1.C.8.9. 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:—
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.