Bab Bab 234 · THE HOUSE WITH A SECRET

About the middle of the last century, a chief justice in the Parliament

of Paris having a mistress and concealing the fact, for at that period

the grand seignors displayed their mistresses, and the bourgeois

concealed them, had “a little house” built in the Faubourg

Saint-Germain, in the deserted Rue Blomet, which is now called Rue

Plumet, not far from the spot which was then designated as _Combat des

Animaux_.

This house was composed of a single-storied pavilion; two rooms on the

ground floor, two chambers on the first floor, a kitchen downstairs, a

boudoir upstairs, an attic under the roof, the whole preceded by a

garden with a large gate opening on the street. This garden was about

an acre and a half in extent. This was all that could be seen by

passers-by; but behind the pavilion there was a narrow courtyard, and

at the end of the courtyard a low building consisting of two rooms and

a cellar, a sort of preparation destined to conceal a child and nurse

in case of need. This building communicated in the rear by a masked

door which opened by a secret spring, with a long, narrow, paved

winding corridor, open to the sky, hemmed in with two lofty walls,

which, hidden with wonderful art, and lost as it were between garden

enclosures and cultivated land, all of whose angles and detours it

followed, ended in another door, also with a secret lock which opened a

quarter of a league away, almost in another quarter, at the solitary

extremity of the Rue du Babylone.

Through this the chief justice entered, so that even those who were

spying on him and following him would merely have observed that the

justice betook himself every day in a mysterious way somewhere, and

would never have suspected that to go to the Rue de Babylone was to go

to the Rue Blomet. Thanks to clever purchasers of land, the magistrate

had been able to make a secret, sewer-like passage on his own property,

and consequently, without interference. Later on, he had sold in little

parcels, for gardens and market gardens, the lots of ground adjoining

the corridor, and the proprietors of these lots on both sides thought

they had a party wall before their eyes, and did not even suspect the

long, paved ribbon winding between two walls amid their flower-beds and

their orchards. Only the birds beheld this curiosity. It is probable

that the linnets and tomtits of the last century gossiped a great deal

about the chief justice.

The pavilion, built of stone in the taste of Mansard, wainscoted and

furnished in the Watteau style, rocaille on the inside, old-fashioned

on the outside, walled in with a triple hedge of flowers, had something

discreet, coquettish, and solemn about it, as befits a caprice of love

and magistracy.

This house and corridor, which have now disappeared, were in existence

fifteen years ago. In ’93 a coppersmith had purchased the house with

the idea of demolishing it, but had not been able to pay the price; the

nation made him bankrupt. So that it was the house which demolished the

coppersmith. After that, the house remained uninhabited, and fell

slowly to ruin, as does every dwelling to which the presence of man

does not communicate life. It had remained fitted with its old

furniture, was always for sale or to let, and the ten or a dozen people

who passed through the Rue Plumet were warned of the fact by a yellow

and illegible bit of writing which had hung on the garden wall since

1819.

Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers-by might have

noticed that the bill had disappeared, and even that the shutters on

the first floor were open. The house was occupied, in fact. The windows

had short curtains, a sign that there was a woman about.

In the month of October, 1829, a man of a certain age had presented

himself and had hired the house just as it stood, including, of course,

the back building and the lane which ended in the Rue de Babylone. He

had had the secret openings of the two doors to this passage repaired.

The house, as we have just mentioned, was still very nearly furnished

with the justice’s old fitting; the new tenant had ordered some

repairs, had added what was lacking here and there, had replaced the

paving-stones in the yard, bricks in the floors, steps in the stairs,

missing bits in the inlaid floors and the glass in the lattice windows,

and had finally installed himself there with a young girl and an

elderly maid-servant, without commotion, rather like a person who is

slipping in than like a man who is entering his own house. The

neighbors did not gossip about him, for the reason that there were no

neighbors.

This unobtrusive tenant was Jean Valjean, the young girl was Cosette.

The servant was a woman named Toussaint, whom Jean Valjean had saved

from the hospital and from wretchedness, and who was elderly, a

stammerer, and from the provinces, three qualities which had decided

Jean Valjean to take her with him. He had hired the house under the

name of M. Fauchelevent, independent gentleman. In all that has been

related heretofore, the reader has, doubtless, been no less prompt than

Thénardier to recognize Jean Valjean.

Why had Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Petit-Picpus? What had

happened?

Nothing had happened.

It will be remembered that Jean Valjean was happy in the convent, so

happy that his conscience finally took the alarm. He saw Cosette every

day, he felt paternity spring up and develop within him more and more,

he brooded over the soul of that child, he said to himself that she was

his, that nothing could take her from him, that this would last

indefinitely, that she would certainly become a nun, being thereto

gently incited every day, that thus the convent was henceforth the

universe for her as it was for him, that he should grow old there, and

that she would grow up there, that she would grow old there, and that

he should die there; that, in short, delightful hope, no separation was

possible. On reflecting upon this, he fell into perplexity. He

interrogated himself. He asked himself if all that happiness were

really his, if it were not composed of the happiness of another, of the

happiness of that child which he, an old man, was confiscating and

stealing; if that were not theft? He said to himself, that this child

had a right to know life before renouncing it, that to deprive her in

advance, and in some sort without consulting her, of all joys, under

the pretext of saving her from all trials, to take advantage of her

ignorance of her isolation, in order to make an artificial vocation

germinate in her, was to rob a human creature of its nature and to lie

to God. And who knows if, when she came to be aware of all this some

day, and found herself a nun to her sorrow, Cosette would not come to

hate him? A last, almost selfish thought, and less heroic than the

rest, but which was intolerable to him. He resolved to quit the

convent.

He resolved on this; he recognized with anguish, the fact that it was

necessary. As for objections, there were none. Five years’ sojourn

between these four walls and of disappearance had necessarily destroyed

or dispersed the elements of fear. He could return tranquilly among

men. He had grown old, and all had undergone a change. Who would

recognize him now? And then, to face the worst, there was danger only

for himself, and he had no right to condemn Cosette to the cloister for

the reason that he had been condemned to the galleys. Besides, what is

danger in comparison with the right? Finally, nothing prevented his

being prudent and taking his precautions.

As for Cosette’s education, it was almost finished and complete.

His determination once taken, he awaited an opportunity. It was not

long in presenting itself. Old Fauchelevent died.

Jean Valjean demanded an audience with the revered prioress and told

her that, having come into a little inheritance at the death of his

brother, which permitted him henceforth to live without working, he

should leave the service of the convent and take his daughter with him;

but that, as it was not just that Cosette, since she had not taken the

vows, should have received her education gratuitously, he humbly begged

the Reverend Prioress to see fit that he should offer to the community,

as indemnity, for the five years which Cosette had spent there, the sum

of five thousand francs.

It was thus that Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Perpetual

Adoration.

On leaving the convent, he took in his own arms the little valise the

key to which he still wore on his person, and would permit no porter to

touch it. This puzzled Cosette, because of the odor of embalming which

proceeded from it.

Let us state at once, that this trunk never quitted him more. He always

had it in his chamber. It was the first and only thing sometimes, that

he carried off in his moving when he moved about. Cosette laughed at

it, and called this valise his _inseparable_, saying: “I am jealous of

it.”

Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not reappear in the open air without

profound anxiety.

He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet, and hid himself from sight

there. Henceforth he was in the possession of the name:—Ultime

Fauchelevent.

At the same time he hired two other apartments in Paris, in order that

he might attract less attention than if he were to remain always in the

same quarter, and so that he could, at need, take himself off at the

slightest disquietude which should assail him, and in short, so that he

might not again be caught unprovided as on the night when he had so

miraculously escaped from Javert. These two apartments were very

pitiable, poor in appearance, and in two quarters which were far remote

from each other, the one in the Rue de l’Ouest, the other in the Rue de

l’Homme Armé.

He went from time to time, now to the Rue de l’Homme Armé, now to the

Rue de l’Ouest, to pass a month or six weeks, without taking Toussaint.

He had himself served by the porters, and gave himself out as a

gentleman from the suburbs, living on his funds, and having a little

temporary resting-place in town. This lofty virtue had three domiciles

in Paris for the sake of escaping from the police.