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TWO MISFORTUNES MAKE ONE PIECE OF GOOD FORTUNE
On the following morning, at daybreak, Jean Valjean was still
by Cosette's bedside; he watched there motionless, waiting for
her to wake.
Some new thing had come into his soul.
Jean Valjean had never loved anything; for twenty-five years
he had been alone in the world.
He had never been father, lover, husband, friend. In the prison
he had been vicious, gloomy, chaste, ignorant, and shy.
The heart of that ex-convict was full of virginity. His sister
and his sister's children had left him only a vague and far-off
memory which had finally almost completely vanished; he had made
every effort to find them, and not having been able to find them,
he had forgotten them.
Human nature is made thus; the other tender emotions of his
youth, if he had ever had any, had fallen into an abyss.
When he saw Cosette, when he had taken possession of her,
carried her off, and delivered her, he felt his heart moved within
him.
All the passion and affection within him awoke, and rushed
towards that child.
He approached the bed, where she lay sleeping, and trembled
with joy.
He suffered all the pangs of a mother, and he knew not what
it meant; for that great and singular movement of a heart which
begins to love is a very obscure and a very sweet thing.
Poor old man, with a perfectly new heart!
Only, as he was five and fifty, and Cosette eight years of
age, all that might have been love in the whole course of his
life flowed together into a sort of ineffable light.
It was the second white apparition which he had encountered.
The Bishop had caused the dawn of virtue to rise on his horizon;
Cosette caused the dawn of love to rise.
The early days passed in this dazzled state.
Cosette, on her side, had also, unknown to herself, become
another being, poor little thing!
She was so little when her mother left her, that she no longer
remembered her.
Like all children, who resemble young shoots of the vine,
which cling to everything, she had tried to love; she had not
succeeded.
All had repulsed her,-- the Thenardiers, their children, other
children.
She had loved the dog, and he had died, after which nothing
and nobody would have anything to do with her.
It is a sad thing to say, and we have already intimated it,
that, at eight years of age, her heart was cold. It was not her
fault; it was not the faculty of loving that she lacked; alas!
it was the possibility.
Thus, from the very first day, all her sentient and thinking
powers loved this kind man.
She felt that which she had never felt before--a sensation
of expansion.
The man no longer produced on her the effect of being old
or poor; she thought Jean Valjean handsome, just as she thought
the hovel pretty.
These are the effects of the dawn, of childhood, of joy.
The novelty of the earth and of life counts for something
here.
Nothing is so charming as the coloring reflection of happiness
on a garret. We all have in our past a delightful garret.
Nature, a difference of fifty years, had set a profound gulf
between Jean Valjean and Cosette; destiny filled in this gulf.
Destiny suddenly united and wedded with its irresistible power
these two uprooted existences, differing in age, alike in sorrow.
One, in fact, completed the other.
Cosette's instinct sought a father, as Jean Valjean's instinct
sought a child.
To meet was to find each other.
At the mysterious moment when their hands touched, they were
welded together.
When these two souls perceived each other, they recognized
each other as necessary to each other, and embraced each other
closely.
Taking the words in their most comprehensive and absolute
sense, we may say that, separated from every one by the walls
of the tomb, Jean Valjean was the widower, and Cosette was the
orphan: this situation caused Jean Valjean to become Cosette's
father after a celestial fashion.
And in truth, the mysterious impression produced on Cosette
in the depths of the forest of Chelles by the hand of Jean Valjean
grasping hers in the dark was not an illusion, but a reality.
The entrance of that man into the destiny of that child had been
the advent of God.
Moreover, Jean Valjean had chosen his refuge well.
There he seemed perfectly secure.
The chamber with a dressing-room, which he occupied with Cosette,
was the one whose window opened on the boulevard.
This being the only window in the house, no neighbors' glances
were to be feared from across the way or at the side.
The ground-floor of Number 50-52, a sort of dilapidated penthouse,
served as a wagon-house for market-gardeners, and no communication
existed between it and the first story.
It was separated by the flooring, which had neither traps
nor stairs, and which formed the diaphragm of the building, as
it were.
The first story contained, as we have said, numerous chambers
and several attics, only one of which was occupied by the old
woman who took charge of Jean Valjean's housekeeping; all the
rest was uninhabited.
It was this old woman, ornamented with the name of the principal
lodger, and in reality intrusted with the functions of portress,
who had let him the lodging on Christmas eve.
He had represented himself to her as a gentleman of means
who had been ruined by Spanish bonds, who was coming there to
live with his little daughter. He had paid her six months in advance,
and had commissioned the old woman to furnish the chamber and
dressing-room, as we have seen. It was this good woman who had
lighted the fire in the stove, and prepared everything on the
evening of their arrival.
Week followed week; these two beings led a happy life in that
hovel.
Cosette laughed, chattered, and sang from daybreak.
Children have their morning song as well as birds.
It sometimes happened that Jean Valjean clasped her tiny red
hand, all cracked with chilblains, and kissed it.
The poor child, who was used to being beaten, did not know
the meaning of this, and ran away in confusion.
At times she became serious and stared at her little black
gown. Cosette was no longer in rags; she was in mourning.
She had emerged from misery, and she was entering into life.
Jean Valjean had undertaken to teach her to read.
Sometimes, as he made the child spell, he remembered that
it was with the idea of doing evil that he had learned to read
in prison.
This idea had ended in teaching a child to read.
Then the ex-convict smiled with the pensive smile of the angels.
He felt in it a premeditation from on high, the will of some
one who was not man, and he became absorbed in revery.
Good thoughts have their abysses as well as evil ones.
To teach Cosette to read, and to let her play, this constituted
nearly the whole of Jean Valjean's existence.
And then he talked of her mother, and he made her pray.
She called him father, and knew no other name for him.
He passed hours in watching her dressing and undressing her
doll, and in listening to her prattle.
Life, henceforth, appeared to him to be full of interest;
men seemed to him good and just; he no longer reproached any one
in thought; he saw no reason why he should not live to be a very
old man, now that this child loved him. He saw a whole future
stretching out before him, illuminated by Cosette as by a charming
light.
The best of us are not exempt from egotistical thoughts.
At times, he reflected with a sort of joy that she would be
ugly.
This is only a personal opinion; but, to utter our whole thought,
at the point where Jean Valjean had arrived when he began to love
Cosette, it is by no means clear to us that he did not need this
encouragement in order that he might persevere in well-doing.
He had just viewed the malice of men and the misery of society
under a new aspect-- incomplete aspects, which unfortunately only
exhibited one side of the truth, the fate of woman as summed up
in Fantine, and public authority as personified in Javert.
He had returned to prison, this time for having done right;
he had quaffed fresh bitterness; disgust and lassitude were overpowering
him; even the memory of the Bishop probably suffered a temporary
eclipse, though sure to reappear later on luminous and triumphant;
but, after all, that sacred memory was growing dim.
Who knows whether Jean Valjean had not been on the eve of
growing discouraged and of falling once more? He loved and grew
strong again.
Alas! he walked with no less indecision than Cosette.
He protected her, and she strengthened him. Thanks to him,
she could walk through life; thanks to her, he could continue
in virtue.
He was that child's stay, and she was his prop.
Oh, unfathomable and divine mystery of the balances of destiny!
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