinized his own heart

in all manner of ways; he felt his pettiness, and many a time he wept.

All that had entered into his life for the last six months had led him

back towards the Bishop’s holy injunctions; Cosette through love, the

convent through humility.

Sometimes at eventide, in the twilight, at an hour when the garden was

deserted, he could be seen on his knees in the middle of the walk which

skirted the chapel, in front of the window through which he had gazed

on the night of his arrival, and turned towards the spot where, as he

knew, the sister was making reparation, prostrated in prayer. Thus he

prayed as he knelt before the sister.

It seemed as though he dared not kneel directly before God.

Everything that surrounded him, that peaceful garden, those fragrant

flowers, those children who uttered joyous cries, those grave and

simple women, that silent cloister, slowly permeated him, and little by

little, his soul became compounded of silence like the cloister, of

perfume like the flowers, of simplicity like the women, of joy like the

children. And then he reflected that these had been two houses of God

which had received him in succession at two critical moments in his

life: the first, when all doors were closed and when human society

rejected him; the second, at a moment when human society had again set

out in pursuit of him, and when the galleys were again yawning; and

that, had it not been for the first, he should have relapsed into

crime, and had it not been for the second, into torment.

His whole heart melted in gratitude, and he loved more and more.

Many years passed in this manner; Cosette was growing up.

[THE END OF VOLUME II “COSETTE”]

VOLUME III

MARIUS

[Illustration: Frontispiece Volume Three]

[Illustration: Titlepage Volume Three]

BOOK FIRST—PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM