Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.

Digne was a little town set in Northern Provence, a picturesque region of Southeast France. It was bordered partly by mountains which were often infested with bandits.

In 1806 Monsieur Charles Myriel was appointed to be the new bishop of Digne. 
When Bishop Myriel arrived in town he was accompanied by his younger sister, Mademoiselle Baptistine, and their maid, Madame Malgoire. 

Their new home, The Bishop’s Palace, was built of stone, spacious and beautiful. It was nicely complemented by a garden planted with magnificent trees. 

The palace was located next to a hospital. The hospital  was a long, narrow one story building with a small garden. 

Three days after his arrival in Digne the bishop paid a visit to the hospital. Before his neighborly call was over, he invited the hospital director to drop by his palace for a visit. 

“ Monsieur, ” he said to the director, “ How many patients do you have? ” 
“ Twenty-six, monseigneur. ” 
The bishop ran his eyes over the hall, seemingly taking measure and making calculations. 
“ It will hold twenty beds, ” he said to himself, then raising his voice, he said: 
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“ Listen, Monsieur Director, to what I have to say. There is evidently a mistake here. There are twenty-six of you in five or six small rooms; there are only three of us, and space for sixty. There is a mistake, I tell you. You have my house and I have yours. 
Restore mine to me; you are at home.” 
The next day twenty-six poor invalids were installed in the bishop’s palace and the bishop was in the hospital. 
In a short time donations of money began to come in. Those who had and those who had not knocked at the bishop’s door ; some came to receive alms and others to bestow them. In less than a year he had become the treasurer of all the benevolent and the dispenser to all needy. Large sums of  money passed through his hands. Nevertheless, he changed in no way his style of life, nor added the least luxury to his simple fare. The poor people of the district always called him Monsieur Bienvenu. 

By 1815 he had reached his 76th year, but he did not appear to be more than sixty. He was not tall. He frequently took long walks and he had a firm step. He was good humoured and everyone felt at ease in his presence. From his whole person joy seemed to radiate. His ruddy and fresh complexion and his white teeth, all of which were well preserved and which he showed when he laughed gave him an open and easy air. People regarded him as warm and gentle. He was a thoughtful person and respected by all who knew him.  

Prayer, alms, consoling the afflicted, gardening, study and work filled up each day of his life. The bishop’s day was full to the brim with good thoughts, good words and good actions. 
Each fine evening he spent an hour or two in his garden meditating in the presence of the great spectacle of the starry firmament. Sitting there alone he compared the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations, and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts which fall from the unknown. 
    What more was needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. A few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky.

THE FALL 

An hour before sunset, on an evening of a day in the beginning of October, 1815, a man travelling afoot entered the little town of DIGNE. The few persons who at the time were at their windows or their doors, regarded this traveler with a sort of distrust. It would have been hard to find a passer-by more wretched in appearance. He was a man of middle height, stout and hardy,  in the strength of maturity; he may have been forty-six or seven. A slouched leather cap half hid his face, bronzed by the sun and wind, and dripping with sweat. His shaggy breast was seen through the coarse yellow shirt which at the neck was fastened by a small silver anchor; he wore a cravat twisted like a rope, coarse blue trousers, worn and shabby, white on one knee, and with holes in the other, and an old ragged gray blouse, patched on one side with a piece of green cloth sewed with twine; upon his back was a well-filled knapsack, strongly buckled and quite new. In his hand he carried an enormous knotted stick; his stockingless feet were in hobnailed shoes; his hair was cropped and his beard long. 

The sweat, the heat, his long walk, and the dust, added an indescribable meanness to his tattered appearance. 
His hair was shorn, but bristly, for it had begun to grow a little, and seemingly had not been cut for sometime. 
When he reached the corner of the rue Poichevert he turned to the left and went towards the mayor’s office. He went in, and a quarter of an hour afterward he came out. 
There was then in Digne a good inn called La Croix de Colbas. 
The traveler turned his steps towards this inn, which was the best in the place, and went at once to the kitchen. All the ranges were fuming, and a great fire was burning briskly in the chimney place. Mine host, who was at the same time head cook, was going from the fireplace to the saucepans, very busy superintending an excellent dinner for some wagoners who were laughing and talking noisily in the next room. 
A fat marmot, flanked by white partridges and goose, was turning on a long spit before the fire; upon the ranges were cooking two large carps from Lake Laucet, and a trout from Lake Alloz. 
The host, hearing the door open, and a newcomer enter, said, without raising his eyes from his ranges: 
“ What will monsieur have? ” 
“ Something to eat and lodging ” 
“ Nothing more easy, ” said mine host, but on turning his head and taking an observation of the traveler, he added: “ For pay. ” 
The man drew from his pocket a large leather purse, and answered: 
“ I have money. ” 
“ Then, ” said mine host, “ I am at your service ” 
The man put his purse back into his pocket, took off his knapsack and put it down hard by the door, and holding his stick in his hand, sat down on a low stool by the fire. 
However, as the host passed backward and forward, he kept a careful eye on the traveler. 
“ Is dinner almost ready? ” said the man. 
“ Directly, ” said mine host.
While the newcomer was warming himself with his back turned, the worthy innkeeper, 
Jacquin Labarre, took a pencil from his pocket, and then tore off the corner of an old paper which he pulled from a little table near the window. On the margin he wrote a line or two. Folded it, and handed the scrap of paper to a child. The innkeeper whispered a word to the boy and he ran off in the direction of the mayor’s office.  
The traveler saw nothing of this 
He asked a second time: “ Is dinner ready? ” 
“ Yes, in a few moments, ” said the host. 
The boy came back with the paper. The host unfolded it hurriedly, as one who is expecting an answer. He seemed to read with attention, then throwing his head on one side, thought for a moment. Then he took a step towards the traveler, who seemed drowned in troublous thought. 
“ Monsieur, ” said he, “ I cannot receive you. I have no room.”
“ Well,” responded the man, “ a corner in the garret, a bed of straw. We will see about that after dinner. ” 
“ I cannot give you any dinner. ”
This declaration, made in a measured but firm tone, appeared serious to the traveler. 
He got up.
“ Ah, bah! But I am dying with hunger. ” 
“ I have nothing, ” said the host. 
The man burst into a laugh, and turned toward the fireplace and the ranges. 
“ Nothing! And all that? ”
“ All that is engaged. ” 
The man sat down again and said, without raising his voice: 
“ I am at an inn. I am hungry, and I shall stay. ” 
The host bent down his ear, and said in a voice that made him tremble: 

“ Go away! ”
At these words the traveler, who was bent over, poking some embers in the fire with the ironshod end of his stick, turned suddenly around, and opened his mouth as if to reply, when the host, looking steadily at him, added in the same lone tone: “ Stop, no more of that. It is my custom to be polite to all. Go! ”
The man bowed his head, picked up his knapsack, and went out.
He took the principal street; he walked at random, slinking near the houses like a sad and humiliated man; he did not once turn around. If he had turned, he would have seen the innkeeper of the Croix de Colbas, standing in his doorway with all his guests, and the passers-by gathered about him, speaking excitedly, and pointing him out, and from the looks of fear and distrust which were exchanged, he would have guessed that before long his arrival would be the talk of the whole town. 
He walked along in this way some time, going by chance down streets unknown to him, and forgetting fatigue, as is the case in sorrow. 
Suddenly he felt a pang of hunger; night was at hand.
He walked along in this way some time, going by chance down the streets unknown to him, and forgetting the fatigue, as is the case of sorrow.Suddenly he felt a pang of hunger; night was at hand.
Some children who had followed him from the Croix de Colbas threw sticks at him. He turned angrily and threatened them with his stick, and they scattered like a flock of birds. 
He passed the prison; an iron chain hung from the door attached to a bell. He rang.  
The grating opened.
“ Monsieur Turnkey, ” said he, talking off his cap respectfully, 
“ Will you open and let me stay here tonight ? ” 
A voice answered: 
“ A prison is not a tavern; get yourself arrested and we will open. ”
The grating closed.
Night came on apace; the cold Alpine winds were blowing.
He began to tramp again, taking his way out of town, hoping to find some tree or haystack beneath which he could shelter himself. He walked on for some time, his head bowed down. When he thought he was far away from all human habitation, he raised his eyes, and looked about him inguiringly. He was in a field; before him was a low hillock covered with stubble. 
The sky was very dark; it was not simply the darkness of night, but there were very low clouds, which seemed to rest upon the hills, and covered the whole heavens. 
There was nothing in the field nor upon the hill but one ugly tree, a few steps from the traveler, which seemed to be twisting and contorting itself. 
He retraced his steps; the gates of Digne were closed. He passed through a breach and entered the town. 
It was about eight o’clock in the evening. As he did not know the streets, he walked at hazard. 
On passing by the cathedral square, he shook his fist at the church. 
At the corner of this square stands a printing office. Exhausted with fatigue, and hoping for nothing better, he lay down on a stone bench in front of this printing office.  
Just then an old woman came out of the church. She saw the man lying there in the dark and said: 
“ What are you doing there my friend ? ” 
He replied harshly, and with anger in his tone:
“ You see my good woman, I am going to sleep. “
The good woman, who really merited the name, was Madame la Marquise de R___ .
“ Upon the bench ? ” said she. “ You cannot pass the night so. You must be cold and hungry. They should give you lodging for charity. ”
“ I have knocked at every door. ”
“ Well, what then ? ” 
“ Everybody has driven me away. ” 
The good woman touched the man’s arm and pointed out to him, on the other side of the square, a little low house beside the bishop’s palace. 
“ You have knocked at every door ? ” she asked. 
“ Yes. “
“ Have you knocked at that one there ? ”
“ No.”
“ Knock there. ” 

That evening after his walk in the town, the Bishop of Digne remained quite late in his room. 
​
He was busy with his great work on Duty, which unfortunately is left incomplete. 
At eight o’clock he was still at work, when Madame Malgoire, as usual, came in to take the silver from the panel near the bed. A moment after, the bishop, knowing that the table was laid, and that his sister was perhaps waiting, closed his book and went into the living room.

Madame Malgoire had just finished placing the plates. 
While she was arranging the table, she was talking with Mademoiselle Baptistine. 
The lamp was on the table, which was near the fireplace, where a good fire was burning. 
One can readily fancy these two women, both past their sixtieth year: Madame Magloire, small, fat, and quick in her movements; Mademoiselle Baptistine, sweet, thin, fragile, a little taller than her brother. Madame Malgoire had the air of a peasant, and Mademoiselle Baptistine that of a lady.
Just as the bishop entered, Madame Malgoire was speaking with some warmth. She was talking to mademoiselle upon a familiar subject, and one to which the bishop was quite accustomed. It was a discussion on the means of fastening the front door. 
It seems that while Madame Malgoire was out making provision for supper, she had heard the news in sundry places. There was talk that an ill-favored runaway, a suspicious vagabond, had arrived and was lurking somewhere in the town, and that some unpleasant adventures might befall those who should come home late at night. Then Mademoiselle Baptistine ventured to say timidly:
“ Brother, do you hear what Madame Malgoire says ? ”
“ I heard something of it indistinctly, ” said the bishop. Then turning his chair half around, putting his hands on his knees, and raising toward the old servant his cordial and good-humoured face, which the firelight shone upon, he said: “ Well, well ! What is the matter ? Are we in any great danger ? ” 
Then Madame Malgoire began her story again, unconsciously exaggerating it a little. 
It appeared that a barefooted gypsy man, a sort of a dangerous beggar, was in the town. He had gone for lodging to Jacquin Labarre, who had refused to receive him; he had been seen to enter the town by the Boulevard Gassendi, and to roam through the street at dusk. 
A man with a knapsack and a rope, and a terrible-looking face. 
“ Indeed ! ” said the bishop.
She continued: “ Yes, monseigneur; it is true. There will something happen tonight in the town; everyone says so. And I say, monseigneur, and mademoiselle says also - ” 
“ Me ? ” interrupted the sister. “ I say nothing. ”
Madame Malgoire went on as if she had not heard this protestation: 
“ We say that this house is not safe at all, and if monseigneur will permit me, I will go and tell Paulin Musebois, the locksmith, to come and put the old bolts in the door again; they are there, and it will take but a minute. I say we must have bolts, were it only for tonight, for I say that a door which opens by a latch on the outside to  the first comer, nothing could be more horrible , and then monseigneur has the habit of always saying ‘Come in, ’even at midnight. But, my goodness ! There is no need even to ask leave- ”
At this moment there was a violent knock on the door. 
“ Come in ! “ said the bishop. 
The door opened. 
It opened quickly, quite wide, as if pushed by someone boldly and with energy. 
A man entered. 
That man, who we know already; it was the traveler we have seen wandering about in search of a lodging. 
He came in, took one step, and paused, leaving the door open behind him. He had his knapsack on his back, his stick in his hand, and a rough, hard, tired, and fierce look in his eyes, as seen by the firelight. He was hideous. It was an apparition of ill omen. 
Madame Malgoire had not even the strength to scream. She stood trembling with her mouth open. 
Mademoiselle Baptistine turned, saw the man enter, and started up half alarmed; then, slowly turning back again toward the fire, she looked at her brother, and her face resumed its usual calmness and serenity. 
The bishop looked upon the man with a tranquil eye. 
As he was opening his mouth to speak, doubtless to ask the stranger what he wanted, the man, leaning with both hands on his club, glanced from one to another in turn, and without waiting for the bishop to speak, said in a loud voice;

“ See here! My name is Jean Valjean, I am a convict; I have been nineteen years in the galleys. Four days ago I was set free, and started for Pontarlier, which is my destination; during those four days I have walked from Toulon.  Today I have walked twelve leagues. 
When I reached this place this evening I went to an inn, and they sent me away on account of my yellow passport, which I had shown at the mayor’s office, as was necessary.  I went to the prison, and the turnkey would not let me in. I went into the fields to sleep beneath the stars: there were no stars; I thought it would rain, and there was not good God to stop the drops, so  I came back to the town to get the shelter of some good doorway. There in the square I lay down upon a stone; a good woman showed me your house, and said: “ Knock there! “ I have knocked. What is this place? Are you an inn? I have money; my savings, one hundred and nine francs and fifteen sous which I have earned in the galleys by my work for nineteen years.  I will pay. What do I care? I have money. I am tired-twelve leagues on foot, and I am so hungry. Can I stay? ”   

“ Madame Malgoire, “ said the bishop, ” put on another plate.”
The man took three steps, and came near the lamp which stood on the table. “Stop,” he exclaimed, as if he had not been understood, “not that, did you understand me? I am a galley slave-a convict-I am just from the galleys. There is my passport, yellow as you see. 
That is enough to have me kicked out wherever I go. There you have it! Everybody has thrust me out; will you receive me? Is this an inn? Can you give me something to eat, and a place to sleep? Have you a stable? ” 
“ Madame Malgoire, ” said the bishop, “put some sheets on the bed in the alcove. ”
Madame Malgoire went out to fulfill her orders. 
The bishop turned to the man. 
“Monsieur, sit down and warm yourself; we are going to have supper presently, and your bed will be made ready while you sup. ”
At last the man quite understood; his face, the expression of which till then had been gloomy and hard, now expressed stupefaction, doubt, and joy, and became absolutely wonderful. 
He began to stutter like a madman.
“True? What! You will keep me? You won’t drive me away? A convict! You call me monsieur and don’t say “Get out, dog! “ as everybody else does. You are really willing that I should stay? 
You are good people! Besides I have money; I will pay well. I beg your pardon, Monsieur Innkeeper, what is your name? I will pay all you say.  You are a fine man. You are an innkeeper, an’t you? ” 

“ I am a priest who lives here, ” said the bishop.
“ A priest, ” said the man. “ Oh, noble priest! Then you do not ask any money? You are the cure’, an’t you? The cure’ of this big church? Yes, that’s it. How stupid I am; I didn’t notice your cap.”
While speaking, he had deposited his knapsack and stick in the corner, replaced his passport in his pocket, and sat down. Mademoiselle Baptistine looked at him pleasantly. 
He continued: 
“ You are humane, Monsieur Cure’; you don’t despise me. A good priest is a good thing. 
Then you don’t want me to pay you? ”
“ No,” said the bishop, “keep your money.”
The bishop shut the door. 

Madame Malgoire brought in a plate and set it on the table. 
“ Madame Malgoire,” said the bishop, “ put this plate as near the fire as you can.” Then turning towards his guest, he added: 
“ The night wind is raw in the Alps; you must be cold, monsieur.”
Every time he said this word monsieur, with his gently solemn, and heartily hospitable voice, the man’s countenance lighted up. “ Monsieur ” to a convict is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst at sea. 
“ The lamp,” said the bishop, “ gives a very poor light.”
Madame Malgoire understood him, and going to his bed-chamber, took from the mantel the two candlesticks, lighted the candles, and placed them on the table. 
“Monsieur Cure’,” said the man, “ you are good; you don’t despise me. You take me into your house; you light your candles for me, and I haven’t hid from you where I come from, and how miserable I am.”
The bishop, who was sitting near him, touched his hand gently and said: “ You need not tell me who you are. This is not my house; it is the house of Christ. It does not ask any comer whether he has a name, but whether he has an affliction. You are suffering; you are hungry and thirsty; be welcome. And do not thank me;do not tell me that I take you into my house. This is the home of no man, except him who needs an asylum. I tell you, you are a traveler, that you are more at home here than I; whatever is here is yours. 
What need have I to know your name? Besides, before you told me, I knew it.”
The man opened his eyes in astonishment. 
“ Really? You knew my name? ”
“ Yes,” answered the bishop, “ Your name is My Brother.”
“ Stop, stop, Monsieur Cure’, “ exclaimed the man. ” I was famished when I came in, but you are so kind that now I don’t know what I am; that is all gone.”
The bishop looked at him again and said: 
“ You have seen much suffering? ”
“ Oh, the red blouse, the ball and chain, the plank to sleep on, the heat, the cold, the galley’s crew, the lash, the double chain for nothing, the dungeon for a word-even when sick in bed, the chain. The dogs, the dogs are happier! Nineteen years! And I am forty-six, and now a yellow passport. That is all.”

“Yes,” answered the bishop, “ you have left a place of suffering. But listen, there will be more joy in heaven over the tears of a repentant sinner than over the white robes of a hundred good men. If you are leaving that sorrowful place with hate and anger against men, you are worthy of compassion; if you leave it with good will, gentleness and peace, you are better than any of us.”
Meantime Madame Magloire had served up supper; it consisted of soup made of water, oil, bread, and salt, a little pork, a scrap of mutton, a few figs, a green cheese, and a large loaf of rye bread. She had, without asking, added to the usual dinner of the bishop a bottle of fine old Mauves Wine. 
The bishop’s countenance was lighted up with this expression of pleasure, peculiar to hospital natures. 
“ To supper! ” he said briskly, as was his habit when he had a guest. He seated the man at his right. Mademoiselle Baptistine, perfectly quiet and natural, took her place at his left. 
The bishop said the blessing, and then served the soup himself, according to the usual custom. The man fell to, eating greedily. 
Suddenly the bishop said: “ It seems to me something is lacking on the table. ”
The fact was that Madame Malgoire had set out only the three plates that were necessary. 
Now it was the custom of the house, when the bishop had anyone to supper, to set all six of the silver plates on the table, an innocent display. This graceful appearance of luxury was a sort of childlikeness which was full of charm in this gentle but austere household, which elevated poverty to dignity. 
Madame Malgoire understood the remark; without a word she went out, and a moment afterward the three plates for which the bishop had asked were shining on the cloth, symmetrically arranged before each of the three guests. 

CONCLUSION OF UNITS I-III

IV

After having said good-night to his sister, Monseigneur Bienvenue took one of the silver candlesticks from the table, handed the other to his guest, and said to him: 
“ Monsieur, I will show you to your room.”

The man followed him. 
The house was so arranged that one could reach the alcove in the oratory only by passing through the bishop’s sleeping chamber. Just as they were passing through this room Madame Magloire was putting up the silver in the cupboard at the head of the bed. 
It was the last thing she did every night before going to bed. 
The bishop left his guest in the alcove, before a clean white bed. The man set down the candlestick upon a small table.  
“ Come, “said the bishop, “ a good night’s rest to you; tomorrow morning, before you go, you shall have a cup of warm milk from our cows. ”
“ Thank-you, Monsieur L’Abbe’,” said the man. 
Scarcely had he pronounced these words of peace, when suddenly he made a singular motion which would have chilled the two good women of the house with horror, had they witnessed it. He turned abruptly toward the old man, crossed his arms, and casting a wild look upon his host, exclaimed in a harsh voice;
“ Ah, now, indeed! You lodge me in your house, as near you as that! ”
He checked himself, and added, with a laugh, in which there was something horrible: 
“ Have you reflected upon it? Who tells you that I am not a murderer? ”
The bishop responded: 
“ God will take care of that.” 
Then with gravity, moving his lips like one praying or talking to himself, he raised two fingers of his right hand and blessed the man, who, however, did not bow, and without turning his head or looking behind him, went into his chamber. 
A few moments afterwards all in the little house slept. 
Toward the middle of the night, Jean Valjean awoke. 
Jean Valjean was born of a poor peasant family of Brie. In his childhood he had not been taught to read; when he was grown up, he chose the occupation of a pruner at Faverolles. 

Jean Valjean was of a thoughtful disposition. He had lost his parents when very young. 
His mother died of malpractice in a milk fever; his father, a pruner before him, was killed by a fall from a tree. Jean Valjean now had one relative left, his sister, a widow with seven children, girls and boys. This sister had brought up Jean Valjean, and, as long as her husband lived, she had taken care of her younger brother. Her husband died, leaving the eldest of these children eight, the youngest one year old. Jean Valjean had just reached his twenty-fifth year; he took the father’s place, and, in his turn, supported the sister who reared him. This he did naturally, as a duty. His youth was spent in rough and ill-recompensed labor: he never was known to have a sweetheart; he had not time to be in love. 
At night he came in weary and ate his soup without saying a word. While he was eating, his sister, Mere Jeanne, frequently took from his bowl the best of his meal: a bit of meat, a slice of pork, the heart of the cabbage, to give to one of her children. He went on eating, his head bent down nearly into the soup, his long hair falling over his dish, hiding his eyes; he did not seem to notice anything that was done. 

He earned in the pruning season eighteen sous a day; after that he hired out as a reaper, workman, teamster or laborer. 
He did whatever he could find to do. His sister worked also, but what could she do with seven little children? It was a sad group, which misery was grasping and closing upon, little by little.  There was a very severe winter; Jean had no work; the family had no bread; literally, no bread, and seven children. 
One Sunday night, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the Place de l’Eglise, in Faverolles, was just going to bed when he heard a violent blow against the barred window of his shop. He got down in time to see an arm thrust through the aperture made by the blow of a fist on the glass. The arm seized a loaf of bread and took it out. Isabeau rushed out; the thief used his legs valiantly; Isabeau pursued him and caught him.The thief had thrown away the bread, but his arm was still bleeding. It was Jean Valjean. 
All that happened in 1795. Jean Valjean was brought before the tribunals of the time for              “ burglary at night, in an inhabited house.” He was found guilty. Valjean was sentenced to five years in the galleys. 
He was taken to Toulon, at which place he arrived after a journey of twenty-seven days,on a cart, the chain still about his neck. At Toulon he was dressed in a red blouse, all his past life was effaced, even to his name. He was no longer Jean Valjean; he was Number 24,601. What became of his sister? What became of the seven children? 
Who troubled himself about that? What becomes of the handfuls of leaves of the young tree when it is sawn at the trunk?
Near the end of the fourth year, his chance of liberty came for Jean Valjean. His comrades helped him as they always do in that dreary place, and he escaped. He wandered two days through the fields. During the evening of the second day, he was retaken; he had neither eaten nor slept for thirty-six hours. The maritime tribunal extended his sentence three years for this attempt, which made eight. In the sixth year his turn of escape came again; he tried it, but failed again. He did not answer at roll call, and the alarm cannon was fired. At night the people in the vicinity discovered him hidden beneath the keel of a vessel on the stocks; he resisted the galley guard which seized him. Escape and resistence. This the provisions of the special code punished him by an addition of five years, two with the double chain. Thirteen years. The tenth year his turn came around again; He made another attempt with no better success. Three years for this new attempt. Sixteen years. And finally, I think it was in the thirteenth year, he made yet another, and was retaken after an absence of only four hours. Nineteen years. In October, 1815, he was set at large; he had entered in 1796 for having broken a pane of glass, and taken a loaf of bread. 
Jean Valjean entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering: he went out hardened; he entered in despair; he went out sullen. 
What had been the life of this soul? 

VI. 

Let us endeavor to tell. 
He was, as we have said, ignorant, but he was not an imbecile.
Never, since his infancy, since his mother, since his sister, never had he been greeted with a friendly word or a kind regard. Through suffering on suffering he came little by little to the conviction that life was a war, and that in that war he was the vanquished. He had no weapon but his hate. He resolved to sharpen it in the galleys and to take it with him when he went out. 
There was at Toulon a school for the prisoners conducted by some not very skillful friars, the most essential branches were taught to such of these poor men who were willing. He was one of the willing ones. He went to school at forty and learned to read, write, and cipher. 
Jean Valjean was not, we have seen, of an evil nature. His heart was still right when he arrived at the galleys. While there he condemned society, and felt that he had become wicked; he condemned Providence, and felt that he became impious. 
We must not omit one circumstance, which is, that in physical strength he far surpassed all the other inmates of the prison. At hard work, at twisting a cable, or turning a windlass, Jean Valjean was equal to four men.  At one time, while the balcony of the City Hall of Toulon was undergoing repairs, one of Puget’s admirable caryatids ( figures of women in long robes, serving as supportive columns ) slipped from its place, and was about to fall, when Jean Valjean, who happened to be there, held it up on his shoulders until the workmen came. 
His suppleness surpassed his strength and skill combined-the science of the muscles. A mysterious system of statics is practiced throughout daily by prisoners, who are eternally envying the birds and flies. To scale a wall, and to find a foothold where you could hardly see a projection was play for Jean Valjean. Given an angle in a wall, with the tension of his back and knees, with elbow and hands braced against the rough face of the stone, he would ascend, as if by magic, to a third story. Sometimes he climbed up in this manner to the roof of the galleys. 
He talked but little, and never laughed. Some extreme emotion was required to draw from him, once or twice a year, that lugubrious ( mournful ) sound of the convict, which is like the echo of a demon’s laugh. To those who saw him, he seemed to be absorbed in continually looking upon something terrible. 
He was absorbed, in fact. 
Sometimes in the midst of his work in the galleys he would stop, and begin to think. His reason, more nature, and, at the same, perturbed more than formerly, would revolt. 
All that had happened to him would appear absurd; all that surrounded him. He would say to himself: 
“ It is all a dream. ” He would look at the jailer standing a few steps from him; the jailer would seem to be a phantom; All at once this phantom would give him a blow with a stick. 
For him the eternal world had scarcely an existence. It would be almost true to say that for Jean Valjean there was no sun, no beautiful summer days, no  radiant sky, no fresh April dawn. Some dim window light was all that shone in his soul. The beginning as well as the end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law, that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by  a vague and incessant desire to injure some living being , it matters not who. So the passport was right which described Jean Valjean as “ a very dangerous man. ” From year to year his soul was withered more and more slowly, but fatally. With his withered heart, he had a dry eye. When he left the galleys, he had not shed a tear for nineteen years. 
 
VII.

As the cathedral clock struck two, Jean Valjean awoke. He had slept something more than four hours. His fatigue had passed away.  He was not accustomed to give many hours to repose.   
He opened his eyes, and looked for a moment into the obscurity about him; then he closed them to go to sleep again. 
When many diverse sensations have disturbed the day, when the mind is preoccupied, we can fall asleep once, but not a second time. Sleep comes at first much more readily than it comes again. Such was the case with Jean Valjean. He could not get to sleep again, and so he began to think. 
He was in one of those moods in which the ideas we have in our minds are perturbed. 
Many thoughts came to him, but there was one which continually presented itself, and which drove away all others. What that thought was, we shall tell directly.  He had noticed the six silver plates and the large ladle that Madame Malgoire had put on the table. 
Those six silver plates took possession of him. There they were, within a few steps. 

At the very moment that he passed through the middle room to reach the one he was now in, the old servant was placing them in a little cupboard at the head of the bed. He had marked that cupboard well on the right, coming from the dining room. They were solid, and old silver. With the big ladle, they would bring at least two hundred francs. 
His mind wavered a whole hour, and a long one, in fluctuation and in struggle. The clock struck three. He opened his eyes, rose up hastily in bed, reached out his arm and felt his haversack, which he had put into the corner of the alcove; then he thrust out his legs and placed his feet on the ground, and found himself, he knew not how, seated on his bed. 
He continued in this situation, and would perhaps have remained there until daybreak, if the clock had not struck the quarter of the half hour. The clock seemed to say to him: “ Come along! ” 
He rose to his feet, hesitated for a moment longer, and listened; all was still in the house; he walked straight and cautiously toward the window, which he could discern. 
The night was not very dark; there was a full moon, across which large clouds were driving before the wind. This produced alternations of light and shade, outdoors eclipses and illuminations, and indoors a kind of glimmer. On reaching the window, Jean Valjean examined it. It had no bars, opened into the garden, and was fastened, according to the fashion of the country, with a little wedge only. He opened it, but as the cold, keen air rushed into the room, he closed it again immediately. He looked into the garden with that absorbed look which studies rather than sees. The garden was enclosed with a white wall, quite low, and readily scaled. Beyond, against the sky, he distinguished the tops of trees at equal distances apart, which showed that this wall separated the garden from an avenue or a lane planted with trees. 
When he had taken this observation, he turned like a man whose mind is made up, went to his alcove, took his haversack, opened it, fumbled in it, took out something which he laid upon the bed, put his shoes into one of his pockets, tied up his bundle, swung it upon his shoulders, put on his cap and pulled the vizor down over his eyes, felt for his stick, and went and put it in the corner of the window, then returned to the bed, and resolutely took up the object which he had laid on it. It looked like a short iron bar, pointed at one end like a spear.      
It would have been hard to distinguish in the darkness for what use this peace of iron had been made. Could it be a lever? Could it be a club? 
In the daytime, it would have been seen to be nothing but a miner’s drill. At that time, the convicts were sometimes employed in quarrying stone on the high hills that surround Toulon, and they often had miners’ tools in their possessions. Miners’ drills are of solid iron, terminating at the lower end in a point, by means of which they are sunk into the rock. 
He took the drill in his right hand, and holding his breath, with stealthy steps, he moved toward the door of the next room, which was the bishop’s as we know. On reaching the door, he found it unlatched. The bishop had not closed it. 
Jean Valjean listened. Not a sound. 
He pushed the door. 
He pushed it lightly with the end of his finger, with the stealthy and timorous carefulness of a cat. The door yielded to the pressure with a silent, imperceptible movement, which made the opening a little wider. 
He waited a moment, and then pushed the door again more boldly. This time a rusty hinge suddenly sent out into the darkness a harsh and prolonged creak. 
He stood still, petrified like a pillar of salt, not daring to stir. Some minutes passed. The door was wide open; he ventured a look into the room. Nothing had moved. He listened. 
Nothing was stirring in the house. The noise of the rusty hinge had wakened nobody.
The first danger was over, but still he felt within him a frightful tumult. Nevertheless he did not flinch. Not even when he thought he was lost had he flinched. His only thought was to make an end of it quickly. He took one step and was in the room.  
A deep calm filled the chamber. Jean Valjean advanced, carefully avoiding the furniture. At the further end of the room he could hear the equal and quiet breathing of the sleeping bishop. 
Suddenly he stopped; he was near the bed, he had reached it sooner than he thought. For nearly a half hour a great cloud had darkened the sky. At the moment when Jean Valjean paused before the bed the cloud broke as if purposely, and a ray of moonlight, crossing the high window, suddenly lighted up the bishop’s face. He slept tranquilly. He was almost entirely dressed, though in bed, on account of the cold nights of the Lower Alps, with a dark woolen garment which covered his arms to the wrists. His head had fallen on the pillow in the unstudied attitude of slumber; over the side of the bed hung his hand, ornamented with the pastoral ring, and which had done so  many good deeds, so many pious acts. His entire countenance was lit up  with a vague expression of content, hope and happiness. It was more than a smile and almost a radiance. On his forehead rested the indescribable reflection of an unseen light. The souls of the upright in sleep  have vision of a mysterious heaven. 
A reflection from this heaven shone upon the bishop. 
The moon in the sky, nature drowsing, the garden without a pulse, the quiet house, the hour, the moment, the silence, added something strangely solemn and unutterable to the venerable repose of this man, and enveloped his white locks with his closed eyes with a serene and majestic glory, his face where all was hope and confidence-this old man’s head and infant’s slumber.  
There was something of divinity almost in this man. 
Jean Valjean was in the shadow with the iron drill in his hand, erect, motionless, terrified, at this radiant figure. He had never seen anything comparable to it. This confidence filled him with fear. The moral world has no greater spectacle than this: a troubled and restless conscience on the verge of committing and evil deed, contemplating the sleep of a good man. 
In a few moments he raised his left hand slowly to his forehead and took off his hat; then, letting his hand fall with the same slowness, Jean Valjean resumed his contemplations, his cap in his left hand, his club in his right, and his hair bristling on his fierce looking head. 
Under this frightful gaze the bishop still slept in profoundest peace. 
The crucifix above the mantlepiece was dimly visible in the moonlight, apparently extending its arms towards both, with a benediction for one and a pardon for the other. 
Suddenly Jean Valjean put on his cap, then passed quickly, without looking at the bishop, along the bed, straight to the cupboard, which he perceived near its head; he raised the drill to force the lock; the key was in it; he opened it; the first thing he saw was the basket of silver; he took it, crossed the room with hasty stride, careless of noise, reached the door, entered the oratory, took his stick, stepped out, put the silver in his knapsack, threw away the basket, ran across the garden, leaped over the wall like a tiger, and fled. 
IX
The next day at sunrise, Monseigneur Bienvenue was walking in the garden. Madame Malgoire ran toward him quite beside herself. 
“ Monseigneur, the man has gone! The silver is stolen! ”
While she was uttering this exclamation her eyes fell on an angle of the garden where she saw traces of an escalade. A capstone of the wall had been thrown down. 
“ See, there is where he got out; he jumped into Cochefilet Lane. The abominable fellow! He has stolen our silver! ”
The bishop was silent for a moment; then raising his serious eyes, he said mildly to Madame Magloire: 
“ Now first, did this silver belong to us ? ” 
Madame Magloire did not answer ; after a moment the bishop continued: 
“ Madame Magloire, I have for a long time wrongfully withheld this silver; it belonged to the poor. Who was this man? A poor man evidently. ”
“ Alas! Alas! “ returned Madame Magloire. ” It is not on my account or mademoiselle’s; it is all the same to us. But it is on yours, monseigneur. What is monsieur going to eat from now ? ” 
The bishop looked at her with amazement: 
“ How so! Have we no tin plates ? ” 
Madame Magloire shrugged her shoulders. 
“ Tin smells. ”
“ Well. then, iron plates. ”
Madame Magloire made an expressive gesture.  
“ Iron Tastes ”
“ Well, ” said the bishop, “ then wooden plates. ”   
In a few minutes he was breakfasting at the same table at which Jean Valjean sat the night before. While breakfasting, Monseigneur Bienvenue pleasantly remarked to his sister who said nothing, and Madame Magloire who was grumbling to herself, that there was really no need even of a wooden spoon or fork to dip a piece of bread into a cup of milk. 

Just as the brother and sister were rising from the table, there was a knock at the door. 
“ Come in, ” said the bishop. 
The door opened. A strange, fierce group appeared on the threshold. Three men were holding a fourth by the collar. The three men were gendarmes; the fourth Jean Valjean. 
A brigadier of gendarmes, who appeared to head the group, was near the door. He advanced toward the bishop, giving a military salute. 
“ Monseigneur- ” said he. 
At this word Jean Valjean, who was sullen and seemed entirely cast down, raised his head with a stupified air. 
“ Monseigneur ! ” he murmured. “ Then it is not the cure’ ! ”
“ Silence ! ” said a gendarme. “ It is monseigneur, the bishop. ”
In the meantime Monseigneur Bienvenu had approached as quickly as his great age permitted. 
“ Ah, there you are ! ” said he, looking toward Jean Valjean. 
“ I am glad to see you. But I gave you the candlesticks also, which are silver like the rest, and would bring two hundred francs. Why did you not take them along with your plates ? ”
Jean Valjean opened his eyes and looked at the bishop with an expression which no human tongue could describe. 
“ Monseigneur, ” said the brigadier, “ then what this man said was true ? We met him. 
He was going like a man who was running away, and we arrested him in order to see. He had this silver. ”   
“ And he told you, ” interrupted the bishop, with a smile, “ that it had been given to him by a good old priest with whom he had passed the night. I see it all. 
And you brought him back here? It is all a mistake. ”
“ If that is so, ” said the brigadier, “ we can let him go ” 
“ Certainly, ” replied the bishop. 
The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who shrank back. 
“ Is it true that they let me go? ” he said in a voice almost inarticulate, as if he were speaking in his sleep. 
“ Yes! You can go. Do you not understand? ” said a gendarme. 
“ My friend,” said the bishop, “ before you go away, here are your candlesticks; take them.”
He went to the mantlepiece, took the two candlesticks, and brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women beheld the action without a word, or gesture, or look, that might disturb the bishop. 

Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks mechanically, and with a wild appearance. 
“ Now, ” said the bishop, “ go in peace.”
Then turning to the gendarmes, he said: 
“ Messieurs, you can retire. ” The gendarmes withdrew.
Jean Valjean felt like a man who is just about to faint. 
The bishop approached him, and said in a low voice: 
“ Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man. ”
Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of this promise, stood confounded. The bishop had laid much stress upon these words as he uttered them. He continued solemnly; 
“ Jean Valjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you, I withdraw it from dark thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God! ”

JEAN VALJEAN went out of the city as if he were escaping. He made all haste to get into the open country, taking the first lanes and bypaths that offered without noticing that he was every moment retracing his steps. He wandered thus all the morning. He had eaten nothing, but he felt no hunger. He was the prey of a multitude of new sensations. He felt somewhat angry, he knew not against whom. 

Although the season was well advanced, there were yet here and there a few late flowers in the hedges, the odor of which, as it met him in his walk, recalled the memories of his childhood. These memories were almost insupportable, it was so long since they had occurred to him. Unspeakable thoughts thus gathered in his mind the whole day. 

As the sun was sinking towards the horizon, lengthening the shadow on the ground of the smallest pebble, Jean Valjean was seated behind a thicket in a large reddish plain, an absolute desert. There was no horizon but the Alps. Not even the steeple of a village church. Jean Valjean may have been three leagues from D—--- A bypath which crossed the plain passed a few steps from the thicket. 
In the midst of this meditation he heard a joyous sound. He turned his head, and saw coming along the path a little Savoyard, a dozen years old, singing, with his hurdy-gurdy at his side and his marmot box on his back. 
One of those pleasant and gay youngsters who go from place to place with their knees sticking through their trousers. 
Always singing, the boy stopped from time to time and played at tossing up some pieces of money that he had in his hand, probably his whole fortune. Among them there was one forty-sous piece.
The boy stopped by the side of the thicket without seeing Jean Valjean and tossed up his handful of souls, until this time he had skillfully caught the whole of them upon the back of his hand.  
This time the forty-sous piece escaped him and rolled toward the thicket near Jean Valjean. 
Jean Valjean put his foot upon it. 
The boy, however, had followed the piece with his eye and had seen where it went . 
He was not frightened and walked straight to the man. It was an entirely solitary place. 
Far as the eye could reach there was no one on the plain or in the path. Nothing could be heard but the faint cries of a flock of birds of passage that were flying across the sky at an immense height.  The child turned his back to the sun, which made his hair like threads of gold, and flushed the savage face of Jean Valjean with a lurid glow. 

“ Monsieur,” said the little Savoyard, with that childish confidence which is made up of ignorance and innocence, “my piece?”
“ What is your name? ” said Jean Valjean. 
“ Petit Gervais, monsieur. ”
“ Get out, ” said Jean Valjean. 
“ Monsieur, ” continued the boy, “ give me my piece.” 
Jean Valjean dropped his head and did not answer. 

The child began again:
“ My piece, monsieur! ”
Jean Valjean did not appear to understand. The boy took him by the collar of his blouse and shook him and at the same time he made an effort to move the big, ironsoled shoe which was placed upon his treasure. 
“ I want my piece ! My forty-sous piece! ”
The child began to cry. Jean Valjean raised his head. He still kept his seat. His look was troubled. He looked upon the boy with an air of wonder, then reached out his hand. He still kept his seat. His look was troubled. He looked upon the boy with an air of wonder, then reached out his hand toward his stick and exclaimed in a terrible voice,“ Who is there? Ah! You here yet? ”  And rising hastily to his feet, without releasing the piece of money, he added: “ You’d better take care of your self! ”
The boy looked at him in terror, then began to tremble from head to foot, and after a few seconds of stupor, took to flight and ran with all his might without daring to turn his head or to utter a cry. 
At a little distance, however, he stopped for want of breath, and Jean Valjean in his reverie heard him sobbing. 
In a few minutes the boy was gone. 
The sun had gone down. 
The shadows were deepening around Jean Valjean. He had not eaten during the day; probably he had some fever. 
He had remained standing, and had not changed his attitude since the child fled. His breathing was at long and unequal intervals. His eyes were fixed on a spot ten or twelve steps before him, and seemed to be studying with profound attention the form of an old piece of blue crockery that was lying in the grass. All at once he shivered; he began to feel the cold night air. 
He pulled his cap down over his forehead, sought mechanically to fold and button his blouse around him, stepped forward and stooped to pick up his stick. 
At that instant he perceived the forty-sous piece which his foot had half buried in the ground, and which glistened among the pebbles. It was like an electric shock. “ What is that? ” said he, between his teeth. He drew back  a step or two, then stopped without the power to withdraw his gaze from this point which his foot had covered the instant before, as if the thing that glistened there in the obscurity had been an eye fixed upon him. After a few minutes, he sprung convulsively toward the piece of money, seized it, and, rising, looked away over the plain, straining his eyes towards all points of the horizon, standing and trembling like a frightened deer which is seeking a place of refuge. 

He saw nothing. Night was falling, the plain was cold and bare, thick purple mists were rising in the glimmering twilight. 
He said: “ Oh! ” and began to walk rapidly in the direction in which the child had gone. After some thirty steps, he stopped, looked about, and saw nothing. 
Then he called with his might: “ Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais! ” 
And then he listened. 
There was no answer. 
The country was desolate and gloomy. On all sides was space. There was nothing about him but a shadow in which his gaze was lost and a silence in which his voice was lost.   

A biting norther was blowing, which gave a kind of dismal life to everything about him. 
The bushes shook their little thin arms with an incredible fury. One would have said that they were threatening and pursuing somebody. 
He began to walk again, then quickened his pace to a run and from time to time stopped and called out in that solitude, in almost desolate and terrible voice: 
“ Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais! ” 
Surely, if the child had heard him, he would have been frightened and would have hid himself. 
But doubtless the boy was already far away. 
Jean Valjean began to run again in the direction which he had first taken. 

He went on in this wise for a considerable distance, looking around, calling and shouting, but met nobody else. Two or three times he left the path to look at what seemed to be somebody lying down or crouching; it was only low bushes or rocks. 
Finally, at a place where three paths met, he stopped. The moon had risen. He strained his eyes  in the distance, and called out once more: “ Petit Gervais! ” but with a feeble, and almost inarticulate voice. That was his last effort. His knees suddenly bent under him, as if an invisible power overwhelmed him at a blow, with the weight of his bad conscience; he fell exhausted upon a great stone, his hands clenched in his hair and his face on his knees, and exclaimed: 
“ What a wretch I am ! ”
Then his heart swelled, and he burst into tears. It was the first time he had wept in nineteen years. 

Jean Valjean wept long. He shed hot tears, he wept bitterly, with more weakness than a woman, with more terror than a child. 
While he wept, the light grew brighter and brighter in his mind-an extraordinary light, a light at once transporting and terrible. His past life, his first offence, his long expiation, his brutal exterior, his hardened interior, his release made glad by so many schemes of vengeance, what had happened to him at the bishop’s , his last action, this theft of forty sous from a child, a crime meaner and the more monstrous that it came after the bishop’s pardon, all this returned and appeared to him, clearly, but in a light that he had never seen before. He beheld his life, and it seemed to  him that he was looking upon Satan by the light of paradise. 
How long did he weep thus? What did he do after weeping ? Where did he go ? Nobody ever knew. It is known simply that, on that very night, the stage driver who drove at that time on the Grenoble route, and arrived at D—--about three o’clock in the morning, saw, as he passed through the bishop’s street, a man in the attitude of prayer, kneel upon the pavement in the shadow, before the door of Monseigneur Bienvenu.   

  To Entrust Is Sometimes 
To Abandon.

THERE was, during the first quarter of the present century, at Montfermeil, near París, a sort of chophouse; it is not there now. It was kept by a man and his wife, named Thénardier, and was situated in the Lane Boulanger. Above the door, nailed against the wall, was a board, upon which something was painted that looked like a man carrying on his back another man wearing the heavy epaulettes of a general, gift and with large silver starts; red blotches typified blood; the remainder of the picture was smoke, and probably represented a battle. Beneath was this inscription: To THE SERGEANT OF WATERLOO. 

Nothing is commoner than a cart of wagon before the door of an inn; nevertheless the vehicle , or more properly speaking, the fragment of a vehicle which obstructed the street in front of the Sergeant of Waterloo one evening in the spring of 1818 certainly would have attracted by its bulk the attention of any painter who may have been passing.     

Why was this vehicle in this place in the street, one may ask? First to obstruct the lane, and then to complete its work of rust. 

The middle of the chain was hanging quite near the ground, under the axle, and upon the bend, as on a swinging rope, two little girls were seated that evening in exquisite grouping, the smaller, eighteen months old, in the lap of the larger, who was two-and-a-half years old. 

A handkerchief carefully knotted kept them from falling. 
A mother. Looking upon this frightful chain, had said; “Ah! This is a plaything for my children!” 
The mother, a woman whose appearance was rather forbidding, but touching at this moment, was seated on the sill of the inn, swinging the two children by a long string, while she brooded them with her eyes for fear of accident with that animal but heavenly expression peculiar to  maternity. At each vibration the hideous links uttered a creaking noise like an angry cry, the little ones were in ecstasies, as the setting sun mingled in the joy, 
Suddenly the mother heard a voice say quite near to her ear: “You have two pretty children there, madame.”
A woman was before her at a little distance; she also had a child, which she bore in her arms. 
She was carrying in addition a large carpetbag, which seemed heavy.  
This woman’s child was one of the divinest beings that can be imagined: a little girl of two or three years. She might have entered the lists with the other little ones coquetry of attire; she wore a headdress of fine linen; ribbons at her shoulders and Valenciennes lace on her cap. The folds of her skirt were raised enough to show her plump fine white leg; she was charmingly rosy and beautiful. The pretty little creature gave one a desire to bite her cherry cheeks. We can say nothing of her eyes except that they must have been very large, and were fringed with superb lashes. She was asleep. 


She was sleeping in the absolutely confiding slumber peculiar to her age. A mother’s arms are made of tenderness, and sweet sleep blessed the child who lies therein. 
As to the mother, she seemed poor and sad; she had the appearance of a workingwoman who is seeking to return to the life of a peasant. She was young and pretty? It was possible but in that garb beauty could not be displayed. Her hair, one blond mesh of which had fallen, seemed very thick, but it was severely fastened up beneath an ugly, close, narrow nun’s headdress, tied under the chin.  Laughing shows fine teeth when one has them, but she did not laugh.  Her eyes seemed not to have been tearless for a long time. She was pale,  and looked very weary, and somewhat sick. She gazed upon her child, sleeping in her arms, with that peculiar look  which only a mother possesses who nurses her own child. Her form was clumsily masked by a large blue handkerchief folded across her bosom. Her hands were tanned and spotted with freckles, the forefinger hardened and pricked with the needle;she wore a coarse brown delaine mantle, a calico dress, and large heavy shoes.  


It was one of those beings which are brought forth from the heart of the people . Sprung from the most unfathomable depths of social darkness, she bore on her brow the mark of the anonymous and unknown. She was born at M—--sur m—--- Who were her parents? None could tell; she had never known either father or mother. She was called Fantine–Why so? Because she had never been known by any other name. 
She could have no family name, for she had no family;she could have no baptismal name, for then there was no church. 


She was named after the pleasure of the first passer-by who found her, a mere infant, straying barefoot in the streets. She received a name as she received the water from the clouds on her head when it rained. She was called Little Fantine. No-body knew anything more of her. Such was the manner in which this human being had come into life. At the age of ten, Fantine left the city and went to service among the farmers of the suburbs. At fifteen, she came to Paris, to “ seek her fortune ”. Fantine was beautiful and remained pure as long as she could.She was a pretty blonde with fine teeth. She had gold and pearls for her dowry: but the gold was on her head and the pearls in her mouth.  


She worked to live, then, also to live, for the heart too has its hunger, she loved. 
To him it was an amour; to her a passion. The streets of the Latin Quarter which swarn with students and grisettes, saw the beginning of this dream. In short, the eclogue took place, and the poor girl had a child. 
The father of her child gone—alas, such partings are irrevocable –She found herself absolutely isolated, with the habit of labor lost, and the taste for pleasure acquired. She had committed a fault, but, in the depths of her nature, we know dwelt modesty and virtue.  She had a vague feeling that she was on the eve of falling into distress, of slipping into  the street. 
She must have courage; she had it, and bore up bravely. 


The idea occurred to her of returning to her native village M—--sur m—---; there perhaps someone would know her, and give her work. Yes, but she must hide her fault. And she had a confused glimpse of the possible necessities of a  separation still  more painful than the first. Her heart ached, but she took her resolution. It will be seen that Fantine possessed the stern courage of life. At twenty-two years of age, on a fine spring morning, she left Paris, carrying her child on her back. He who had seen the two passing must have pitied them. The woman had nothing in the world but this child, and this child had nothing in the world but this woman. Fantine had nursed her child –that had weakened her chest somewhat—and she coughed slightly. 


Toward noon, after having, for the sake of rest, traveled from time to time at a cost of three or four cents a league, in what they called then the Petites Voitures of the environs of Paris, Fantine reached Montfermeil, and stood in the Lane Boulanger. 
As she was passing by the Thénardier chophouse, the two little children sitting in delight on their monstrous swings had a sort of dazzling effect upon her, and she paused before this joyous vision.  


There are charms. These two little girls were one for this mother. 
She beheld them with emotion. The presence of angels is a herald of paradise. She thought she saw about this inn the mysterious Here of Providence. These children were evidently happy; she gazed upon them, she admired them, so much affected that at the moment when the mother was taking breath between the verses of her song, she could not  help saying what we have been reading.  “ You have two pretty children there, madame.”
The most ferocious animals are disarmed by caresses to their young. 

The mother raised her head and thanked her, and made the stranger sit down on the stone step, she herself being on the doorstill; the two women began to talk together. 
“My name is Madame Thénardier,” said the mother of the two girls. “We keep this inn.”
This Madame Thénardier was a red-haired, browny, angular woman.
She was still young, scarcely thirty years old. If this woman, who was seated stooping, had been upright, perhaps her towering form and her broad shoulders, those of a movable colossus, fit for a market woman, would have dismayed the traveler, disturbed her confidence, and prevented what we have to relate. A person seated instead of standing - fate hangs on such a thread as that. 
The traveler told her story, a little modified. 
She said she was a workingwoman, and her husband was dead. Not being able to procure work in Paris she was going in search of it elsewhere, in her own province; that she had left Paris that morning on foot; that carrying her child she had become tired, and meeting the Villemomble stage had got in; that from Villemomble she had come on foot to Montfermeil; that the child had walked a little, but not much, she was so young; that she was compelled  to carry her, and the jewel had fallen asleep. 
And at these words she gave her daughter a passionate kiss, which wakened her. The child opened its large blue eyes, like it’s mother’s, and saw - what? Nothing, everything, with that serious and sometimes severe air of little children, which is one of the mysteries of their shining innocence before our shadowy virtues. One would say that they felt themselves to be angels, and knew us to be human. Then the child began to laugh, and, although the mother restrained her, slipped to the ground, with the indomitable energy of a little one that wants to run about. All at once she perceived the two others in their swing, stopped short, and put out her tongue in token of admiration. 
Mother Thénardier untied the children and took them from their swing saying: 
“Play together, all three of you.” 
    At that age acquaintance is easy, and in a moment the little Thénardiers were playing with the newcomer, making holes in the ground to their intense delight. 
This newcomer was very sprightly: the goodness of the mother is written in the gaiety of the child; she had taken a splinter of wood, which she used as a spade, and was stoutly digging a hole fit for a fly. The gravedigger’s work is charming when done by a child.  

The two women continued to chat. 
“What do you call your brat?”
“Cosette”
“How old is she?”
“She is going on three years.”
“The age of my oldest.” 
The three girls were grouped in an attitude of deep anxiety and bliss; a great event had occurred: a large worm had come out of the ground; they were afraid of it, and yet in ecstasies over it. 

Their bright foreheads touched each other - three heads in one halo of glory. 
“Children.” exclaimed the Thénardier Mother. “How soon they know one another. See them! One would swear they were three sisters.”
These words were the sparks which the other mother was probably awaiting. She seized the hand of Madame Thénardier and said: 
“Will you keep my child for me?”
“I must think over it,” said Thénardier. 
“I will give six francs a month.”
Here a man’s voice was heard from within: 
“Not less than seven francs, and six months paid in advance.”
“Six times seven are forty-two,” said Thénardier. 
“I will give it,” said the mother.
“And fifteen francs extra for the first expenses,” added the man. 
“That’s fifty-seven francs,” said Madame Thénardier.
“I will give it,” said the mother.  “I have eighty francs. That will leave me enough to go into the country If I walk. I will earn some money there, and as soon as I have I will come for my little love.” 
The man’s voice returned: 
“Has the child a wardrobe?”
“That is my husband,” said Thénadier.
“Certainly she has, the poor darling. I knew it was your husband. And a fine wardrobe it is too, an extravagant wardrobe, everything in dozens, and silk dresses like a lady. They are there in my carpetbag.”
“You must leave that here,” put in the man’s voice. 
“Of course I shall give it to you.” said the mother. “It would be strange if should leave my child naked.”

The face of the master appeared. 
“It is all right,” said he. 
The bargain was concluded. The mother passed the night at the inn, gave her money and left her child, fastened again her carpetbag, diminished by her child’s wardrobe,  and very light now, and set off next morning, expecting soon to return. 
These partings are arranged tranquilly, but they are full of despair. 

A neighbour of the Thénardiers met this mother on her way, and came in, saying:
“I have just met a woman in the street , who was crying as if her heart would break.” 
When Cosette’s mother had gone, the man said to his wife. 
“That will do me for my note of 110 francs which falls due tomorrow; I was 50 francs short. Do you know I should have had a sheriff and a protest? You have proved a good mouse trap  with your little ones.” 
“Without knowing it,” Said the woman.

II

The captured mouse was a very puny one, but the cat exulted even over a lean mouse. 
What were the Thénardiers?  
They belonged to that bastard class formed of low people who have risen, and intelligent people who have fallen, which lies between the classes called middle and lower, and which unites some of the faults of the latter with nearly all the vices of the former, without possessing the generous impulses of the workman, or the respectability of the bourgeois. 
They were of those dwarfish natures, which, if perchance heated by some sullen fire, easily becomes monstrous. The woman was a heart a brute; the man a blackguard: both in the highest degree capable of that hideous species of progress which can be made toward evil. There are souls which, crablike, crawl continually toward darkness, going back in life rather than advancing in it, using what experience they have to increase their deformity, growing worse without ceasing and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness. Such souls were this man and this woman. 
To be wicked does not insure prosperity - for the inn did not succeed well. 
Thanks to Fantine’s fifty-seven francs, Thénardier had been able to avoid a protest and to honor his signature. The next month they were still in need of money, and the woman carried Cossete’s wardrobe to Paris and pawned for sixty francs. 
When this sum was spent, the Thénardiers began to look upon the little girl as a child which they sheltered for charity, and treated her as such. 
Her clothes being gone, they dressed her in the cast off garments of the little Thénardiers, that is in rags.
They fed her on the orts and ends, a little better than the dog and a little worse than the cat. The dog and the cat were her messmates. Cosette ate with them under the table in a wooden dish like theirs. 
Her mother, as we shall see hereafter, who had found a place at M__sur m____, wrote or rather had someone write for her, every month, inquiring news of her child. The Thénardiers replied invariably: 
“Cossette is doing wonderfully well.” 

There are certain natures which cannot have love on one side without hatred on the other. This Thénardier mother passionately loved her own little ones — this made her detest the young stranger. Cosette could not stir that she did no draw down upon herself a hailstorm of undeserved and severe chastisements. A weak, soft little one who knew nothing of this world, or of God, continually ill-treated, scolded, punished, beaten, she saw beside her two  other young things like herself, who lived in a halo of glory!
The woman was unkind to Cosette; Eponine and Azelma were unkind also.Children at that age are only copies of the mother; the size is reduced, that is all.
A year passed and then another.
People used to say in the village:
What good people these Thénardiers are! They are not rich, and yet they bring up a poor child that has been left with them.” 
They thought Cosette was forgotten by her mother. 
From  year to year the child grew, and her misery also. 
So long as Cosette was very small, she was the scapegoat of the two other children; as soon as she began to grow a little, that is to say, before she was five years old, she became the servant of the house.
Cosette was made to run errands, sweep the rooms, the yard, the street, wash the dishes, and even carry burdens. The Thénardiers felt doubly authorized to treat her thus, as the mother, who still remained at M—---sur m —----, began to be remiss in her payments. Some months remained due. 
Had this mother return to Montfermeil, at the end of these three years, she would not have known her child, Cosette, so fresh and pretty when she came to that house, now thin and wan. She had a peculiar restless air. “Shy!” said the Thénardiers.
Injustice had made her sullen, and misery had made her ugly. Her fine eyes only remained to  her, and they were painful to look at, for, large as they were, they seemed to increase the sadness. 
It was a harrowing sight to see in the wintertime the poor child, not yet six years old, shivering under the tatters of what was once a calico dress, sweeping the street before daylight with an enormous broom in her little red hands and tears in her large eyes. 

In the place she was called the lark. People like figurative names and were pleased thus to name this little being, not larger than a bird, trembling, frightened, and shivering, awake every morning first of all in the house and the village, always in the street or in the fields before dawn. 
Only the poor lark never sang. 

The Descent


I 

WHAT had become of this mother, in the meanwhile, who, according to the people of Montfermeil, seemed to have abandoned her child? Where was she? What was she doing? 
After leaving her little Cosette with the Thénardiers, she went on her way and arrived at M—------sur m—------. 
This, it will be remembered, was in 1818. 
Fantine had left the province some twelve years before, and M—--sur m—----had greatly changed in appearance. While Fantine had been slowly sinking deeper and deeper into misery, her native village had been prosperous. 
Within about two years there had been accomplished there one of those industrial changes which are the great events of small communities. 

From the immemorial the special occupation of the inhabitants of M—---sur m—-------had been the imitation of English jets and German black-glass trinkets. The business had always been dull in consequence of the high price of the raw material, which reacted upon the manufacture. At the time of Fantine’s return to M—----sur m—----an entire transformation had been effected in the production of these “black goods.” 
Toward the end of the year 1815, an unknown man had established himself in the city, and had conceived the idea of substituting gum-lac for resin in the manufacture, and for bracelets, in particular, he made the clasps by simply bending the ends of the metal together instead of soldering them. 
This very slight change had worked a revolution. 
In less than three years the inventor of this process had become rich, which was well, and had made all around him rich, which was better. He was a stranger in the Department. Nothing was known of his birth, and but little of his early history. 
The story went that he came to the city with very little money, a few hundred francs at most. 
From this slender capital, under the inspiration of an ingenious idea, made fruitful by order and care, he had drawn a fortune for himself, and a fortune for the whole region. 
On his arrival at M—----sur m-—---he had the dress, the manners, and the language of a laborer only.  
It seems that the very day on which he thus obscurely entered the little city of M—---sur m—---, just at dusk on a December evening, with his bundle on his back, and a thorn stick in his hand, a great fire had broken out in the townhouse. 
This man rushed into the fire, and saved, at the peril of his life, two children, who proved to be those of the captain of the gendarmerie, and in the hurry and gratitude of the moment no one thought to ask him for his passport. He was known from that time by the name of Father Madeleine.    

He was a man of about fifty, who always appeared to be preoccupied in mind, and who was good-natured; this was all that could be said about him. 
Thanks to the rapid progress of this manufacture, to which he had given such wonderful life, M—-sur m—---had become a considerable center of business. Immense purchases were made there every year for the Spanish markets, where there is a large demand for jet work, and M—---sur m—----, in this branch of trade, almost competed with London and Berlin. The profits of Father Madeleine were so great that by the end of the second year he was able to build a large factory, in which there were two immense workshops, one for men and the other for women; whoever was needy could go there and be sure of finding work and wages. Before the arrival of Father Madeleine, the whole region was languishing; now it was all alive with the healthy strength of labor. An active circulation kindled everything and penetrated everywhere. Idleness and misery were unknown. There was no pocket so obscure that it did not contain some money and no dwelling so poor that it was not the abode of some joy. 

Father Madeleine employed everybody: he had only one condition: “Be an honest man!” “Be an honest woman!” 
As we have said, in the midst of this activity, of which he was the cause and the pivot, Father Madeleine had made his fortune, but, very strangely for a mere man of business, that did not appear to be his care. It seemed that he thought much for others, and little for himself. In 1820, it was known that he had six hundred and thirty thousand francs for himself, he had expended more than a million for the city and for the poor.  
The hospital was poorly endowed, and he made provision for ten additional beds. M—---sur m—----is divided into the upper city and the lower city. The lower city, where he lived, had only one schoolhouse, a miserable hovel which was fast going to ruin; he built two, one for the girls, and the other for the boys, and paid the two teachers, from his own pocket, double the amount of their meager salary from the government, and one day, he said to a neighbor who expressed surprise at this: 
“The two highest functionaries of the state are the nurse and the schoolmaster.” He built at his own expense, a house of refuge, an institution then almost unknown in France, and provided a fund for old and infirm laborers. About his factory, as a center, a new quarter of the city had rapidly grown up, containing many indigent families, and he established a pharmacy that was free to all. 
At length, in 1819, it was reported in the city one morning, that upon the recommendation of the prefect, and in consideration of the services he had rendered to the country, Father Madeleine had been appointed by the king, Mayor of M—----sur m—---. 

M—---- sur m—----was filled with the rumor, and the report proved to be well founded, for a few days afterward, the nomination appeared in the Moniteur. The next day Father Madeleine declined. 
In 1820, five years after his arrival at M—---sur m—----, the services that he had rendered to the region was so brilliant, and the wish of the whole population was so unanimous, that the king again appointed him mayor of the city. He refused again; but the prefect resisted his determination, the principal citizens came and urged him to accept, and the people in the streets begged him to do so; all insisted so strongly that at last he yielded. It was remarked that what appeared most of all to bring him to this determination was the almost angry exclamation of an old woman belonging to the poorer class, who cried out to him from her doorstone, with some temper: 
“A good mayor is a good thing. Are you afraid of the good you can do?”

LITTLE by little in the lapse of time all opposition had ceased. 

People came from thirty miles around to consult Monsieur Madeleine. He settled differences, he prevented lawsuits, he reconciled enemies. 
Everybody, of his own will, chose him for judge. He seemed to have the book of the natural law by heart. A contagion of veneration had, in the course of six or seven years, step by step, spread over the whole country. 
One man alone, in the city and its neighborhood, held himself entirely clear from this contagion, and, whatever Father Madeleine did, he remained indifferent, as if a sort of instinct unchangeable and imperturbable, kept him awake and on the watch. 
Often, when Monsieur Madeleine passed along the street, calm, affectionate, followed by the benediction of all, it happened that a tall man, wearing a flat hat and an iron gray coat, and armed with a stout cane, would turn around abruptly behind him, and follow him with his eyes until he disappeared, crossing his arms, slowly shaking his head, and pushing his upper with his under lip up to his nose, a sort of significant grimace which might be rendered by: “But what is that man? I am sure I have seen him somewhere. At all events, I at least am not his dupe.”

This personage, grave with an almost threatening gravity, was one of those who, even in a hurried interview, command the attention of the observer. 
His name was Javert, and he was one of the police. 
He exercised at M—sur m— the unpleasant, but useful, function of inspector. He was not there at the date of Madeleine’s arrival. 
Certain police officers have a peculiar physiognomy in which can be traced an air of meanness mingled with an air of authority. Javert had this physiognomy, without meanness. 
He was born in prison. His mother was a fortuneteller whose husband was in the galleys. He grew up to think himself without the pale of society, and despaired of ever entering it. He noticed that society closes its doors, without pity, on two classes of men: those who attack it and those who guard it; he could choose between these two classes only; at the same time he felt that he had an indescribable basis of rectitude, order, and honesty, associated with an irrepressible hatred for that gypsy race to which he belonged. He entered the police, He succeeded. At forty he was an inspector. 
In his youth he had been stationed in the galleys at the South.   
The face of Javert consisted of a snub nose, with two deep nostrils, which were bordered by large bushy whiskers that covered both his cheeks. One felt ill at ease the first time he saw those two forests and those two caverns. When Javert laughed, which was rarely and terribly,  his thin lips parted, and showed, not only his teeth, but his gums, and around his nose there was a wrinkle as broad and wild as the muzzle of a fallow deer.  Javert,  when serious, was a bulldog; when he laughed, he was a tiger. For the rest, a small head, large jaws, hair hiding the forehead and falling over the eyebrows, between the eyes a permanent central frown, a gloomy look, a mouth pinched and frightful, and an air of fierce command. 
This man was a compound of two sentiments, very simple and very good in themselves, but he almost made them evil by his exaggeration of them: respect for authority and hatred of rebellion; in his eyes, theft, murder, all crimes, were only forms of rebellion. In his strong and implicit faith he included all who held any function in the state, from the prime minister to the constable. He had nothing but disdain, aversion, and disgust for all who had once overstepped the bounds of the law.  He was absolute, and admitted no exceptions.
He was stoical, serious, austere: a dreamer of “stern” dreams; humble and haughty, like all fanatics. His stare was cold and as piercing as a gimlet. His whole life was contained in these two words; waking and watching. Woe to him who should fall into his hands! He would have arrested his father if escaping from the galleys, and denounced his mother for violating her ticket of leave. And he would have done it with that sort of interior satisfaction that springs from virtue.His life was a life of privations, isolation, self-denial and chastity: never any amusement. It was implacable duty absorbed in the police as the Spartans were absorbed in Sparta, a pitiless detective, a fierce honesty, a marblehearted informer,   
Such was this formidable man. 
Javert was like an eye always fixed on Monsieur Madeleine, an eye full of suspicion and conjecture. Monsieur Madeleine finally noticed it, but seemed to consider it of no consequence.
He asked no question of Javert, he neither sought him nor shunned him, he endured this unpleasant and annoying stare without appearing to pay any attention to it. He treated Javert as he did everybody else, at ease and with kindness. 
Javert was evidently somewhat disconcerted by the completely natural air and the tranquility of Monsieur Madeleine. 
One day, however, his strange manner appeared to  make an impression upon Monsieur Madeleine. The occasion was this. 


IV
 
MONSIEUR MADELEINE was walking one morning along one of the unpaved alleys of   M—sur m—; he heard a shouting and saw a crowd at a little distance. He went to the spot. An old man, named Father Fauchelevent, had fallen under his cart, his horse being thrown down. 
The horse had his thighs broken, and could not stir. The old man was caught between the wheels. Unluckily he had fallen so that the whole weight rested upon his breast. The cart was heavily loaded. Father Fauchelevent was uttering doleful groans. They had tried to pull him out, but in vain. An unlucky effort, inexpert help, a false push, might crush him. It was impossible to extricate otherwise than by raising the wagon from beneath. Javert, who came up at the moment of the accident, had sent for a jack. 
Monsieur Madeleine came. The crowd fell back with respect. 
“Help,” cried out Fauchelevent. “Who is a good fellow to save an old man?”  
  Monsieur Madeleine turned toward the bystanders. 
“ Has anyone a jack? ”
“They have gone for one,” replied a peasant. 
“ How soon will it be here? ” 
“ We sent to the nearest place, to Flachot Place, where there is a blacksmith, but it will take a good quarter of an hour at least. ” 
“ A quarter of an hour! ” exclaimed Madeleine to the peasants who were looking on. 
“ We must! ”
“ But it will be too late! Don’t you see that the wagon is sinking all the while? ”
“ It can’t be helped.”
“ Listen,” resumed Madeleine, “there is room enough still under the wagon for a man to crawl in, and lift it with his back.  In half a minute we will have the poor man out. Is there nobody here who has strength and courage? Five louis d’ors for him! ”
Nobody stirred in the crowd. 
“Ten louis,” said Madeleine. 
The bystander dropped their eyes. One of them muttered: 
“He’d have to be devilish stout. And then he would risk getting crushed.”
“Come,” said Madeleine, “twenty louis”
The same silence.
“ It is not willingness which they lack,” said a voice. 
Monsieur Madeleine turned and saw Javert. He had not noticed him when he came. 
Javert continued:
“ It is strength. He must be a terrible man who can raise a wagon like that on his back.”
Then, looking fixedly at Monsieur Madeleine, he went on, emphasizing every word that he uttered:  
“ Monsieur Madeleine, I have known but one man capable of doing what you call for.”
Madeleine shuddered. 
Javert added, with an air of indifference, but without taking his eyes from Madeleine: 
“ He was a convict.”
“ Ah! ” said Madeleine: 
“ In the galleys at Toulon.” 
Madeleine became pale. 
“Oh! How it crushes me! ” cried the old man.  
Madeleine raised his head, met the falcon eye of Javert still fixed upon him, looked at the immovable peasants, and smiled sadly. Then, without saying a word, he fell on his knees, and even before the crowd had time to utter a cry, he was under the cart.   

There was an awful moment of suspense and of silence.
Madeleine, lying almost flat under the fearful weight, was twice seen to try in vain to bring his elbows and knees nearer together. They cried out to him: “Father Madeleine! Come out from there!” Old Fauchelevent himself said: “ Monsieur Madeleine! Go away! I must die, you see that; leave me! You will be crushed too.” Madeleine made no answer. The bystanders held their breath. The wheels were still sinking and it had now become almost impossible for Madeleine to extricate himself. 
All at once the enormous mass started, the cart rose slowly, the wheels came half out of the ruts. A smothered voice was heard, crying: “Quick Help!” It was Madeleine, who had just made a final effort. 
They all rushed to the work. The devotion of one man had given strength and courage to all. The cart was lifted by twenty arms. Old Fauchelevent was safe.  
Madeleine arose. He was very pale, though dripping with sweat. His clothes were torn and covered with mud. All wept. The old man kissed his knees and called him to good God. 
He himself wore on his face an indescribable expression of joyous and celestial suffering, and he looked with tranquil eye upon Javert, who was still watching him. 
Fauchelevent got well, but he had a stiff knee. Monsieur Madeleine, through the recommendation of the sisters and the curé, got the old man a place as gardener at a convent in the Quarter Saint Antoine at París. 

V

SUCH was the situation of the country when Fantine returned. No one remembered her. Luckily the door of Monsieur Madeleine’s factory was like the face of a friend. She presented herself there, and was admitted into the workshop for women. 
The business was entirely new to Fantine; she could not be very expert in it, and consequently did not receive much for her day’s work, but that little was enough; the problem was solved; she was earning her living. 
When Fantine realized how she was living, she had a moment of joy. To live honestly by her own labor, what a heavenly boon! The taste for labor returned to her, in truth. 
She bought a mirror, delighted herself with the sight of her youth, her fine hair, and her fine teeth, forgot many things, thought of nothing save Cosette and the possibilities of the future, and was almost happy. She hired a small room and furnished it on the credit of her future labor: 
Not being able to say that she was married, she took good care, as we have already intimated, not to speak of her little girl. 

At first, as we have seen, she paid the Thénardiers punctually. As she only knew how to sign her name she was obliged to write through a public letter writer. 
She wrote often; that was noticed. They began to whisper in the women’s workshop that Fantine “ wrote letters,” and that “she had airs.” 

So Fantine was watched. 
Beyond this, more than one was jealous of her fair hair and of her white teeth. 
It was ascertained that she wrote, at least twice a month and always to the same address, and that she prepaid the postage. They succeeded in learning the address: Monsieur Thénardier, Innkeeper, Montfermeil. The public letter writer, a simple old fellow, who could not fill his stomach with red wine without emptying his pockets of his secrets, was made to reveal this at a drinking house. In short, it became known that Fantine had a child. “She must be that sort of a woman.” And there was one old gossip who went to Montfermeil, talked with the Thénardiers, and said on her return: “For my thirty five francs, I have found out all about it. I have seen the child!”   
All this took time; Fantine had been more than a year at the factory, when one morning the overseer of the workshop handed her, on behalf of the mayor, fifty francs, saying that she was no longer wanted in the shop, and enjoining her, on behalf of the mayor, to leave the city. 

Fantine was thunderstruck. She could not leave the city; she was in debt for her lodging and her furniture. Fifty francs were not enough to clear off that debt. She faltered out some suppliant words. The overseer gave her to understand that she must leave the shop instantly. Fantine was moreover only a moderate worker. Overwhelmed with shame even more than with despair, she left the shop, and returned to her room. Her fault then was now known to all! 
She felt no strength to say a word. She was advised to see the mayor; she dared not. The mayor gave her fifty francs, because he was kind,and sent her away, because he was just. She bowed to that decree.

VI

MONSIEUR MADELEINE had known nothing of all this. The best men are often compelled to delegate their authority. It was in the exercise of this full power, and with the conviction that she was doing right, that the overseer had framed the indictment, tried, condemned, and executed Fantine. 
Fantine offered herself as a servant in the neighborhood; she went from one house to another. Nobody wanted her. She could not leave the city. The secondhand dealer to whom she was in debt for her furniture - and such furniture! - had said to her: “ If you go away, I will have you arrested as a thief. ” The landlord, whom she owed for rent, had said to her: “ You are young and pretty, you can pay. ” She divided the fifty francs between the landlord and the dealer, returned to the latter three-quarters of his goods, kept only what was necessary, and found herself without work, without position, having nothing but her bed, and owing still about a hundred francs. 
She began to make coarse shirts for the soldiers of the garrison, and earned twelve sous a day. Her daughter cost her ten. It was at this time that she began to get behindhand with the Thénardiers. 
However, an old woman, who lit her candle for her when she came home at night, taught her the art of living in misery. 
Behind living on a little lies the art of living on nothing. They are two rooms: the first is obscure; the second is utterly dark. 
Fantine learned how to do entirely without fire in winter, how to give up a bird that eats a farthing’s worth of millet every other day, how to make a coverlid of her petticoat, and a petticoat of her coverlid, how to save her candle in taking her meals by the light of an opposite window. Few know how much certain feeble beings, who have grown old in privation and honesty, can extract from a sou. This finally becomes a talent.  Fantine acquired this sublime talent and took heart a little. 

The old woman, who had given her what might be called lessons in indigent life, was a pious woman,  Marguerite by name, a devotee of genuine devotion, poor, and charitable to the poor, and also to the rich, knowing how to write just enough to sign MARGERITTE, and believing in God, which is science. 
There are many of these virtues in low places; someday they will be on high. This life has a morrow. 
At first, Fantine was so much ashamed that she did not dare to go out. 
When she was in the street, she imagined that people turned behind her and pointed at her; everybody looked at her and no one greeted her; the sharp and cold disdain of the passers-by  penetrated her, body and soul, like a north wind. 

She must indeed become accustomed to disrespect as she had to poverty. Little by little she learned her part. After two or three months she shook off her shame and went out as if there were nothing in the way.  “ It is all one to me,” said she. 
She went and came,  holding her head up and wearing a bitter smile, and felt that she was becoming shameless. 

Excessive work fatigued Fantine, and the slight dry cough that she had increased. She sometimes said to her neighbor, Marguerite: “ Just feel how hot  my hands are. ” 
In the morning, however, when with an old broken comb she combed her fine hair which flowed down in silky waves, she enjoyed a moment of happiness. 

VII

SHE had been discharged toward the end of winter; summer passed away, but winter returned. Short days, less work. In winter there is no heat, no light, no noon, evening touches morning, there is fog, and mist, the window is frosted, and you cannot see clearly. The sky is but the mouth of a cave. The whole day is the cave. The sun has the appearance of a pauper. Frightful season! Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man. Her creditors harassed her. Fantine earned too little. Her debts had increased. The Thénardiers, being poorly paid, were constantly writing letters to her, the contents of which disheartened her, while the postage was ruining her.  One day they wrote to her that her little Cosette was entirely destitute of clothing for the cold weather, that she needed a woolen skirt, and that her mother must send at least ten francs for that. She received the letter and crushed it in her hand for a whole day. In the evening she went into a barber’s shop at the corner of the street, and pulled out her comb. Her beautiful fair hair fell below her waist. 
“ What beautiful hair! ” exclaimed the barber.
“ How much will you give me for it? ” said she. 
“ Ten francs. ” 
“ Cut it off. ” 
She bought a knit skirt and sent it to the Thénardiers. 
This skirt made the Thénardiers furious. It was the money that they wanted.  They gave the skirt to Eponine. The poor lark still shivered. 
Fantine thought: “ My child is no longer cold; I have clothed her with my hair. ” She put on a little round cap which concealed her shorn head, and with that she was still pretty. 
A gloomy work was going on in Fantine’s heart. 
When she saw that she could  no longer dress her hair, she began to look with hatred on all around her. She had long shared in the universal veneration for Father Madeleine; nevertheless by dint of repeating to herself that it was he who had turned her away and that he was the cause of her misfortunes, she came to hate him also, and especially. When she passed the factory at the hours in which the laborers were at the door, she forced herself to laugh and sing.
An old workingwoman who saw her once singing and laughing in this way said: “ There is a girl who will come to a bad end. ”  
She took a lover, the first corner, a man whom she did not love, through bravado, and with rage in her heart. He was a wretch, a kind of mendicant musician, a lazy ragamuffin, who beat her, and who left her, as she had taken him, with disgust. 
She worshiped her child. 
The lower she sank, the more all became gloomy around her, the more the sweet little angel shone out in the bottom of her heart. She would say: “ When I am rich, I shall have my Cosette with me. ” and she laughed. The cough did not leave her, and she had night sweats. 
One day she received from the Thénardiers a letter in these words: “ Cosette is sick of an epidemic disease. A military fever they call it. The drugs necessary are dear. It is ruining us, and we can no longer pay for them. Unless you send us forty francs within a week the little one will die.”
She burst out laughing, and said to her old neighbor: 
“ Oh! They are nice! Forty francs! Think of that! That is two Napoleons! Where do they think I can get them ? Are they fools, these boors ? ”
She went, however, to the staircase, near a dormer window, and read the letter again. 
Then she went downstairs and outdoors, running and jumping, still laughing. 
As she passed through the square, she saw many people gathered about an odd-looking carriage on top of which stood a man in red clothes, declaiming. He was a juggler and a traveling dentist,  and was offering to the public complete sets of teeth, opiates, powders, and elixirs. 
Fantine joined the crowd and began to laugh with the rest at this harangue. The puller of teeth saw this beautiful girl laughing, and suddenly called out: “ You have pretty teeth, you girl who are laughing there. If you will sell me your two incisors, I will give you a gold Napoleon for each of them. ”
“ What is that ? What are my incisors ? ” asked Fantine. 

“ The incisors,” resumed the professor of dentistry, “ are the front teeth, the two upper ones.”
“ How horrible! ” cried Fantine.  
“ Two Napoleons! ” grumbled a toothless old hag who stood by. “ How lucky she is! ”
Fantine fled away and stopped her ears not to hear the shrill voice of the man who  called after her: “ Consider, my beauty! Two Napoleons! How much good they will do you.If you have the courage for it, come this evening to the inn of the Tillac d’ Argent; you will find me there.”

Fantine returned home. 
She was raving, and told the story to her good neighbor Marguerite.
“ And what was it he offered you? ” asked Marguerite.  
“ Two Napoleons.”
“ That is forty francs.” 
“ Yes,” said Fantine, “ that makes forty francs.” 
She became thoughtful and went about her work.  In a quarter of an hour she left her sewing and went to the stairs to read again the Thénardiers’ letter. 
On her return she said to Marguerite, who who was at work near her: 
“ What does this mean, a military fever? Do you know? ”
“ Yes,” answered the old woman, “ it is a disease.”
“ Does it attack children? ”
“ Children especially.” 
“ Do people die of it? ”
“ Very often,” said Marguerite. 
Fantine withdrew and went once more to read over the letter on the stairs. 
 
In the evening she went out, and took the direction of the rue de Paris where the inns are. 
The next morning, when Marguerite went into Fantine’s chamber before daybreak, for they always worked together, and so made one candle do for the two, she found Fantine seated upon her couch, pale and icy. She had not been in bed. Her cap had fallen upon her knees. The candle had burned all night, and was almost consumed.  
Marguerite stopped upon the threshold, petrified by this wild disorder, and exclaimed: “Good Lord! The candle is all burned out. Something has happened.” 
Then she looked at Fantine, who sadly turned her shorn head. 
Fantine had grown ten years older since evening. 
“ Bless us! ” said Marguerite. “What is the matter with you, Fantine ? ” 
“ Nothing,” said Fantine. “ Quite the contrary. My child will not die with that frightful sickness for lack of aid. I am satisfied.” 
So saying, she showed the old woman two Napoleons that glistened on the table. 
“ Oh! Good God! ” said Marguerite. “ Why there is a fortune! Where did you get these louis d’or? ”
“ I got them,” answered Fantine. 
At the same time she smiled. The candle lit up her face. 
It was a sickening smile, for the corners of her mouth were stained with blood, and a dark cavity revealed itself there. 
The two teeth were gone.  
She sent the forty francs to Montfermeil. 
And this was a ruse of the Thénardiers to get money. 
Cosette was not sick. 

Fantine threw her looking glass out of the window. Long before, she had left her little room on the second story for an attic room with no other fastening than a latch, one of those garret rooms the ceiling of which makes an angle with the floor and hits your head at every moment. The poor cannot go to the end of their chamber or to the end of their destiny, but by bending continually more and more. Her creditors were more pitiless than ever. The secondhand dealer, who had taken back nearly all his furniture, was constantly saying to her: “ When  will you pay me, wench? ”
Good God! What did they want her to do? She felt herself hunted down, and something of the wild beast began to  develop within her. About the same time, Thenardier wrote to her that really he had waited with too much generosity, and that he must have a hundred francs immediately, or else little Cosette, just convalescing after her severe sickness, would be turned outdoors into the cold and upon the highway, and that she would become what she could,and would perish if she must. “ A hundred francs,” thought Fantine. “ But when is there a place where one can earn a hundred sous a day? ”
“ Come! ” said she, “ I will sell what is left.” 
The unfortunate creature became a woman of the town.     
 
VIII

WHAT is this history of Fantine? It is society buying a slave. 
From whom? From misery. 
From hunger, from cold, from loneliness, from abandonment, from privation. Melancholy barter. A soul for a bit of bread. Misery makes the offer, society accepts. 
The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does not yet permeate it; it is said that slavery has disappeared from European civilization. This is a mistake. It still exists, but it weighs now only upon woman, and it is called prostitution.  
It weighs upon woman, that is to say, upon grace, upon beauty, upon maternity.  This is not one of the least of man’s shames. 
At the stage of this mournful drama at which we have now arrived, Fantine has nothing left of what she had formerly been. She has become marble in becoming corrupted. Whoever touches her feels a chill. She goes her ways, she endured you, and she knows you not; she wears a dishonored and severe face. Life and social order have spoken their last word to her. All that can  happen to her has happened. She has endured all, borne all, experienced all, suffered all, lost all, wept for all.  

She is resigned, with that resignation that resembles indifference as death resembles sleep. She shuns nothing now. She fears nothing now. Every cloud falls upon her, and all the ocean sweeps over her! What matters it to her! The sponge is already drenched. 
She believed so at least, but it is a mistake to imagine that man can exhaust his destiny, or can reach the bottom of anything whatever. 
Alas! What are all these destinies thus driven pell-mell? 
Whither go they? Why are they so? 
He who knows that, sees all the shadow. 
He is alone. His name is God. 

IX 
There is in all small cities, and there was at M—sur m— in particular, a set of young men who nibble their fifteen hundred livres of income in the country with the same air with which their fellows devour two hundred thousand francs a year at Paris. They are beings of the great neuter species: geldings, parasites, nobodies,  who have a little land, a little folly, and a little wit, who would be clowns in a drawing room, and think themselves gentlemen in a barroom, who talk about “ my fields, my woods, my peasants,” hiss the actresses at the theater to prove that they are persons of taste, quarrel with the officers of the garrison to show that they are gallant, hunt, smoke, gape, drink, take snuff, play billiards, stare at passengers getting out of the coach, live at the café, dine at the inn, have a dog who eats the bones under the table, and a mistress who sets the dishes upon it, hold fast to a sou, overdo the fashions, admire tragedy, despise women, wear out their old boots, copy London as reflected from Paris, and Paris as reflected from Pont-á-Mousson, grow stupid as they grow old, do no work, do no good, and not much harm. 
Eight or ten months after what has been related in the preceding pages, in the early part of January, 1823, one evening when it had been snowing, one of these dandies, one of these idlers, a “well-intentioned” man, very warmly wrapped in one of those large cloaks which completed the fashionable costume in cold weather, was amusing himself with tormenting a creature who was walking back and forth before the window of the officers’ café, in a ball dress, with her neck and shoulders bare, and flowers upon her head. The dandy was smoking, for that was decidedly the fashion.  
Every time that the woman passed before him, he threw out at her, with a puff of smoke from his cigar,  some remark which he thought was witty and pleasant as: “How ugly you are! ”

 “ Are you trying to hide? ” “ You have lost your teeth! ” etc., etc. This gentleman’s name was Monsieur Bamatabois. The woman, a rueful, bedizened specter, who was walking backward and forward upon the snow, did not answer him, did not even look at him, but continued her walk in silence and with a dismal regularity that brought her under his sarcasm every five minutes, like the condemned  soldier who at stated periods returns under the rods. This failure to secure attention doubtless piqued the loafer, who , taking advantage of the moment when she turned, came up behind her with a stealthy step, and stifling his laughter stooped down, seized a handful of snow from the sidewalk, and threw it hastily into her back between her naked shoulders.  The girl roared with rage, turned, bounded like a panther, and rushed upon the man, burying her nails in his face, and using the most frightful words that ever fell from the off-scouring of a guardhouse. 
These insults were thrown out in a voice roughened by brandy, from a hideous mouth which lacked the two front teeth. It was Fantine.  

At the noise which this made, the officers came out of the café, a crowd gathered, and a large circle was formed, laughing,  jeering and applauding, around this center of attraction composed of two beings who could hardly be recognized as a man and a woman, the man defending himself, his hat knocked off,  the woman kicking and striking, her head bare, shrieking, toothless, and without hair, livid with wrath, and horrible. 
Suddenly a tall man advanced quickly from the crowd , seized the woman by her muddy satin waist, and said: “ Follow me! ”
The woman raised her head; her furious voice died out at once. Her eyes were glassy, from livid she had become pale, and she shuddered with a shudder of terror. She recognized Javert. 
The dandy profited by this to steal away. 

X 
JAVERT dismissed the bystanders, broke up the circle, and walked off rapidly toward the Bureau of Police, which is at the end of the square, dragging the poor creature after him. She made no resistance, but followed mechanically. Neither spoke a word. The flock of spectators followed with their jokes. The deepest misery, an opportunity for  obscenity. 

When they reached the Bureau of Police, which was a low hall warmed by a stove, and guarded by a sentinel, with a grated window looking on the street, Javert opened the door, entered with Fantine, and closed the door behind him. 
On entering, Fantine crouched down in a corner, motionless and silent, like a frightened dog. 
 The sergeant of the guard placed a lighted candle on the table. Javert sat down, drew from his pocket a sheet of stamped paper, and began to write. 
Javert was impassible; his grave face betrayed no emotion. He was, however, engaged in serious and earnest consideration. At this moment he felt that his policeman’s stool was a bench of justice. He was conducting a trial. He was trying and condemning. He called all the ideas of which his mind was capable around the grand thing that he was doing. The more he examined the conduct of this girl, the more he revolted at it. It was clear that he had seen a crime committed. He had seen, there in the street, society represented by a property holder and an elector, insulted and attacked by a creature who was an outlaw and an outcast.  A prostitute had assaulted a citizen. He, Javert, had seen that himself. He wrote in silence. 
When he had finished, he signed his name, folded the paper, and handed it to the sergeant of the guard, saying: “ Take three men, and carry this girl to jail.” Then turning to Fantine: “ You are in for six months.” 
The hapless woman shuddered.  
“ Six months! Six months in prison! ” cried she. “ Six months to earn seven sous a day! But what will become of Cosette! My daughter! My daughter! Why, I still owe more than a hundred francs to the Thénardiers. Monsieur Inspector, do you know that? ”
She dragged herself along on the floor, dirtied by the muddy boots of all these men, without rising, clasping her hands, and moving rapidly on her  knees. 
“ Monsieur Javert,” said she, “ I beg your pity. I assure you that I was not in the wrong. If you had seen the beginning, you would have seen. I swear to you by the good God that I was not in the wrong. That gentleman, whom I do not know, threw snow in my back. Have they the right to throw snow into our backs  when we are going along quietly like that without doing any harm to anybody? That made me wild. I am not very well, you see! And then he had already been saying things to me for some time. “ You are homely! ” “ You have no teeth! ” I know too well that I have lost  my teeth. I did not do anything; I thought: “ He is a gentleman who is assuming himself.” “I was not immodest with him, I did not speak to him.” 

It was then that he threw the snow at me. Monsieur Javert, my good Monsieur Inspector! Just think that I have a hundred francs to pay, or else they will turn away my little one. Oh! My God! I cannot have her with me. What I do is so vile! Do you see, she is a little one that they will put out on the highway, to do what she can, in the very heart of the winter; you must feel pity for such a thing, good Monsieur Javert. 
If she were older, she could earn her living, but she cannot at such an age. Have pity on me, Monsieur Javert.” 
She talked thus, bent double, shaken with sobs, blinded by tears, her neck bare, clenching her hands, coughing with a dry and short cough, stammering very feeble with an agonized voice. Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched. At that moment Fantine had again become beautiful. At certain instants she stopped and tenderly kissed the policeman’s coat. She would have softened a heart of granite, but you cannot soften a heart of wood. 
“ Come,” said Javert, “ I have heard you. Haven’t you got through? March off at once! You have your six months! The Eternal Father in person could do nothing for you.”
At those solemn words: “ The Eternal Father in person could do nothing for you,” she understood that her sentence was fixed. She sank down murmuring: 
“ Mercy! ” 
Javert turned his back. 
The soldiers seized her by the arms. 
A few minutes before  a man had entered without being noticed. He had closed the door, and stood with his back against it and heard the despairing supplication of Fantine. When the soldiers put their hands upon the wretched being, who would not rise, he stepped forward out of the shadow and said: 
“ One moment, if you please! ”
Javert raised his eyes and recognized Monsieur Madeleine.  
He took off his hat, and bowing with a sort of angry awkwardness: 
“ Pardon, Monsieur Mayor- ” 
This word, Monsieur Mayor, had a strange effect upon Fantine. She sprang to her feet at once, like a specter rising from the ground, pushed back the soldiers with her arms, walked straight to Monsieur Madeleine before they could stop her, and gazing at him fixedly, with a wild  look, she exclaimed: 
“ Ah! It is you then who are Monsieur Mayor! ”
Then she burst out laughing and spit in his face, 
Monsieur Madeleine wiped his face and said: 
“Inspector Javert, set this woman at liberty.” 

Javert felt as though he were on the point of losing his senses.    
He was stupefied with amazement; thought and speech alike failed him; the sum of possible astonishment had been overpassed. He remained speechless. 
The mayor’s words were not less strange a blow to Fantine. 
She raised her bare arm and clung to the damper of the stove as if she were staggered. Meanwhile she looked all around and began to talk in a low voice, as if speaking to herself:
 “ At liberty! They let me go! I am not to go to prison for six months?  Who was it said that? It is not possible that anybody said that. I misunderstood. That cannot be this  monster of a mayor! Oh, Monsieur Javert, It is you who said that they must let me go, is it not? Go and inquire, speak to my landlord; I pay my rent, and he will surely tell you that I am honest. Oh dear, I beg your pardon, I have touched - I did not know it - the damper of the stove, and it smokes.” 
Then addressing herself to the soldiers: 
“Say now, did you see how I spit in his  face? Oh! You old scoundrel of a mayor, you come here to frighten me, but I am not afraid of you. I am afraid of Monsieur Javert. I am afraid of my good Monsieur Javert! ” 
As she said this she turned again toward the inspector: 
“ Now, you see, Monsieur Inspector, you must be just. I know that you are just, Monsieur Inspector; in fact, it is very simple, a man who jocosely throws a little snow into a woman’s back, that makes them laugh, the officers, they must divert themselves with something, and we poor things are only for their amusement. And then, you, you come, you are obliged to keep order, you arrest the woman who has done wrong, but on reflection as you are good, you tell them to set me at liberty, that is for my little one, because six months in prison, that would prevent my supporting my child. Only never come back again, wretch! Oh! I will never come back again, Monsieur Javert! They may do anything they like with me now, I will not stir. Only, today, you see, I cried out because that hurt me. I  did not in the least expect that snow from that gentleman, and then, I have told you, I am not very well, I cough, I have something in my chest like a ball which burns me, and the doctor tells me: “ Be careful. ” Stop, feel, give me your hand, don’t be afraid, here it is. ” 
Suddenly she hastily adjusted the disorder of her garments, smoothed down the folds of her dress, which, in dragging herself about, had been raised almost as high as her knees, and walked toward the door, saying in an undertone to the soldiers, with a friendly nod of the head: 
“ Boys, Monsieur the Inspector said that you must release me; I am going.” 
She put her hand upon the latch. One more step and she would be in the street. 



Javert until that moment had remained standing, motionless , his eyes fixed on the ground, looking, in the midst of the scene, like a statue which was waiting to be placed in position. 
The sound of the latch roused him. He raised his head with an expression of sovereign authority, an expression always the more frightful in proportion as power is vested in beings of lower grade, ferocious in the wild beast, atrocious in the undeveloped man. 
“ Sergeant, ” exclaimed he, “ don’t you see that this vagabond is going off? Who told you to let her go? 
“ I ” said Madeleine. 
At the words of Javert, Fantine had trembled and dropped the latch, as a thief who is caught drops what he has stolen. When Madeleine spoke, she turned, and from that moment , without saying a word, without even daring to breathe freely, she looked by turns from Madeleine to  Javert and from Javert to Madeleine, as the one or the other was speaking. 

When Monsieur Madeleine pronounced that “ I ” which we have just heard, the inspector of police, Javert, turned toward the mayor, pale, cold, with blue lips, a  desperate look, his whole body agitated with an imperceptible tremor, and, an unheard-of thing, said to him with a downcast look, but a firm voice: 
“Monsieur Mayor, that cannot be done.”
“Why?” said Monsieur Madeleine. 
“ This wretched woman has insulted a citizen.”  
“ Inspector Javert, ” replied Monsieur Madeleine, in a conciliating and calm tone, “ listen.  You are an honest man, and I have no objection to explaining myself to you. The truth is this. I was passing through the square when you arrested this woman; there was a crowd still there; I learned the circumstances; I know all about it; it is the citizen who was in the wrong, and who, by a faithful police, would have been arrested.”    
Javert went on: 
“ This wretch has just insulted Monsieur the Mayor.” 
“ That concerns me,” said Monsieur Madeleine. “ The insult to me rests with myself, perhaps. I can do what I please about it.” 
“ I beg Monsieur the Mayor’s pardon. The insult rests not with him, it rests with justice.”  
“ Inspector Javert,” replied Monsieur Madeleine, “ the highest justice is conscience. I have heard this woman. I know what I am doing.”  
“ And for my part, Monsieur Mayor, I do not know what I am  seeing.” 
“ Then content yourself with obeying.”
“ I obey my duty. My duty requires that this woman spend six months in prison.”   
Monsieur Madeleine answered mildly: 
“ Listen to this. She shall not a day.” 
“ Monsieur Mayor, permit —”
“ Not another word.” 
“ However— ”
“ Retire,” said Monsieur Madeleine. 
Javert received the blow, standing in front, and with open breast like a Russian soldier. He bowed to the ground before the mayor, and went out. 

Fantine stood by the door and looked at him with stupor as he passed before her. 
Meanwhile she also was the subject of a strange revolution. 
She listened  with dismay, she looked around with alarm, and at each word that Monsieur Madeleine uttered, she felt the fearful darkness of her hatred melt within and flow away while there was born in her heart an indescribable and unspeakable warmth of joy, of confidence, and of love. 
When Javert was gone, Monsieur Madeleine turned toward her, and said to her, speaking slowly and with difficulty, like a man who is struggling that he may not weep: 
“ I have heard you. I  knew nothing of what you have said. I believe that it is true. I did not even know that you had left my workshop. Why did you not apply to me? But now, I will pay your debts, I will have your child come to you, or you shall go to her.  You shall live here, at Paris, or where you will. I take charge of your child and you. You shall do no more work, if you do not wish to. I will give you all the money that you need.  You shall again become honest in again becoming happy. More than that, listen. I declare to you from this moment, if all is as you say, and I do  not doubt it, that you have never ceased to  be virtuous and holy before  God.  Oh, poor woman! ”    

This was more than poor Fantine could bear. To have Cosette! To leave this infamous life! To live free, rich, happy, honest, with Cosette! To see suddenly spring up in the midst of her misery all these realities of paradise! She looked as if she were stupefied at the man who was speaking to  her, and could only pour out two or three sobs: “Oh! Oh! Oh! ” Her limbs gave way, she threw herself  on her knees before Monsieur Madeleine, and, before he could prevent it, he felt that she had seized his hand and carried it to her lips. 
Then she fainted.  

Javert 
I  
  
MONSIEUR MADELEINE had Fantine taken to the infirmary, which was in his own house. He confided her to the sisters, who put her to bed. A violent fever came on, and she passed a part of the night in delirious ravings. Finally, she fell asleep. 
Toward noon the following day, Fantine awoke. She heard a breathing near her bed, drew aside the curtain, and saw Monsieur Madeleine standing gazing at something above his head. His look was full of compassionate and supplicating agony.  She followed its direction, and saw that it was fixed upon a crucifix nailed against the wall.  
From that moment Monsieur Madeleine was transfigured in the eyes of Fantine; he seemed to her clothed upon with light. 
He was absorbed in a kind of prayer. She gazed at him for a long while without daring to interrupt him; at last she said timidly: 
“ What are you doing? ”
Monsieur Madeleine had been in that place for an hour waiting for Fantine to  awake. He took her hand, felt her pulse, and said: 
“ How do you feel? ”
“ Very well. I have slept.” she said. “ I think I am getting better –this will be nothing.” 
Then he said, answering the question she had first asked him, as if she had just asked it: 
“ I was praying to the martyr who is on high.” 
And in his thought he added: “ For the martyr who is here below.” 
Monsieur Madeleine had passed the night and morning in informing himself about Fantine. He knew all now, he had learned, even in all its poignant details, the history of Fantine. 
He went on: 
“ You have suffered greatly, poor mother. Oh! Do not lament, you have now the portion of the elect. It is in this way that mortals become angels. It is not their fault; they do not know how to set about it otherwise. This hell from which you have come out is the first step toward heaven. We must begin by that.” 
He sighed deeply; but she smiled with this sublime smile from which two teeth were gone. 
Monsieur Madeleine wrote immediately to the Thénardiers. 
Fantine owed them a hundred and twenty francs. He sent them three hundred francs, telling them to pay themselves out of it, and bring the child at once to M—sur m—, where her mother, who was sick, wanted her. 
This astonished Thénardier. 
“ The Devill” he said to his wife. “ We won’t let go of the child. It may be that this lark will become a milch cow. I guess some silly fellow has been smitten by the mother.” 
He replied by a bill of five hundred  and some odd francs carefully drawn up. In this bill figured two incontestable items for upward of three hundred francs, one of a physician and the other of an apothecary who had attended and supplied Eponine and Azelma during two long illnesses. Cossette, as we have said, had not been ill. This was only a slight substitution of names. Thénardier wrote at the bottom of the bill: “ Received on account three hundred francs.” 
“ Monsieur Madeleine immediately sent three hundred francs more, and wrote: “ Make haste to  bring Cossette.” 
“ Christy! ” said Thénardier. “ We won”t let go of the girl.” 
Meanwhile Fantine had not recovered.  She still remained in the infirmary.  
Monsieur Madeleine came to see her twice a day, and at each visit she asked him: 
“ Shall I see my Cosette soon?
He answered: 
“ Perhaps tomorrow, I expect her every moment .” 
And the mother’s pale face would brighten. 
“ Ah! ”  She would say. “ How happy I shall be.” 
We have just said she did not recover; on the contrary, her condition seemed to become worse from week to week. The doctor sounded her lungs and shook his head. 
Monsieur Madeleine said to him: 
“ Well? ”
“ Has she not a child she is anxious to see? ” said the doctor. 
“ Yes.” 
“ Well then, make haste to bring her.” 
Monsieur Madeleine gave a shudder. 
Fantine asked him: “ What did the doctor say? ”
Monsieur Madeleine tried to smile.  
“ He told us to bring your child at once. That will restore your health.” 

One morning Monsieur Madeleine was in his office arranging for some pressing business of the mayoralty, when he was informed that Javert, the inspector of police, wished to speak with him. 
“ Let him come in,” said he. 
Javert entered. 
He respectfully saluted the mayor, who had his back towards him. The mayor did not look up, but continued to make notes on the papers. 
Javert advanced a few steps, and paused without breaking the silence. His whole person expressed abasement and firmness and an indescribably courageous dejection. 
At last the mayor laid down his pen and turned partly around: 
“ Well, what is it? What is the matter, Javert? ”
Javert remained silent a moment as if collecting himself then raised his voice with a sad solemnity which did not, however, exclude simplicity: “ There has been a criminal act committed, Monsieur Mayor.” 
“ What act? ”
“ An inferior agent  of the government has been wanting in respect to a magistrate, in the gravest manner, I come,  as is my duty, to bring the fact to your knowledge.” 
“ Who is this agent? ” asked Monsieur Madeleine. 
“ I, ” said Javert. 
“ You? ”
“ I. “ 
“ And who is the magistrate who has to complain of this agent? ”
“ You, Monsieur Mayor.” 
Monsieur Madeleine straightened himself in his chair. Javert continued, with serious looks and eyes still cast down.  
“ Monsieur Mayor, I come to ask you to be so kind as to make charges and procure my dismissal.” 
Monsieur Madeleine, amazed, opened his mouth. Javert interrupted him: 
“ You will say that I may tender my resignation, but that is not enough.  To resign is honorable; I have done wrong. I ought to be punished. I must be dismissed.” 
“ Ah, indeed! Why? ”
“ You will understand, Monsieur Mayor,” Javert sighed deeply, and continued sadly and coldly:
“ Monsieur Mayor, six weeks ago, after that scene about that girl, I was enraged and I denounced you.” 
“ Denounced me? ” 
“ To the Prefecture of Police at Paris.” 
Monsieur Madeleine, who did not laugh much oftener than Javert, began to laugh: 
“As a mayor having encroached upon the police? ”
“ As a former convict.” 
The mayor became livid. 
Javert, who had not raised his eyes, continued: 
“ I believed it. For a long while I had had suspicions. A resemblance, information you obtained at Faverolles, your immense strength, the affair of  old Fauchelevent – and in fact I don’t know what other stupidities; but at last I took you for a man named Jean Valjean.” 
“ Named what? How did you call that name? ”
“ Jean Valjean. He was a convict I saw twenty years ago, when I was adjutant of the galley guard at Toulon. After leaving the galleys this Valjean, it appears, robbed a bishop’s palace, then he committed another robbery with weapons in his hands, on a highway, on a little Savoyard.For eight years his whereabouts have been unknown, and search has been made for him. I fancied – in short, I have done this thing. 
Anger determined me, and I denounced you to the prefect.” 
Monsieur Madeleine, who had taken up the file of papers again, a few moments before, said with a tone of perfect indifference: “ And what answer did you get? ” 
“ That I was crazy.” 
“ Well! ”
“ Well, they were right.”
“It is fortunate that you think so! ”
“ It must be so, for the real Jean Valjean has been found.” 
The paper that Monsieur Madeleine held fell from his hand; he raised his head, looked steadily at Javert, and said in an inexpressible tone: 
“ Ah! ” 
Javert continued: 
“ I will tell you how it is, Monsieur Mayor. There was, it appears, in the country, near Ailly-le-Haut Clocher, a simple sort of fellow who was called Father Champmathieu. He was very poor. Nobody paid any attention to him. Such folks live, one hardly knows how. Finally, this last fall, Father Champmathieu was arrested for stealing cider apples from —, but that is of no  consequence. There was a theft, a wall scaled, branches of trees broken. Our Champmathieu was arrested; he had even then a branch of an apple tree in his hand.  The rogue was caged. So far, it was nothing more than a penitentiary matter. But here comes in the hand of providence. The jail being in a bad condition, the police justice thought it best to take him to Arras, where the prison of the department is. In this prison at Arras there was a former convict named Brevet, who is there for some trifle, and who, for his good conduct, has been made turnkey. No sooner was Champmathieu set down, than Brevet cried out: “ Ha, ha ! I know that man. He is a fagot. Look up here, my good man. You are Jean Valjean.  “ Jean Valjean, who is Jean Valjean? ” Champmathieu plays off the astonished. “ Don’t play ignorance,” said Brevet. “ You are Jean Valjean; you were in the galleys at Toulon. It is twenty years ago. We were there together.” Champmathieu denied it all. Faith! You understand; they fathomed it. The case was worked up and this was what they found. This Champmathieu thirty years ago was a pruner in diverse places, particularly in Faverolles. There we lose trace of him. You follow me, do you not? Search has been made at Faverolles; the family of Jean Valjean are no longer there. Nobody knows where they are. You know in such classes these disappearances of families often occur. You search, but can find nothing. Such people, when they are not mud, are dust. And then as the commencement of this story dates back thirty years, there is nobody now at Faverolles who knew Jean Valjean. But search has been at Toulon. Besides Brevet there are only two convicts who have seen Jean Valjean. They are convicts for life; their names are Cochepaille and Chenildieu. These men were brought from the galleys and confronted with the pretended Champmathieu. They did not hesitate. To them as well as to  Brevet it was Jean Valjean. Same age, fifty-four years old, same height, same appearance, in fact the same man; it is he. At this time it was that I sent my denunciation to the Prefecture at Paris. They replied that I was out of my mind, and that Jean Valjean was at Arras in the hands of justice.  
You may imagine how that astonished me, I who believed that I had here the same Jean Valjean. I wrote to the justice; he sent for me and brought Champmathieu before me.” 
“ Well,” interrupted Monsieur Madeleine. 
Javert replied,  with an incorruptible and sad face: 
“ Monsieur Mayor, truth is truth. I am sorry for it, but that man is Jean Valjean. I recognized him also.” 
Monsieur Madeleine said in a very low voice: 
“ Are you sure ”
Javert began to  laugh with the suppressed laugh which indicates profound conviction. 
“ H’m, sure! But this man pretends not to understand; he says: “ I am Champmathieu: I have no more to say.” He puts on an appearance of astonishment; he plays the brute. Oh, the rascal is cunning! But it is all the same, there is the evidence. Four persons have recognized him, and the old villain will be condemned. It has been taken to the assizes at Arras. I am going to  testify. I have been summoned.” 

Monsieur Madeleine had turned again to his desk, and was quietly looking over his papers, reading and writing alternatively, like a man pressed with business. He turned again toward Javert: 
“ That will do, Javert, indeed all these details interest me very little. We are wasting time, and we have urgent business. But did you not tell me you were going to Arras in eight or ten days on this matter? ”
“ Sooner than that, Monsieur Mayor.” 
“ What day then? ”
“ I think I told Monsieur that the case would be tried tomorrow, and that I should leave by the diligence tonight.” 
Monsieur Madeleine made an imperceptible motion. 
“ And how long will the matter last? ”
“ One day at longest. Sentence will be pronounced at latest tomorrow evening. But I shall not wait for the sentence, which is certain; as soon as my testimony is given I shall return here.” 
“ Very well,” said Monsieur Madeleine. 
And he dismissed him with a wave of his hand. 
Javert did not go. 
“ Your pardon, monsieur,” said he.  
“ What more is there?” asked Monsieur Madeleine. 
“ Monsieur Mayor, there is one thing more to which I desire to call your attention.” 
“ What is it? ”
“ It is that I ought to  be dismissed.” 
Monsieur Madeleine arose. 
“ Javert, you are a man of honor and I esteem you. You exaggerate your fault. Besides, this is an offense which concerns me.  You are worthy of  promotion rather than disgrace.  I desire you to keep your place.” 
Javert looked at Monsieur Madeleine with his calm eyes, in whose depths it seemed that one beheld his conscience, unenlightened, but stern and pure, and said in a tranquil voice: 
“ Monsieur Mayor, I cannot agree to that. I ought to treat myself as I would treat anybody else. When I put down malefactors, when I rigorously brought up  offenders, I often said to myself; “You, if you ever trip, if ever I catch you doing wrong, look out! I have tripped, I have caught myself doing wrong. So much the worse! I must be sent away, broken, dismissed; that is right. I have hands: I can till the ground. It is all the same to me. Monsieur  Mayor, the good of the service demands an example. I simply ask the dismissal of Inspector Javert.” 

All this was said in a tone of proud humility, a desperate and resolute tone, which gave an indescribably whimsical grandeur to this oddly honest man. 
“ We will see,” said  Monsieur Madeleine. 
And he held out his hand to him. 
Javert started back, and said fiercely: 
“Pardon, Monsieur Mayor, that should not be. A mayor does not give his hand to a spy.” 
He added between his teeth: 
“ Spy, yes; from the moment I abused the power of my position, I  have been nothing better than a spy! ”
Then he  bowed profoundly, and went toward the door. 
There he turned around, his eyes yet downcast. 
“ Monsieur Mayor, I will continue in the service until I am relieved.” 
He went out. Monsieur Madeleine sat musing, listening to his firm and resolute step as it died away along the corridor.   

The Champmathieu Affair 

I 
THE reader has doubtless divined that Monsieur Madeleine is none other than Jean Valjean. 
We have already looked into the depths of that conscience; the time has come to look into them again.  We do so not without emotion, nor without trembling. There exists nothing more terrific than this kind of contemplation. The mind’s eye can nowhere find anything more dazzling or more dark than in man; it can fix itself upon nothing which is more awful, more complex, more mysterious or more infinite. There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul. 

From the first words that Javert pronounced on entering his office,  at the moment when that name which he had so deeply buried was so strangely uttered, he was seized with stupor, and as if intoxicated by the sinister grotesqueness of his destiny, through that stupor he felt the shudder which precedes great shocks; he bent like an oak at the approach of a storm, like a soldier at the approach of an assault. He felt clouds full of thunderings and lightnings gathering upon his head. Even while listening to Javert, his first thought was to go, to run, to denounce himself, to drag this Champmathieu out of prison, and to put himself in his place; it was painful and sharp as an incision into the living flesh, but passed away, and he said to himself: “Let us see! Let us see! ” He repressed this first generous impulse and recoiled before such heroism. 
Doubtless it would have been fine if, after the holy words of the bishop, after so many years of repentance and self-denial, in the midst of a penitence admirably commenced, even in the presence of so terrible a conjecture, he had not faltered an instant, and had continued to march on with even pace toward that yawning pit at the bottom of which was heaven – this would have been fine, but this was not the case. We must render an account of what took place in that soul, and we can relate only what was there. What first gained control was the instinct of self-preservation; he collected his ideas hastily, stifled his emotions, took into consideration the presence of Javert, the great danger, postponed any decision with the firmness of terror, banished from his mind all consideration of the course he should pursue, and resumed his calmness as a gladiator retakes his buckler. 
For the rest of the day he was in this state, a tempest within, a perfect calm without. He went according to his habit to the sick bed of Fantine, and prolonged his visit, by an instinct of kindness, saying to himself that he ought to do so and recommend her earnestly to the sisters, in case it should happen that he would have to be absent. He felt vaguely that it would perhaps be necessary for him to go to Arras, and without having in the least decided upon this journey, he said to himself that, entirely free from suspicion as he was, there would be no difficulty in being a witness of what might pass, and he engaged a tilbury,  in order to  be prepared  for any emergency. 
He dined with a good appetite.  
Returning to his room  he collected his thoughts. He examined the situation and found it an unheard–of one, so unheard–of that in the midst of his reverie, by some strange impulse of almost inexplicable anxiety, he rose from his chair, and bolted his door. He feared  lest something might yet enter.  He barricaded himself against  all  possibilities. 
A moment afterward he blew out his light. It annoyed him. 
It seemed to him  that somebody could see him. 
Who? Somebody?  
Alas! What he wanted to keep outdoors had entered; what he wanted to render blind was looking upon him. His conscience. 
His conscience, that is to say, God.  
At the first moment, however, he deluded himself; he had a feeling of safety and solitude; the bolt drawn, he believed himself invisible. Then he took possession of himself; he placed his elbows on the table, rested his head on his hand and set himself to  meditating in the darkness. 
His brain had lost the power of retaining its ideas; then passed away like waves, and he grasped his forehead with both hands to stop them.  
Out of this tumult, which overwhelmed his will and his reason, and from which he sought to draw a certainty and a resolution, nothing came clearly  forth but anguish. 
His brain was burning. He went to the window and threw it wide open. Not a star was in the sky. He returned and sat down by the table. 
The first hour thus rolled away.  
Little by little,  however, vague outlines began to take form and to fix themselves in his meditation; he could perceive, with the precision of reality, not the whole situation, but a few details. 
     It seemed to him that he had awakened from some wondrous slumber, and that he found himself gliding over a precipice in the middle of the night, standing, shivering, recoiling in vain, upon the very edge of an abyss. He perceived distinctly in the gloom an unknown man, a stranger, whom fate had mistaken for him, and was pushing into the gulf in his place. It was necessary, in order that the gulf should be closed, that someone should fall in, he or the other. 
He had only to let it alone. 
All this was so violent and so strange that he suddenly felt that kind of indescribable movement that no man experience more than two or three times in his life, a sort of convulsion of the conscience that stirs up all that is dubious in the heart, which is composed of irony, of joy, and of despair, and which might be called a burst of interior laughter. 
He hastily relighted his candle. 
“ Well, what! ” said he, “ What am  I afraid of ? Why do I ponder over these things? I am now safe; all is finished. Ah, yes, but, what is there unfortunate in all this! People who should see me, upon my honor, would think that a catastrophe had befallen me! After all, if there is any harm done to anybody, it is in nowise my fault. Providence has done it all. This is what He wishes apparently. Have I the right to disarrange what He arranges? What is it that I ask for now? Why do I interfere? It does not concern me. How! I am not satisfied! But what would I have then? The aim to which I have aspired for so many years, my nightly dream, the object of my prayers to heaven, security– I have gained it. It is God’s will. I must do nothing contrary to the will of God. And why is it God’s will? That I may carry on what I have begun, that I may do good, that I may be one day a grand and encouraging example, that it may be said that there was finally some little happiness resulting from this suffering which I have undergone and this virtue to which I have returned! It is decided, let the matter alone! Let us not interfere with God ” 
Thus he spoke in the depths of his conscience, hanging over what might be called his own abyss. He rose from  his chair, and began to walk the room. “ Come,” said he, “ let us think of it no more. The resolution is formed! ” But he felt no joy. 
Quite the contrary, 
One can no more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. In the case of the sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty, it is called remorse. God upheaves the soul as well as the ocean. 
After the lapse of a few moments, he could do no otherwise; he resumed this somber dialogue, in which it was himself who spoke and himself who listened, saying what he wished to keep silent, listening to what he did not wish to hear, yielding to that mysterious power which said to him: “ Think! ” as it said two thousand years ago to another condemned: “ March! ”
He asked himself then where he was. He questioned himself upon this “ resolution formed.” He confessed to himself that all that he had been arranging in his mind was monstrous, that “ to let the matter alone, not to interfere with God,” was simply horrible, to let this mistake of destiny and of men be accomplished,  not to prevent it, to  lend himself to it by his silence;to  do nothing, finally, was to do all! It was the last degree of hypocritical meanness! It was a base, cowardly, lying, abject, hideous crime! 
For the first time within eight years,  the unhappy man had just tasted the bitter flavor of a wicked thought and a wicked action.
He spit it out with disgust. 
He continued to question himself. He sternly asked himself what he had understood by this:
“ My object is attained. ” He declared that his life, in truth, did have an object. But what object? To conceal his name? To deceive the police? Was it for so petty a thing that he had done all that he had done? 
Had he no other object, which was the great one, which was the true one? To save, not his body, but his soul. To become honest and good again. To be an upright man! Was it not that above all, that alone, which he had always wished,and which the bishop had enjoined upon him? To close the door on his past? But he was not closing it, great God! He was reopening it by committing an infamous act! For he became a robber again, and the most odious of robbers! He robbed another of his existence, his life, his peace, his place in the world; he became an assassin! He murdered, he murdered in a moral sense a wretched man, he inflicted upon him that frightful life in death, that living burial, which is called the galleys; on the contrary, to deliver himself up, to save this man stricken by so ghastly a mistake, to reassume his name, to become again from duty to convict Jean Valjean – that was really to achieve his resurrection and to close forever the hell from whence he had emerged! To fall back into it in appearance was to emerge in reality! He must do that! All he had done was nothing, if he did not do that! All his life was useless, all his suffering was lost. He had only to ask the question: “ What is the use? ” He felt that the bishop was there, that the bishop was present all the more that he was dead, that the bishop was looking fixedly at him, that henceforth Mayor Madeleine with all his virtues would be abominable to him, and the galley slave, Jean Valjean, would be admirable and pure in his sight. That man saw his mask, but the bishop saw his face. 
That man saw his life, but the bishop saw his conscience. He must then go to Arras, deliver the wrong Jean Valjean, denounce the right one. Alas! That was the greatest of sacrifices, the most poignant of victories, the final step to be taken, but he must do it. Mournful destiny! He could only enter into sanctity in the eyes of God, by returning into infamy in the eyes of men! 
“ Well,” said he, “ let us take this course! Let us do our duty! Let us save this man!” 
He pronounced these words in a loud voice, without perceiving that he was speaking aloud. 
He took his books, verified them, and put them in order.
He threw into the fire a package of notes which he held against needy small traders. He wrote a letter, which he sealed, and upon the envelope of which might have been read, if there had been anyone in the room at the time: 
Monsieur Laffitte, Banker, rue d’ Artois, Paris.  
The letter to Monsieur Lafitte finished, he put in his pocket as well as a pocketbook, and began to walk again. 
The current of his thought had not changed. He still  saw his duty clearly written in luminous letters which flared out before his eyes, and moved with his gaze: “ Go! Avow thy name! Denounce thyself! ” 
He felt that he had reached the second decisive movement of his conscience, and his destiny; that the bishop had marked the first phase of his new life, and that this Champmathieu marked the second . After a great crisis, a great trial. 
His blood rushed violently to his temples. He walked back and forth constantly. Midnight was struck first from the parish church, then from the city hall. He counted the twelve strokes of the two clocks, and he compared the sound of the two bells.  It reminded him that, a few days before, he had seen at a junkshop an old bell for sale, upon which was this name: 
ANTOINE ALBIN DE ROMAINVILLE. 
He was cold. He kindled a fire. He did not think to close the window. 
Meanwhile he had fallen distracted into his stupor again. It required not a little effort to recall his mind to what he was thinking of before the clock struck.  He succeeded at last. 
“ Ah! Yes,” said he, “ I had formed the resolution to denounce myself.” 
And then all at once he thought of Fantine. 
“ Stop! ” said he. “ This poor woman!” 
Here was a new crisis. 
Fantine, abruptly appearing in his reverie, was like a ray of unexpected light. It seemed to him that everything around him was changing its aspect; he exclaimed: 
“ Ah! Yes, indeed! So far I have only thought of myself! I have only looked to my own convenience! It is whether I shall keep silent or denounce myself, conceal my body or save my soul, be a despicable and respected magistrate, or an infamous  and venerable galley slave: it is myself, always myself, only myself.  But, good God! All this is egotism. Different forms of egotism, but still egotism! Suppose I should think a little of others? The highest duty is to think of others. let us see, let us examine! In ten years I shall have made ten millions; I scatter it over the country, I keep nothing for myself; what is it to me? What I am doing is not for myself.
The prosperity of all goes on increasing, industry is quickened and excited, manufactories and workshops are multiplied, families, a hundred families, a thousand families, are happy, the country becomes populous; villages spring up  where there were only farms, farms spring up where there was nothing, poverty disappears, and with poverty disappear debauchery, prostitution, theft, murder, all vices, all crimes! And this poor mother brings up her child! And the whole country is rich and honest! Ah, yes! How foolish, how absurd I was! What was I speaking of in denouncing myself? This demands reflection, surely, and nothing must be precipitate. What! Because it would have pleased me to do the grand and the generous! That is melodramatic after all! Because I only thought of myself, of myself alone, what! To save from a punishment perhaps a little too severe, but in reality just, nobody knows who, a thief, a scoundrel at any rate. Must an entire country be let go to ruin! Must a poor hapless woman perish in the hospital! Must a poor little girl perish on the street! Like dogs! Ah! That would be abominable! And the mother not even see her child again! And the child hardly have known her mother! And all for this old whelp of an apple thief, who, beyond all doubt, deserves the galleys for something else, if not for this. Fine scruples these, which saved an old vagabond who has, after all, only a few years to live, and who will hardly  be more unhappy in the galleys than in his hovel, and which sacrifice a whole population, mothers, wives, children! Take it at the very worst. Suppose there were a misdeed for me in this, and that my conscience should some day reproach me; the acceptance for the good of others of these reproaches which weigh only upon me, of  this misdeed which affects only my own soul, why, that is devotion, that is virtue.”  
He arose and resumed his walk. This time it seemed to him that he was satisfied. 
Diamonds are found only in the dark places of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought.  It seemed to him that after having descended into these depths, after having groped long in the blackest of this darkness, he had at last found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, and that he held it in his hand, and it blinded him  to look at it. 
“Yes,” thought he, “that is it! I am in the true road. I have the solution. I must end by holding fast to something. My choice is made. Let the matter alone! No more vacillation, no more shrinking. This is in the interest of all, not in my own. I am Madeleine,  I remain Madeleine. Woe to him who is Jean Valjean! He and I are no longer the same. I do not recognize that man, I no longer know what he is; if it is found that anybody is Jean Valjean at this hour, let him take care of himself. That does not concern me. That is a fatal name which is floating about in the darkness; if it stops and settles upon any man, so much the worse for that man.”  
He looked at himself in the little mirror that hung over his mantelpiece and said: 
“ Yes! To come to a resolution has solaced me! I am quite another man now! ”
He took a few steps more, then he stopped short. 
“Come! ” said he. “ I must not hesitate before any of the consequences of the resolution I have formed. There are yet some threads which knit me to this Jean Valjean. They must be broken! There are, in this very room, objects which would accuse me, mute things which would be witnessed; it is done, all these must disappear.” 
He felt in his pocket, drew out his purse, opened it, and took out a little key. 
He put this key into a lock, the hole of which was hardly visible, lost as it was in the darkest shading of the figures on the paper  which covered the wall. A secret door opened, a kind of falsepress built between the corner of the wall and the casing of the chimney. There was nothing in this closet but a few refuse trifles, a blue smock frock, an old pair of trousers, an old harversack,and a great thorn stick, ironbound at both ends. Those who had seen Jean Valjean at the time he passed through D—, in October, 1815, would have recognized easily all the fragments of this miserable outfit.  
He cast a furtive look toward the door, as if he were afraid it would open in spite of the bolt that held it; then with a quick and hasty movement, and at a single armful, without even a glance at these things which he had kept so religiously and with so much danger during so many years, he took the whole, rags, stick, haversack, and threw them all into the fire. In a few seconds, the room and the wall opposite were lit up with a great red flickering glare. It was all burning; the thorn stick cracked and threw out sparks into the middle of the room. 
The harversack, as it was consumed with the horrid rage which it contained, left something uncovered which glistened in the ashes. By bending toward it, one could have easily recognized a piece of silver. It was doubtless the forty-sous piece stolen from the little Savoyard. 
But he did not look at the fire; he continued his walk to and fro, always at the same pace. 
Suddenly his eyes fell upon the two silver candlesticks on the mantel, which were glistening dimly in the reflection. 
“ Stop! ” he thought. “ All Jean Valjean is contained in them too. They also must be destroyed.”
He took the two candlesticks. 

There was fire enough to melt them quickly into an unrecognizable ingot. 
He bent over the fire and warmed himself a moment.  It felt really comfortable to him. “ The pleasant warmth! ” said he. 
He stirred the embers with one of the candlesticks. 
A minute more, and they would have been in the fire. 
At that moment, it seemed to him that he heard a voice crying within him: “ Jean Valjean! Jean Valjean! ”
His hair stood on end; he was like a man who hears some terrible thing. 
“Yes! That is it; finish! ” said the voice.  “ Complete what you are doing! Destroy these candlesticks! Annihilate this memorial! Forget the bishop! Forget all! Ruin this Champmathieu, yes! Very well. Applaud yourself! So it is arranged, it is determined, it is done. Behold a man, a graybeard who knows not what he is accused of, who has done nothing, it may be, an innocent man, whose misfortune is caused by your name, upon whom your name weights like a crime, who will be taken instead of you, will be condemned, will end his days in abjection and in horror! Very well. Be an honored man yourself. Remain, Monsieur Mayor, remain honorable and honored, enrich the city, feed the poor, bring up the orphans, live happy, virtuous, and admired, and all this time while you are here in joy and in the light, there shall be a man wearing your red blouse, bearing your name in ignominy, and dragging your chain in the galleys! Yes! This is a fine arrangement! Oh, wretch! ”
The sweat rolled off his forehead. He looked upon the candlestick with haggard eyes. Meanwhile the voice which spoke within him had not ended. It continued: 
“ Jean Valjean! There shall be about you many voices which will make great noise, which will speak very loud, and which will bless you, and one only which nobody shall hear, and which will curse you in the darkness. Well, listen wretch! All these blessings shall fall before they reach Heavens; only the curse shall mount into the presence of God! ”   
This voice, at first quite feeble, and which was raised from the most obscure depths of  his conscience, had become by degrees loud and formidable, and he heard it now at his ear. 
It seemed to him that it had emerged from himself, and that it was speaking now from without. He thought he heard the last words so distinctly that he looked about the room with a kind of terror. 
“ Is there anybody here? ” asked he, aloud and in a startled voice.  
Then he continued with a laugh, which was like the laugh of an idiot: 
“ What a fool I am! There cannot be anybody here.”
There was One; but He who was there was not of such as the human eye can see. 
He put the candlestick on the mantel. 
He now recoiled with equal terror from each of the resolutions which he had formed in turn.  Each of the two ideas which counseled him appeared to him as fatal as the other. 
What a fatality! What a chance that this Champmathieu should be mistaken for him! To be hurled down headlong by the very means which Providence seemed at first to have employed to give him full security.  
There was a moment during which he contemplated the future. Denounce himself, great God! Give himself up! He saw with infinite despair all that he must leave, all that he must resume. 
He must then bid farewell to this existence, so good, so pure, so radiant, to this respect of all, to honor, to  liberty! Great God! Instead of that, the galley crew, the iron collar, the red blouse, the chain at his foot, fatigue, the dungeon, the plank bed, all these horrors, which he knew so well! At this age, after having been what he was! Oh, what wretchedness! Can destiny then be malignant like an intelligent being, and become monstrous like the human heart? 
And do what he might , he always fell back upon his sharp dilemma which was at the bottom of his thought. To remain in paradise and there become a demon! To re-enter into hell and there become an angel! 
What shall be done, great God! What shall be done? 
The torment from which he had emerged with so much difficulty broke loose anew within him.  His ideas again began to become confused.  
He staggered without as well as within. He walked like a little child that is just allowed to go alone. 
He could see nothing distinctly. The vague forms of all the reasoning thrown out by his mind trembled and were dissipated one after another in smoke. But this much he felt, that by whichever resolve he might abide, necessarily, and without possibility of scape, something of himself would surely die; that he was entering into a sepulcher on the right hand, as well as on the left; that he was suffering a death agony of his virtue. 
Alas! All his irresolutions were again upon him He was no further advanced than when he began.  
So struggled beneath its anguish, this unhappy soul.  
THE clock struck three. For five hours he had been walking thus almost without interruption, when he dropped into his chair. 
He fell asleep and dreamed. 
This dream,  like most dreams, had no further relation to the condition of affairs than its mournful and poignant character, but it made an impression upon him. This nightmare struck him so forcibly that he afterward wrote it down. It is one of the papers in his own handwriting, which he has left behind him. We think it our duty to copy here literally. 
Whatever this dream may be, the story of that night would be incomplete if we should omit it. It is the gloomy adventure of a sick soul. 
It is as follows: Upon the envelope we find this line written: “ The dream that I had that night.”
I was in a field. A great sad field where there was no grass. It did not seem that it was day, nor that it was night.  
I was walking with my brother, the brother of my childhood; this brother of whom I must say that I never think, and whom I scarcely remember. 
We were talking, and we met others walking. We were speaking of a neighbor we had formerly, who, since she had lived in the street, always worked with her window open. Even while we talked, we felt cold on account of that open window. 
There were no trees in the field. 
We saw a man passing near us. He was entirely naked,ashen-colored, mounted upon a horse which was of the color of earth.  The man had no hair; we saw his skull and the veins in his skull.   In his hand he held a stick which was limber like a twig of grapevine, and heavy as iron. This horseman passed by and said nothing. 
My brother said to me: “ Let us take the deserted road.” 
There was a deserted road where we saw not a bush, nor even a sprig of moss. All was of the color of earth, even the sky. A few steps further, and no one answered me when I spoke. I perceived that my brother was no longer with me. 
I entered a village which I saw. I thought that it must be Romainville ( why Romainville?). 
The first street by which I entered was deserted.  I passed into a second street. At the corner of the two streets was a man standing against the wall; I said to this man: “ What place is this? Where am I? ” The man made no  answer. I saw the door of a house open; I went in. 
The first room was deserted. I entered the second.  Behind the door of this room was a man standing against the wall. I asked this man: Whose house is this? Where am I? The man made no answer. The house had a garden.  
I went out of the house and into the garden. The garden was deserted. Behind the first tree I found a man standing. I said to this man: “ What is this garden? Where am I? The man made no answer. The house had a garden. 
I went out of the house and into the garden. The garden was deserted. Behind the first tree I found a man standing. I said to this man: “ What is this garden? Where am I?” The man made no answer. 
I wandered about the village, and I perceived that it was a city.  All the streets were deserted, all the doors were open. No living being was passing along the streets, or stirring in the rooms, or walking in the gardens. But behind every angle of a wall, behind every door, behind everything, there was a man standing who kept silence.
But one could ever be seen at a time. These men looked at me as I passed by. 
I went out of the city and began to walk in the fields. 
After a little while, I turned and I saw a great multitude coming after me.  I recognized all the men that I had seen in the city. Their heads were strange. They did not seem to hasten, and still they walked faster than I.They made no sound in walking. In an instant this multitude came up and surrounded me. The faces of these men were the color of earth. 
Then the first one whom I had seen and questioned on entering the city, said to me: “ Where are you going? Do you know that you have been dead for a long time? ” 
I opened my mouth to answer, and I perceived that no one was near me.  
He awoke. He was chilly. A wind as cold as the morning wind made the sashes of the still open window swing on their hinges. The fire had gone out. The candle was low in the socket.The night was yet dark. 
He arose and went to the window. There were still no stars in the sky. 
From his window he could look into the courtyard and into the street. A harsh,rattling noise that suddenly resounded from the ground made him look down. 
He saw below him two red stars, whose rays danced back and forth grotesquely in the shadow. 
His mind was still half buried in the mist of his reverie: 
“ Yes! ” thought he. “ There are none in the sky. They are on the earth now. ”
This confusion, however, faded away; a second noise like the first awakened him completely; he looked, and he saw that these two stars were the lamps of a carriage. By the light which they emitted, he could distinguish the form  of a carriage. It was a tilbury drawn by a small white horse. 
The noise which he had heard was the sound of the horse’s hoofs upon the pavement. 
“ What carriage is that? ” said him to himself. “ Who is it that comes so early? ”
At that moment there was a low rap at the door of his room. 
He shuddered from  head to foot and cried in a terrible voice: 
“ Who is there? ”
Someone answered: 
“ I, Monsieur Mayor.” 
He recognized the voice of the old woman, his portress.  
“ Well,” said he, “ what is it?” 
“ Monsieur Mayor, it is the chaise.” 
“ What chaise? ”
“ The tilbury.”
“ What tilbury? ”
“ Did not Monsieur the Mayor order a tilbury? ”  
“ Oh, Yes! ” he said.
Could the old woman have seen him at that moment she would have been frightened. 
There was a long silence. He examined the flame of the candle with a stupid air, and took some of the melted wax from around the wick and rolled it in his fingers. The old woman was waiting. She ventured, however, to speak again: 
“ Monsieur Mayor, what shall I say? ” 
“ Say that it is right, and I am coming down.” 
III

It was nearly eight o’clock in the evening when the cariole drove into the yard of the Hôtel de la Poste at Arras. The man whom we have followed thus far, got out, left the hotel, and began to walk in the city. 
He was not acquainted in Arras, the streets were dark, and he went haphazard.  Nevertheless he seemed to refrain obstinately from asking his way. He crossed the little river Crinchon, and found himself in a labyrinth of narrow streets, where he was soon lost. A citizen came along with a lantern. After some hesitation, he determined to speak to this man, but not until he had looked before and behind, as if he were afraid that somebody might overhear the question he was about to ask. 
“ Monsieur,” said he. “The courthouse if you please?” 
“If monsieur wishes to  see a trial, he is rather late. Ordinarily the sessions close at six o’clock.”
However, when they reached the great square, the citizen showed him four long lighted windows on the front of a vast dark building. 
“Faith, monsieur, you are in time, you are fortunate. Do you see those four windows? That is the court of assizes. There is a light there. Then they have not finished. The case must have been prolonged and they are having an evening session.” 
He followed the citizen’s instructions, and in a few minutes found himself in a hall where there were many people, and scattered groups of lawyers in their robes whispering here and there. 
This hall, which, though spacious, was lighted by a single lamp, was an ancient hall of the episcopal palace, and served as a waiting room. A double folding door, which was now closed, separated it from the large room in which the court of assizes was in session. 
He approached several groups and listened to their talk.
The calendar of the term being very heavy, the judge had set down two short, simple cases for that day. They had begun with an infanticide, and now were on the convict, the second offender, the “ old stager. ” This man had stolen some apples, but that did not appear to be very well proved; what was proved was that he had been in the galleys at Toulon. This was what ruined his case. The examination of the man had been finished, and the testimony of the witnesses had been taken, but there yet remained the argument of the counsel,  and the summing up of his prosecuting attorney was very good, and never failed with his prisoners; he was a fellow of  talent, who wrote poetry. 
An officer stood near the door which opened into the courtroom. He asked this officer: 
“ Monsieur, will the door be opened soon? ”
“ It will not be opened,” said the officer. 
“ Why not? ”
“ Because the hall is full. ”
“ What! There are no more seats? ”
“ Not a single one. The door is closed.  No one can enter.” 
The officer added, after a silence: “ There are indeed two or three places still behind Monsieur the Judge, but Monsieur the Judge admits none but public functionaries to them.” 
So saying, the officer turned his back. 
He retired with his head bowed down, crossed the antechamber, and walked slowly down the staircase, seeming to hesitate at every step. It is probable that he was holding counsel with himself. The violent combat that had been going on within him since the previous evening was not finished, and, every moment, he fell upon some new turn. When he reached the turn of the stairway, he leaned against the railing and folded his arms. Suddenly he opened his coat, drew out his pocketbook; took out a pencil, tore out a sheet, and wrote rapidly upon that sheet,  by the glimmering light, this line: “ Monsieur Madeleine, Mayor of M— sur m—”   

            Then he went up the stairs again rapidly, passed through the crowd, walked straight to the officer, handed him the paper, and said to him with authority: “ Carry that to Monsieur the Judge.” 
The officer took the paper, cast his eye upon it, and obeyed. 

IV
WITHOUT himself suspecting it, the Mayor of M— sur m— had a certain celebrity. For seven years the reputation of his virtue had been extending throughout Bas-Boulonnais; it had finally crossed the boundaries of the little country, and had spread into the two or three neighboring departments. 
The judge of the Royal Court of Douai, who was holding this term of the assizes at Arras, was familiar, as well as everybody else, with this name so profoundly and so universally honored.  When the officer, quietly opening the door which led from the counsel chamber to the courtroom, bent behind the judge’s chair and handed him the paper, on which was written the line we have just read, adding: “ This gentleman desires to witness the trial,” the judge made a hasty movement of deference, seized a pen, wrote a few words at the bottom of the paper,  and handed it back to  the officer, saying to him: “ Let him enter.” 
The unhappy man, whose history we are relating, had remained near the door of the hall, in the same place and the same attitude as when the officer left him. He heard, through his thoughts, someone saying to him: “Will monsieur do  me the honor to follow me? It was the same officer who had turned his back upon him the minute before, and who now bowed to the earth before him. The officer at the same time handed him the paper.  He unfolded it, and, as he happened to be near the lamp,  he could read: 
“ The judge of the Court of Assizes presents his respects to  Monsieur Madeleine.” 
He crushed the paper in his hands, as if those few words had left some strange and bitter taste behind. 
He followed the officer. 
In a few minutes he found himself alone in a kind of paneled cabinet, of a severe appearance, lighted by two wax candles placed upon a table covered with green cloth. The last words of the officer who had left him still rang in his ear: “ Monsieur, you are now in the counsel chamber; you have but to turn the brass knob of that door and you will find yourself in the courtroom, behind the judge’s chair. ” These words were associated in his thoughts with a vague remembrance of the narrow corridors and dark stairways through which he had just passed.  
At one moment he made, with a kind of authority united to rebellion, that indescribable gesture which means and which so well says: “ Well! Who is there to  compel me? ” Then he turned quickly, saw before him the door by which he had entered, went to it, opened it, and went out. 
He was no longer in that room; he was outside, in a corridor, a long, narrow corridor, cut up with steps and side doors, making all sorts of angles, lighted here and there by lamps hung on the wall similar to  nurse lamps for the sick; it was the corridor by which he had come. He drew breath and listened; no sound behind him, no sound before him; he ran as if he were pursued. 
When he had doubled several of the turns of this passage, he listened again. There was still the same silence and the same shadow about  him.  He was out of breath, he tottered, he leaned against the wall. The stone was cold: the sweat was icy upon his forehead;  he roused himself with a shudder. 
Then and there, alone, standing in that obscurity, trembling with cold and, perhaps, with something else, he reflected. 
He had reflected all night, he had reflected all day; he now heard but one voice within him, which said: “ Alas! ” 
A quarter of an hour thus rolled away. Finally, he bowed his head, sighed with anguish, let his arms fall, and retraced his steps. He walked slowly and as if overwhelmed.  It seemed as if he had been caught in his flight and brought back. 
He entered the counsel chamber again. The first thing that he saw was the handle of the door. That handle, round and of polished brass, shone out before him like an ominous star. 
He looked at it as a lamb might look at the eye of a tiger. 
His eyes could not move from it. 
From time to time, he took another step toward the door. 
Had he listened, he would have heard, as a kind of confused murmur, the noise of the neighboring hall; but he did not listen and he did not hear. 
Suddenly, without himself knowing how, he found himself near the door; he seized the knob convulsively; the door opened. 
He was in the courtroom. 
V   
He took a step, closed the door behind him, mechanically, and remained standing, noting what he saw. 
It was a large hall, dimly lighted, and noisy and silent by turns, where all the machinery of a criminal trial was exhibited, with its petty yet solemn gravity, before the multitude. 
At one end of the hall, that at which he found himself, heedless judges, in threadbare robes, were biting their fingernails, or closing their eyelids; at the other end was a ragged rabble; there were lawyers in all sorts of attitudes; soldiers with honest and hard faces; old, stained wainscoting, a dirty ceiling, tables covered with serge, which was more nearly yellow than green; doors blackened by finger marks;tavern lamps, giving more smoke than light, on nails in the paneling; candles, in brass candlesticks, on the tables; everywhere obscurity, unsightliness, and gloom, and from all this there arose an austere and august impression; for men felt therein the presence of that great human thing which is called law, and that great divine thing which is called justice. 
No man in this multitude paid any attention to him. All eyes converged on a single point, a wooden bench placed against a little door, along the wall at the left hand of the judge. Upon this bench, which was lighted by several candles, was a man between two gendarmes. 
This was the man.  
He did not look for him, he saw him. His eyes went toward him naturally, as if they had known in advance where he was. 
He thought he saw himself, older, doubtless, not precisely the same in features, but alike in attitude and appearance, with that bristling hair, with those wild and restless eyeballs, with that blouse – just as he was on the day he entered D– full of hatred, and concealing in his soul that hideous hoard of frightful thoughts which he had spent nineteen years in gathering upon the floor of the galleys. 
He said to himself, with a shudder: “ Great God! Shall I again come to this? ”
This being appeared at least sixty years old. There was something indescribably rough, stupid, and terrified in his appearance. 
At the sound of the door, people had stood aside to  make room. The judge had turned his head, and supposing the person who entered to be the mayor of M— sur m—, greeted him with a bow. The prosecuting attorney, who had seen Madeleine at M— sur m—, whither he had been called more than once by the duties of his office, recognized him and bowed likewise. He scarcely perceived them. He gazed about him, a prey to a sort of hallucination.  

Judges, clerk, gendarmes, a throng of heads, cruelly curious – he had seen all these once before, twenty-seven years ago. He had fallen again upon these fearful things; they were before him, they moved, they had being; it was no longer an effort of his memory, a mirage of his fancy, but real gendarmes and real judges, a real throng, and a real men of flesh and bone. It was done; he saw reappearing and living again around him, with all the frightfulness of reality, the monstrous visions of the past. 
All this was yawning before him. 
Stricken with horror, he closed his eyes, and exclaimed from the depths of his soul: “ Never! ” 
And by a tragic sport of destiny, which was agitating all his ideas and rendering him  almost insane, it was another self before him. This man on trial was called by all around him, Jean Valjean! 
He had before his eyes an unheard - of vision, a sort of representation of the most horrible moment of his life, played by his shadow. 
All, everything was there – the same paraphernalia, the same hour of the night – almost the same faces,  judge and assistant judges, soldiers, and spectators. But above the head of the judge was a crucifix, a thing which did not appear in courtrooms at the time of his sentence. When he was tried, God was not there.  
A chair was behind him; he sank into it, terrified at the idea that he might be observed. When seated, he took advantage of a pile of papers on the judges’ desk to hide his face from the whole room.  He could now see without being seen. 
He entered fully into the spirit of the reality; by degrees he recovered his composure, and arrived at that degree of calmness at which it is possible to listen. 
 
       Monsieur Bamatabois was one of the jurors. 
He looked for Javert, but did not see him. The witnesses’ seat was hidden from him by the clerk’s table. And then, as we have just said, the hall was very dimly lighted.  
At the moment of his entrance, the counsel for the prisoner was finishing his plea. The attention of all was excited to the highest degree; the trial had been in progress for three hours. 
During these three hours, the spectators had seen a man, an unknown, wretched being, thoroughly stupid or thoroughly artful, gradually bending beneath the weight of a terrible probability. He made gestures and signs which signified denial, or he gazed at the ceiling.  He spoke with difficulty and answered with embarrassment, but from head to foot his whole person denied the charge. He seemed like an idiot in the presence of all these intellects ranged in battle around him, and like a stranger in the midst of this society by whom he had been seized. Nevertheless, a most threatening future awaited him; probabilities increased every moment, and every spectator was looking with more anxiety than himself for the calamitous sentence which seemed to be hanging over his head with ever increasing surety. One contingency even gave a glimpse of the possibility, beyond the galleys, of a capital penalty should his identity be established, and the Petit Gervais affair result in his conviction. Who was this man? What was the nature of his apathy? Was it imbecility or artifice? Did he know too much or nothing at all? These were questions upon which the spectators took sides, and which seemed to affect the jury. There was something fearful and something mysterious in the trial; the drama was not merely gloomy, but it was obscure. 
The counsel for the defense had made a very good plan.  
The counsel established that the theft of the apples was not in fact proved. His client, whom in his character of counsel he persisted in calling Champmathieu, had not seen to scale the wall or break off the branch.  He had been arrested in possession of this branch (which the counsel preferred to call “ bough ” ); but he said that he had found it on the ground. Where was the proof to the contrary ? Undoubtedly, there had been a thief. But what evidence was there that this thief was Champmathieu? One single thing. That he was formerly a convict. The counsel would not deny that this fact unfortunately appeared  to be fully proved, but even supposing him to be the convict Jean Valjean, did this prove that he had stolen the apples? 
That was a presumption at most, not a proof. The accused, it was true, and the counsel “ in good faith ” must admit it, had adopted “ a mistaken system of defense.” He had persisted in denying everything, both the theft and the fact and the fact that he had been a convict. An avowal on the latter point would have been better certainly, and would have secured to him the indulgence of the judges; the counsel had advised him to this course, but the defendant  had obstinately refused, expecting probably to escape punishment entirely, by admitting nothing. 
It was a mistake, but must not the poverty of  his intellect be taken into consideration? The man was evidently imbecile. Long suffering in the galleys, long suffering out of the galleys, had brutalized him, etc., etc.; if he made a bad defense, was this a reason for convicting him? As to the Petit Gervais affair, the counsel had nothing to say; it was not in the case. He concluded by entreating the jury and court, if the identity of Jean Valjean appeared evident to them, to apply to him  the police penalties prescribed for the breaking of ban, and not the fearful punishment decreed to the convict found guilty of a second offense. 
The prosecuting attorney replied to  the counsel for the defense. He was violently and flowery, like most prosecuting attorneys. 
He complimented the counsel for his “ frankness,” of which he shrewdly took advantage. He attacked the accused through all the concessions which his counsel had made. The counsel seemed to admit that the accused was Jean Valjean. He accepted the admission. This man then was Jean Valjean. This fact was conceded to the prosecution, and could be no longer contested. Who was Jean Valjean? Description of Jean Valjean: “ a monster vomited,” etc. The auditory and the jury “ shuddered.” This description finished, the prosecuting attorney resumed  with an oratorical burst, designed to excite the enthusiasm of the Journal de la Préfecture to the highest pitch next morning. “ And it is such a man,” etc, etc. A vagabond, a mendicant, without means of existence, etc, etc. Accustomed through his existence to criminal acts, and profiting little by his past life in the galleys, as is proved by the crime committed upon Petit Gervais, etc, etc. It is such a man who, found on the highway in the very act of theft, a few paces from a wall that had been scaled, still  holding in his hand the subject of his crime, denies the act in which he is caught, denies the theft, denies the escalade, denies everything, denies even his name, denies even his identity! Besides  a hundred other proofs, to which he will not return, he is identified by your witnesses. 
Javert—the incorruptible inspector of police –Javert—and three of his former companions in disgrace, the convicts Brevet, Chenildieu, and Cochepaille. What has he to oppose this overwhelming unanimity? His denial. What depravity! You will do justice, gentlemen of the jury, etc., etc. While the prosecuting attorney was speaking the accused listened open mouthed, with a sort of astonishment, not unmingled with admiration. He was evidently surprised that a man could speak so well. From time to time, at the most “ forcible ” parts of the argument, at those moments when eloquence, unable to contain itself, overflows in a stream of withering epithets, and surrounds the prisoner like a tempest, he slowly moved his head from right to left, and from left to right — a sort of sad, mute protest, with which he contented himself from  the beginning of the argument.  Two or three times the spectators nearest him heard him say in a low tone: “ This all comes from not asking for Monsieur Baloup!” The prosecuting attorney pointed out to the jury this air of stupidity, which was evidently put on, and which denoted, not imbecility, but address, artifice, and the habit of deceiving justice; and which showed in its full light the “ deep-rooted perversity ” of the man. He concluded by reserving entirely the Petit Gervais affair, and demanding a sentence to the full extent of the law. 
This was, for this offense, as will be remembered, hard labor for life. 
The counsel for the prisoner rose, commenced by complimenting “ monsieur, the prosecuting attorney, on his admirable argument,” then replied as best he could, but in a weaker tone; the ground was evidently giving way under him.  

VI 

THE time had come for closing the case. The judge commanded the accused to rise, and put the usual question: “ Have you anything to add to your defense? ”  
The man, standing, and twirling in his hands a hideous cap which he had, seemed not to hear. 
The judge repeated the question. 
This time the man heard, and appeared to comprehend. He started like one awakening from sleep, cast his eyes around him, looked at the spectators, the gendarmes, his counsel, the jurors, and the court, placed his huge fists on the bar before him, looked around, and suddenly fixing his eyes upon the prosecuting attorney, began to speak. It was like an eruption. It seemed from the manner in which the words escaped his lips, incoherent, impetuous, jostling each other pell-mell, as if they were all eager to find vent at the same time. He said: 
“ I have this to say: That I have been a wheelwright at Paris; that it was at Monsieur Baloup’s too. It  is a hard life to be a wheelwright, you always work outdoors, in yards, under sheds when you have good bosses, never in shops, because you must have room, you see. In the winter, it is so cold that you thresh your arms to warm them. But the bosses won’t allow that; they say it is a waste of time. It is tough work to handle iron when there is ice on the pavements. It wears a man out quick. You get old when you are young at this trade. A man is used up by forty. I was fifty-three; I was sick a good deal. And then the workmen are so bad! When a poor fellow isn’t young, they always call you old bird, and old beast! I earned only thirty sous a day, they paid me as little as they could – the bosses took advantage of my age. Then I had my daughter, who was a washerwoman at the river. She earned a little for herself; between us two, we got on; she had hard work too. All day long up to the waist in a tub, in rain, in snow, with wind that cuts your face when it freezes, it is all the same, the washing must be done; there are folks who haven’t much linen and are waiting for it; if you don’t wash you lose your customers. The planks are not well matched, and the water falls on you everywhere.  You get your clothes wet through and through; that strikes in. She would come home at seven o’clock at night, and got to bed right away. She was so tired. Her husband used to beat her. She is dead, she wasn’t very happy. She was a good girl; she never went to balls, and was very quiet. I remember one Shrove Tuesday she went to bed at eight o’clock. Look here, I am telling the truth. You have only to ask if ‘tisn’t so. Ask! How stupid I am! Paris is a gulf. Who is there that knows Father Champmathieu? But there is Monsieur Baloup. Go and see Mounsieur Baloup. I don’t know what more you want of me.” 
The man ceased speaking, but did not sit down. He had uttered these sentences in a loud, rapid, hoarse, harsh, and guttural tone,with a sort of angry and savage simplicity. Once, he stopped to bow to somebody in the crowd. The sort of affirmations which he seemed to fling out  haphazard came from him like hiccoughs, and he added to each the gesture of a man chopping wood. When he had finished, the auditory burst into laughter. He looked at them, and seeing them laughing and not knowing why, began to laugh himself. 
That was sinister. 
The judge, a considerate and kindly man, raised his voice. He reminded the “ gentlemen of the jury ” that Monsieur Baloup, the former master wheelwright by whom the prisoner said he had been employed, had been summoned, but had not appeared. He had become bankrupt, and could not be found. 
Then, turning to the accused, he adjured him to listen to what he was about to say, and added: “ You are in a position which demands reflection. The gravest presumptions are weighing against you, and may lead to fatal results. Prisoner, on your own behalf, I question you a second time, explain yourself clearly on these two points. First, did you or did you not climb the wall of the Pierron  close, break off the branch and steal the apples, that is to say, commit the crime of theft, with the addition of breaking into an enclosure? Secondly, are you or are you not the discharged convict, Jean Valjean? ” 

The prisoner shook his head with a knowing look, like a man who understands perfectly, and knows what he is going to say. He opened his mouth, turned toward the presiding judge, and said: 
“ In the first place–”
Then he looked at his cap, looked up at the ceiling, and was silent. 
“ Prisoner,” resumed the prosecuting attorney, in an austere tone, “ give attention. You have replied to nothing  that has been asked you. Your agitation condemns you.” 
The accused had at last resumed his seat; he rose abruptly when the prosecuting attorney had ended, and exclaimed: 
“ You are a very bad man, you, I mean. This is what I wanted to say. I couldn’t think of it first off. I never stole anything. I am a man who don’t get something to eat everyday. I was coming from Ailly, walking alone after a shower, which had made the ground all yellow with mud, so that the ponds were running over, and you only saw little sprigs of grass sticking out the sand along the road, and I found a broken branch on the ground with apples on it, and I picked it up not knowing what trouble it would give me. It is three months that I have been in prison, being knocked about. More’n that, I can’t tell. You talk against me and tell  me “ answer! ” The gendarme, who is a good fellow, nudges my elbow, and whispers, “ answer now.” I can’t explain myself; I never studied; I  am a poor man. You are all wrong not to see that I didn’t steal. I picked up off the ground things that was there. You talk about Jean Valjean — I don’t know any such people. I have worked for Monsieur Baloup, Boulevard de l'Hôpital. My name is Champmathieu. You must be very sharp to tell me where I was born. I don’t know myself.  

Everybody can’t have houses to be born in; that would be too handy. I think my father and mother were strollers, but I don’t know. When I was a child they called me Little One; now, they call me Old Man. They’re my Christian names. Take them as you like. I have been in Auvergne, I  have been at Faverolles. Bless me! Can’t a man have been in Auvergne and Faverolles without having been at the galleys? I tell you I never stole, and that I am Father Champmathieu. I have been at Monsieur Baloup’s: I lived in his house. I am tired of your everlasting nonsense. 
What is everybody after me for like a mad dog? ”

The prosecuting attorney was still standing; he addressed the judge: 
“ Sir, in the presence of the confused but very adroit denegations of the accused, who endeavors to pass for an idiot, but who will not succeed in it – we prevent him–we request that it may please you and the court to call again within the bar the convicts, Brevet, Cochepaille, and Chenildieu, and the police inspector Javert, and to submit them  to a final interrogation, concerning the identity of the accused with the convict Jean Valjean.” 
“ I must remind the prosecuting attorney,” said the presiding judge, “ that police inspector Javert, recalled by his duties to the chief town of a neighboring district, left the hall, and the city also, as soon as his testimony was taken. We granted him this permission, with the consent of the prosecuting attorney and the counsel of the accused.” 

“ True, ” replied the prosecuting attorney; “ in the absence of Monsieur Javert I think it a duty to recall to the gentlemen of the jury what he said here a few hours ago. Javert is an estimable man, who does honor to inferior but important functions, by his rigorous and strict probity. These are the terms in which he testified: “ I do not need even moral presumptions and material proofs to contradict the denials of the accused. I recognize him perfectly. This man’s name is not Champmathieu; he is a convict. Jean Valjean, very hard, and much feared. I often saw him when I was adjutant of the galley guard at Toulon. I repeat it; I recognize him perfectly.”  
    
This declaration, in terms so precise, appeared to produce a strong impression upon the public and jury.  The prosecuting attorney concluded by insisting that, in the absence of Javert, the three witnesses, Brevet, Chenildieu, and Cochepaille, should be heard anew and solemnly interrogated. 
  
The judge gave an order to an officer, and a moment afterward the door of the witness room opened, and the officer, accompanied by a gendarme ready to lend assistance, led in the convict Brevet. The audience was in breathless suspense, and all hearts palpitated as if they contained but a single soul. 
The old convict Brevet was clad in the black and gray jacket of the central prisons. Brevet was about sixty years old; he had the face of a man of business, and the air of a rogue. They sometimes go together. He had become something like a turnkey in the prison, to which he had been brought by new misdeeds. He was one of those men of whom their superiors are wont to say: “ He tries to make himself useful.” The chaplain bore good testimony to his religious habits. It must not be forgotten that this happened under the Restoration. 
“ Brevet,” said the judge, “ you have suffered infamous punishment, and cannot take an oath.” 
Brevet cast down his eyes. 
“ Nevertheless,” continued the judge, “ even in the man whom the law has degraded there may remain, if divine justice permit, a sentiment of honor and equity. The moment is a solemn one, and there is still time to retract if you think yourself mistaken. Prisoner, rise. Brevet, look well upon the prisoner, collect your remembrances, and say, on your soul and conscience, whether you still recognize this man as your former comrade in the galleys, Jean Valjean.” 
Brevet looked at the prisoner, then turned again to the court.  “ Yes, your honor. I was the first to recognize him, and still do so. This man is Jean Valjean, who came to Toulon in 1976, and left in 1815. I left a year after. He looks like a brute now, but he must have grown stupid with age; at the galleys he was sullen. I recognize him now, positively.” 
“ Sit down,” said the judge. “ Prisoner, remain standing.” 
Chenildieu was brought in, a convict for life, as was shown by his red cloak and green cap. He was undergoing his punishment in the galleys of Toulon, whence he had been brought for this occasion. He was a little man, about fifty years old, active, wrinkled, lean, yellow, brazen, restless, with a sort of sickly feebleness in his limbs and whole person, and immense force in his eye. His companions in the galleys had nicknamed him Je-nie-Dieu. 
The judge addressed nearly the same words to him as to Brevet. When he reminded him that his infamy had deprived him of the right to take an oath, Chenieldieu raised his head and looked  the spectators in the face.  The judge requested him to collect his thoughts, and asked him,  as he had Brevet, whether he still recognized the prisoner. 
Chenildieu burst out laughing.  
“ Gad! Do I recognize him! We were five years on the same chain. You’re sulky with me, are you, old boy? ” 
“ Sit down,” said the judge. 
The officer brought in Cochepaille;  this other convict for life, brought from  the galleys and dressed in red like Chenildieu, was a peasant from Lourdes, and a semibear of  the Pyrenees. He had tended flocks in the mountains, and from shepherd had glided into brigandage. Cochepaille was not less uncouth than the accused, and appeared still more stupid. He was one of those unfortunate men whom nature turns out as wild beasts, and society finishes up into galleys slaves. 
The judge attempted to move him by a few serious and pathetic words, and asked him, as he had the others, whether he still recognized without hesitation or difficulty the man standing before him. 
“ It is Jean Valjean,” said Cochepaille. “ The same they called Jean-the-Jack, he was so strong.” 
Each of the affirmations of these three men, evidently sincere and in good faith, had excited in the audience a murmur of evil augury for the accused – a murmur which increased in force and continuance every time a new declaration was  added to the preceding one. The prisoner himself listened to them with that astonished countenance which, according to the prosecution, was his principal means of defense. At the first, the gendarmes by his side heard him mutter between his teeth: “ Ah, well! There is one of them! ” After the second, he said in a louder tone, with an air almost of satisfaction: 
“ Good! ” At the third, he exclaimed: “ Famous! ” 
The judge addressed him :
“ Prisoner, you have listened. What have you to say? ”
He replied: 
“ I say – famous! ”
A buzz ran through the crowd and almost invaded the jury. 
It was evident that the man was lost. 
“ Officers,” said the judge, “ enforce order. I am about to sum up the case.” 
At this moment there  was a movement near the judge. A voice was heard exclaiming: 
“ Brevet, Chenildieu, Cochepaille, look this way!” 
So lamentable and terrible was this voice that those who heard it felt their blood run cold. All eyes turned toward the spot whence it came. A man, who had been sitting among the privileged spectators behind the court, had risen, pushed open the low door which separated the tribunal from the bar, and was standing in the center of the hall. The judge, the prosecuting attorney, Monsieur Bamatabois, twenty persons recognized him, and exclaimed at once: 
“Monsieur Madeleine” 
VII 

It was he, indeed. The clerk’s lamp lighted up his face. He held his hat in hand; there was no disorder in his dress; his overcoat was carefully buttoned. He was very pale, and trembled slightly. His hair, already gray when he came to Arras, was now perfectly white. It had become so during the hour that he had been there. All eyes were strained toward him. 
The sensation was indescribable. There was a moment of hesitation in the auditory. The voice had been so thrilling, the man standing there appeared so calm, that at first  nobody could comprehend it. They asked who had cried out. They could not believe that this tranquil man had uttered that fearful cry. 
This indecision lasted but few seconds. Before even the judge and prosecuting attorney could say a word, before  the gendarmes and officers could make a sign, the man, whom all up to this moment  had called Monsieur Madeleine, had advanced toward the witnesses, Cochepaille, Brevet, and Chenildieu.  
“ Do you not recognize me? ” said he. 
All three stood confounded, and indicated by a shake of the head that they did not know him. Cochepaille, intimidated, gave the military salute. Monsieur Madeleine turned toward the jurors and court, and said in a mild voice: 
“ Gentlemen  of the jury, release the accused. Your honor, order my arrest. He is not the man whom you seek; it is I. I am Jean Valjean.”  
Not a breath stirred. To the first commotion of astonishment had succeeded a sepulchral silence. That species of religious awe was felt in the hall which thrills the multitude at the accomplishment of a grand action. 
Nevertheless, the face of the judge was marked with sympathy and sadness; he exchanged glances with the prosecuting attorney, and a few whispered words with the assistant judges. 
He turned to the spectators and asked in a tone which was understood by all: 
“ Is there a physician here? ” 
The prosecuting attorney continued: 
“ Gentlemen of the jury, the strange and unexpected incident which disturbs the audience,  inspires us, as well as yourselves, with a feeling we have no need to express. You all know, at least by reputation, the honorable Monsieur Madeleine, Mayor of  M— sur m—. If there be a physician in the audience, we unite with his honor the judge in entreating him to be kind enough to lend his assistance to Monsieur Madeleine and conduct him to his residence.” 
Monsieur Madeleine did not permit the prosecuting attorney to finish, but interrupted him with a tone full of gentleness and authority. These are the words he uttered: we give them literally, as they were written down immediately after the trial, by one of the witnesses of the scene – as they still ring in the ears of those who heard them, now nearly forty years ago. 
“ I thank you, Monsieur Prosecuting Attorney,  but I am not mad. You shall see. You were on the point of committing a great mistake; release that man. I am the only one who sees clearly here, and I tell you the truth. What I do at this moment, God beholds from on high, and that is sufficient. You can take me, since I am here . Nevertheless, I have done my best. I have disguised myself under another name, I have become rich. I have become a mayor. I have desired to enter again among honest men. It seems that this cannot be. In short, there are many things which I cannot tell. I shall not relate to you the story of my life: some day you will know it. I did rob Monsieur the Bishop— that is true; I did rob Petit Gervais—that is true. They were right in telling you that Jean Valjean was a wicked wretch. But all the blame may not belong to him. Listen, your honors; a man so abased as I has no remonstrance to make with providence, nor advice to give to society; but, mark you, the infamy from which I  have sought to rise is pernicious to  men. The galleys make the galley slave. Receive this in kindness, if you will. Before the galleys, I was a poor peasant, unintelligent, a species of idiot; the galley changed me. I was stupid, I became wicked; I was a log, I became a firebrand. Later, I  was saved by indulgence and kindness, as I had been lost by severity. But, pardon, you cannot comprehend what I say. You will find in my house, among the ashes of the fireplace, the forty-sous piece of which, seven years ago, I robbed Petit Gervais. I have nothing more to add. Take me. Great God! The prosecuting attorney shakes his head. You say “Monsieur Madeleine has gone mad ’ ; you do not believe me. This is hard to be borne. Do not condemn that man, at least. What! These men do not  know me! Would that Javert were here. He would recognize me! ”
Nothing could express the kindly yet terrible melancholy of the tone which accompanied these words. 
He turned to the three convicts: 
“ Well! I recognize you, Brevet, do you remember —” 
He paused, hesitated a moment, and said: 
“ Do you remember those checkered, knit suspenders that you had in the galleys? ”
Brevet started as if struck with surprise, and gazed wildly at him from head to foot. He continued: 
“ Chenildieu, surnamed by yourself Je-nie-Dieu, the whole of your left shoulder has been burned deeply, from laying it one day on a chafing dish full of embers,to efface the three letters T.F.P., which yet are still to be seen there. Answer me, is this true? ” 
“ It is true! ” said Chenildieu. 
He turned to Cochepaille: 
“ Cochepaille, you have on your left arm, near where you have been bled, a date put in blue letters with burnt powder. 
It is the date of the landing of the emperor at Cannes, March 1st, 1815. Lift up your sleeve.” 
Cochepaille lifted up his sleeve; all eyes around him were turned to his naked arm. A gendarme brought a lamp; the date was there. 
The unhappy man turned toward the audience and the court with a smile, the thought of which still rends the hearts of those who witnessed it. It was the smile of triumph; it was also the smile of despair. 
“ You see clearly.” said he, “ that I am Jean Valjean.”
There were no  longer either judges or accusers, or gendarmes in the hall; there were only fixed eyes and beating hearts. Nobody remembered longer the part which he had to play; the prosecuting attorney forgot that he was there to  prosecute, the judge that he was there to  preside, the counsel for the defense that he was there to defend. Strange to say no question was put, no authority intervened. 

It was evident that Jean Valjean was before their eyes. That fact shone forth. The appearance of this man had been enough fully to clear up the case, so obscure a moment before. Without need of any further explanation, the multitude, as by a sort of electric revelation, comprehended instantly, and at a single glance, this simple and magnificent story of a man giving himself up that another might not be condemned in his place. The details, the hesitation, the slight reluctance possible were lost in this immense, luminous fact. 
It was an impression which quickly passed over, but for the moment it was irresistible.  
“ I will not disturb the proceeding further.” continued Jean Valjean. “ I am going, since I am not arrested. I have many things to do. Monsieur the Prosecuting Attorney knows where I am going, and will have me arrested when he chooses.” 
He walked toward the outer door. Not a voice was raised, not an arm stretched out to prevent him. All stood aside. There was at this moment an indescribable divinity within him which makes the multitudes fall back and make way before a man. 
He passed through the throng with slow steps. It was never known who opened the door, but it is certain that the door was open when he came to it. On reaching it he turned and said: “Monsieur the Prosecuting Attorney, I remain at your disposal.” 
He then addressed himself to the auditory. 
“ You all, all who are here, think me worthy of pity, do you not? Great God! When I think of what I have been on the point of doing, I think myself worthy of envy. Still, would that all this had not happened! ”
He went out, and the door closed as it had opened, for those who do deeds sovereignly great are always sure of being served by somebody in the multitude.  
Less than an hour afterward, the verdict of the jury discharged from all accusations the said Champmathieu, and Champmathieu, set at liberty forthwith, went his way stupefied, thinking all men mad, and understanding nothing of this vision. 

Counterstroke

I 

Day began to dawn. Fantine had had a feverish and sleepless night, yet full of happy visions;she fell asleep at daybreak. The sister who had watched with her took advantage of this slumber to go and prepare a new potion  of quinine. The good sister had been for a few moments in the laboratory of the infirmary, bending over the vials and drugs, looking at them very closely on account of the mist which the dawn cast over all objects, when suddenly she turned her head, and uttered a faint cry. Monsieur Madeleine stood before  her. He had just come in silently. 
“ You, Monsieur the Mayor! ” she exclaimed. 
“ How is the poor woman? ” he answered in a low voice. 
“ Better just now.  But we have been very anxious indeed.” 
She explained that Fantine had been very ill the night before, but was now better, because she believed that the mayor had gone to Montfermeil for her child. The sister dared not question the mayor, but she saw clearly from his manner that he had not come from that place. 
“ That is well,” said he. “ You did right not to deceive her. ” 
“ Yes,” returned the sister, “ but now, Monsieur the Mayor, when she sees you without her child, what shall we tell her? ”
He reflected for a moment, then said: 
“ God will inspire us.” 
“ But, we cannot tell her a lie,” murmured the sister, in a smothered tone. 
The broad daylight streamed into the room, and lighted up the face of Monsieur Madeleine. 
The sister happened to raise her eyes. 

“ Oh! God! Monsieur! ” she exclaimed.  “ What has befallen you? Your hair is all white! ” 
“ White! ” said he. 
She had no mirror; she rummaged in a case of instruments, and found a little glass which the physician of the infirmary used to discover whether the breath had left the body of a patient. Monsieur Madeleine took the glass, looked at his hair in it, and said: “Indeed!” 
He spoke the word with indifference, as if thinking of something else. 
The sister felt chilled by an unknown something, of which she caught a glimpse in all this. 
He made a few remarks about a door that shut with difficulty, the noise of which might awaken the sick woman; then entered the chamber of Fantine, approached her bed, and opened the curtains. She was sleeping. Her breath came from her chest with that tragic sound which is peculiar to these diseases, and which rends the heart of unhappy mothers, watching the slumbers of their fated children. But this labored respiration scarcely disturbed an ineffable serenity, which overshadowed her countenance, and transfigured her in her sleep. 
Her pallor had become whiteness, and her cheeks were glowing. 
Her long, fair eyelashes, the only beauty left to her of her maidenhood and youth, quivered as they lay closed upon her cheek. Her whole person trembled as if with the fluttering of wings which were felt,  but could not be seen, and which seemed about to unfold and bear away. To see her thus, no one could have believed that her life was despaired of. 
She looked more as if about to soar away than to die. 
Monsieur Madeleine remained for some time motionless near the bed, looking by turns at the patient and the crucifix, as he had done two months before, on the day when he came for the first time to see her in this asylum. They were still there, both in the same attitude, she sleeping, he praying; only now, after these two months had rolled away, her hair was gray and his was white. 
The sister had not entered with him. He stood by the bed, with his fingers on his lips, as if there were someone in the room to silence. She opened her eyes, saw him, and said tranquilly, with a smile:  
“ And Cosette? ”

II 
SHE did not start with surprise or joy; she was joy itself. 
The simple question: “ And Cosette? ” was asked with such deep faith, with so much certainty, with so complete an absence of disquiet or doubt, that he could find no word in reply. She continued: 
“ I knew that you were there; I was asleep, but I saw you. I have seen you for a long time; I have followed you with my eyes the whole night. You were in a halo of glory, and all manner of celestial forms were hovering around you! ”
He raised his eyes toward the crucifix. 
“ But tell me, where is Cosette? ” she resumed. “ Why not put her on my bed that I might see her the instant I woke? ”  
He answered something mechanically, which he could never afterward recall. 
Happily, the physician had come and had been apprised of this. He came to the aid of Monsieur Madeleine. 
“ My child,” said he, “ be calm, your daughter is here.” 
The eyes of Fantine beamed with joy, and lighted up her whole countenance. She clasped her  hands with an expression full of the most violent and most gentle entreaty: 
“ Oh! ” she exclaimed. “ Bring her to me! ”
Touching illusions of the mother; Cosette was still to her a little child to be carried in the arms. 
“ Not yet, ” continued the physician, “ not at this moment. 
You have some fever still. The sight of your child will agitate you, and make you worse. We must cure you first.” 
Monsieur Madeleine was sitting in a chair by the side of the bed. She turned toward him, and made visible efforts to appear calm and “ very good,” as she said, in that weakness of disease which resembles childhood, so that, seeing her so peaceful, there should be no objection to bringing her Cosette. Nevertheless, although restraining herself, she could not help addressing a thousand questions to Monsieur Madeleine.  
“ Did you have a pleasant journey, Monsieur the Mayor? Oh! how good you have been to go for her! Tell me only how she is. Did she bear the journey well? Ah! She will not know me.  In all this time, she has forgotten me, poor kitten! Children have no memory. They are like birds. Today they see one thing, and tomorrow another, and remember nothing. Tell me only, were her clothes clean?  Did those Thénardiers keep her neat ? How did they feed her? Oh! How I want to see her! Monsieur the Mayor, did you think her pretty? Is not my daughter beautiful? You must have been very cold in the diligence? Could they not bring her here for one little moment?
They might take her away immediately. Say! You are master here, are you willing? ” 
He took her hand. “ Cosette is beautiful,” said he. “ Cosette is well; you shall see her soon, but be quiet. You talk too fast; and then you throw your arms out of bed, which makes you cough.” 
In fact, coughing fits interrupted Fantine at almost every word. 
Monsieur Madeleine still held her hand and looked at her with anxiety.  It was evident that he had come to tell her things before which his mind now hesitated. The physician had made his visit and retired. The sister alone remained with them. 
But in the midst of the silence, Fantine cried out: 
“ I hear her! Oh, darling! I hear her! ”
There was a child playing in the court – the child of the portress or some workwoman. 
It was one of those chances which are always met with, and which seem to make part of the mysterious representation of tragic events. The child, which was a little girl, was running up and down to keep herself warm, singing and laughing in a loud voice. Alas! With what are not the plays of children mingled! Fantine had heard this little girl singing. 
“ Oh! ” said she. “ It is my Cosette! I know her voice! ” 
The child departed as she had come, and the voice died away. Fantine listened for some time. A shadow came over her face, and Monsieur Madeleine heard her whisper: “ How wicked it is of that doctor not to let me see my child! That man has a bad face! ” 
But yet her happy train of thought returned.  With her head on the pillow she continued to talk to herself. “How happy we shall be! We will have a little garden in the first place;  Monsieur Madeleine has promised it to me. My child will play in the garden. She must know her letters now. I will teach her to spell. 
She will chase the butterflies in the grass, and I will watch her. Then there will be her first communion. Ah! When will her first communion be? ”
She began to count on her fingers.
“ One, two, three, four. She is seven years old. In five years. 
She will have a white veil and openwork stockings, and will look like a little lady. Oh, my good sister, you do not know how foolish I am;  here I am thinking of my child’s first communion! ”
And she began to laugh. 
He had let go the hand of Fantine. He listened to the words as one listens to the wind that blows, his eyes on the ground, and his mind plunged into unfathomable reflections. Suddenly she ceased speaking, and raised her head mechanically. Fantine had become appalling. 
She did not speak; she did not breathe; she half-raised herself in the bed, the covering fell from her emaciated shoulders; her countenance, radiant a moment before, became livid, and her eyes, dilated with terror, seemed to fasten on something before her at the other end of the room. 
“ Good God! ” exclaimed he. “ What is the matter, Fantine? ” She did not answer; she did not take her eyes from the object which she seemed to see, but touched his arm with one hand, and with the other made a sign to him to look behind him.  
He turned, and saw Javert.   

III
LET us see what had happened. 
The half-hour after midnight was striking when Monsieur Madeleine left the hall of the Arras assizes. He had returned to his inn just in time to take the mail coach, in which he had retained his seat. A little before six in the morning he had reached M—sur m—, where his first care had been to post a letter to Monsieur Laffitte, then go to the infirmary and visit Fantine. 
Immediately upon the discharge of Champmathieu the prosecuting attorney closeted himself with the judge. The subject of their conference was: “ Of the necessity of the arrest of the person of Monsieur the Mayor of M — sur m—.”
The order of arrest was therefore granted. The prosecuting attorney sent it to M—sur m— by a courier, at full speed, to police inspector Javert. 
It will be remembered that Javert had returned to M— sur m— immediately after giving his testimony. 
Javert was just rising when the courier brought him the warrant and order of arrest. 
The courier was himself a policeman, and an intelligent man, who, in three words, acquainted Javert with what had happened at Arras. 
The order of arrest, signed by the prosecuting attorney, was couched in these terms: 
“ Inspector Javert will seize the body of Sieur Madeleine, Mayor of M— sur m—, who has this day been identified in court as the discharged convict Jean Valjean.” 
Javert came unostentatiously, had taken a corporal and four soldiers from the station house nearby, had left the soldiers in the court, had been shown to Fantine’s chamber by the portress, without suspicion, accustomed as she was to see armed men asking for the mayor. 
On reaching the room of Fantine, Javert turned the key, pushed open the door with the gentleness of a sick nurse, or a police spy, and entered.   
Properly speaking, he did not enter. He remained standing in the half-opened door, his hat on his head , and his left hand in his overcoat, which was buttoned to the chin. In the bend of his elbow might be seen the leaden head of his enormous cane, which disappeared behind him. 
He remained thus for nearly a minute, unperceived. Suddenly, Fantine raised her eyes, saw him, and caused Monsieur Madeleine to turn round. 
At the moment when the glance of Madeleine encountered that of Javert, Javert, without stirring, without moving, without approaching, became terrible. No human feeling can ever be so appalling as joy. 
It was the face of a demon who had again found his victim. 
The certainty that he had caught Jean Valjean at last, brought forth upon his countenance all that was in his soul. 
The deformity of triumph spread over his narrow forehead. It was the fullest development of horror that a gratified face can show. 
Javert was at this moment in heaven. Without clearly defining his own feelings, yet notwithstanding with a confused intuition of his necessity and his success, he, Javert, personified justice, light, and truth, in their celestial function as destroyers of evil. He was surrounded and supported by infinite depths of authority, reason, precedent, legal conscience, the vengeance of the law, all the stars in the firmament; he protected order, he hurled forth the thunder of the law, he avenged society, he stood erect in a halo of glory; there was in his victory a reminder of defiance and of combat; standing haughty, resplendent, he displayed in full glory the superhuman beastlines of a ferocious archangel; the fearful shadow of the deed which he was accomplishing made visible in his clenched fist the uncertain flashes of the social sword; happy and indignant, he had set his heel on crime, vice, rebellion, perdition, and hell; he was radiant, exterminating, smiling; there was an incontestable grandeur in this monstrous St. Michael. 
Javert, though hideous, was not ignoble.
Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the idea of duty, are things which, mistaken, may become hideous, but which, even though hideous, remain great; their majesty, peculiar to the human conscience, continues in all their horror; they are virtues with a single vice–error. The pitiless, sincere joy of a fanatic in an act of atrocity preserves an indescribably mournful radiance which inspires with veneration.  Without suspecting it, Javert, in his fear-inspiring happiness, was pitiable, like every ignorant man who wins a triumph. Nothing could be more painful  and terrible than this face, which revealed what we may call the evil of good. 

IV

FANTINE had not seen Javert since the day the mayor had wrested her from him. Her sick brain accounted for nothing, only she was sure that he had come for her. She could not endure this hideous face, she felt as if she were dying, she hid her face with both hands, and shrieked in anguish: 
“ Monsieur Madeleine, save me! ”
Jean Valjean had risen. He said to Fantine in his gentleness and calmest tone: 
“ Be composed; it is not for you that he comes.” 
He then turned to Javert and said: 
“ I know what you want.” 
Javert answered: 
“ Hurry along.” 
While speaking thus, he did not stir a step, but cast upon Jean Valjean a look like a noose, with which he was accustomed to draw the wretched to  him by force. 
It was the same look which Fantine had felt penetrate to the very marrow of her bones,two months before 
At the exclamation of Javert, Fantine had opened her eyes again. But the mayor was there, what could she fear? 
Javert advanced to the middle of the chamber, exclaiming: 
“ Hey, there, are you coming? ”
The unhappy woman looked around her. There was no one but the nun and the mayor. To whom this contemptuous familiarity be addressed? To herself alone. She shuddered. 
Then she saw a mysterious thing, so mysterious that its like had never appeared to her in the darkest delirium of fever. 
She saw the spy Javert seize Monsieur the Mayor by the collar; she saw Monsieur the Mayor bow his head. The world seemed vanishing before her sight. 
Javert, in fact, had taken Jean Valjean by the collar. 
Javert burst into a horrid laugh, displaying all his teeth. 
“ There is no Monsieur the Mayor here any longer! ” said he. 
Jean Valjean did not attempt to disturb the hand which grasped the collar of his coat. He said: 
“ Javert– ”
Javert interrupted him: “ Call the Monsieur the Inspector! ”
“ Monsieur,” continued Jean Valjean, “ I would like to speak a word with you in private.” 
“ Aloud, speak aloud,” said Javert, “ people speak aloud to me.” 
Jean Valjean went on,  lowering his voice. 
“ It is a request that I have to make of you–” 
“ I tell you to speak aloud.” 
“ But this should not be heard by anyone but yourself.” 
“ What is that to me? I will not listen.” 
Jean Valjean turned to him and said rapidly and in a very low tone: 
“ Give me three days! Three days to go  for the child of this unhappy woman! I will pay whatever is necessary. You shall accompany me if you like.” 
“ Are you laughing at me! ” cried Javert. “ Hey! I did not think you so stupid! You ask for three days to get away, and tell me that you are going for this girl’s child! Ha, ha, that’s good! That is good! ” 
Fantine shivered. 
“ My child! ” she exclaimed. “ Going for my child! Then she is not here! Sister, tell me, where is Cosette? I want my child! Monsieur Madeleine, Monsieur the Mayor! ”
Javert stamped his foot. 
“ There is the other now! Hold your tongue, hussy! Miserable country, where galley slaves are magistrates and women of the town are nursed like countesses! Ha, but all this will be changed; it was time! ”
He gazed steadily at Fantine, and added, grasping anew the cravat, shirt, and coat collar of Jean Valjean: 
“ I tell you that there is no Monsieur Madeleine, and that there is no Monsieur the Mayor. There is a robber, there is a brigand, there is a convict called Jean Valjean, and I have got him! That is what there is! ”
Fantine started upright, supporting herself by her rigid arms and hands;she looked at Jean Valjean, then at Javert, and then at the nun; she opened her mouth as if to speak; a rattle came from  her throat, her teeth struck together, she stretched out her arms in anguish, convulsively opening her hands, and groping about her like one who  is drowning, she sank suddenly back upon the pillow. 
Her head struck the head of the bed and fell forward on her breast, the mouth gaping, the eyes open and glazed. 
She was dead. 
Jean Valjean put his hand on that of Javert, which held him, and opened it as he would have opened the hand of a child; then he said: 
“ You have killed this woman.” 
“ Have done with this! ” cried Javert, furious. “ I am not here to listen to sermons; save all that; the guard is below; come right along, or the handcuffs! ”
There stood in a corner of the room an old iron bedstead in a dilapidated condition, which the sisters used as a camp bed when they watched. Jean Valjean went to the bed, wrenched out the rickety head bar–a thing easy for muscles like his – in the twinkling of an eye, and with the bar in his clenched fist, looked at Javert. Javert recoiled toward the door. 
Jean Valjean, his iron bar in hand, walked slowly toward the bed of Fantine.  On reaching it, he turned and said to Javert in a voice that could scarcely be heard: 
“ I advise you not to disturb me now.” 
Nothing is more certain than that Javert trembled. 
He had an idea of calling the guard, but Jean Valjean might profit by his absence to escape. He remained, therefore, grasped the bottom of his cane, and leaned against the framework of the door without taking his eyes from Jean Valjean. 
Jean Valjean rested his elbow upon the post, and his head upon his hand, and gazed at Fantine, stretched motionless before him. He remained thus, mute and absorbed, evidently lost to everything of this life. His countenance and attitude bespoke nothing but inexpressible pity.
After a few moments’ reverie, he bent down to Fantine, and addressed her in a whisper. 
What did he say? What could this condemned man say to this dead woman? What were these words? They were heard by none on earth. Did the dead woman hear them? There are touching illusions which perhaps are sublime realities. One thing is beyond doubt: the sister, the only witness of what passed, has often related that, at the moment when Jean Valjean whispered in the ear of Fantine, she distinctly saw an ineffable smile beam on those pale lips and in those dim eyes, full of the wonder of the tomb.  
Jean Valjean took Fantine’s head in his hands and arranged it on the pillow, as a mother would have done for her child, then fastened the string of her nightdress, and replaced her hair beneath her cap. This done, he closed her eyes. 
The face of Fantine, at this instant, seemed strangely illumined. 
Death is the entrance into the great light.  
Fantine’s hand hung over the side of the bed. Jean Valjean knelt before this hand, raised it gently, and kissed it. 
Then he rose, and turning to Javert, said: 
“ Now, I am at your disposal.” 
Fantine was buried in the common grave of the cemetery, which is for everybody and for all, and in which the poor are lost. Happily, God knows where to find the soul. Fantine was laid away in the darkness with bodies which had no name; she suffered the promiscuity of dust. She was thrown into the public pit.  Her tomb was like her bed. 

— Cosette --

Waterloo

DURING the night of the 18th of June, on the battlefield of Waterloo, the dead were despoiled. Wellington was rigid; he ordered whoever should be taken in the act to be put to death;  but rapine is persevering. The marauders were robbing in one corner of the battlefield while they were shooting them in another. 
The moon was an evil genius on this plain. 
Toward midnight a man was prowling, or rather crawling, along the sunken road of Ohain. He was dressed in a blouse which was in part a capote, was restless and daring, looking behind and before as he went. Who was this man? Night, probably, knew more of his doings than day! He had no knapsack, but evidently large pockets under his capote. From time to time he stopped, examined the plain around him as if to see if he were observed, stooped down suddenly, stirred on the ground something silent and motionless, then rose up and skulked away. 

The night was serene. Not a cloud was in the zenith. What mattered it that the earth was red, the moon retained her whiteness. Such is the indifference of heaven. In the meadows, branches of trees broken by grape, but not fallen, and held by the bark, swung gently in the night wind. A breath, almost a respiration, moved the brushwood. There was a quivering in the grass which seemed like the departure of souls. 
The night prowler which we have just introduced to the reader ferreted through this immense grave. He looked about. He passed an indescribably hideous review of the dead. He walked with his feet in blood. 
Suddenly he stopped. 
A few steps before him, in the sunken road, at a point where the mound of corpses ended, from  under this mass of men and horses appeared an open hand, lighted by the moon. 
This hand had something upon a finger which sparkled; it was a gold ring. 
The man stooped down, remained a moment, and when he rose again there was no ring upon that hand. 
He did not rise up precisely; he remained in a sinister and startled attitude, turning his back to the pile of dead, scrutinizing the horizon, on his knees, all the front of his body being supported on his two forefingers, his head raised just enough to peep above the edge of the hollow road. The four paws of the jackal are adapted to certain actions.  
Then, deciding upon his course, he arose. 
At this moment he experienced a shock. He felt that he was held from behind. 
He turned; it was the open hand, which had closed, seizing the lappet of his capote. 
An honest man would have been frightened. This man began to laugh. 
“ Oh,” said he, “ it’s only the dead man. I like a ghost better than a gendarme.”
However, the hand relaxed and let go its hold. Strength is soon exhausted in the tomb. 
“ Ah ha! returned the prowler. “ Is this dead man alive? Let us see.” 
He bent over again, rummaged among the heap, removed whatever impeded him, seized the hand, laid hold the arm, disengaged the head, drew out the body, and some moments after dragged into the shadow of the hollow road  an inanimate man, at least one who was senseless. It was a cuirassier, an officer, an officer, also, of some rank; a great gold epaulet protruded from beneath his cuirass, but he had no casque. A furious saber cut had disfigured his face, where nothing but blood was to be seen. It did not seem, however, that he had any limbs broken; and by some happy chance, if the word is possible here, the bodies were arched above him in such a way as to prevent his being crushed. His eyes were closed. 
He had on his cuirass the silver cross of the Legion of Honor.  
The prowler tore off this cross, which disappeared in one of the gulfs which he had under his capote. 
After which he felt the officer’s fob, found a watch there, and took it. Then he rummaged in his vest and found a purse, which he pocketed. 
When he had reached this phase of the succor he was lending the dying man, the officer opened his eyes. 
“ Thanks,” said he feebly. 
The rough movements of the man handling him, the coolness of the night, and breathing the fresh air freely, had roused him from his lethargy. 
The prowler answered not. He raised his head. The sound of a footstep could be heard on the plain; probably it was some patrol who was approaching. 
The officer murmured, for there were still signs of suffering in his voice: 
“ Who has gained  the battle? ”
“ The English,” answered the prowler. 
The officer replied: 
“ Search my pockets. You will there find a purse and a watch. 
Take them.”
This had already been done. 
The prowler made a pretense of executing the command, and said: 
“ There is nothing there.” 
“ I have been robbed,” replied the officer; “ I am sorry. They would have been yours.” 
The step of the patrol became more and more distinct.   
“ Somebody is coming,” said the prowler, making a movement as if he would go. 
The officer, raising himself up painfully upon one arm, held him back.  
“ You have saved my life. Who are you? ”
The prowler answered quick and low: 
“ I belong, like yourself, to the French army. I must go. If I am taken I shall be shot. I have saved your life.  Help yourself now.”
“ What is your grade? ”
“ Sergeant.” 
“ What is your name? ”
“ Thénardier.”
“ I shall not forget that name,” said the officer. “ And you, remember mine. My name is Pontmercy.”

The Ship “ Orion” 

I 

We shall be pardoned for passing rapidly over the painful details. We shall merely reproduce an item published  in the Journal de Paris, some few months after the remarkable events that occurred at M —sur m—: 
An old convict, named Jean Valjean, has recently been brought before the Var Assizes, under circumstances calculated to attract attention. 
This Villain had succeeded in eluding the vigilance of the police; he had changed his name, and had even been adroit enough to procure the appointment of mayor in one of our small towns in the North. He had established in this town a very considerable business, but was, at length, unmasked and arrested, thanks to the indefatigable zeal of the public authorities. 
He kept, as his mistress, a prostitute, who died of the shock at the moment of his arrest. This wretch, who is endowed with herculean strength, managed to escape, but , three or four days afterward, the police retook him, in Paris, just as he was getting into one of the small vehicles that ply between the capital  and the village of Montfermeil (Seine-et-Oise). It is said that he had availed himself of the interval of these three or four days of freedom, to withdraw a considerable sum deposited by him with one of our principal bankers. The amount  is estimated at six or seven hundred thousand francs. According to the minutes of the case, he has concealed it in some place known  to himself alone, and it has been impossible to seize it; however that may be, the said Jean Valjean has been brought before the assizes of the Department of the Var under indictment for an assault and robbery on the high road commitment vi et armis some eight years ago on the person of one of those honest lads who, as the patriarch of Ferney has written in immortal verse, 

… De Savoie arrivent tous les sus, 
Et don’t la  main légèrement essuie
Ces longs canaux engorgés par la suie. 

This bandit attempted no defense. It was proved by the able and eloquent representative of the crown that the robbery was shared in by others, and that Jean Valjean formed one of a band of robbers in the South. Consequently, Jean Valjean, being found guilty, was condemned to death. The criminal refused to appeal to the higher courts, and the king, in his inexhaustible clemency, deigned to commute his sentence to  that of hard labor in prison for life. Jean Valjean was immediately forwarded to the galleys at Toulon. 
Jean Valjean changed his number at the galleys. He became 9430

II
VERY shortly after the time when the authorities took it into their heads that the liberated convict Jean Valjean had, during his escape of a few days’ duration, been prowling about Montfermeil, it was remarked, in that village, that a certain old road laborer named Boulatruelle had “ a fancy ” for the woods. 
People in the neighborhood claimed to  know that Boulatruelle had been in the galleys; he was under police surveillance, and, as he could find no work anywhere, the government employed him at half wages as a mender on the crossroad from Gagny to Lagny. 
What had been observed was this: 
For sometime past, Boulatruelle had left off his work at stone breaking and keeping the road in order, very early, and had gone into the woods with his pick. He would be met toward evening in the remotest glades and the wildest thickets, having the appearance of a person looking for something and, sometimes, digging holes. The worst puzzled of all were the schoolmaster and the tavern keeper,  Thénardier, who was 

… Who come from savoy every year, 
And whose hand deftly wipes out 
Those long channels choked up with soot.   

everybody’s friend, and who had not disdained to strike up an intimacy with even Boulatruelle. 
“ He has been in the galleys,” said Thénardier. “ Good Lord! 
Nobody knows who is there who may be there! ”
So they made up a  party and plied the old roadsman with drink. Boulatruelle drank enormously, but said little. He combined with admirable art and in mastery proportions the thirst of a guzzler with the discretion of a judge. However, by dint of returning to the charge and by putting together and twisting the obscure  expressions that he did let fall, Thénardier and the schoolmaster made out,  as they thought, the following: 
One morning about daybreak as he was going to his work, Boulatruelle had been surprised at seeing under a bush in a corner of the woods, a pickax and spade, as one would say, hidden there. However, he supposed that they were the pick and spade of old Six-Fours, the water carrier, and thought no more about it. But, on the evening of the same day, he had seen, without being seen himself, for he was hidden behind a large tree, “ a person who did not belong at all to that region,” and whom he, Boulatruelle, “ knew very well ” –or, as Thénardier translated it, “an  old comrade at the galleys” – turn off from the high road toward the thickest part of the woods. 
Boulatruelle obstinately refused to tell the stranger’s name.  
This person carried a package,  something square, like a large box or a small trunk. Two or three hours later, Boulatruelle saw this person come forth again from the woods, this time carrying now not the little trunk but a pick, and a spade. The pick and the spade were a ray of light to Boulatruelle; he hastened to the bushes, in the morning, and found neither one nor the other. He thence concluded that this person, on entering the woods, had dug a hole with his pick, had buried the chest, and had, then, filled up the hole with his spade.  
Now as the chest was too small to contain a corpse, it must contain money; hence his continued searches. Boulatruelle had explored, sounded, and ransacked the whole forest, and had rummaged every spot where the earth seemed to have been freshly disturbed. But all in vain. 
He had turned up nothing. Nobody thought any more about it, at Montfermeil.   

III

TOWARD the end  of October, in that same year, 1823, the inhabitants of Toulon saw coming back into their port, in consequence of heavy weather, and in order to repair some damages, the ship “ Orion,” which was at a later period employed at Brest as a vessel of instruction, and which then formed a part of the Mediterranean squadron.  

Every day, then, from morning till night, the quays, the wharves, and the piers of the port of Toulon were covered with a throng of saunterers and idlers, whose occupation consisted in gazing at the “ Orion. ”
She was moored near the Arsenal. She was in commission, and they were repairing her. The hull had not been injured on the starboard side, but a few planks had been taken off here and there, according to custom, to admit the air to the framework.  

One morning, the throng which was gazing at her witnesses an accident. 
The crew was engaged in furling sail. The topman, whose duty it was to take in the starboard upper corner of the main topsail, lost his balance. He was seen tottering; the dense throng assembled on the wharf of the Arsenal uttered a cry, the man’s head overbalanced his body, and he whirled over the yard, his arms outstretched toward the deep; as he went over, he grasped the manropes, first with one hand, and then with the other, and hung suspended in that manner. The sea lay far below him at a giddy depth. The shock of his fall had given to the manropes a violent swinging motion, and the poor fellow hung dangling to and fro at the end of this line, like a stone in a sling. 

To go to his aid was to run a frightful risk. None of the crew, who were all fishermen of the coast recently taken into service, dared attempt it. In the meantime, the poor topman was becoming exhausted; his agony could not be seen in his countenance, but his increasing weakness could be detected in the movements of all his limbs. His arms twisted about in horrible contortions. Every attempt he made to reascend only increased the oscillations of the manropes. He did not cry out, for fear of losing his strength. All were now looking forward to the moment when he should let go of the rope, and, at instants, all turned their heads away that they might not see him fall. There are moments when a rope’s end, a pole, the branch of a tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit. 
Suddenly, a man was discovered clambering up the rigging with the agility of a wildcat.
This man was clad in red – it was a convict; he wore a green cap – it was a convict for life. As he reached the roundtop, a gust of wind blew off his cap and revealed a head entirely white – it was not a young man.    
In fact, one of the convicts employed on board in some prison task had, at the first alarm, run to the officer of the watch, and, amid the confusion and hesitation of the crew, while all the sailors trembled and shrank back, had asked permission to save the topman’s  life at the risk of his  own. A sign of assent being given, with one blow of a hammer he broke the chain riveted to the iron ring at his ankle, then took a rope in his hand, and flung himself into the shrouds. Nobody, at the moment, noticed with what ease the chain was broken. It was only some time afterward that anybody remembered it. 
In a twinkling he was upon the yard. He paused a few seconds, and seemed to measure it with his glance. Those seconds, during which the wind swayed the sailor to and fro at the end of the rope, seemed ages to the lookers-on.  At length, the convict raised his eyes to heaven, and took a step forward. The crowd drew a long breath . He was seen to run along the yard. On reaching its extreme tip, he fastened one end of the rope he had with him, and let the other hang at full length. Thereupon, he began to let himself down by his hands along this rope, and then there was an inexpressible sensation of terror; instead of one man, two were seen dangling at that giddy height. 
You would have said it was a spider seizing a fly, only, in this case, the spider was bringing life, and not death. Ten thousand eyes were fixed upon the group. Not a cry, not a word was uttered; the same emotion contracted every brow. 
Every man held his breath, as if afraid to add the least whisper to the wind which was swaying  the two unfortunate men.  
However, the convict had, at length, managed to make his way down to the seaman. It was time; one minute more, and the man, exhausted and despairing, would have fallen into the deep. The convict firmly secured him to the rope to which he clung with one hand while  he worked with the other. 
Finally, he was seen reascending to the yard, and hauling the sailor after him; he supported him there, for an instant, to let him recover his strength, and then, lifting him in in his arms, carried him, as he walked along the yard, to the crosstrees, and from there to the roundtop, where he left him in the hands of his messmates. 
Then the throng applauded; old galley sergeants wept,  women hugged each other on the wharves, and, on all sides, voices were heard exclaiming, with a sort of tenderly subdued enthusiasm: “This man must be pardoned!” 
He, however, had made it a point of duty to descend again immediately, and go back to his work. In order to arrive more quickly, he slid down the rigging, and started to run along a lower yard. All eyes were following him. There was a certain moment when everyone felt alarmed; whether it was that he felt fatigued, or because his head swam,  people thought they saw him hesitate and stagger. Suddenly, the throng uttered a thrilling outcry: the convict had fallen into the sea. 
The fall was perilous. The frigate “ Algesiras ” was moored close to the “ Orion,” and the poor convict had plunged between the two ships. It was feared that he would be drawn under one or the other. Four men sprang, at once, into a boat. 
The people cheered them on, and anxiety again took possession of all minds. The man had not again risen to the surface. 
He had disappeared in the sea, without making even a ripple, as though he had fallen into a cask of oil. They sounded and dragged the place. It was in vain.The search was continued until night, but not even the body was found. 
The next morning, the Toulon Journal published the following lines: “ November 17, 1823. Yesterday, a convict at work on board the ‘Orion,’ on his return from rescuing a sailor, fell  into the sea, and was drowned. His body was not recovered. It is presumed that it has been caught under the piles at the pierhead of the Arsenal. This man was registered by the number 9430, and his name was Jean Valjean.” 


Fulfillment of the Promise to the Departed. 

I 

MONTFERMEIL is situated between Livry and Chelles, upon the southern slope of the high plateau which separates the Ouruq from the Marne. At present, it is a considerable town adorned all the year round with stuccoed villas, and, on Sundays, with citizens in full blossom. In 1823, it was a  peaceful and charming spot, and not upon the road to any place; the inhabitants cheaply enjoyed that rural life which is so luxuriant and so easy of enjoyment. But water was scarce there on account of the height of the plateau. 
They had to go a considerable distance for it. The end of the village toward Gagny drew its water from the magnificent ponds in the forest on that side; the other end, which surrounds the church and which is toward Chelles, found drinking water only at a little spring on the side of the hill, near the road to Chelles, about fifteen minutes’ walk from Montfermeil.  
It was therefore a serious matter for each household to obtain its supply of water. The great houses, the aristocracy, the Thénardier tavern included, paid a penny a bucketful to and old man who made his business, and whose income from the Montfermeil waterworks was about eight sous per day; but this man worked only till seven o’clock in summer and five in the winter, and when night had come on, and the first floor shutters were closed, whoever had not drinking water went after it, or went without it. 
This was the terror of the poor being whom the reader has not perhaps forgotten –little Cosette. It will be remembered that Cosette was useful to the Thénardiers in two ways: they got paid from the mother and work from the child. Thus when the mother ceased entirely to pay, we have seen why, in the preceding chapters, the Thénardiers kept Cosette. She saved them a servant. In that capacity she ran for water when it was wanted. 
So the child, always horrified at the idea of going to the spring at night, took good care that water should never be wanted at the house. 
Christmas in the year 1823 was particularly brilliant at Montfermeil. The early part of the winter had been mild; so far there had been neither frost nor snow. Some jugglers from Paris had obtained permission from the mayor to set up their stalls in the main street of the village, and a company of peddlers had, under the same license, put up  their booths in the square before the church and even in the Lane Boulanger, upon which, as the reader perhaps remembers, the Thénardier chophouse was situated. This filled up the taverns and pothouses, and gave to this little quiet place a noisy and joyous appearance. 
On that Christmas evening, several men, wagoners and peddlers, were seated at table and drinking around four or five candles in the low hall of the Thénardier tavern. This room resembled all barrooms; tables, pewter mugs, bottles, drinkers, smokers; little light, and much noise. Thénardier,  the wife, was looking to the supper, which was cooking before a bright blazing fire; the husband, Thénardier, was drinking with his guests and talking politics. 
Cosette was at her usual place, seated on the crosspiece of the kitchen table, near the fireplace; she was clad in rags; her bare feet were in wooden shoes, and by the light of the fire she was knitting woolen stockings for the little Thénardiers. A young kitten was playing under the chairs. In a neighboring room the fresh voices of two children were heard laughing and prattling; it was Eponine and Azelma.  
In the chimney corner, a cowhide hung upon a nail.  
At intervals, the cry of a very young child, which was somewhere in the house, was heard about the noise of the barroom. This was a little boy which the woman had had some winters before– “I don’t know why,” she said, “It was the cold weather,” – and was a little more than three years old. The mother had nursed him, but did not love him.
When the hungry clamor of the brat became too much to hear: “ Your boy is squalling,” said Thénardier, “ why don’t you go and see what he wants? ” “ Bah! ” answered the mother; “ I am sick of him.” And the poor little fellow continued to cry in the darkness.  

II
FOUR new guests had just come in.  
Cosette was musing sadly; for, though she was only eight years old, she had already suffered so much that she mused with the mournful air of an old woman. 
She had a black eye from a blow of the Thénardierss’ fist, which made the Thénardiess say from time to time: “ How ugly she is with her patch on her eye.” 
Cosette was then thinking that it was evening, late in the evening, that the bowls and pitchers in the rooms of the travelers who had arrived must be filled immediately, and that there was no more water in the cistern. 
All at once,  one of the peddlers who lodged in the tavern came in, and said in a harsh voice: 
“ You have not watered my horse.”
“ Yes, we have, sure,” said the Thénardiess. 
“ I tell you no, ma’am,” replied the peddler.  
Cosette came out from under the table. 
“Oh, yes, monsieur! ” said she. “ The horse did drink; he drank in the bucket, the bucketful, and ‘twas me that carried it to him, and I talked to him.” 
This was not true. Cosette lied. 
“ Here is a girl as big as my fist, who can tell a lie as big as a house,” exclaimed the peddler. “  I tell you that he has not had any water, little wench! He has a way of blowing when he has not had any water, that I know well enough.”
Cosette persisted, and added in a voice stifled with anguish, and which could hardly be heard: 
“ But he did drink a good deal.” 
“ Come,” continued the peddler, in a passion, “ that is enough; give my horse some water, and say no more about it.”
Cosette went back under the table.  
“ Well of course that is right,” said the Thénardiess; “ if the beast has not had any water, she must have some.” 
Then looking about her: 
“ Well, what has become of that girl? ”
She stooped down and discovered Cosette crouched at the other end of the table, almost under the feet of the drinkers. 
“Aren’t you coming? ” cried the Thénardiess. 
Cosette came out of the kind of hole where she had hidden. 
The Thénardiess continued:
“Mademoiselle Dog-without-a-name, go and carry some drink to this horse.” 
“ But, ma’am,” said Cosette feebly, “ there is no water.”
The Thénardiess threw the street door wide open. 
“ Well, go after some! ”
Cosette hung her head,and went for an empty bucket that was by the chimney corner. 
The bucket was larger than she, and the child could have sat down in it comfortably.  
The Thénardiess went back to her range, and tasted what was in the kettle with a wooden spoon, grumbling the while. 
“ There is some at the spring. She is the worst girl that ever was. I think ‘twould have been better if I’d left out the onions.” 
Cosette remained motionless, bucket in hand, the open door before her. She seemed to be waiting for somebody to come to her aid.  
“ Get along! ” cried the Thénardiess.
Cosette went out. The door closed. 

III

THE row of booths extended along the street from the church, the reader will remember, as far as the Thénardier tavern. 
These booths, on account of the approaching passage of the citizens on their way to the midnight mass, were all illuminated with candles, burning in paper lanterns, which, as the schoolmaster of Montfermeil, who was at that moment seated at one of Thénardier’s tables, said, produced a magical effect. In retaliation, not a star was to be seen in the sky.  
The last of these stalls, set up exactly opposite Thénardier’s door, was a toyshop, all glittering with trinkets, glass beads, and things magnificent in tin. In the first rank, and in front, the merchant had placed, upon a bed of white napkins, a great doll nearly two feet high dressed in a robe of pink crepe with golden wheat ears on its head, and which had real hair and enamel eyes. The whole day, this marvel had been displayed to the bewilderment of the passers under ten years of age, but there had not been found in Montfermeil a mother rich enough, or prodigal enough, to give it to her child. Eponine and Alzema had passed hours in contemplating it, and Cosette herself, furtively, it is true, had dared to look at it.  
At the moment when Cosette went out, bucket in hand, all gloomy and overwhelmed as she was, she could not help raising her eyes toward this wonderful doll, toward “ the lady,” as she called it. The poor child stopped petrified. She had not seen this doll so near before. 
This whole booth seemed a palace to her; this doll was not a doll, it was a vision. It was joy, splendor, riches, happiness, and it appeared in a sort of chimerical radiance to this unfortunate little being, buried so deeply in a cold and dismal misery. The longer she looked, the more she was dazzled. 
She thought she saw paradise. There were other dolls behind the large one that appeared to her to be fairies and genii. 
The merchant walking to and fro in the back part of his stall suggested the Eternal Father. 
In  this adoration, she forgot everything, even the errand on which she had been sent. Suddenly, the harsh voice of the Thénardiess called her back to the reality: “ How, jade, haven’t you gone yet? Hold on; I am coming for you! I’d like to know what she’s doing there? Little monster, be off! ” 
The Thénardiess had glanced into the street, and perceived Cosette in ecstasy. 
Cosette fled with her bucket, running as fast as she could. 

IV

As the Thénardier tavern was in that part of the village which is near the church, Cosette had to go to the spring in the woods toward Chelles to draw water. 
She looked no more at the display in the booths, so long as she was in the Lane Boulanger, and in the vicinity of the church, the illuminated stalls lighted the way, but soon the last gleam from the last stall disappeared. The poor child found herself in darkness. She became buried in it.  Only, as she became the prey of a certain sensation, she shook the handle of the bucket as much as she could on her way.  That made a noise, which kept her company. 
Cosette thus passed through the labyrinths of crooked and deserted streets, which terminates the village of Montfermeil toward Chelles. As long as she had houses, or even walks, on the sides of the road, she went on boldly enough. 
From time to time, she saw the light of a candle through the cracks of a shutter; it was light and life to her; there were people there; that kept up her courage. However, as she advanced, her speed slackened as if mechanically. When she had passed the corner of the last house, Cosette stopped. To go beyond the last booth had been difficult; to go further than the last house became impossible. She put the bucket on the ground, buried her hands in her hair, and began to scratch her head slowly, a motion peculiar to terrified and hesitating children. It was Montfermeil no longer, it was the open country; dark and deserted space was before her. She looked with despair into this darkness where nobody was, where there were beasts, where there were perhaps ghosts. She looked intensely, and she heard the animals walking in the grass, and she distinctly saw the ghosts moving in the trees. Then she seized her bucket again; fear gave her boldness. “ Pshaw,” said she, “ I will tell her there isn’t any more water! ” And she resolutely went back into Montfermeil.  
She had scarcely gone a hundred steps when she stopped again, and began to scratch her head. Now, it was the Thénardiers that appeared to  her, the hideous Thérnardiess, with her hyena mouth, and wrath flashing from her eyes. The child cast a pitiful glance before her and behind her. What could she do? What would become of her? Where should she go? Before her, the specter of the Thénardiess; behind her, all the phantoms of night and of the forest. It was at the Thénardiess that she recoiled. She took the road to the spring again, and began to run. She ran out of the village; she ran into the woods, seeing nothing, hearing nothing.  She did not stop running until out of breath, and even then she staggered on. 
She went right on, desperate. 
The nocturnal tremulousness of the forest wrapped her about completely. 
She thought no more; she saw nothing more. The immensity of night confronted this little creature. On one side, the infinite shadow; on the other, an atom. 
The spring was a small natural basin, made by the water in the loamy soil, about two feet deep, surrounded with moss, and with that long figured grass called Henry Fourth’s collars, and paved with a few large stones.  A brook escaped from it with a gentle, tranquil murmur. 
Cosette did not take time to breathe. It was very dark, but she was accustomed to come to this fountain. She felt with her left hand in the darkness for a young oak which bent over the spring and usually served her as a support, found a branch, swung herself from it, bent down and plunged the bucket in the water. She was for a moment so excited that her strength was tripled. She drew out the bucket almost full and set it on the grass. 
This done, she perceived that her strength was exhausted. She was anxious to start at once; but the effort of filling the bucket had been so great that it was impossible for her to take a step.  She was compelled to sit down. She fell upon the grass and remained in a crouching posture. 
She closed her eyes, then she opened them, without knowing why, without the power of doing otherwise. At her side, the water shaken in the bucket made circles that resembled serpents of white fire. 
Above her head,  the sky was covered with vast black clouds which were like sheets of smoke. The tragic mask of night seemed to bend vaguely over this child. 
Jupiter was setting in the depths of the horizon. 
The child looked with a startled eye upon that great star which she did not know and which made her afraid. The planet, in fact, was at the moment very near the horizon  and was crossing a dense bed of mist which gave it a horrid redness. The mist, gloomily empurpled, magnified the star.
One would have called it a luminous wound. 
A cold wind blew from the plain. The woods were dark, without any rustling of leaves, without any of those vague and fresh coruscations of summer. Great branches drew themselves up fearfully. Mean and shapeless bushes whistled in the glades. The tall grass wriggled under the north wind like eels. The brambles twisted about like long arms seeking to seize their prey in their claws.  Some dry weeds, driven by the wind, passed rapidly by, and appeared to flee with dismay before something that was following.  The prospect was dismal. 
Nobody walks alone at night in the forest without trembling. 

Cosette shuddered. Words fail to express the peculiar strangeness of that shudder which chilled her through and through. Her eye had become wild. She felt that perhaps she would  be compelled to return there at the same hour the next night. 
Then, by a sort of instinct, to get out of this singular state, which she did not understand, but which terrified her, she began to count aloud,  one, two, three, four, up to ten, and when she had finished, she began again. This restored her to a real perception of  things about her. Her hands,  which she had wet in drawing the water, felt cold. She arose. Her fear had returned, a natural and insurmountable fear. She had only one thought, to fly, to fly with all her might, across woods, across fields, to houses, to windows, to lighted candles. Her eyes fell upon the bucket that was before her. Such was the dread with which the Thénardiess inspired her, that she did not dare to go without the bucket of water. She grasped the handle with both hands. She could hardly lift the bucket. 
She went a dozen steps in this manner, but the bucket was full, it was heavy, she was compelled to rest it on the ground. 
She breathed an instant, then grasped the handle again, and walked on, this time a little longer. But she had to stop again. 
After resting a few seconds, she started on. She walked bending forward, her head down, like an old woman: the weight of the bucket strained and stiffened her thin arms. 
The iron handle was numbing and freezing her little wet hands; from time to time she had to stop, and every time she stopped, the cold water that splashed from the bucket fell upon her naked knees.

This took place in the depth of a wood, at night, in the winter, far from all human sight; it was a child of eight years; there was none but God at that moment who saw this sad thing. 
And undoubtedly her mother, alas! 
For there are things which open the eyes of the dead in their grave.  
She breathed with a kind of mournful rattle; sobs choked her, but she did not dare to weep, so fearful was she of the Thénardiess, even at a distance. She always imagined that the Thénardiess was near. 
However, she could not make much headway in this manner, and was getting along very slowly. She tried hard to shorten her resting spells, and to walk as far as possible between them. She remembered with anguish that it would take her more than an hour to return to Montfeirmeil thus, and that the Thénardiess would beat her. This anguish added to her dismay at being alone in the woods at night. She was worn out with fatigue, and was not yet out of the forest. 
Arriving near an old chestnut tree which she knew, she made a last halt, longer than the others, to get well rested; then she gathered all her strength, took up the bucket again, and began to walk on courageously. Meanwhile the poor little despairing thing could not help crying: “ Oh! My God! My God! ” 
At that moment she felt all at once that the weight of the bucket was gone.  
A hand, which seemed enormous to her, had  just caught the handle, and was carrying it easily. She raised her head.  A large dark form, straight and erect, was walking beside her in the gloom. It was a man who had come up behind her, and whom she had not heard. This man, with - out saying a word, had grasped the handle of the bucket she was carrying. 
There are instincts for all the crises of life. 
The child was not afraid. 

V

THE man spoke to her. His voice was serious, and was almost a whisper. 
“ My child, that is very heavy for you which you are carrying there.”
Cosette raised her head and answered: 
“ Yes, monsieur.” 
“ Give to me,” the man continued. “ I will carry it for you.”
Cosette let go of the bucket. The man walked along with her. 
“ It is very heavy, indeed,” said he to himself. Then he added:  
“ Little girl, how old are you? ”
“ Eight years, monsieur.”
“ And have you come far in this way? ”
“ From the spring in the woods.” 
“ And are you going far? ”
“ A good quarter of an hour from here.”
The man remained a moment without speaking, then he said abruptly: 
“ You have no mother then? ”
 “ I don’t know,” answered the child. 
Before the man had had time to say a word,  she added: 
“ I don’t believe I have. All the rest have one. For my part, I have none.” 
And after a silence, she added:
“ I believe I never had any.” 
The man stopped, put the bucket on the ground, stooped down, and placed his hands upon the child’s shoulders, making an effort to look at her and see her face in the darkness. 
The thin and puny face of Cosette was vaguely outlined in the livid light of the sky. 
“ What is your name? ” said the man. 
“ Cosette.”
It seemed as if the man had an electric shock. He looked at her again, then letting go of her shoulders, took up the bucket, and walked on. 
A moment after, he asked: 
“ Little girl, where do you live? ”
“ At Montfermeil, if you know it.” 
“ It is there that we are going? ”
“ Yes, monsieur.” 
He made another pause. Then he began: 
“ Who is it that has sent you out into the woods after water at this time of night? ”
“ Madame Thénardier.” 
The man resumed with a tone of voice which he tried to render indifferent, but in which there as nevertheless a singular tremor:  
“ What does she do, your Madame Thénardier? ”
“ She is my mistress,” said the child. “ She keeps the tavern.” 
“ The tavern,” said the man. “Well, I am going there to lodge tonight. Show me the way.” 
“We are going there,” said the child. 
The man walked very fast. Cosette followed him without difficulty. She felt fatigue no more. From time to time, she raised her eyes toward this man with a sort of tranquility and inexpressible confidence. She had never been taught to turn toward Providence and to pray. However, she felt in her bosom something that resembled hope and joy, and which rose toward heaven. 
A few minutes passed. The man spoke: 
“ Is there no servant at Madame Thénardier’s? ”
“ No, monsieur.”  
“ Are you alone? ”
“ Yes, monsieur.” 
There was another interval of silence. Cosette raised her voice: 
“ That is, there are two little girls.” 
“ What little girls? ”
“ Ponine and Zelma.” 
The child simplified in this way the romantic names dear to the mother. 
“ What are Ponine and Zelma? ”
“ They are Madame Thénardier’s young ladies, you might say her daughters.” 
“ And what do they do? ”
“ Oh! ” said the child.  “ They have beautiful dolls, things which there’s gold in; they are full of business. They play, they amuse themselves.” 
“ All day long? ”
“ Yes, monsieur.” 
“ And you? ”
“ Me! I work.” 
“ All day long? ”
The child raised her large eyes in which there was a tear,  which could not be seen in the darkness, and answered softly: 
“ Yes, monsieur.” 
She continued after an interval of silence: 
“ Sometimes, when I have finished my work and they are willing, I amuse myself also.” 
“ How do you amuse yourself? ”
“ The best I can. They let me alone. But I have not many playthings. Ponine and Zelma are not willing for me to play with their dolls.  I have only a little lead sword, not longer than that.”  
The child showed her little finger. 
“ And which does not cut? ”
“ Yes, monsieur,” said the child, “ It cuts lettuce and flies’ heads.”
They reached the village; Cosette guided the stranger through the streets. The man questioned her no more, and now maintained a mournful silence. When they had passed the church, the man, seeing all these booths in the streets, asked 

Cosette: “ Is it fair time here? ”
“ No, monsieur, it is Christmas.” 
As they drew near the tavern, Cosette timidly touched his arm. 
“ Monsieur? ” 
“ What, my child? ”
“ Here we are close by the house.” 
“ Well? ”
“ Will you let me take the bucket now? ”
“ What for? ”
“ Because, if madame sees that anybody brought it for me, she will beat me.”  
The man gave her the bucket. A moment after they were at the big door of the chophouse.

VI 
COSETTE could  not help casting one look toward the grand doll still displayed in the toy shop; then she rapped. The door opened. The Thénardiess appeared with a candle in her hand. 
“ Oh! It is you, you little beggar! Lud-a-massy! You have taken your time! She has been playing, the wench! ” 
“ Madame,” said Cosette, trembling, “ there is a gentleman who is coming to lodge.” 
The Thénardiess very quickly replaced her fierce air by her amiable grimace, a change at sight peculiar to  innkeepers, and looked for the newcomer with eager eyes.
“ Is it monsieur? ” said she. 
“ Yes, madame,” answered the man, touching his hat. 
Rich travelers are not so polite. This gesture and the sight of the stranger’s costume and baggage which the Thénardiess passed in review at a glance made the amiable grimace disappear and the fierce air reappear. She added dryly: 
“ Enter, goodman.”
The “ goodman ” entered. The Thénardiess cast a second glance at him, examined particularly  his long coat which was absolutely threadbare, and his hat which was somewhat broken, and with a nod, a wink, and a turn of  her nose, consulted her husband, who was still drinking with the wagoners. 
The husband answered by that imperceptible shake of the forefinger which, supported by a protrusion of the lips, signifies in such a case: “ Complete destitution.” Upon this the Thénardiess exclaimed: 
“ Ah! My brave man, I am very sorry, but I have no room.”
“ Put me where you will,” said the man. “ In the garret, in the stable. I will pay as if I had a room.” 
“ Forty sous.”
“ Forty sous. Well.”
“ In advance.” 
“ Forty sous,” whispered a wagoner to the Thénardier, “ but it is only twenty sous.” 
“ It is forty sous for him,” replied the Thénardiess in the same tone. “ I don’t lodge poor people for less.”
“ That is true,” added her husband softly, “ it ruins a house to have this sort of people.”
Meanwhile the man, after leaving his stick and bundle on a bench, had seated himself at a table on which Cosette had been quick to place a bottle of wine and a glass. The peddler, who had asked for the bucket of water, had gone himself to carry it to his horse. Cosette had resumed her place under the kitchen table and her knitting. 
The man, who hardly touched his lips to the wine he had turned out, was contemplating the child with a strange attention. 
Cosette was ugly. Happy, she might, perhaps, have been pretty. Cosette was thin and pale; she was nearly eight years old, but one would hardly have thought her six. Her large eyes, sunk in a  sort of shadow, were almost put out by continual weeping. The corners of her mouth had that curve of habitual anguish, which is seen in the condemned and in the hopelessly sick. Her hands were covered with chilblains. 
The light of the fire, which was shining upon her, made her bones stand out and rendered her thinness fearfully visible. 
As she was always shivering, she had acquired the habit of drawing her knees together. Her whole dress was nothing but a rag, which would have excited pity in the summer, and which excited horror in the winter. She had on nothing but cotton, and that full of holes, not a rag of woolen. Her skin showed here and there, and black and blue spots could be distinguished, which indicated that places where the Thénardiess had touched her. Her naked legs were red and rough. 
The hollows under her collar bones would make one weep. 
The whole person of this child, her gait, her attitude, the sound of her voice, the intervals between one word and another, her looks, her silence, her least motion, expressed and uttered a single idea: fear.  
Fear was spread all over her; she was, so to say, covered with it; fear drew back her elbows against her sides, drew her heels under her skirt, made her take the least possible room, prevented her from breathing more than was absolutely necessary, and had become what might be called her bodily habit, without possible variation, except of increase. There was in the depth of her eye an expression of astonishment mingled with terror. This fear was such that on coming in, all wet as she was, Cosette had not dared go and dry herself by the fire, but had gone silently to her work. 
The expression of the countenance of this child of eight years was habitually so sad and sometimes so tragical that it seemed, at certain moments, as if she were in the way of becoming an idiot or a demon. 
Never,  as we have said, had she known what it is to pray, never had she set foot within a church. “How can I spare the time? ” said the Thénardiess. 
The man in the yellow coat did not take his eyes from Cosette. 
“ Oh! You want supper? ” asked the Thénardiess of the traveler. 
He did not answer. He seemed to be thinking deeply. 
“ What is that man? ” said she between her teeth. “ It is some frightful pauper. He hasn’t a penny for his supper. Is he going to pay me for his lodging only? It is very lucky, anyway, that he didn’t think to steal the money that was on the floor.”
A door now opened, and Eponine and Azelma came in. 
They were really two pretty little girls, rather city girls than peasants, very charming, one with her well-polished auburn tresses, the other with her long black braids falling down her back, and both so lively, neat, plump, fresh, and healthy, that it was a pleasure to see them. They were warmly clad, but with such maternal art, that the thickness of the stuff detracted nothing from the coquetry of the fit. Winter was provided against without effacing spring. These two little girls shed light around them. Moreover, they were regnant. In their toilet, in their gaiety, in the noise they made, there was sovereignty. When  they entered, the Thénardiess said to them in a scolding tone, which was full of adoration: 
“ Ah! You are here then, you children! ”
They went and sat down by the fire. They had a doll which they turned backward and forward upon their knees with many pretty prattlings. From  time to time, Cosette raised her eyes from her knitting, and looked sadly at them as they were playing. 
Eponine and Azelma did not notice Cosette.  To them she was like the dog. These three little girls could not count twenty-four years among them all, and they already represented all human society; on one side envy, on the other disdain. 
The doll of the Thénardier sisters was very much faded, and very old and broken, and it appeared nonetheless wonderful to Cosette, who had never in her life had a doll, “ a real doll,” to use an expression that all children will understand. 
All at once, the Thénardiess, who was continually going and coming about the room, noticed that Cosette’s attention was distracted, and that instead of working she was busied with the little girls who were playing.  
“ Ah! I’ve caught you! ” cried she. “ That is the way you work! I’ll make you  work with a cowhide, I will.”
The stranger, without leaving his chair, turned toward the Thénardiess. 
“ Madame,” said he, smiling diffidently. “ Pshawl! Let her play! ”
On the part of any traveler who had eaten a slice of mutton, and drunk two bottles of wine at his supper, and who had not had the appearance of a horrid pauper, such a wish would have been  a command. But that a man who wore that hat should allow himself to have a desire, and that a man who wore that coat should permit himself to have a wish, was what the Thénardiess thought ought not to be tolerated.  She replied sharply: 
“ She must work, for the eats. I don’t support her to do nothing.”
“ What is it she is making? ” said the stranger, in that gentle voice which contrasted so strangely with his beggar’s clothes and his porter’s shoulders. 
The Thénardiess deigned to answer. 
“ Stockings, if you please. Stockings for my little girls who have none, worth speaking of,  and will soon be going barefooted.”
The man looked at Cosette’s poor red feet, and continued: 
“ When will she finish that pair of stockings? ”
“ It will take her at least three or four good days, the lazy thing.” 
“ And how much might this pair of stockings be worth, when it is finished? ”
The Thénardiess cast a disdained glance at him. 
“ At least thirty sous.”
“ Would you take five francs for them? ” said the man. 
“ Goodness! ” exclaimed a wagoner who was listening, with a horse laugh. “ Five francs? It’s a humbug! Five bullets! ”
Thénardier now thought it time to speak. 
“ Yes, monsieur, if it is your fancy, you can have that pair of stockings for five francs. We can’t refuse anything to travelers.”
“ You must pay for them now,”  said the Thénardiess, in her short and peremptory way. 
“ I will buy that pair of stockings,” answered the man, “ and,” added he, drawing a five-franc piece from his pocket and laying it on the table, “ I will pay for them.” 
Then he turned toward Cosette. 
“ Now your work belongs to me. Play, my child.”
The wagoner was so affected by the five-franc piece that he left his glass and went to look at it.
“ It’s so, that’s a fact! ” cried he, as he looked at it. “ A regular hindwheel! And no counterfeit! ”
Thénardier approached, and silently put the piece in his pocket. 
The Thénardiess had nothing to reply. She bit her lips, and her face assumed an expression of hatred. 
Meanwhile Cosette trembled. She ventured to ask: 
“ Madame, is it true? Can I play? ”
“ Play!” said the Thénardiess in a terrible voice. 
“Thank you, madame,” said Cosette. And, while her mouth thanked the Thénardiess, all her little soul was thanking the traveler. 
Thénardier returned to his drink. His wife whispered in his ear: 
“ What can that yellow man be? ” 
“ I have seen,” answered Thénardier, in a commanding tone, “ millionaires with coats like that.”
Cosette had left her knitting, but she had not moved from her place.  Cosette always stirred as little as was possible. She had taken from  a little box behind her a few old rags, and her little lead sword. 
Eponine and Azelma paid no attention to what was going on. They had just performed a very important operation; they had caught the kitten. They had thrown the doll on the floor, and Eponine, the elder, was dressing the kitten, in spite of her miaulings and contortions, with a lot of clothes and red and blue rags.  
Meanwhile, the drinkers were singing an obscene song, at which they laughed enough to  shake the room. Thénardier encouraged and accompanied them. 
As birds make a nest of anything, children make a doll of no matter what. While Eponine and Azelma were dressing up the cat, Cosette, for her part, had dressed up the sword.  
That done,  she had laid it upon her arm, and was singing it softly to sleep.
The Thénardiess, on her part, approached the yellow man. 
“ My husband is right,” thought she; “it may be Monsieur Laffitte.  Some rich men are so odd.” 
She came and rested her elbow on the table at which he was sitting. 
“ Monsieur–” said she.  
At this word monsieur, the man turned. The Thénardiess had called him before only “ brave man ” or “ goodman.”
“ You see, monsieur,” she pursued, putting on her sweetest look, which was still more unendurable than her ferocious manner, “ I am very willing the child should play; I am not opposed to it, it is well for once, because you are generous. 
But, you see, she is poor; she must work.”
“ The child is not yours, then? ” asked the man.
“ Oh dear! No, monsieur! It is a little pauper that we have taken in through charity. A sort of imbecile child. She must have water on her brain. Her head is big, as you see. We do all we can for her, but we are not rich. We write in vain to her country; for six months we had no answer. We think that her mother must be dead.”
“ Ah! ” said the man, and he fell back into his reverie. 
“ This mother was no great thing,” added the Thénardiess. 
“ She abandoned her child.” 
During all this conversation, Cosette, as if instinct had warned her that they were talking about her, had not taken her eyes from the Thénardiess. She listened. She heard a few words here and there.  
Meanwhile the drinkers, all three-quarters drunk, were repeating their foul chorus with redoubled gaiety. It was highly spiced jests, in which the names of the Virgin and the child Jesus were often heard. The Thénardiess had gone to take her part in the hilarity. Cosette, under the table, was looking into the fire, which was reflected from her fixed eye; she was again rocking the sort of rag baby that she had made, and as she rocked it, she sang in a low voice: “ My mother is dead! My mother is dead! My mother is dead! ” 
At the repeated entreaties of the hostess, the yellow man, “ the millionaire,” finally consented to sup. 
“ What will monsieur have? ”
“ Some bread and cheese,” said the man. 
“ Decidedly, it is a beggar,” thought the Thénardiess. 
The revelers continued to sign their songs, and the child, under the table, also sang hers. 
All at once, Cosette stopped. She had just turned and seen the little Thénardiess’ doll, which they had forsaken for the cat and left on the floor, a few steps from the kitchen table.  
Then she let the bundled-up sword, that only half satisfied her, tall, and ran her eyes slowly around the room.
The Thénardiess was whispering to her husband and counting some money, Eponine and Azelma were playing with the cat, the travelers were eating or drinking or singing, nobody was looking at her. She had not a moment to lose. She crept out from under the table on her hands and knees, made sure once more that nobody was watching her, then darted quickly to the doll, and seized it. An instant afterward she was at her place, seated, motionless, only turned in such a way as to keep the doll that she held in her arms in the shadow. The happiness of playing with a doll was so rare to her that it had all the violence of rapture. 
Nobody had seen her, except the traveler, who was slowly eating his meager supper. 
This joy lasted for nearly a quarter of an hour. 
But in spite of Cosette’s precautions, she did not perceive that one of the doll’s feet stuck out, and that the fire of the fireplace lighted it up very vividly. This rosy and luminous foot which protruded from the shadow suddenly caught Azelma’s eye, and she said to Eponine: “Oh! Sister!”
The two little girls stopped, stupefied; Cosette had dared to take the doll. 
Eponine got up, and without letting go of the cat, went to her mother and began to pull at her skirt. 
“Let me alone,” said the mother; “what do you want?”
“Mother,” said the child, “look there.”
And she pointed at Cosette. 
Cosette, wholly absorbed in  the ecstasy of her possession, saw and heard nothing else. 
The face of the Thénardiess assumed the peculiar expression which is composed of the terrible mingled with the commonplace and which has given this class of women the name of furies. 
This time wounded pride exasperated her anger still more. 
Cosette had leaped over all barriers. Cosette had laid her hands upon the doll of “ those young ladies.” A czarina who had seen a moujík trying on the grand cordon of  her imperial son would have had the same expression.  
She cried with a voice harsh with indignation: 
“Cosette!”
Cosette shuddered as if the earth had quaked beneath her.  
She turned around. 
“ Cosette! ” repeated the Thénardiess.  
Cosette took the doll and placed it gently on the floor with a kind of veneration mingled with despair. Then, without taking away her eyes, she joined her hands, and, what is frightful to tell in a child of that age, she wrung them; then, what none of the emotions of the day had drawn from her, neither the run in the wood, nor the weight of  the bucket of water, nor even the stern words she had heard from the Thénardiess, she burst into tears. She sobbed.  
Meanwhile the traveler arose. 
“ What is the matter? ” said he to the Thénardiess. 
“ Don’t you see? ” said the Thénardiess, pointing with her finger to the corpus delicti lying at Cosette’s feet. 
“ Well, what is that? ” said the man. 
“ That beggar,” answered the Thénardiess, “ has dared touch the children’s doll.”
“ All this noise about that? ” said the man. “ Well, what if she did play with that doll? ”
“ She has touched it with her dirty hands! ” continued the Thénardiess, “ With her horrid hands! ”
Here Cosette redoubled her sobs. 
“ Be still! ” cried the Thénardiess. 
The man walked straight to the street door, opened it, and went out. 
As soon as he had gone, Thénardiess profited by his absence to give Cosette under the table a severe kick, which made the child shriek. 
The door opened again, and the man reappeared, holding in his hands the fabulous doll of which we have spoken, and which had been the admiration of all the youngsters of the village since  morning; he stood it up before Cosette, saying: 
“ Here, this is for you.” 
It is probable that during the time he had been there more than an hour –in the midst of his reverie, he had caught confused glimpses of this toyshop, lighted up with lamps and candles so splendidly  that it shone through the barroom window like an illumination. 
Cosette raised her eyes; she saw the man approach her with that doll as she would have seen the sun approach; she heard those astounding words: “ This is for you.” She looked at him, she looked at the doll, then she drew back slowly, and went and hid as far as she could under the table in the corner of the room. 

She wept no more, she cried no more, she had the appearance of no longer daring to breathe.
The Thénardiess, Eponine, and Azelma were so many statues. Even the drinkers stopped. There was a solemn silence in the whole barroom. 
The Thénardiess, petrified and mute, recommenced her conjectures anew: “ What is this old fellow? Is he a pauper? Is he a millionaire? Perhaps he’s both, that is a robber.” 
The face of the husband Thénardier presented that expressive wrinkle which marks the human countenance whenever the dominant instinct appears in it with all its brutal power.    
The innkeeper contemplated by turns the doll and the traveler; he seemed to be scenting this man as he would have scented a bag of money. This only lasted for a moment. He approached his wife and whispered to her: 
“ That machine cost at least thirty francs. No nonsense. 
Down on your knees before the man! ”
Coarse natures have this in common with artless natures, that they have no transitions. 
“ Well, Cosette,” said the Thénardiess in a voice which was meant to be sweet, and which was entirely composed of the sour honey of vicious women, “ an’t you going to take your doll? ”
Cosette ventured to come out of her hole.  
“ My little Cosette,” said Thénardier with a caressing air, “ monsieur gives you a doll. Take it. It is yours.”
Cosette looked upon the wonderful doll with a sort of terror. Her face was still flooded with tears, but her eyes began to fill, like the sky in the breaking of the dawn, with strange radiations of joy. What she experienced at that moment was almost like what she would have felt if someone had said to her suddenly:  “ Little girl, you are Queen of France.” 
It seemed to her that if she touched that doll, thunder would spring forth from it. 
Which was true to some extent, for she thought that the Thénardiess would scold and beat her. 
However, the attraction overcame her. She finally approached and timidly murmured, turning toward the Thénardiess: “ Can I, madame ? ”
No expression can describe her look, at once full of despair, dismay, and transport. 
“ Good Lord! ” said the Thénardiess. “ It is yours. Since monsieur gives it to you.” 
“ Is it true, is it true, monsieur? ” said Cosette. “ Is the lady for me? ”
The stranger appeared to have his eyes full of tears. He seemed to be at that stage of emotion in which one does not speak for fear of weeping. He nodded assent to Cosette, and put the hand of “ the lady ” in her little hand. 
Cosette withdrew her hand hastily, as if that of “ the lady ” burned her, and looked down at the floor. We are compelled to add that at that instant she thrust out her tongue enormously. All at once she turned, and seized the doll eagerly. “ I will call her Catharine,” said she.
It was a strange moment when Cosette’s rags met and pressed against the ribbons and the fresh pink muslins of the doll.  
“ Madame,” said she, “ may I put her in a chair? ”
“ Yes,  my child,” answered the Thénardiess. 
It was Eponine and Azelma now who looked upon Cosette with envy. 
Cosette placed Catharine on a chair, then sat down on the floor before her, and remained motionless, without saying a word, in the attitude of contemplation. 
“ Why don’t you play, Cosette? ” said the stranger. 
“ Oh! I am playing,” answered the child. 
This stranger, this unknown man, who seemed like a visit from Providence to Cosette, was at that moment the being which the Thénardiess hated more than all else in the world.   
However, she was compelled to restrain herself. Her emotions were more than she could endure, accustomed as she was to dissimulation, by endeavoring to copy her husband in all her actions. She sent her daughters to bed immediately, then asked the yellow man’s “ permission ” to send Cosette to bed — “ who  is very tired to-day,” added she, with a motherly air.
Cosette went to bed, holding Catharine in her arms.  
Several hours passed away. The midnight mass was said, the revel was finished, the drinkers had gone, the house was closed, the room was deserted, the fire had gone out, the stranger still remained in the same place and in the same posture.  From time to time he changed the elbow on which he rested.
​
That was all. But he had not spoken a word since Cosette was gone.  
Thénardier moved, coughed, spit, blew his nose, and creaked his chair. The man did not stir. “ Is he asleep? ” thought Thénardier.  The man was not asleep, but nothing could arouse him. 
Finally, Thénardier took off his cap, approached softly, and ventured to say: 
“ Is monsieur not going to repose? ”
“ Yes,” said the stranger,  “ you are right. Where is your stable? ”
“ Monsieur,” said Thénardier, with a smile, “ I will conduct monsieur.” 
He took the candle, the man took his bundle and his staff, and Thénardier led him into a room on the first floor, which was very showy, furnished all in mahogany, with a high-post bedstead and red calico curtains. 
“ What is this? ” said the traveler. 
“ It is properly our bridal chamber,” said the innkeeper. 
“ We occupy another like this, my spouse and I; this is not open more than three or four times in a year.” 
“ I should have liked the stable as well,” said the man, bluntly.  
Thénardier did not appear to hear this not very civil answer.  
He lighted two entirely new wax candles, which were displayed upon the mantel; a good fire was blazing in the fireplace. 
When the traveler turned again the host had disappeared. 
Thénaridier had discreetly taken himself out of the way without daring to say good night, not desiring to treat with a disrespectful cordiality a man whom he proposed to skin royally in the morning. 

VII 
  

 ON the following morning, at least two hours before day, Thénardier, seated at a table in the barroom, a candle by his side, with pen in hand, was making out the bill of the traveler in the yellow coat. 
His wife was standing, half bent over him, following him with her eyes. Not a word passed between them. It was, on one side, a profound meditation, on the other that religious admiration with which we observe a marvel of the human mind spring up and expand. A noise was heard in the house; it was the lark, sweeping the stairs. 
After a good quarter of an hour and some erasures, Thénardier produced his masterpiece. 
Then he went out. 
He was scarcely out of the room when the traveler came in. 
Thénardier reappeared immediately behind him, and remained motionless in the half-open door, visible only to his wife. 
The yellow man carried his staff and bundle in his hand.  
“ Up so soon! ” said the Thénardiess. “ Is monsieur going to leave us already? ”
The traveler appeared preoccupied and absent-minded. 
He answered: 
“ Yes, madame, I am  going away. ”
“Monsieur, then, had no business at Montfermeil? ” replied she. 
“ No, I am passing through, that is all. Madame,” added he, “ what do I owe? ”
The Thénardiess, without answering, handed him the folded bill. 
The man unfolded the paper and looked at it, but his thoughts were evidently elsewhere. 
“ Madame,” replied he, “ do you do a good business in Montfermeil? ”
“ So-so, monsieur,” answered the Thénardiess, stupefied at seeing no other explosion.
She continued in a mournful and lamenting strain:  
“Oh! Monsieur, the times are very hard, and then we have so few rich people around here! It is a very little place, you see. If we only had rich travelers now and then, like monsieur! 
We have so many expenses! Why, that little girl eats us out of house and home.” 
The man replied in a voice which he endeavored to render indifferent, and in which there was a slight tremulousness.  
“ Suppose you were relieved of  her? ”
“ Who? Cosette? ”
Yes.
The red and violent face of the woman became illumined with a hideous expression. 
“ Ah, monsieur! My good monsieur! Take her, keep her, take her away, carry her off, sugar her, stuff her, drink her, eat her, and be blessed by the holy Virgin and all the saints in paradise! ” 
“ Agreed.”
“ Really! You will take her away? ”
“ I will.” 
“ Immediately? ”
“ Immediately. Call the child.” 
“ Cosette! ” cried the Thénardiess. 
“ In the meantime,” continued the man, “ I will pay my bill. 
How much is it? ”
He cast a glance at the bill, and could not repress a movement of surprise. 
“ Twenty-three francs? ” 
At this moment Thénardier advanced into the middle of the room and said: 
“ Monsieur owes twenty-six sous.” 
“ Twenty-six sous! ” exclaimed the woman. 
“ Twenty sous for the room,” continued Thénardier coldly, “ and six for supper. As to the little girl, I must have some talk with monsieur about that. Leave us, wife.”
The Thénardiess was dazzled by one of those unexpected flashes which emanate from talent.  She felt that the great actor had entered upon the scene, answered not a word, and went out. 
As soon as they were alone, Thénardier offered the traveler a chair.  The traveler sat down, but Thénardier remained standing, and his face assumed a singular expression of good nature and simplicity.  
“ Monsieur,” said he, “ listen, I must say that I adore this child.” 
The stranger looked at him steadily. 
“ What child? ”
Thénardier continued: 
“ How strangely we become attached! This child I adore.”
“ Who is that? ” asked the stranger. 
“ Oh, our little Cosette! And you wish to take her away from us? Indeed, I speak frankly, as true as you are an honorable man, I cannot consent to it. I should miss her. I have had her since she was very small. It is true, she costs us money, it is true she has her faults, it is true we are not rich,  it is true I paid four hundred francs for medicines at one time when she was sick. But we must do something for God. She has neither father nor mother; I have brought her up. I have bread enough for her and for myself. In fact, I must keep this child.  I feel the need of her prattle in the house.”
The stranger was looking steadily at him all the while. He continued: 
“ Pardon me, excuse me, monsieur, but one does not give his child like that to a traveler. Isn’t it true that I am right? After that, I don’t say — you are rich and have the appearance of a very fine man—if it is for her advantage—but I must know about it. You understand? On the supposition that I should let her go and sacrifice my own feelings, I should want to know where she is going. 
I would not want to lose sight of her, I should want to know who she was with, that I might come and see her now and then, and that she might know that her good foster father was still watching over her.  
Finally, there are things which are not possible. I do not know even your name.  If you should take her away, I should say, alas for the little Lark, where has she gone? I must, at least, see some poor rag of paper, a bit of a passport, something.” 
The stranger, without removing from him this gaze which went, so to speak, to the bottom of his conscience, answered in a severe and firm tone. 
“Monsieur Thénardier, people do not take a passport to come five leagues from Paris.  If I take Cosette, I take her, that is all. You will not know my name, you will not know my abode, you  will not know where she goes, and my intention is that she shall never see you again in her life. Do you agree to that ? Yes or no? ”
As demons and genii recognize by certain signs the presence of a superior God, Thénardier comprehended that he was to deal with one who was very powerful. It came like an intuition; he understood it with his clear and quick sagacity; although during the evening he had been drinking with the wagoners, smoking, and singing bawdy songs, still he was observing the stranger all the while. He had surprised the searching glances of the old man constantly returning to the child. 
Why this interest? What was this man? Why, with so much money in his purse, this miserable dress? These were questions which he put to himself without being able to answer them, and they irritated him. He had been thinking it over all night. 
This could not be Cosette’s father. Was it a grandfather? Then why did he not make himself known at once? When a man has a right, he shows it. This man evidently had no right to Cosette. Then who was he? Thénardier was lost in conjectures. 
He caught glimpses of everything, but saw nothing. However it might be, when he commenced the conversation with this man, sure that there was a secret in all this, sure that the man had an interest in remaining unknown, he felt himself strong; at the stranger’s clear and firm answer, when he saw that this mysterious personage was mysterious and nothing more,  he felt weak. He was expecting nothing of the kind. His conjectures were put to flight. He rallied his ideas. He weighed all in a second.  Thénardier was one of those men who comprehend a situation at a glance. He decided that this was the moment to advance straightforward and swiftly. He did what great captains do at that decisive instant which they alone can recognize; he unmasked his battery at once.  
“ Monsieur,” said he, “ I must have fifteen hundred francs.”
The stranger took from his side pocket an old black leather pocketbook, opened it, and drew forth three bank bills which he placed upon the table. He then rested his large thumb on these bills, and said to the tavern keeper. 
“ Bring Cosette.” 
An instant after, Cosette entered the barroom. 
The stranger took the bundle he had brought and untied it. 
This bundle contained a little woolen frock, an apron, a coarse cotton undergarment, a petticoat, a scarf, woolen stockings,  and shoes—a complete dress for a girl of seven years. It was all in black. 
“ My child,” said the man, “ take this and go and dress yourself quick.” 
The day was breaking when those of the inhabitants of Montfermeil who were beginning to open their doors saw pass on the road to París a poorly clad goodman leading a little girl dressed in mourning who had a pink doll in her arms. They were going toward Livry.  
It was the stranger and Cosette. 
No one recognized the man; as Cosette was not now in tatters, few recognized her.
Cosette was going away.  With whom? She was ignorant. 
Where? She knew not. All she understood was, that she was leaving behind the Thénardier chophouse. Nobody had thought of bidding her good-by, nor had she of bidding good-by to anybody.  She went out from that house, hated and hating. 
Poor gentle being, whose heart had only been crushed hitherto. 
Cosette walked seriously along, opening her large eyes, and looking at the sky. From time to time she looked at the goodman. She felt somewhat as if she were near God. 
On the evening of the same day,  Jean Valjean entered Paris again at nightfall, with the child, by the Barrière de Monceaux. There he took a cabriolet, which carried him as far as the esplanade of the Observatory. There he got out, paid the driver, took Cosette by the hand, and both in the darkness of the night, through the deserted streets in the vicinity of l’Ourcine and La Glacière, walked toward the Boulevard de l’Hôpital.
The day had been strange and full  of emotions for Cosette; they had eaten behind hedges bread and cheese bought at isolated chophouses; they had often changed carriages, and had traveled short distances on foot. She did not complain, but she was tired, and Jean Valjean perceived it by her pulling more heavily at his hand while walking. He took her in his arms; Cosette, without letting go of Chatharine, laid her head on Jean Valjean’s shoulder, and went to sleep.

The Old Gorbeau House 

I 

Forty years ago, the solitary pedestrian who ventured into the unknown regions of La Salpêtrière and went up along the boulevard as far as the Barrière d’Italie, reached certain points where it might be said that Paris disappeared. It was no longer a solitude, for there were people passing; it was not the country, for there were houses and streets; it was not a city, the streets had ruts in them, like the highways, and grass grew along their borders; it was not a village, the houses were too lofty. What was it then? It was an inhabited place where there was nobody, it was a desert place where there was somebody; it was a boulevard of the great city, a street of Paris, wilder, at night, than a forest, and gloomier, by day, than a graveyard. 
It was the old quarter of the Horse Market. 
Our pedestrian, if he trusted himself beyond the four tumbling walls of this Horse Market, if willing to go even further than the rue du Petit Banquier, leaving on his right a courtyard shut in by lofty walls, then a meadow studded with stacks of tanbark that looked like the gigantic beaver dams, then an enclosure half filled with lumber and piles of logs, sawdust and shavings, from the top of which a huge dog was baying, then a long, low ruined wall with a small dark-colored and decrepit gate in it, covered with moss, which was full  of flowers in springtime, then, in the loneliest spot, a frightful broken-down structure on which could be read in large letters:  
POST NO BILLS; this bold promenader, we say, would reach the corner of the rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel, a latitude not much explored. There, near a manufactory and between two garden walks, could be seen at the time of which we speak an old ruined dwelling that, at first sight, seemed as small as a cottage, yet was, in reality, as vast as a cathedral. It stood with its gable end toward the highway, and hence its apparent diminutiveness. Nearly the whole house was hidden. Only the door and one window could be seen. 
This old dwelling had but one story. 
The door was merely a collection of worm-eaten boards rudely tacked together with crosspieces that looked like pieces of firewood clumsily split out. It opened directly on a steep staircase with high steps covered with mud, plaster, and dust, and of the same breadth as the door, and which seemed from the street to rise perpendicularly like a ladder, and disappear in the shadow between two walls. 
The window was broad and of considerable height, with large panes in the sashes and provided with Venetian shutters; only the panes had received a variety of wounds which were at once concealed and made manifest  by ingenious strips and bandages of paper, and the shutters were so broken and disjointed that they menaced the passers-by more than they shielded the occupants of the dwelling. This door with its dirty look and this window with its decent though dilapidated appearance, seen thus in one and the same building, produced the effect of two ragged beggars bound in the same direction and walking side by side, with different mien under the same rags, one having always been a pauper while the other had been a gentleman. 
The staircase led up to a very spacious interior, which looked like a barn converted into a house. This structure had for its main channel of communication a long hall, on which there opened, on either side, apartments of different dimensions scarcely habitable, rather resembling booths than rooms. 
These chambers looked out upon the shapeless grounds of the neighborhood. Altogether, it was dark and dull and dreary, even melancholy and sepulchral, and it was penetrated, either by the dim, cold rays of the sun or by icy drafts, according to the situation of the cracks, in the roof, or in the door. One interesting and picturesque peculiarity of this kind of tenement is the monstrous size of the spiders. 
The letter carriers called the house No. 50-52; but it was known, in the quarter, as Gorbeau House. 

II

BEFORE this Gorbeau tenement Jean Valjean stopped. Like the bird of prey, he had chosen this lonely place to make his nest. 
He fumbled in his waistcoat and took from it a sort of night key, opened the door, entered, then carefully closed it again and ascended the stairway, still carrying Cosette. 
At the top of the stairway he drew from his pocket another key, with which he opened another door. The chamber which he entered and closed again immediately was a sort of garret, rather spacious, furnished only with a mattress spread on the floor, a table, and a few chairs. A stove containing a fire, the coals of which were visible, stood in one corner. The street lamp of the boulevards shed a dim light through this poor interior. At the further extremity there was a little room containing a cot bed. On this Jean Valjean laid the child without waking her.
He struck a light with a flint and steel and lit a candle, which, with his tinderbox, stood ready, beforehand, on the table, and, as he had done on the preceding evening, he began to gaze upon Cosette with a look of ecstasy, in which the expression of goodness and tenderness went almost to the verge of insanity. The little girl, with that tranquil confidence which belongs only to extreme strength or extreme weakness, had fallen asleep without knowing with whom she was, and continued to slumber without knowing where she was. 
Jean Valjean bent down and kissed the child’s hand. 
Nine months before, he had kissed the hand of the mother, who also had just fallen asleep.
The same mournful, pious, agonizing feeling now filled his heart. 
He knelt down by the bedside of Cosette. 
It was broad daylight, and yet the child slept on. A pale ray from the December sun struggled through the garret window and traced upon the ceiling long streaks of light and shade. Suddenly a carrier’s wagon, heavily laden, trundled over the cobblestones of the boulevard, and shook the old building like the rumbling of a tempest, jarring it from cellar to rooftree.
“ Yes, madame! ” cried Cosette, starting up out of sleep. 
“ Here I am! Here I am! ” 
And she threw herself from the bed, her eyelids still half closed with the weight of slumber, stretching out her hand toward the corner of the wall. 
“ Oh! What shall I do? Where is my broom? ” said she.
By this time her eyes were fully open, and she saw the smiling face of Jean Valjean. 
“ Oh! Yes – so it is! ” said the child. “Good Morning, monsieur.” 
Children at once accept joy and happiness with quick familiarity, being themselves naturally all happiness and joy. 
Cosette noticed Catharine at the foot of the bed, laid hold of her at once, and, playing the while, asked Jean Valjean a thousand questions:Where was she? Was Paris a big place? Was Madame Th­énardier really very far away? Wouldn’t she come back again, etc., etc. All at once she exclaimed, “ How pretty it is here! ”
It was a frightful hovel, but she felt free. 
“ Must I sweep? ” she continued at length. 
“ Play! ” replied Jean Valjean. And thus the day passed by. Cosette, without troubling herself with trying to understand anything about it, was inexpressibly happy with her doll and her good friend.


III 

THE dawn of the next day found Jean Valjean again near the bed of Cosette. He waited there, motionless, to see her wake.
Something new was entering his soul. 
Jean Valjean had never loved anything. For twenty-five years he had been alone in the world. He had neer been a father, lover, husband, or friend. At the galleys, he was cross, sullen, abstinent, ignorant, and intractable. The heart of the old convict was full of freshness. His sister and her children had left in his memory only a vague and distant impression, which had finally almost entirely vanished. He had made every exertion to  find them again, and, not succeeding, had forgotten them. Human nature is thus constituted. The other tender emotions of  his youth, if any such he had, were lost in an abyss. 
When he saw Cosette, when he had taken her, carried her away and rescued her, he felt his heart moved. All that he had of feeling and affection was aroused and vehemently attracted toward this child. He would approach the bed where she slept, and would tremble there with delight; he felt inward yearnings, like a mother, and knew not what they were, for it is something very incomprehensible and very sweet, this grand and strange emotion of a heart in its first love. 
Poor old heart, so young!
But, as he was fifty-five and Cosette was but eight years old, all that he might have felt  of  love in his entire life melted into a sort of miserable radiance. 
This was the second white vision he had seen. The bishop had caused the dawn of virtue on his horizon; Cosette evoked the dawn of love. 
The first few days rolled by amid this bewilderment. 
On her part,  Cosette, too, unconsciously underwent a change, poor little creature! She was so small when her mother left her, that she could not recollect her now. As all children do, like the young shoots of the vine that cling to everything, she had tried to love. She had not been able to succeed. Everybody had repelled her — the Thénardiers, their children, other children. She had loved the dog; it died, and after that no person and no thing would have anything to do with her. 
Mournful thing to tell , at the age of eight her heart was cold. 
This was not her fault; it was not the faculty of love that she lacked; alas, it was the possibility. And so, from the very first day, all that thought and felt in her began to love this kind old friend. She now felt sensations utterly unknown to her before — a sensation of budding and of growth. 
Her kind friend no longer impressed her as old and poor. In her eyes Jean Valjean was handsome, just as the garret had seemed pretty. 
Nature had placed a wide chasm — fifty years’ interval of age — between Jean Valjean and Cosette. This chasm fate filled up. Fate abruptly brought together, and wedded with its resistless power, these two shattered lives, dissimilar in years, but similar in sorrow. The one, indeed, was the complement of the other. The instinct of Cosette sought for a father, as the instinct of Jean Valjean sought for a child.To meet, was to find one another. In that mysterious moment, when their hands touched, they were welded together. When their two souls saw each other, they recognized that they were mutually needed, and they closely embraced. 
Taking the words in their most comprehensive and most absolute sense, it might be said that, separated from everything by the walls of the tomb, Jean Valjean was the husband bereaved, as Cosette was the orphan. This position made Jean Valjean become, in a celestial sense, the father of Cosette. 
And, in truth, the mysterious impression produced upon Cosette, in the depths of the woods at Chelles, by the hand of Jean Valjean grasping her own in the darkness, was not an illusion but a reality. The coming of this man and his participation in the destiny of this child had been the advent of God.  
In the meanwhile, Jean Valjean had chosen well his hiding place. He was there in a state of security that seemed to be complete. 
The apartment with the side chamber which he occupied with Cosette was the one whose window looked out upon the boulevard. This window being the only one in the house, there was no neighbor’s prying eye to fear either from that side or opposite. 
The lower floor of No. 50-52 was a sort of dilapidated shed; it served as a sort of stable for market gardeners, and had no communication with the upper floor. The upper floor contained, as we have said, several rooms and a few lofts, only one of which was occupied — by an old woman, who was maid of all work to Jean Valjean. All the rest was uninhabited. 
It was this old woman, honored with the title of landlady, but, in reality, entrusted with the functions of portress, who had rented him these lodgings on Christmas Day. He had passed himself off to her as a gentleman of means, ruined by the Spanish Bonds, who was going to live there with his granddaughter. He had paid her for six months in advance, and engaged the old dame to furnish the chamber and the little bedroom, as we have described them. This old woman it was who had kindled the fire in the stove and made everything ready for them, on the evening of their arrival. 
Weeks rolled by. These two beings led in that wretched shelter a happy life.
From the earliest dawn, Cosette laughed, prattled, and sang. Children have their morning song, like birds. 
Sometimes it happened that Jean Valjean would take her little red hand, all chapped and frostbitten as it was, and kiss it. The poor child, accustomed only to blows, had no idea what this meant, and would draw back ashamed. 
At times, she grew serious and looked musingly at her little black dress. Cosette was no longer in rags; she was in mourning. She was issuing from utter poverty and was entering upon life. 
Jean Valjean had begun to teach her to read. Sometimes, while teaching the child to spell, he would remember that it was with the intention of accomplishing evil that he had learned to read, in the galleys. This intention had now been changed into teaching a child to read. Then the old convict would smile with the pensive smile of angels. 
He felt in this a preordination from on high, a volition of someone more than man, and he would lose himself in reverie. 
Good thoughts as well as bad have their abysses. 
To teach Cosette to read, and to watch her playing, was nearly all Jean Valjean’s life. And then, he would talk to her about her mother, and teach her to pray. 
She called him “ Father,” and knew him by no other name. 
This is but personal opinion; but in order to express our idea thoroughly, at the point Jean Valjean had reached, when he began to love Cosette, it is not clear to us that he did not require this fresh supply of goodness to enable him to persevere in the right path. He had seen the wickedness of men and the misery of society under new aspects — aspects incomplete and, unfortunately, showing forth only one side of the truth—the lot of woman summed up in Fantine, public authority personified in Javert; he had been sent back to the galleys this time for doing good; new waves of bitterness had overwhelmed him; disgust and weariness had once more resumed their sway; the recollection of the bishop, even, was perhaps eclipsed, sure to reappear afterward, luminous and triumphant; yet, in fact, this blessed remembrance was growing feebler. Who knows that Jean Valjean was not on the point of becoming discouraged and falling back to evil ways? Love came, and he again grew strong. Alas, he was no less feeble than Cosette. He protected her, and she gave strength to him.
Thanks to him, she could walk upright in life; thanks to her, he could persist in virtuous deeds. He was the support of this child, and this child was his prop and staff. Oh, divine and unfathomable mystery of the compensations of Destiny!

IV

THERE was,  in the neighborhood of Saint Médard, a mendicant who sat crouching over the edge of a condemned public well nearby, and to whom Jean Valjean often gave alms. He never passed this man without giving him a few pennies. 
Sometimes he spoke to him. Those who were envious of this poor creature said he was in the pay of the police. He was an old church beadle of seventy-five, who was always mumbling prayers. 
One evening, as Jean Valjean was passing that way, unaccompanied by Cosette, he noticed the beggar sitting in his usual place, under the streetlamp which had just been lighted. 
The man, according to custom, seemed to be praying and was bent over. Jean Valjean walked up to him, and put a piece of money in his hand, as usual. The beggar suddenly raised his eyes, gazed intently at Jean Valjean, and then quickly dropped his head. This movement was like a flash; Jean Valjean shuddered; it seemed to him that he had just seen, by the light of the streetlamp, not the calm, sanctimonious face of the age beadle, but a terrible and well-known countenance. 
He experienced the sensation one would feel on finding himself suddenly face to face, in the gloom, with a tiger. He recoiled, horror-stricken and petrified, daring neither to breathe nor to speak, to stay nor to fly, but gazing upon the beggar who had once more bent down his head, with its tattered covering, and seemed to be no longer conscious of his presence. At this singular moment, an instinct, perhaps the mysterious instinct of self-preservation, prevented Jean Valjean  from uttering a word. The beggar had the same form, the same rags, the same general appearance as on every other day. 
“ Pshaw! ” said Jean Valjean to himself. “ I am mad! I am dreaming! It cannot be! ” And he went home, anxious and ill at ease. 
He scarcely dared to admit, even to himself, that the countenance he thought he had seen was the face of Javert. 
That night, upon reflection, he regretted that he had not questioned the man so as to compel him to raise his head a second time. On the morrow, at nightfall, he went thither, again. The beggar was in his place. “ Good day! ” said Jean Valjean, with firmness, as he gave him the accustomed alms. The beggar raised his head and answered in a whining voice: “ Thanks, kind sir, thanks! ” It was, indeed, only the old beadle.  
Jean Valjean now felt fully reassured. He even began to laugh. “ What the deuce was I about to fancy that I saw Javert,” thought he. “ Is my sight growing poor already? ” And he thought no more about it.
Some days after, it might be eight o’clock in the evening, he was in his room, giving Cosette her spelling lessons, which the child was repeating in a loud voice, when he heard the door of the building open and close again. That seemed odd to him. The old woman, the only occupant of the house besides himself and Cosette, always went to bed at dark to save candles. Jean Valjean made a sign to Cosette to be silent. He heard someone coming up the stairs. Possibly, it might be the old woman, who had felt unwell and had been to the druggist’s. Jean Valjean listened. The footstep was heavy, and sounded like a man’s; but the old woman wore heavy shoes, and there is nothing so much like the step of a man as the step of an old woman. However, Jean Valjean blew out his candle.  
He sent Cosette to bed, telling her in a suppressed voice to lie down very quietly— and, as he kissed her forehead, the footsteps stopped. Jean Valjean remained silent and motionless, his back turned toward the door, still seated on his chair from which he had not moved, and holding his breath in the darkness. After a considerable interval, not hearing anything more, he turned round without making any noise, and as he raised his eyes toward the door of his room, he saw a light through the keyhole. This ray of light was an evil star in the black background of the door and the wall. There was, evidently, somebody outside with a candle who was listening. 
A few minutes elapsed, and the light disappeared. But he heard no sounds of footsteps, which seems to indicate that whoever was listening at the door had taken off his shoes. 
Jean Valjean  threw himself on his bed without undressing, but could not shut his eyes that night. 
At daybreak, as he was sinking into slumber from fatigue, he was aroused, again, by the creaking of the door of some room at the end of the hall, and then he heard the same footsteps which had ascended the stairs, on the preceding night. 
The steps approached. He started from his bed and placed his eye to the keyhole, which was quite a large one, hoping to get a glimpse of the person, whoever it might be, who had made his way into the building in the nighttime and had listened at his door. It was a man, indeed, who passed by Jean Valjean’s room, this time without stopping. The hall was still too dark for him to make out his features, but, when the man reached the stairs, a ray of light from without made his figure stand out like a profile, and Jean Valjean had a full view of his back. The man was tall, wore a long frock coat, and had a cudgel under his arm. It was the redoubtable form of Javert. 
Jean Valjean might have tried to get another look at him through his window that opened on the boulevard, but he would have had to  raise the sash, and that he dared not do. 
It was evident that the man had entered by means of a key, as if at home. Who, then, had given him the key? And what was the meaning of this?
At seven in the morning, he made a roll of a hundred francs he had in a drawer and put it into his pocket. Do what he would to manage this so that the clinking of the silver should not be heard, a five-franc piece escaped his grasp and rolled jingling away over the floor. 
At dusk, he went to the street door and looked carefully up  and down the boulevard. No one was to be seen. The boulevard seemed to be utterly deserted. It is true that there might have been someone hidden behind a tree. 
He went upstairs again. 
“ Come,” said he to Cosette. 
He took her by the hand and they both went out.

A Dark Chase Needs 
a Silent Hound

I 

JEAN VALJEAN had immediately left the boulevard and began to thread the streets, making as many turns as he could, re-turning sometimes upon his track to make sure that he was not followed. 
The moon was full.  Jean Valjean was not sorry for that. The moon, still near the horizon, cut large prisms of light and shade in the streets. Jean Valjean could glide along the houses and the walls on the dark side and observe the light side. He did not, perhaps, sufficiently realize that the obscure side escaped him. However, in all the deserted little streets in the neighbourhood of the rue de Poliveau, he felt sure that no one was behind him. 
As eleven o’clock struck in the tower of Saint Etienne du Mont, he crossed the rue de Pontoise in front of the bureau of the Commissary of Police, which is at No. 14. Some moments afterward, the instinct of which we have already spoken made him turn his head. At this moment he saw distinctly thanks to the commissary’s lamp which revealed them – three men following him quite near, pass one after another under this lamp on the dark side of the street. One of these men entered the passage leading to the commissary’s house. The one in advance appeared to him decidedly suspicious. 
“ Come, child! ” said he to Cosette, and he made haste to get out of the rue de Pontoise. 
He made a circuit, went round the arcade des Patriarches, which was closed on account of the lateness of the hour, walked rapidly through the rue de L’Epée-de-Bois and the rue de L'Arbalète, and plunged into the rue des Postes.  
There was a square there, where the Collège Rollin now is, and from which branches off the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève.
The moon lighted up this square brightly. Jean Valjean concealed himself in a doorway, calculating that if these men were still following him, he could not fail to get a good view of them when they crossed this lighted space. 
In fact, three minutes had not elapsed when the men appeared. There were now four of them; all were tall, dressed in long brown coats, with round hats, and great clubs in their hands. They were not less fearfully forbidding by their size and their large fists than by their stealthy tread in the darkness. One would have taken them for four specters in citizens’ dress. 
They stopped in the center of the square and formed a group like people consulting. They appeared undecided. The man who seemed to be the leader turned and energetically pointed in the direction in which Jean Valjean was; one of the others seemed to insist with some obstinacy on the contrary direction. At the instant when the leader turned, the moon shone full in his face.  Jean Valjean recognized Javert perfectly. 

II 

UNCERTAINTY was at an end for Jean Valjean; happily, it still continued with these men. He took advantage of their hesitation; it was time lost for them, gained for him. He came out from the doorway in which he was concealed, and made his way into the rue des Postes toward the region of  the Jardin des Plantes. Cosette began to be tired; he took her in his arms, and carried her. There was nobody on the streets, and the lamps had not been lighted on account of the moon. 
He doubled his pace. 
He passed through the rue de la Clef, then by the Fontaine de Saint Victor along the Jardin des Plantes by the lower streets, and reached the quay. There he looked around. The quay was deserted. The streets were deserted. Nobody behind him. He took a breath. 
He arrived at the Bridge of Austerlitz.  
A large cart was passing the Seine at the same time, and like him was going toward the right bank. This could be made of use. He could go to the whole length of the bridge in the shade of this cart. 
From the point where he was, he could see the whole length of the Bridge of Austerlitz. 
Four shadows, at that moment, entered upon the bridge. 
These shadows were coming from the Jardin des Plantes toward the right bank. 
These four shadows were the four men. 
Jean Valjean felt a shudder like that of the deer when he sees the hounds again upon his track. 
One hope was left him: by plunging into the little street before him, if he could succeed in reaching the woodyards, the marshes, the fields, the open grounds, he could escape. 
It seemed to him that he might trust himself to this silent little street. He entered it. 

III

SOME three hundred paces on, he reached a point where the street forked. It divided into two streets, the one turning off obliquely to the left, the other to the right. Jean Valjean had before him the two branches of a tree. Which should he choose? 
He did not hesitate, but took the right. 
Why?
Because the left branch led toward the faubourg – that is to say, toward the country – that is, toward the uninhabited region. 
He turned, from time to time, and looked back. He took care to keep always on the dark side of the street. The street was straight behind him.  The two or three first times he turned, he saw nothing; the silence was completed, and he kept on his way somewhat reassured. Suddenly, on turning again, he thought he saw in the portion of the street through which he had just passed, far in the obscurity, something which stirred. 
He plunged forward rather than walked, hoping to find some side street by which to escape, and once more to elude his pursuers. 
He came to a wall. 
This wall, however, did not prevent him from going further; it was a wall forming the side of a cross alley, in which the street Jean Valjean was then in came to an end. 
Here again he must decide; should he take the right or the left? 


He looked to the right. The alley ran out to a space between some buildings that were mere sheds or barns, then terminated abruptly. The end of this blind alley was plain to be seen – a great white wall.
He looked to the left. The alley on this side was open and, about two hundred paces further on, ran into a street of which it was an affluent. In this direction lay safety. 
The instant Jean Valjean decided to turn to the left, to try to reach the street which he saw at the end of the alley, he perceived, at the corner of the alley and the street toward which he was just about going, a sort of black, motionless statue. 
It was a man, who had just been posted there, evidently, and who was waiting for him, guarding the passage. 
Jean Valjean was startled. 
There was no doubt. He was watched by this shadow. 
What should he do? 
There was now no time to turn back. What he had seen moving in the obscurity some distance behind him, the moment before, was undoubtedly Javert and his squad. Javert probably had already reached the commencement of the street of which Jean Valjean was at the end. Javert, to all appearances, was acquainted with this little trap, and had taken his precautions by sending one of his men to guard the exit. These conjectures, so like certainties, whirled about wildly in Jean Valjean’s troubled brain, as a handful of dust flies before a sudden blast. He scrutinized the Petite rue Picpus; there was a sentinel. He saw the dark form repeated in black upon the white pavement flooded with the moonlight. To advance was to fall upon that man. To go back was to throw himself into Javert’s hands. Jean Valjean felt as if caught by a chain that was slowly winding up. He looked up into the sky in despair. 

IV 
 
At this moment a muffled and regular sound began to make itself heard at some distance. Jean Valjean ventured to thrust his head a little way around the corner of the street. Seven or eight soldiers, formed in platoon, had just turned into the rue Polonceau. He saw the gleam of their bayonets. They were coming toward him.
 The soldiers, at whose head he distinguished the tall form of Javert, advanced slowly and with precautions. They stopped frequently. It was plain they were exploring all the recesses of the walls and all the entrances of doors and alleys. 
It was — and here conjecture could not be deceived — some patrol which Javert had met and which he had put in requisition.  
Javert’s two assistants marched in the ranks. 
At the rate at which they were marching, and the stops they were making, it would take them about a quarter of an hour to arrive at the spot where Jean Valjean was. It was a frightful moment. A few minutes separated Jean Valjean from that awful precipice which was opening before him for the third time. And the galleys now were no  longer simply the galleys, they were Cosette lost forever; that is to say, a life in death. 
 There was now only one thing possible. 
Jean Valjean had this peculiarity, that he might be said to carry two knapsacks; in one he had the thoughts of a saint, in the order the formidable talents of a convict. He helped himself from one or the other as occasion required. 
Among other resources, thanks to his numerous escapes from the galleys at Toulon, he had, it will be remembered, become master of that incredible art of raising himself, in the right angle of a wall, if need to be to the height of a six story; an art without ladders or props, by mere muscular strength, supporting himself by the back of his neck, his shoulders, his hips, and his knees, hardly making use of the few projections of the stone, which rendered so terrible and so celebrated the corner of the yard of the Conciergerie of Paris by which, some twenty years ago, the convict Battemolle made his scape. 
Jean Valjean measured with his eyes the wall above which he saw a lime tree. It was about eighteen feet high. 
The wall was capped by a flat stone without any projection. 
The difficulty was Cosette. Cosette did not know how to scale a wall. Abandon her? Jean Valjean did not think of it. To carry her was impossible. The whole strength of a man is necessary to accomplish these strange ascents. The least burden would make him lose his center of gravity and he would fall. 
He needed a cord. Jean Valjean had none. Where could he find a cord, at midnight, in the rue Polonceau? Truly at that instant, if Jean Valjean had had a kingdom, he would have given it for a rope. 
All extreme situations have their flashes which sometimes make us blind, sometimes illuminate us. 
The despairing gaze of Jean Valjean encountered the lamppost in the cul-de-sac Genrot. 
At this epoch there were no gaslights in the streets of Paris. 
At nightfall they lighted the streetlamps, which were placed at intervals, and were raised and lowered by means of a rope traversing the street from end to end, running through the grooves of posts. The reel on which this rope was wound was enclosed below the lantern in a little iron box, the key of which was kept by the lamplighter, and the rope itself was protected by a casing of metal. 
Jean Valjean, with the energy of a final struggle, crossed the street at a bound, entered the cul-de-sac, sprang the bolt of the little box with the point of his knife, and an instant after was back at the side of Cosette. He had a rope. 
We have explained that the streetlamps had not been lighted that night. The lamp in the Cul-de-sac Genrot was then, as a matter of course, extinguished like the rest, and one might pass by without even noticing that it was not in its place. 
Meanwhile the hour, the place, the darkness, the preoccupation of Jean Valjean, his singular actions, his going to and fro, all this began to disturb Cosette. Any other child would have uttered loud cries long before. She contented herself with pulling Jean Valjean by the skirt of his coat. The sound of the approaching patrol was constantly becoming more and more distinct.  
“ Father,” said she, in a whisper, “ I am afraid. Who is it that is coming? ”
“ Hush! ” answered the unhappy man. “ It is the Thénardiess.” 
Cosette shuddered. He added: 
“ Don’t say a word; I’ll take care of her. If you cry, if you make any noise, the Thénardiess will hear you. She is coming to catch you.” 
Then, without any haste, but without doing anything a second time, with a firm and rapid decision, so much the more remarkable at such a moment when the patrol and Javert might come upon him at any instant, he took off his cravat, passed it around Cosette’s body under the arms, taking care that it should not hurt the child, attached this cravat to an end of the rope by means of the knot which seamen call a swallow knot, took the other end of the rope in his teeth, took off his shoes and stockings and threw them over the wall, and began to raise himself in the angle of the wall and the gable with as much solidity and certainty as if he had the rounds of a ladder under his heels and his elbows. Half a minute had not passed before he was on his knees on the wall. 
Cosette watched him, stupefied, without saying a word. 
Jean Valjean’s charge and the name of the Thénardiess had made her dumb. 
All at once, she heard Jean Valjean’s voice calling to her in a low whisper: 
“ Put your back against the wall.” 
She obeyed. 
“ Don’t speak, and don’t be afraid,” added Jean Valjean. 
And she felt herself lifted from the ground. 
Before she had time to think where she was she was at the top of the wall. 
Jean Valjean seized her, put her on his back, took her two little hands in his left hand, lay down flat and crawled along the top of the wall. As he had supposed, there was a building there, the roof of which sloped very nearly to the ground, with a gentle inclination.
A fortunate circumstance, for the wall was much higher on this side than on the street. Jean Valjean saw the ground beneath him at a great depth. 
He had just reached the inclined plane of the roof, and had not yet left the crest of the wall, when a violent uproar proclaimed the arrival of the patrol. He heard the thundering voice of Javert: 
“ Search the cul-de-sac! The rue Droit Mur is guarded, the Petite rue Picpus also. I’ll answer for it if he is in the cul-de-sac.”  
The soldiers rushed into the Cul-de-sac Genrot.  
Jean Valjean slid down the roof, keeping hold of Cosette, reached the lime trees, and jumped to the ground. Whether from terror, or from courage, Cosette had not uttered a whisper. Her hands were a little scraped. 

V

JEAN VALJEAN found himself in a sort of garden, very large and of a singular appearance, one of those gloomy gardens which seem made to be seen in the winter and at night. This garden was oblong, with a row of large poplars at the further end, some tall forest trees in the corners, and a clear space in the center, where stood a very large isolated tree, then a few fruit trees, contorted and shaggy, like big bushes, some vegetable beds, a melon patch the glass covers of which shone in the moonlight, and an old well. There were here and there stone benches which seemed black with moss. The walks were bordered with sorry little shrubs perfectly straight. The grass covered half of them, and a green moss covered the rest. 

Nothing can be imagined more wild and more solitary than this garden. There was no one there, which was very natural on account of the hour, but it did not seem as if the place were made for anybody to walk in, even in broad noon. 
Jean Valjean’s first care had been to find his shoes, and put them on; then he entered the shed with Cosette. A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed. The child, thinking constantly of the Thénardiess, shared his instinct, and cowered down as closely as she could. 
Cosette trembled, and pressed closely to his side. They heard the tumultuous clamor of the patrol ransacking the cul-de-sac and the street, the clatter of their muskets against the stones, the calls of Javert to the watchmen he had stationed, and his imprecations mingled with words which they could not distinguish. 
At the end of a quarter of an hour it seemed as though this stormy rumbling began to recede. Jean Valjean did not breathe. 
He had placed his hand gently upon Cosette’s mouth. 
But the solitude about him was so strangely calm that that frightful din, so furious and so near, did not even cast over it a shadow of disturbance. It seemed as if these walls were built of the deaf stones spoken of in the Scriptures. 
Suddenly, in the midst of this deep calm, a new sound arose, a celestial, divine, ineffable sound, as ravishing as the other was horrible. It was a hymn which came forth from the darkness, voices of women, from the gloomy building which overlooked the garden.
Cosette and Jean Valjean fell on their knees. 
They knew not what it was; they knew not where they were, but they both felt, the man and the child, 
That they ought to be on their knees. 

While these voices were singing Jean Valjean was entirely absorbed in them.   He no longer saw the night, he saw a blue sky. He seemed to feel the spreading of these wings we all have within us. 
The chant ceased. 

All had again relapsed into silence. There was nothing more in the street, nothing more in the garden. That which threatened, that which reassured, all had vanished. The wind rattled the dry grass on the top of the wall, which made a low, soft, and mournful noise. 👈
​
  VI
THE child had laid her head upon a stone and gone to sleep. 
He sat down near her and looked at her. Little by little, as he beheld her, he grew calm, and regained possession of his clearness of mind. 
He plainly perceived this truth, the basis of his life henceforth, that so long as she should be alive, so long as he should have her with him, he should need nothing except for her, and fear nothing save on her account. He did not even realize that he was very cold, having taken off his coat to cover her. 
Meanwhile, through the reverie into which he had fallen, he had heard for some time a singular noise. It sounded like a little bell that someone was shaking. This noise was in the garden. 
It was heard distinctly, though feebly. It resembled the dimly heard tinkling of cowbells in the pastures at night.
This noise made Jean Valjean turn. 
He looked, and saw that there was someone in the garden. 
Something which resembled a man was walking among the glass cases of the melon patch, rising up, stooping down, stopping, with a regular motion, as if he were drawing or stretching something upon the ground. This being appeared to limp. 
Jean Valjean shuddered. He said to himself that perhaps Javert and his spies had not gone away, that they had doubtless left somebody on the watch in the street; that, if this man should discover him in the garden, he would cry thief, and would deliver him up. He took the sleeping Cosette gently in his arms and carried her into the furthest corner of the shed behind a heap of old furniture that was out of use. Cosette did not stir. 
From there he watched the strange motions of the man in the melon patch. It seemed very singular, but the sound of the bell followed every movement of the man. When the man approached, the sound approached; when he moved away, the sound moved away; if he made some sudden motion, a trill accompanied the motion; when he stopped, the noise ceased. It seemed evident that the bell was fastened to this man, but then what could that mean? What was this man to whom a bell was hung as to a ram or a cow? 
While he was revolving these questions, he touched Cosette’s hands. They were icy. 
“ Oh! God! ” said he. 
He called to her in a low voice: 
“ Cosette! ”
She did not open her eyes. 
He shook her smartly. 
She did not wake. 
“ Could she be dead? ” said he, and he sprang up, shuddering from head to foot. 
Cosette was pallid; she had fallen prostrate on the ground at his feet, making no sign. 
He listened to her breathing; she was breathing, but with a respiration that appeared feeble and about to stop. 
How should he get her warm again? How rouse her? All else   

Was banished from his thoughts. He rushed desperately out of the ruin. 
It was absolutely necessary that in less than a quarter of an hour Cosette should be in bed and before a fire. 

VII

HE walked straight to the man whom he saw in the garden. 
He had taken in his hand the roll of money which was in his vest pocket. 
This man had his head down, and did not see him coming. 
With a few strides, Jean Valjean was at his side. 
Jean Valjean approached him, exclaiming:
“ A hundred francs! ”
The man started and raised his eyes. 
“ A hundred francs for you,” continued Jean Valjean, “ If you will give me refuge tonight.” 
The moon shone full on Jean Valjean’s bewildered face.
“ What, it is you, Father Madeleine! ” said the man. 
This name, thus pronounced, at this dark hour, in this unknown place, by this unknown man, made Jean Valjean start back. 
He was ready for anything but that. The speaker was an old man, bent and lame, dressed much like a peasant, who had on his left knee a leather kneecap from which hung a bell. His face was in the shade, and could not be distinguished. 
Meanwhile the good man had taken off his cap, and was exclaiming, tremulously: 
“ Ah! My God! How did you come here, Father Madeleine? 
How did you get in, O Lord? Did you fall from the sky? 
“ Who are you? And what is this house? asked Jean Valjean.        
“ Oh! Indeed, that is good now,” exclaimed the old man. “ I am the one you got the place for here, and this house is the one you got me the place in.  What! You don’t remember me? ”
“ No,” said Jean Valjean. “ And how does it happen that you know me? ”
“ You saved my life,” said the man. 
He turned, a ray of the moon lighted up his side face, and Jean Valjean recognized old 
 Fauchelevent. 
“ Ah! ” said Jean Valjean. “ It is you? Yes, I remember you.” 

“ That is very fortunate! ” said the old man in a reproachful tone. 
“ And what are you doing here? ” added Jean Valjean. 
“ Oh! I am covering my melons.” 
Old Fauchelevent had in his hand, indeed, at the moment when Jean Valjean accosted him, the end of a piece of awning which he was stretching out over the melon patch. He had already spread out several in this way during the hour he had been in the garden. It was this work which made him go though the peculiar motions observed by Jean Valjean from the shed. 
He continued: 
“ I said to myself: the moon is bright, there is going to be a frost. Suppose I put their jackets on my melons? And,” added he, looking at Jean Valjean, with a loud laugh, “ You would have done well to do as much for yourself. But how did you come here? ”
Jean Valjean, finding that he was known by this man, at least under his name of Madeleine, went no further with his precautions. He multiplied questions. Oddly enough their parts seemed reversed. It was he, the intruder, who put questions. 
“ And what is this bell you have on your knee? ”
“ That! ” answered Fauchelevent. “ That is so that they may keep away from me.” 
“ Keep away from you? ” 
Old Fauchelevent winked in an indescribable manner. 
“ Ah! Bless me! There’s nothing but women in this house, plenty of young girls. It seems that I am dangerous to meet.
The bell warns them. When I come they go away.”
“ What is this house? ”
“ Why, you know very well.” 
“ No, I don’t. ”
“ Why, you got me this place here as gardener.”    
“ Answer me as if I didn’t know.” 
“ Well, It is the convent of the Petit Picpus, then.”
Jean Valjean remembered. Chance, that is to say Providence, had thrown him precisely into this convent of the Quartier Saint Antoine, to which old Fauchelevent, crippled by his fall from his cart, had been admitted, upon his recommendation, two years before. He repeated as if he were talking to himself: 
“ The Convent of the Petit Pipcus! ”
“ But now, really,” resumed Fauchelevent, “ how the deuce did you  manage to get in, you, Father Madeleine? It is no use for you to be a saint; you are a man, and no men come in here.” 
“ But you are here ”
“ There is none but me. ”
“ But,” resumed Jean Valjean, “ I must stay here.” 
“ Oh! My God,” exclaimed Fauchelevent. 
Jean Valjean approached the old man, and said to him in a grave voice. 
“ Father Fauchelevent, I saved your life.” 
“ I was first to remember it,” answered Fauchelevent. 
Well, you can now do for me what I once did for you.” 
Fauchelevent grasped in his old wrinkled and trembling hands the robust hands of Jean Valjean, and it was some seconds before he could speak; at last he exclaimed: 
Oh! That would be a blessing of God if I could do something for you, in return for that! I save your life! Monsieur Mayor, the old man is at your disposal.” 
A wonderful joy had, as it were, transfigured the old gardener. A radiance seemed to shine forth from his face.
What do you want me to do? he added.
“ I will explain. You have a room? ”
“ I have a solitary shanty, over there, behind the ruins of the old convent, in a corner that nobody ever sees. There are three rooms.” 
The shanty was  in fact so well concealed behind the ruins, and so well arranged, that no one should see it.--- that  Jean Valjean had not seen it. 
“ Good,” said Jean Valjean, “ Now, I ask of you two things.” 
“ What are they, Monsieur Madeleine? ”
“ First, that you will not tell anybody what you know about me. Second, that you will not attempt to learn anything more.” 
“ As you please. I know that you can do nothing dishonorable, and that you have always been a man of God. And then, besides, it was you that put me here. It is your place, I am yours.” 
“ Very well. But now come with me. We will go for the child.”
“ Ah! ” said Fauchelevent. “ There is a child! ”
He said not a word more, but followed Jean Valjean as a dog follows his master. 
In half an hour Cosette, again become rosy before a good fire, was asleep in the old gardener’s bed. Jean Valjean had put on his cravat and coat; his hat, which he had thrown over the wall, had been found and brought in. While Jean Valjean was putting on his coat, Fauchelevent had taken off his kneecap with the bell attached, which now, hanging on a nail near a shutter, decorated the wall. The two men were warming themselves, with their elbows on a table, on which Fauchelevent had set a piece of cheese, some brown bread, a bottle of wine, and two glasses, and the old man said to Jean Valjean, putting his hand on his knee: 
“ Ah! Father Madeleine! You didn’t know me at first ? You save people’s lives and then you forget them ? Oh! That’s bad; they remember you. You are ungrateful! ” 

  The Convent 

I 


BEFORE closing his eyes, Jean Valjean had said: “ Henceforth I must remain here.” These words were chasing one another through Fauchelevent’s head the whole night. 
To tell the truth, neither of them had slept. 
Jean Valjean, feeling that he was discovered and Javert was upon his track, knew full well that he and Cosette were lost should they return into the city. Since the new blast which had burst upon him had thrown him into his cloister, Jean Valjean had but one thought, to remain there. Now, for one in his unfortunate position, this convent was at once the safest and the most dangerous place, the most dangerous, for, no man being allowed to enter, if he should be discovered, it was a fragrant crime, and Jean Valjean would take but one step from the convent to prison; the safest, for if he succeeded in getting permission to remain, who would come there to look for him ? To live in an impossible place; that would be safety. 
For his part, Fauchelevent was racking his brains. He began by deciding that he was utterly bewildered. How did Monsieur Madeleine come there, with such walls ! The walls of a cloister are not so easily crossed. How did he happen to be with a child ? A man does not scale a steep wall with a child in his arms. Who was this child ? Where did they both come from ? 
Since Fauchelevent had been in the convent, he had not heard a word from M —--sur m—---, and he knew nothing of what had taken place. From some words that escaped from Jean Valjean, however, the gardener thought he might conclude that Monsieur Madeleine had probably failed on account of the hard times, and that he was pursued by his creditors, or it might be that he was compromised in some political affair and was concealing himself. Being in concealment, Monsieur Madeleine had taken the convent for an asylum, and it was natural that he should wish to remain there. Fauchelevent was groping amid conjectures, but saw nothing clearly except this: “ Monsieur Madeleine has saved my life. ” This single certainty was sufficient , and determined him.   He said aside to himself: “ It is my turn now.” He added in his conscience: “ Monsieur Madeleine did not deliberate so long when the question was about squeezing himself under the wagon to draw me out.” He decided that he would save Monsieur Madeleine.    
But to have him remain in the convent, what a problem was that ! Before that almost chimerical attempt, Fauchelevent did not recoil; this poor Picardy peasant, with no other ladder than his devotion, his good will, a little of that old country cunning, engaged for once in the service of a generous intention, undertook the scale the impossibilities of the cloister and the craggy escarpments of the rules of St. Benedict. Fauchelevent was an old man who had been selfish throughout his life, and who, near the end of his days, crippled, infirm, having no interest longer in the world, found it sweet to be grateful, and seeing a virtuous action to be done, threw himself into it like a man who, at the moment of death, finding at hand a glass of some good wine which he had never tasted, should drink it greedily. 

He formed his resolution then: to devote himself to Monsieur Madeleine. 

FATHER FAUCHELEVENT rapped softly at a door, and a gentle voice answered: “ Come in.” 
This door was that of the parlor allotted to the gardener, for use when it was necessary to communicate with him. This parlor was near the hall of the chapter. The prioress, seated in the only chair in the parlor, was waiting for Fauchelevent. 
The gardener made a timid bow, and stopped at the threshold of the cell. The prioress, who was saying her rosary, raised her eyes and said: 
“ Ah! It is you, Father Fauvent.” 
This abbreviation had been adopted in the convent. 
Fauchelevent again began his bow. 
“ Father Fauvent,I have called you.”
“ I am here, reverend mother.”
“ I wish to speak to you.” 
“ And I, for my part,” said Fauchelevent, with a boldness at which he was alarmed himself, “ I have something to say to the most reverend mother.   
The prioress looked at him. 
“ Ah, you have a communication to make to me.”
“ A petition ! ”
“ Well, what is it ? ”

The goodman, 
     began before the reverend prioress a rustic harangue, quite diffuse and very profound. He spoke at length of his age, his infirmities of the weight of the years henceforth doubly heavy upon him, of the growing demands of his work, of the size of the garden, of the nights to be spent, like last night for example, when he had to put awnings over the melons on account of the moon; and finally ended with this: that he had a brother                      a brother not young
                                                      ; that if it was 
desired, this brother could come and live with him and help him; that he was an excellent gardener; that the community would get good services from him, better than his own; that, otherwise, if his brother were not admitted, as he, the oldest, felt that he was broken down, and unequal to the labor, he would be obliged to leave, thought with much regret, and that his brother had a little girl that he would bring with him, who would be reared under God in the house, and who, perhaps who knows? — would someday become a nun. 
When he had finished, the prioress stopped the sliding of her rosary through her fingers, and said: 
“ Can you, between now and night, procure a strong iron bar ? ”
“ For what works ? ”
“ To be used as a lever ? ”
“ Yes, reverend mother,” answered Fauchelevent. 
The prioress, without adding a word, arose, and went into the next room, which was the hall of the chapter, where the vocal mothers were probably assembled: Fauchelevent remained alone.

To be continue...