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CLOISTERED
Cosette continued to hold her tongue in the convent.
It was quite natural that Cosette should think herself Jean
Valjean's daughter.
Moreover, as she knew nothing, she could say nothing, and
then, she would not have said anything in any case.
As we have just observed, nothing trains children to silence
like unhappiness. Cosette had suffered so much, that she feared
everything, even to speak or to breathe.
A single word had so often brought down an avalanche upon
her.
She had hardly begun to regain her confidence since she had
been with Jean Valjean.
She speedily became accustomed to the convent.
Only she regretted Catherine, but she dared not say so.
Once, however, she did say to Jean Valjean: "Father,
if I had known, I would have brought her away with me."
Cosette had been obliged, on becoming a scholar in the convent,
to don the garb of the pupils of the house.
Jean Valjean succeeded in getting them to restore to him the
garments which she laid aside. This was the same mourning suit
which he had made her put on when she had quitted the Thenardiers'
inn.
It was not very threadbare even now. Jean Valjean locked up
these garments, plus the stockings and the shoes, with a quantity
of camphor and all the aromatics in which convents abound, in
a little valise which he found means of procuring. He set this
valise on a chair near his bed, and he always carried the key
about his person.
"Father," Cosette asked him one day, "what
is there in that box which smells so good?"
Father Fauchelevent received other recompense for his good
action, in addition to the glory which we just mentioned, and
of which he knew nothing; in the first place it made him happy;
next, he had much less work, since it was shared.
Lastly, as he was very fond of snuff, he found the presence
of M. Madeleine an advantage, in that he used three times as much
as he had done previously, and that in an infinitely more luxurious
manner, seeing that M. Madeleine paid for it.
The nuns did not adopt the name of Ultime; they called Jean
Valjean the other Fauvent.
If these holy women had possessed anything of Javert's glance,
they would eventually have noticed that when there was any errand
to be done outside in the behalf of the garden, it was always
the elder Fauchelevent, the old, the infirm, the lame man, who
went, and never the other; but whether it is that eyes constantly
fixed on God know not how to spy, or whether they were, by preference,
occupied in keeping watch on each other, they paid no heed to
this.
Moreover, it was well for Jean Valjean that he kept close
and did not stir out.
Javert watched the quarter for more than a month.
This convent was for Jean Valjean like an island surrounded
by gulfs.
Henceforth, those four walls constituted his world. He saw
enough of the sky there to enable him to preserve his serenity,
and Cosette enough to remain happy.
A very sweet life began for him.
He inhabited the old hut at the end of the garden, in company
with Fauchelevent.
This hovel, built of old rubbish, which was still in existence
in 1845, was composed, as the reader already knows, of three chambers,
all of which were utterly bare and had nothing beyond the walls.
The principal one had been given up, by force, for Jean Valjean
had opposed it in vain, to M. Madeleine, by Father Fauchelevent.
The walls of this chamber had for ornament, in addition to
the two nails whereon to hang the knee-cap and the basket, a Royalist
bank-note of '93, applied to the wall over the chimney-piece,
and of which the following is an exact facsimile:--
{GRAPHIC HERE}
This specimen of Vendean paper money had been nailed to the wall
by the preceding gardener, an old Chouan, who had died in the
convent, and whose place Fauchelevent had taken.
Jean Valjean worked in the garden every day and made himself
very useful. He had formerly been a pruner of trees, and he gladly
found himself a gardener once more.
It will be remembered that he knew all sorts of secrets and
receipts for agriculture.
He turned these to advantage. Almost all the trees in the
orchard were ungrafted, and wild. He budded them and made them
produce excellent fruit.
Cosette had permission to pass an hour with him every day.
As the sisters were melancholy and he was kind, the child made
comparisons and adored him.
At the appointed hour she flew to the hut. When she entered
the lowly cabin, she filled it with paradise. Jean Valjean blossomed
out and felt his happiness increase with the happiness which he
afforded Cosette.
The joy which we inspire has this charming property, that,
far from growing meagre, like all reflections, it returns to us
more radiant than ever. At recreation hours, Jean Valjean watched
her running and playing in the distance, and he distinguished
her laugh from that of the rest.
For Cosette laughed now.
Cosette's face had even undergone a change, to a certain extent.
The gloom had disappeared from it.
A smile is the same as sunshine; it banishes winter from the
human countenance.
Recreation over, when Cosette went into the house again, Jean
Valjean gazed at the windows of her class-room, and at night he
rose to look at the windows of her dormitory.
God has his own ways, moreover; the convent contributed, like
Cosette, to uphold and complete the Bishop's work in Jean Valjean.
It is certain that virtue adjoins pride on one side.
A bridge built by the devil exists there.
Jean Valjean had been, unconsciously, perhaps, tolerably near
that side and that bridge, when Providence cast his lot in the
convent of the Petit-Picpus; so long as he had compared himself
only to the Bishop, he had regarded himself as unworthy and had
remained humble; but for some time past he had been comparing
himself to men in general, and pride was beginning to spring up.
Who knows?
He might have ended by returning very gradually to hatred.
The convent stopped him on that downward path.
This was the second place of captivity which he had seen.
In his youth, in what had been for him the beginning of his life,
and later on, quite recently again, he had beheld another,-- a
frightful place, a terrible place, whose severities had always
appeared to him the iniquity of justice, and the crime of the
law. Now, after the galleys, he saw the cloister; and when he
meditated how he had formed a part of the galleys, and that he
now, so to speak, was a spectator of the cloister, he confronted
the two in his own mind with anxiety.
Sometimes he crossed his arms and leaned on his hoe, and slowly
descended the endless spirals of revery.
He recalled his former companions:
how wretched they were; they rose at dawn, and toiled until
night; hardly were they permitted to sleep; they lay on camp beds,
where nothing was tolerated but mattresses two inches thick, in
rooms which were heated only in the very harshest months of the
year; they were clothed in frightful red blouses; they were allowed,
as a great favor, linen trousers in the hottest weather, and a
woollen carter's blouse on their backs when it was very cold;
they drank no wine, and ate no meat, except when they went on
"fatigue duty."
They lived nameless, designated only by numbers, and converted,
after a manner, into ciphers themselves, with downcast eyes, with
lowered voices, with shorn heads, beneath the cudgel and in disgrace.
Then his mind reverted to the beings whom he had under his
eyes.
These beings also lived with shorn heads, with downcast eyes,
with lowered voices, not in disgrace, but amid the scoffs of the
world, not with their backs bruised with the cudgel, but with
their shoulders lacerated with their discipline.
Their names, also, had vanished from among men; they no longer
existed except under austere appellations. They never ate meat
and they never drank wine; they often remained until evening without
food; they were attired, not in a red blouse, but in a black shroud,
of woollen, which was heavy in summer and thin in winter, without
the power to add or subtract anything from it; without having
even, according to the season, the resource of the linen garment
or the woollen cloak; and for six months in the year they wore
serge chemises which gave them fever.
They dwelt, not in rooms warmed only during rigorous cold,
but in cells where no fire was ever lighted; they slept, not on
mattresses two inches thick, but on straw.
And finally, they were not even allowed their sleep; every
night, after a day of toil, they were obliged, in the weariness
of their first slumber, at the moment when they were falling sound
asleep and beginning to get warm, to rouse themselves, to rise
and to go and pray in an ice-cold and gloomy chapel, with their
knees on the stones.
On certain days each of these beings in turn had to remain
for twelve successive hours in a kneeling posture, or prostrate,
with face upon the pavement, and arms outstretched in the form
of a cross.
The others were men; these were women.
What had those men done?
They had stolen, violated, pillaged, murdered, assassinated.
They were bandits, counterfeiters, poisoners, incendiaries,
murderers, parricides.
What had these women done?
They had done nothing whatever.
On the one hand, highway robbery, fraud, deceit, violence,
sensuality, homicide, all sorts of sacrilege, every variety of
crime; on the other, one thing only, innocence.
Perfect innocence, almost caught up into heaven in a mysterious
assumption, attached to the earth by virtue, already possessing
something of heaven through holiness.
On the one hand, confidences over crimes, which are exchanged
in whispers; on the other, the confession of faults made aloud.
And what crimes!
And what faults!
On the one hand, miasms; on the other, an ineffable perfume.
On the one hand, a moral pest, guarded from sight, penned up under
the range of cannon, and literally devouring its plague-stricken
victims; on the other, the chaste flame of all souls on the same
hearth. There, darkness; here, the shadow; but a shadow filled
with gleams of light, and of gleams full of radiance.
Two strongholds of slavery; but in the first, deliverance
possible, a legal limit always in sight, and then, escape.
In the second, perpetuity; the sole hope, at the distant extremity
of the future, that faint light of liberty which men call death.
In the first, men are bound only with chains; in the other,
chained by faith.
What flowed from the first?
An immense curse, the gnashing of teeth, hatred, desperate
viciousness, a cry of rage against human society, a sarcasm against
heaven.
What results flowed from the second?
Blessings and love.
And in these two places, so similar yet so unlike, these two
species of beings who were so very unlike, were undergoing the
same work, expiation.
Jean Valjean understood thoroughly the expiation of the former;
that personal expiation, the expiation for one's self.
But he did not understand that of these last, that of creatures
without reproach and without stain, and he trembled as he asked
himself: The expiation of what?
What expiation?
A voice within his conscience replied:
"The most divine of human generosities, the expiation
for others."
Here all personal theory is withheld; we are only the narrator;
we place ourselves at Jean Valjean's point of view, and we translate
his impressions.
Before his eyes he had the sublime summit of abnegation, the
highest possible pitch of virtue; the innocence which pardons
men their faults, and which expiates in their stead; servitude
submitted to, torture accepted, punishment claimed by souls which
have not sinned, for the sake of sparing it to souls which have
fallen; the love of humanity swallowed up in the love of God,
but even there preserving its distinct and mediatorial character;
sweet and feeble beings possessing the misery of those who are
punished and the smile of those who are recompensed.
And he remembered that he had dared to murmur!
Often, in the middle of the night, he rose to listen to the
grateful song of those innocent creatures weighed down with severities,
and the blood ran cold in his veins at the thought that those
who were justly chastised raised their voices heavenward only
in blasphemy, and that he, wretch that he was, had shaken his
fist at God.
There was one striking thing which caused him to meditate
deeply, like a warning whisper from Providence itself:
the scaling of that wall, the passing of those barriers, the
adventure accepted even at the risk of death, the painful and
difficult ascent, all those efforts even, which he had made to
escape from that other place of expiation, he had made in order
to gain entrance into this one.
Was this a symbol of his destiny?
This house was a prison likewise and bore a melancholy resemblance
to that other one whence he had fled, and yet he had never conceived
an idea of anything similar.
Again he beheld gratings, bolts, iron bars--to guard whom?
Angels.
These lofty walls which he had seen around tigers, he now
beheld once more around lambs.
This was a place of expiation, and not of punishment; and
yet, it was still more austere, more gloomy, and more pitiless
than the other.
These virgins were even more heavily burdened than the convicts.
A cold, harsh wind, that wind which had chilled his youth, traversed
the barred and padlocked grating of the vultures; a still harsher
and more biting breeze blew in the cage of these doves.
Why?
When he thought on these things, all that was within him was
lost in amazement before this mystery of sublimity.
In these meditations, his pride vanished.
He scrutinized his own heart in all manner of ways; he felt
his pettiness, and many a time he wept.
All that had entered into his life for the last six months
had led him back towards the Bishop's holy injunctions; Cosette
through love, the convent through humility.
Sometimes at eventide, in the twilight, at an hour when the
garden was deserted, he could be seen on his knees in the middle
of the walk which skirted the chapel, in front of the window through
which he had gazed on the night of his arrival, and turned towards
the spot where, as he knew, the sister was making reparation,
prostrated in prayer. Thus he prayed as he knelt before the sister.
It seemed as though he dared not kneel directly before God.
Everything that surrounded him, that peaceful garden, those
fragrant flowers, those children who uttered joyous cries, those
grave and simple women, that silent cloister, slowly permeated
him, and little by little, his soul became compounded of silence
like the cloister, of perfume like the flowers, of simplicity
like the women, of joy like the children.
And then he reflected that these had been two houses of God
which had received him in succession at two critical moments in
his life:
the first, when all doors were closed and when human society
rejected him; the second, at a moment when human society had again
set out in pursuit of him, and when the galleys were again yawning;
and that, had it not been for the first, he should have relapsed
into crime, and had it not been for the second, into torment.
His whole heart melted in gratitude, and he loved more and
more.
Many years passed in this manner; Cosette was growing up.
[The end of Volume II. "Cosette"]
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