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THE HOUSE WITH A SECRET
About the middle of the last century, a chief justice in the
Parliament of Paris having a mistress and concealing the fact,
for at that period the grand seignors displayed their mistresses,
and the bourgeois concealed them, had "a little house"
built in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the deserted Rue Blomet,
which is now called Rue Plumet, not far from the spot which was
then designated as Combat des Animaux.
This house was composed of a single-storied pavilion; two
rooms on the ground floor, two chambers on the first floor, a
kitchen down stairs, a boudoir up stairs, an attic under the roof,
the whole preceded by a garden with a large gate opening on the
street. This garden was about an acre and a half in extent.
This was all that could be seen by passers-by; but behind
the pavilion there was a narrow courtyard, and at the end of the
courtyard a low building consisting of two rooms and a cellar,
a sort of preparation destined to conceal a child and nurse in
case of need.
This building communicated in the rear by a masked door which
opened by a secret spring, with a long, narrow, paved winding
corridor, open to the sky, hemmed in with two lofty walls, which,
hidden with wonderful art, and lost as it were between garden
enclosures and cultivated land, all of whose angles and detours
it followed, ended in another door, also with a secret lock which
opened a quarter of a league away, almost in another quarter,
at the solitary extremity of the Rue du Babylone.
Through this the chief justice entered, so that even those
who were spying on him and following him would merely have observed
that the justice betook himself every day in a mysterious way
somewhere, and would never have suspected that to go to the Rue
de Babylone was to go to the Rue Blomet.
Thanks to clever purchasers of land, the magistrate had been
able to make a secret, sewer-like passage on his own property,
and consequently, without interference.
Later on, he had sold in little parcels, for gardens and market
gardens, the lots of ground adjoining the corridor, and the proprietors
of these lots on both sides thought they had a party wall before
their eyes, and did not even suspect the long, paved ribbon winding
between two walls amid their flower-beds and their orchards. Only
the birds beheld this curiosity.
It is probable that the linnets and tomtits of the last century
gossiped a great deal about the chief justice.
The pavilion, built of stone in the taste of Mansard, wainscoted
and furnished in the Watteau style, rocaille on the inside, old-fashioned
on the outside, walled in with a triple hedge of flowers, had
something discreet, coquettish, and solemn about it, as befits
a caprice of love and magistracy.
This house and corridor, which have now disappeared, were
in existence fifteen years ago.
In '93 a coppersmith had purchased the house with the idea
of demolishing it, but had not been able to pay the price; the
nation made him bankrupt.
So that it was the house which demolished the coppersmith.
After that, the house remained uninhabited, and fell slowly
to ruin, as does every dwelling to which the presence of man does
not communicate life. It had remained fitted with its old furniture,
was always for sale or to let, and the ten or a dozen people who
passed through the Rue Plumet were warned of the fact by a yellow
and illegible bit of writing which had hung on the garden wall
since 1819.
Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers-by
might have noticed that the bill had disappeared, and even that
the shutters on the first floor were open.
The house was occupied, in fact. The windows had short curtains,
a sign that there was a woman about.
In the month of October, 1829, a man of a certain age had
presented himself and had hired the house just as it stood, including,
of course, the back building and the lane which ended in the Rue
de Babylone. He had had the secret openings of the two doors to
this passage repaired. The house, as we have just mentioned, was
still very nearly furnished with the justice's old fitting; the
new tenant had ordered some repairs, had added what was lacking
here and there, had replaced the paving-stones in the yard, bricks
in the floors, steps in the stairs, missing bits in the inlaid
floors and the glass in the lattice windows, and had finally installed
himself there with a young girl and an elderly maid-servant, without
commotion, rather like a person who is slipping in than like a
man who is entering his own house.
The neighbors did not gossip about him, for the reason that
there were no neighbors.
This unobtrusive tenant was Jean Valjean, the young girl was
Cosette. The servant was a woman named Toussaint, whom Jean Valjean
had saved from the hospital and from wretchedness, and who was
elderly, a stammerer, and from the provinces, three qualities
which had decided Jean Valjean to take her with him.
He had hired the house under the name of M. Fauchelevent,
independent gentleman. In all that has been related heretofore,
the reader has, doubtless, been no less prompt than Thenardier
to recognize Jean Valjean.
Why had Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Petit-Picpus?
What had happened?
Nothing had happened.
It will be remembered that Jean Valjean was happy in the convent,
so happy that his conscience finally took the alarm.
He saw Cosette every day, he felt paternity spring up and
develop within him more and more, he brooded over the soul of
that child, he said to himself that she was his, that nothing
could take her from him, that this would last indefinitely, that
she would certainly become a nun, being thereto gently incited
every day, that thus the convent was henceforth the universe for
her as it was for him, that he should grow old there, and that
she would grow up there, that she would grow old there, and that
he should die there; that, in short, delightful hope, no separation
was possible.
On reflecting upon this, he fell into perplexity.
He interrogated himself.
He asked himself if all that happiness were really his, if
it were not composed of the happiness of another, of the happiness
of that child which he, an old man, was confiscating and stealing;
if that were not theft? He said to himself, that this child had
a right to know life before renouncing it, that to deprive her
in advance, and in some sort without consulting her, of all joys,
under the pretext of saving her from all trials, to take advantage
of her ignorance of her isolation, in order to make an artificial
vocation germinate in her, was to rob a human creature of its
nature and to lie to God. And who knows if, when she came to be
aware of all this some day, and found herself a nun to her sorrow,
Cosette would not come to hate him?
A last, almost selfish thought, and less heroic than the rest,
but which was intolerable to him.
He resolved to quit the convent.
He resolved on this; he recognized with anguish, the fact
that it was necessary.
As for objections, there were none. Five years' sojourn between
these four walls and of disappearance had necessarily destroyed
or dispersed the elements of fear. He could return tranquilly
among men.
He had grown old, and all had undergone a change.
Who would recognize him now? And then, to face the worst,
there was danger only for himself, and he had no right to condemn
Cosette to the cloister for the reason that he had been condemned
to the galleys.
Besides, what is danger in comparison with the right?
Finally, nothing prevented his being prudent and taking his
precautions.
As for Cosette's education, it was almost finished and complete.
His determination once taken, he awaited an opportunity. It
was not long in presenting itself.
Old Fauchelevent died.
Jean Valjean demanded an audience with the revered prioress
and told her that, having come into a little inheritance at the
death of his brother, which permitted him henceforth to live without
working, he should leave the service of the convent and take his
daughter with him; but that, as it was not just that Cosette,
since she had not taken the vows, should have received her education
gratuitously, he humbly begged the Reverend Prioress to see fit
that he should offer to the community, as indemnity, for the five
years which Cosette had spent there, the sum of five thousand
francs.
It was thus that Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Perpetual
Adoration.
On leaving the convent, he took in his own arms the little
valise the key to which he still wore on his person, and would
permit no porter to touch it.
This puzzled Cosette, because of the odor of embalming which
proceeded from it.
Let us state at once, that this trunk never quitted him more.
He always had it in his chamber.
It was the first and only thing sometimes, that he carried
off in his moving when he moved about. Cosette laughed at it,
and called this valise his inseparable, saying: "I am jealous
of it."
Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not reappear in the open air
without profound anxiety.
He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet, and hid himself
from sight there.
Henceforth he was in the possession of the name:-- Ultime
Fauchelevent.
At the same time he hired two other apartments in Paris, in
order that he might attract less attention than if he were to
remain always in the same quarter, and so that he could, at need,
take himself off at the slightest disquietude which should assail
him, and in short, so that he might not again be caught unprovided
as on the night when he had so miraculously escaped from Javert.
These two apartments were very pitiable, poor in appearance, and
in two quarters which were far remote from each other, the one
in the Rue de l'Ouest, the other in the Rue de l'Homme Arme.
He went from time to time, now to the Rue de l'Homme Arme,
now to the Rue de l'Ouest, to pass a month or six weeks, without
taking Toussaint.
He had himself served by the porters, and gave himself out
as a gentleman from the suburbs, living on his funds, and having
a little temporary resting-place in town. This lofty virtue had
three domiciles in Paris for the sake of escaping from the police.
THE HOUSE WITH A SECRET
About the middle of the last century, a chief justice in the
Parliament of Paris having a mistress and concealing the fact,
for at that period the grand seignors displayed their mistresses,
and the bourgeois concealed them, had "a little house"
built in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the deserted Rue Blomet,
which is now called Rue Plumet, not far from the spot which was
then designated as Combat des Animaux.
This house was composed of a single-storied pavilion; two
rooms on the ground floor, two chambers on the first floor, a
kitchen down stairs, a boudoir up stairs, an attic under the roof,
the whole preceded by a garden with a large gate opening on the
street. This garden was about an acre and a half in extent.
This was all that could be seen by passers-by; but behind
the pavilion there was a narrow courtyard, and at the end of the
courtyard a low building consisting of two rooms and a cellar,
a sort of preparation destined to conceal a child and nurse in
case of need.
This building communicated in the rear by a masked door which
opened by a secret spring, with a long, narrow, paved winding
corridor, open to the sky, hemmed in with two lofty walls, which,
hidden with wonderful art, and lost as it were between garden
enclosures and cultivated land, all of whose angles and detours
it followed, ended in another door, also with a secret lock which
opened a quarter of a league away, almost in another quarter,
at the solitary extremity of the Rue du Babylone.
Through this the chief justice entered, so that even those
who were spying on him and following him would merely have observed
that the justice betook himself every day in a mysterious way
somewhere, and would never have suspected that to go to the Rue
de Babylone was to go to the Rue Blomet.
Thanks to clever purchasers of land, the magistrate had been
able to make a secret, sewer-like passage on his own property,
and consequently, without interference.
Later on, he had sold in little parcels, for gardens and market
gardens, the lots of ground adjoining the corridor, and the proprietors
of these lots on both sides thought they had a party wall before
their eyes, and did not even suspect the long, paved ribbon winding
between two walls amid their flower-beds and their orchards. Only
the birds beheld this curiosity.
It is probable that the linnets and tomtits of the last century
gossiped a great deal about the chief justice.
The pavilion, built of stone in the taste of Mansard, wainscoted
and furnished in the Watteau style, rocaille on the inside, old-fashioned
on the outside, walled in with a triple hedge of flowers, had
something discreet, coquettish, and solemn about it, as befits
a caprice of love and magistracy.
This house and corridor, which have now disappeared, were
in existence fifteen years ago.
In '93 a coppersmith had purchased the house with the idea
of demolishing it, but had not been able to pay the price; the
nation made him bankrupt.
So that it was the house which demolished the coppersmith.
After that, the house remained uninhabited, and fell slowly
to ruin, as does every dwelling to which the presence of man does
not communicate life. It had remained fitted with its old furniture,
was always for sale or to let, and the ten or a dozen people who
passed through the Rue Plumet were warned of the fact by a yellow
and illegible bit of writing which had hung on the garden wall
since 1819.
Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers-by
might have noticed that the bill had disappeared, and even that
the shutters on the first floor were open.
The house was occupied, in fact. The windows had short curtains,
a sign that there was a woman about.
In the month of October, 1829, a man of a certain age had
presented himself and had hired the house just as it stood, including,
of course, the back building and the lane which ended in the Rue
de Babylone. He had had the secret openings of the two doors to
this passage repaired. The house, as we have just mentioned, was
still very nearly furnished with the justice's old fitting; the
new tenant had ordered some repairs, had added what was lacking
here and there, had replaced the paving-stones in the yard, bricks
in the floors, steps in the stairs, missing bits in the inlaid
floors and the glass in the lattice windows, and had finally installed
himself there with a young girl and an elderly maid-servant, without
commotion, rather like a person who is slipping in than like a
man who is entering his own house.
The neighbors did not gossip about him, for the reason that
there were no neighbors.
This unobtrusive tenant was Jean Valjean, the young girl was
Cosette. The servant was a woman named Toussaint, whom Jean Valjean
had saved from the hospital and from wretchedness, and who was
elderly, a stammerer, and from the provinces, three qualities
which had decided Jean Valjean to take her with him.
He had hired the house under the name of M. Fauchelevent,
independent gentleman. In all that has been related heretofore,
the reader has, doubtless, been no less prompt than Thenardier
to recognize Jean Valjean.
Why had Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Petit-Picpus?
What had happened?
Nothing had happened.
It will be remembered that Jean Valjean was happy in the convent,
so happy that his conscience finally took the alarm.
He saw Cosette every day, he felt paternity spring up and
develop within him more and more, he brooded over the soul of
that child, he said to himself that she was his, that nothing
could take her from him, that this would last indefinitely, that
she would certainly become a nun, being thereto gently incited
every day, that thus the convent was henceforth the universe for
her as it was for him, that he should grow old there, and that
she would grow up there, that she would grow old there, and that
he should die there; that, in short, delightful hope, no separation
was possible.
On reflecting upon this, he fell into perplexity.
He interrogated himself.
He asked himself if all that happiness were really his, if
it were not composed of the happiness of another, of the happiness
of that child which he, an old man, was confiscating and stealing;
if that were not theft? He said to himself, that this child had
a right to know life before renouncing it, that to deprive her
in advance, and in some sort without consulting her, of all joys,
under the pretext of saving her from all trials, to take advantage
of her ignorance of her isolation, in order to make an artificial
vocation germinate in her, was to rob a human creature of its
nature and to lie to God. And who knows if, when she came to be
aware of all this some day, and found herself a nun to her sorrow,
Cosette would not come to hate him?
A last, almost selfish thought, and less heroic than the rest,
but which was intolerable to him.
He resolved to quit the convent.
He resolved on this; he recognized with anguish, the fact
that it was necessary.
As for objections, there were none. Five years' sojourn between
these four walls and of disappearance had necessarily destroyed
or dispersed the elements of fear. He could return tranquilly
among men.
He had grown old, and all had undergone a change.
Who would recognize him now? And then, to face the worst,
there was danger only for himself, and he had no right to condemn
Cosette to the cloister for the reason that he had been condemned
to the galleys.
Besides, what is danger in comparison with the right?
Finally, nothing prevented his being prudent and taking his
precautions.
As for Cosette's education, it was almost finished and complete.
His determination once taken, he awaited an opportunity. It
was not long in presenting itself.
Old Fauchelevent died.
Jean Valjean demanded an audience with the revered prioress
and told her that, having come into a little inheritance at the
death of his brother, which permitted him henceforth to live without
working, he should leave the service of the convent and take his
daughter with him; but that, as it was not just that Cosette,
since she had not taken the vows, should have received her education
gratuitously, he humbly begged the Reverend Prioress to see fit
that he should offer to the community, as indemnity, for the five
years which Cosette had spent there, the sum of five thousand
francs.
It was thus that Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Perpetual
Adoration.
On leaving the convent, he took in his own arms the little
valise the key to which he still wore on his person, and would
permit no porter to touch it.
This puzzled Cosette, because of the odor of embalming which
proceeded from it.
Let us state at once, that this trunk never quitted him more.
He always had it in his chamber.
It was the first and only thing sometimes, that he carried
off in his moving when he moved about. Cosette laughed at it,
and called this valise his inseparable, saying: "I am jealous
of it."
Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not reappear in the open air
without profound anxiety.
He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet, and hid himself
from sight there.
Henceforth he was in the possession of the name:-- Ultime
Fauchelevent.
At the same time he hired two other apartments in Paris, in
order that he might attract less attention than if he were to
remain always in the same quarter, and so that he could, at need,
take himself off at the slightest disquietude which should assail
him, and in short, so that he might not again be caught unprovided
as on the night when he had so miraculously escaped from Javert.
These two apartments were very pitiable, poor in appearance, and
in two quarters which were far remote from each other, the one
in the Rue de l'Ouest, the other in the Rue de l'Homme Arme.
He went from time to time, now to the Rue de l'Homme Arme,
now to the Rue de l'Ouest, to pass a month or six weeks, without
taking Toussaint.
He had himself served by the porters, and gave himself out
as a gentleman from the suburbs, living on his funds, and having
a little temporary resting-place in town. This lofty virtue had
three domiciles in Paris for the sake of escaping from the police.
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