Kabanata Kabanata 245 · COSETTE’S APPREHENSIONS

During the first fortnight in April, Jean Valjean took a journey. This,

as the reader knows, happened from time to time, at very long

intervals. He remained absent a day or two days at the utmost. Where

did he go? No one knew, not even Cosette. Once only, on the occasion of

one of these departures, she had accompanied him in a hackney-coach as

far as a little blind-alley at the corner of which she read: _Impasse

de la Planchette_. There he alighted, and the coach took Cosette back

to the Rue de Babylone. It was usually when money was lacking in the

house that Jean Valjean took these little trips.

So Jean Valjean was absent. He had said: “I shall return in three

days.”

That evening, Cosette was alone in the drawing-room. In order to get

rid of her ennui, she had opened her piano-organ, and had begun to

sing, accompanying herself the while, the chorus from _Euryanthe_:

“Hunters astray in the wood!” which is probably the most beautiful

thing in all the sphere of music. When she had finished, she remained

wrapped in thought.

All at once, it seemed to her that she heard the sound of footsteps in

the garden.

It could not be her father, he was absent; it could not be Toussaint,

she was in bed, and it was ten o’clock at night.

She stepped to the shutter of the drawing-room, which was closed, and

laid her ear against it.

It seemed to her that it was the tread of a man, and that he was

walking very softly.

She mounted rapidly to the first floor, to her own chamber, opened a

small wicket in her shutter, and peeped into the garden. The moon was

at the full. Everything could be seen as plainly as by day.

There was no one there.

She opened the window. The garden was absolutely calm, and all that was

visible was that the street was deserted as usual.

Cosette thought that she had been mistaken. She thought that she had

heard a noise. It was a hallucination produced by the melancholy and

magnificent chorus of Weber, which lays open before the mind terrified

depths, which trembles before the gaze like a dizzy forest, and in

which one hears the crackling of dead branches beneath the uneasy tread

of the huntsmen of whom one catches a glimpse through the twilight.

She thought no more about it.

Moreover, Cosette was not very timid by nature. There flowed in her

veins some of the blood of the bohemian and the adventuress who runs

barefoot. It will be remembered that she was more of a lark than a

dove. There was a foundation of wildness and bravery in her.

On the following day, at an earlier hour, towards nightfall, she was

strolling in the garden. In the midst of the confused thoughts which

occupied her, she fancied that she caught for an instant a sound

similar to that of the preceding evening, as though some one were

walking beneath the trees in the dusk, and not very far from her; but

she told herself that nothing so closely resembles a step on the grass

as the friction of two branches which have moved from side to side, and

she paid no heed to it. Besides, she could see nothing.

She emerged from “the thicket”; she had still to cross a small lawn to

regain the steps.

The moon, which had just risen behind her, cast Cosette’s shadow in

front of her upon this lawn, as she came out from the shrubbery.

Cosette halted in alarm.

Beside her shadow, the moon outlined distinctly upon the turf another

shadow, which was particularly startling and terrible, a shadow which

had a round hat.

It was the shadow of a man, who must have been standing on the border

of the clump of shrubbery, a few paces in the rear of Cosette.

She stood for a moment without the power to speak, or cry, or call, or

stir, or turn her head.

Then she summoned up all her courage, and turned round resolutely.

There was no one there.

She glanced on the ground. The figure had disappeared.

She re-entered the thicket, searched the corners boldly, went as far as

the gate, and found nothing.

She felt herself absolutely chilled with terror. Was this another

hallucination? What! Two days in succession! One hallucination might

pass, but two hallucinations? The disquieting point about it was, that

the shadow had assuredly not been a phantom. Phantoms do not wear round

hats.

On the following day Jean Valjean returned. Cosette told him what she

thought she had heard and seen. She wanted to be reassured and to see

her father shrug his shoulders and say to her: “You are a little

goose.”

Jean Valjean grew anxious.

“It cannot be anything,” said he.

He left her under some pretext, and went into the garden, and she saw

him examining the gate with great attention.

During the night she woke up; this time she was sure, and she

distinctly heard some one walking close to the flight of steps beneath

her window. She ran to her little wicket and opened it. In point of

fact, there was a man in the garden, with a large club in his hand.

Just as she was about to scream, the moon lighted up the man’s profile.

It was her father. She returned to her bed, saying to herself: “He is

very uneasy!”

Jean Valjean passed that night and the two succeeding nights in the

garden. Cosette saw him through the hole in her shutter.

On the third night, the moon was on the wane, and had begun to rise

later; at one o’clock in the morning, possibly, she heard a loud burst

of laughter and her father’s voice calling her:—

“Cosette!”

She jumped out of bed, threw on her dressing-gown, and opened her

window.

Her father was standing on the grass-plot below.

“I have waked you for the purpose of reassuring you,” said he; “look,

there is your shadow with the round hat.”

And he pointed out to her on the turf a shadow cast by the moon, and

which did indeed, bear considerable resemblance to the spectre of a man

wearing a round hat. It was the shadow produced by a chimney-pipe of

sheet iron, with a hood, which rose above a neighboring roof.

Cosette joined in his laughter, all her lugubrious suppositions were

allayed, and the next morning, as she was at breakfast with her father,

she made merry over the sinister garden haunted by the shadows of iron

chimney-pots.

Jean Valjean became quite tranquil once more; as for Cosette, she did

not pay much attention to the question whether the chimney-pot was

really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen, or thought

she had seen, and whether the moon had been in the same spot in the

sky.

She did not question herself as to the peculiarity of a chimney-pot

which is afraid of being caught in the act, and which retires when some

one looks at its shadow, for the shadow had taken the alarm when

Cosette had turned round, and Cosette had thought herself very sure of

this. Cosette’s serenity was fully restored. The proof appeared to her

to be complete, and it quite vanished from her mind, whether there

could possibly be any one walking in the garden during the evening or

at night.

A few days later, however, a fresh incident occurred.