Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)
Page 47
The gulf that nature had created between Valjean and Cosette, the gap of fifty years, was bridged by circumstance. The over-riding force of destiny united these two beings so sundered by the years and so akin in what they lacked. Each fulfilled the other, Cosette with her instinctive need of a father, Valjean with his instinctive need of a child. For them to meet was to find, and in the moment when their hands first touched, they joined. Seeing the other, each perceived the other’s need. In the deepest sense of the words it may be said that in their isolation Jean Valjean had been a widower, as Cosette was an orphan; and in this sense he became her father. Her instant trust of him that evening in the wood, when his hand had clasped her own, was, after all, no delusion. The man’s entry into the life of the child had truly been the coming of God …
Valjean had been careful in his choice of a refuge, and he seemed to have found one which afforded them absolute security. The room and inner-room which they occupied possessed the only window looking on to the boulevard, and since this was so they could not be overlooked by their neighbours, either within the house or across the way.
The lower part of No. 50–52, which was used as a storehouse by market-gardeners, had no communication with the single upper storey, being separated from it by a solid floor in which there was no trap or stairway, as it were the diaphragm of the building. The upper storey, as we have said, consisted of a number of rooms and a few attics. Of these only one was occupied, by an old woman who did Valjean’s housework. The rest were empty.
It was this old woman, who went by the title of ‘chief tenant’ but in fact acted as caretaker, who had let the room to him on Christmas Eve. He had told her that he was a gentleman of private means, ruined by the failure of the Spanish loan, and that he proposed to live there with his granddaughter. He had paid six months in advance and instructed her to furnish the room and its inner chamber in the manner we have described, and it was she who had lit the stove and prepared everything for their arrival.
Weeks passed, and the two lived happily in their drab dwelling. Children sing at daybreak as naturally as the birds, and Cosette laughed, chattered, and sang throughout the day. It happened sometimes that Jean Valjean would take her small, red hand, still roughened by chilblains, and kiss it. More accustomed to being beaten, the poor child did not know what to make of this and was plunged in embarrassment. And at moments she grew serious and reflected on the black dress she wore. She was clad no longer in rags but in mourning, emerging from misery into life.
Valjean was teaching her to read and it sometimes occurred to him, as he listened to her spell out the words, that when he had taught himself to read in prison it had been with the idea of putting it to nefarious use. Instead of which, he was passing it on to a child. This brought a singularly gentle smile to his lips, and it led into wide fields of speculation. He had a sense that it was foreordained, that he was serving the purpose of a Being higher than man. To teach Cosette to read, to help her to be happy, this was becoming the mainspring of his life. He talked to her about her mother and taught her to say her prayers. She called him ‘father’, never any other name.
He was content to spend hours watching her and listening to her chatter as she dressed and undressed her doll. Life now seemed to him full of interest, the world seemed good and just; he harboured no grudge against any man, and saw no reason why he should not live to a ripe old age now that this child loved him. He saw a radiant future enchantingly lighted by Cosette. None of us is wholly free from egotism. There were moments when it pleased him to think that she would never be pretty.
This is a personal opinion, but to be wholly frank we must say that we can see no certainty that Jean Valjean, at the point he had reached when he came to love Cosette, would have been able to continue on the path of virtue without that moral support. He had been confronted by new aspects of the malice of men and the sufferings of society, limited aspects depicting only one side of the truth – the lot of women summed up in Fantine, public authority embodied in Javert. He had been sent back to prison, this time for a good deed. Renewed bitterness had assailed him, disgust and weariness, to the point that even the sacred memory of the bishop was perhaps at moments eclipsed. It must certainly have been reborn later, luminous and triumphant, but at that stage it was greatly diminished. Who can be sure that Jean Valjean had not been on the verge of losing heart and giving up the struggle? In loving he recovered his strength. But the truth is that he was no less vulnerable than Cosette. He protected her and she sustained him. Thanks to him she could go forward into life, and thanks to her he could continue virtuous. He was the child’s support and she his mainstay. Sublime, unfathomable marvel of the balance of destiny!
IV
Matters observed by the chief tenant
As a precaution, Jean Valjean never left the house during the day. He walked for an hour or two every evening, sometimes alone but often with Cosette, choosing deserted side-streets, or going into churches after nightfall. The church he visited most often was Saint-Médard, which was the nearest. When he did not take Cosette she stayed with the old woman, the ‘chief tenant’; but nothing delighted her more than to be allowed to go with him. They walked hand-in-hand and he talked quietly to her, enchanted by her gaiety.
The old woman cleaned and cooked and did their shopping. They lived modestly, always with a little fire but like people who are hard-pressed for money. Valjean had added nothing to the furnishings of their apartment, but he had replaced the glass-paned door of Cosette’s inner room with a solid one.
He still wore his yellow coat, black breeches, and battered hat. The people of the neighbourhood supposed him to be very poor, and now and then, when he was out walking, a good-natured housewife would stop and offer him a sou. He accepted it, bowing. But it also sometimes happened that, encountering some poor wretch begging for charity, he would look cautiously about him, furtively thrust a coin into his hand, often silver, and then hurriedly walk on. This was unwise. He became known in the neighbourhood as ‘the beggar who gives alms’.
The ‘chief tenant’, a soured old creature consumed with envious curiosity concerning her neighbours, took a great interest in Jean Valjean without his realizing it. She was hard of hearing, which made her talkative, and she had retained only two of her teeth, one on the upper jaw and one on the lower, which she constantly clicked together. She asked Cosette endless questions which the child could not answer, knowing nothing except that she came from Montfermeil. One day the old woman caught sight of Valjean entering one of the empty rooms on the corridor in what seemed to her a suspicious manner. She crept after him like a cat and watched through a chink in the door, which he had closed. No doubt as an added precaution, he was standing with his back to the doorway. She saw him reach into his pocket and take out a case containing scissors and thread. He then unstitched a part of the lining of his tail-coat and brought out a yellowed piece of paper which he unfolded. The old woman saw to her amazement that it was a thousand-franc note, only the second or third that she had seen in her whole life. She fled in great alarm.
A few minutes later Valjean came up to her and asked her to be so good as to change the note, saying that it was the quarterly instalment of his income which he had drawn the day before. Where had he drawn it? she wondered. He had not left the house until six, by which time the State savings bank would be closed. She set off on her errand turning the matter over in her mind, and the thousand-franc note, embroidered and multiplied, became the subject of many excited conversations among the housewives of the Rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel.
It happened a few days later that Jean Valjean, in his shirtsleeves, was sawing firewood in the corridor, while the old woman tidied his room. She was there alone, Cosette being in the corridor with Valjean. The yellow coat was hanging from a nail and the old woman examined it. The lining had been re-stitched. Prodding it carefully with her fingers she seemed to feel thicknesses of paper in the tails and lapels – undoubtedly more thousand-franc notes!
Meanwhile the winter was drawing to a close.
V
The sound of a dropped coin
There was a beggar with a pitch beside a condemned public well near the church of Saint-Médard on whom Jean Valjean bestowed alms, rarely passing the spot without giving him a few sous. Sometimes he talked to him. But there were those who said that the beggar was a police informer. He was a one-time beadle, aged seventy-five, who constantly intoned prayers.
On a certain evening Valjean went that way unaccompanied by Cosette. The beggar was in his usual place, hard by a street-lamp that had just been lighted, squatting as usual with his body bent forward, apparently praying. Valjean stopped and thrust the customary gift into his hand. As he did so the beggar looked up and gazed searchingly at him, then quickly bowed his head. It had happened in an instant, but it gave Valjean a shock. He seemed to have caught a glimpse, by the light of the street-lamp, not of the vacant, devotional countenance of the beggar, but of quite another face that was already known to him. It was like suddenly encountering a tiger in the dark. He stepped back, frozen with alarm, not knowing whether to stay or run, to speak or be silent, and stared at the beggar who, with his head now hidden beneath a tattered covering, seemed to have forgotten his existence. In that critical moment some instinct of self-preservation restrained Jean Valjean from speaking a word. The beggar looked precisely as usual, the same huddled figure, the same rags. ‘I’m mad,’ thought Valjean. ‘I’m dreaming. The thing’s impossible.’ Nevertheless he returned home in a state of profound disquiet, scarcely daring to admit, even to himself, that the face he thought he had glimpsed was that of Javert.
Pondering the matter that night, he regretted not having spoken to the man so as to oblige him to raise his head again. The next evening he went back and found him there as usual. ‘Good evening, old man,’ he said resolutely and handed him a sou. The beggar looked up and said in a quavering voice, ‘Thank you, thank you, kind sir.’ It was unquestionably the old beadle.
Valjean was so entirely reassured that he could laugh at himself. ‘How the deuce could I have mistaken him for Javert? I’m beginning to see things.’ And he thought no more about it.
At about eight o’clock a few evenings later, when he was giving Cosette a reading-lesson in his room, he heard the street door of the house open and close. This was unusual. The old woman, the house’s only other inhabitant, always went to bed at nightfall to save candles. Jean Valjean signed to Cosette to keep quiet. Someone was coming up the stairs. It was possible that the old woman, feeling unwell, had gone out to the apothecary. The footsteps on the stairs sounded like those of a man; but she wore heavy shoes, and nothing sounds more like the footsteps of a man than those of an old woman. Nevertheless, Valjean blew out his candle.
He sent Cosette to her room, telling her in a low voice to go quietly, and as he was in the act of kissing her on the forehead the footsteps ceased. Jean Valjean stayed silent and motionless, still seated in his chair with his back to the door and holding his breath. After a while, having heard nothing more, he turned cautiously round and saw through a crevice in the door a gleam of light that was like a sinister star in the surrounding darkness. Someone with a candle was outside.
Several minutes passed and then the light vanished. But there was no sound of footsteps, which suggested that the person listening at the door had removed his shoes. Valjean flung himself fully clad on his bed and did not close his eyes all night.
At daybreak, when he was on the verge of falling asleep, he was aroused by the creaking of a door along the corridor; then he heard footsteps sounding like those of the person who had climbed the stairs the night before. He leapt up and put an eye to his keyhole, which was a large one, hoping to catch a glimpse of the intruder. It was a man, as he had suspected, and this time he went past Valjean’s room without stopping. The corridor was too dark for his face to be visible, but as he reached the top of the stairs he was silhouetted against the light coming from outside and Valjean had a full view of him from behind. He saw a tall man clad in a long tail-coat with a cudgel under his arm. A man with the formidable outline of Javert.
Valjean might have tried to get a better look at him through the window overlooking the boulevard, but this would have entailed opening the window, which he was afraid to do. Clearly the man had used a key to enter the house. But who had provided him with a key? What did it mean?
When the old woman came in at seven to do the room, Valjean looked hard at her but asked no questions. Her manner was unchanged. As she was sweeping the floor she said:
‘Did monsieur hear someone come in last night?’
To a person of her age, living on that boulevard, eight o’clock was the same as midnight.
‘Now you mention it, I did,’ he answered casually. ‘Who was it?’
‘It was the new tenant. He has just moved in.’
‘What is his name?’
‘I don’t exactly remember. A Monsieur Dumont or Daumont – something like that.’
‘And what kind of man is he, this Monsieur Dumont?’
She looked at him with her small, foxy eyes and said:
‘He’s a rentier – like you.’
The words may have had no especial intention, but Valjean believed that the discerned one.
When the old woman had left, he made a roll of the coins he kept in a drawer, about a hundred francs, and put it in his pocket. Although he did this with care, so that the chink of money should not be heard, a five-franc piece fell out of his hand and rolled noisily across the floor.
At dusk he went downstairs and looked cautiously up and down the boulevard. It seemed to be entirely deserted, although there could be people hidden behind the trees.
He went upstairs again and said to Cosette, ‘Come along.’
He took her hand and they left the house together.
Book Five
Hunt in Darkness
I
Twists and turns
AT THIS point, in view of what follows and because of matters coming later in the story, a word of explanation is called for.
For some years past the author of this book, who regrets the necessity to speak of himself, has been absent from Paris. During this time the city has been transformed. A new city has arisen which to him is in some sort unknown. He has no need to say that he loves Paris, which is his spiritual home. But in the process of demolition and reconstruction, the Paris of his youth, of which he cherishes the memory, has become a Paris of the past. He must be allowed to talk of that Paris as though it still existed. It may well be that he will refer to a particular house in a particular street where today neither house nor street is to be found. The reader may verify such details if he thinks it worth the trouble. For the author’s part, not knowing the new Paris, he writes of the one he knew and still treasures; it pleases him to suppose that something of it remains, and that not everything has vanished. Going about one’s native land one is inclined to take many things for granted, roads and buildings, roofs, windows and doorways, the walls that shelter strangers, the house one has never entered, trees which are like other trees, pavements which are no more than cobblestones. But when we are distant from them we find that those things have become dear to us, a street, trees and roofs, blank walls, doors and windows; we have entered those houses without knowing it, we have left something of our heart in the very stonework. Those places we no longer see, perhaps will never see again but still remember, have acquired an aching charm; they return to us with the melancholy of ghosts, a hallowed vision and as it were the true face of France. We love and evoke them such as they were; and such as to us they still are, we cling to them and will not hav
e them altered, for the face of our country is our mother’s face.
The author, then, begs leave to treat of the past as though it were the present, and, asking the reader to make allowance for this, continues his tale.
Jean Valjean at once moved off the boulevard and into the side streets, constantly changing direction and now and then turning back to put any possible pursuer off the scent. It was the manoeuvre of the hunted stag, known to huntsmen as ‘doubling in his tracks’, which has the advantage, in country where a visible trail is left, that one set of tracks covers another.
The night was one of full moon, and this suited him. The moon, still low on the horizon, broke up the streets in patches of light and darkness. He could keep to the shadows and see what went on in the light. Perhaps he was too much inclined to ignore what might be lurking in the darkness; but nevertheless, in the network of deserted streets round the Rue de Poliveau, he felt reasonably sure that he was not being followed.
Cosette walked unquestioningly beside him. The hardships of the first six years of her life had taught her a passive stoicism. Moreover, and we shall have occasion to refer to this again, she had grown accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of the man and the unexpectedness of life in general, and she felt safe in his protection.
Jean Valjean knew no more than she where they were going, trusting to God as she trusted to himself. He, too, felt that his hand clasped that of a Being greater than himself, and it was as though some invisible presence were guiding him. But he had no clear idea of what he should do next, no considered plan. He was not even sure that the man he had seen was Javert, and if it were it did not follow that Javert had known him for Jean Valjean. Was he not disguised? Was he not believed to be dead? But strange things had happened in the past few hours and he could not disregard them. He was resolved never to return to the Gorbeau tenement. Like an animal driven from its lair he was looking for a temporary refuge, while he sought a safer lodging.