Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  ‘Another thing, Reverend Mother.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘If you have any other work of this kind, my brother is exceptionally strong.’

  ‘You must do it as quickly as you can.’

  ‘But I can’t work fast. I’m getting old. That’s why I need help. And I limp.’

  ‘A limp is no sin. It may even be a blessing. The Emperor Henry II, who opposed the antipope Gregorius and restored Benedict VIII, was called by two other names, the Saint and the Cripple.’

  ‘It’s a great thing to have two,’ murmured Fauchelevent, who was indeed a little hard of hearing.

  ‘You had better allow a full hour, Père Fauvent. Be near the High Altar with your crowbar at eleven. The service will begin at midnight, and your work must be completed a good quarter-of-an-hour beforehand.’

  ‘I will do everything in my power to prove my devotion to the community. That is understood. I’ll nail the coffin, and at precisely eleven I shall be in the chapel. The chantry-mothers and Mère Ascension will also be there. Two men would be better still, but no matter, I shall have my crowbar. We will open the vault and lower the coffin and close the vault again. No traces will be left and the Government will suspect nothing. So it is all settled, Reverend Mother?

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘There will be the coffin that is brought in, an empty coffin. What are we to do with that, Père Fauvent?’

  There was a pause while both considered this matter.

  ‘It will be taken out and buried.’

  ‘Empty?’

  Another pause followed, and then Fauchelevent made a gesture dismissing that problem.

  ‘Reverend Mother, I will nail both coffins. No one is allowed in that room except myself. I will cover the empty one with the pall.’

  ‘But when the bearers carry it to the hearse, and when it is lowered into the grave, they will know by the weight that there is nothing in it.’

  ‘The dev—’ burst out Fauchelevent and checked himself as the prioress began to make the sign of the cross with her eyes upon him. He searched hastily for an expedient to cover his lapse.

  ‘I’ll put earth in the coffin, Reverend Mother – enough to make it feel as though there was a body.’

  ‘Yes, that will do. Earth and the flesh are one. You will see to it, Père Fauvent?’

  ‘Most certainly.’

  The prioress’s grave and troubled expression gave way to one of reassurance. She made a sign of dismissal, and Fauchelevent turned towards the door. But as he was about to leave the room she said gently:

  ‘Père Fauvent, I am pleased with you. Tomorrow, after the burial, bring your brother to see me, and tell him to bring his granddaughter.’

  IV

  Stratagem of an ex-prisoner

  The steps of a cripple are like the gropings of the half-blind; they do not quickly reach their destination. Moreover Fauchelevent was thinking. It took him nearly a quarter of an hour to return to the cottage. Cosette was awake and Jean Valjean had seated her by the fire. At the moment when Fauchelevent entered he was pointing to the gardener’s hod hanging on the wall and saying:

  ‘Listen carefully, my love. We have got to leave this place, but we shall come back here and be happy. The gardener will carry you out on his back in that basket. He will take you to a place where a lady will look after you until I come to fetch you. You must be very good and not say a word if you do not want Mme Thénardier to catch you.’

  Cosette nodded gravely.

  Valjean looked round at Fauchelevent.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Everything’s arranged and nothing is. I’ve got leave to take you to the prioress, but before I can bring you in you’ve got to go out. That’s where the trouble lies. The child’s easy enough provided she’ll keep quiet.’

  ‘I can answer for that.’

  ‘But what about you, Père Madeleine?’ Fauchelevent waited hopefully for an answer and finally burst out: ‘Why on earth can’t you go out the way you got in?’

  Jean Valjean simply replied as he had done before:

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘But in that case, how the dev— how the deuce are we to get you out?’ Fauchelevent sat muttering, half to himself. ‘There’s another thing that worries me. I said I’d put earth in it, but that won’t do. If it’s packed tight it’ll be too heavy, and if it’s loose it’ll shift about, it won’t feel like a body. They’ll suspect something.’

  Valjean was staring at him, unable to follow any of this. The old man went on to explain the situation, the resolve of the Chapter that the dead nun should be interred in the chapel vault according to her wish and in defiance of regulations, the part which he was to play in the affair and the stratagem whereby he would present Valjean to the prioress as his brother and Cosette as his niece. But there remained this problem of the empty coffin.

  ‘What coffin are you talking about?’ asked Valjean.

  ‘The municipal coffin. The doctor reports that a nun has died and the Municipality sends round a coffin, and the next day the pallbearers come with a hearse and take her off to the cemetery. But if they lift an empty coffin they’ll know there’s nothing in it.’

  ‘Then you must put something in it.’

  ‘Another dead body? I haven’t got one.’

  ‘A living body.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Me,’ said Jean Valjean.

  Fauchelevent, who was seated, rose up from his chair as though a fire-cracker had exploded beneath it.

  ‘You!’

  ‘Why not?’ Valjean smiled one of his rare smiles which were like sunshine breaking through a winter’s sky. ‘When you told me that Mère Crucifixion had died I said, if you remember, that Père Madeleine was buried alive. That is what it will be.’

  ‘In fact, you’re just joking. You aren’t serious.’

  ‘But indeed I am. We are agreed that I must get out of here unseen. I said that you would have to find the equivalent of a hod and a piece of sacking. And there it is. The hod will be of pine and the sacking will be a black pall.’

  ‘White. The nuns are always buried in white.’

  ‘Well then, white.’

  ‘You’re no ordinary man, Père Madeleine.’

  It was a device typical of the wild and foolhardy contrivances of prison inmates, but seeing it against the background of the disciplined and peaceful life of the convent Fauchelevent was as filled with amazement as if he had seen a heron fishing in the gutter in the Rue Saint-Denis.

  ‘I have got to get out without being seen,’ said Jean Valjean, ‘and this is a way of doing it. But what happens exactly? Where will this empty coffin be?’

  ‘In what is called the mortuary chamber, resting on trestles with a pall over it.’

  ‘How long will it be?’

  ‘Six feet.’

  ‘Tell me about the mortuary chamber.’

  ‘It’s on the ground floor, with a barred window on to the garden, closed by shutters on the outside, and two doors, one to the chapel and the other to the street.’

  ‘Have you the key to both doors?’

  ‘No, only to the convent door. The porter has the other.’

  ‘When does he unlock it?’

  ‘Only to admit the pall-bearers to take away the coffin. When this has been done the door locked again.’

  ‘Who nails the coffin?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And you cover it with the pall?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you be alone?’

  ‘Yes. Except for the police doctor and the pall-bearers, no other man is allowed in the mortuary chamber. It’s written on the wall.’

  ‘Can you hide me in the chamber some time during the night when everyone’s asleep?’

  ‘Not in the chamber itself. But there’s a closet where I keep my burial tools. I have a key to that.’

  ‘What time will the hearse come tomorrow?’

  �
��At about three in the afternoon. The body will be buried a little before nightfall in the Cimetière Vaugirard. It’s some distance away.’

  ‘So I shall have to hide all night and all tomorrow morning in your closet. I shall need food.’

  ‘I can bring you some.’

  ‘And you can nail me in the coffin at two.’

  Fauchelevent sat back, cracking his finger-joints.

  ‘It’s impossible.’

  ‘Nonsense. What is so difficult about putting a few nails in a coffin?’

  What to Fauchelevent appeared inconceivable appeared to Valjean a simple matter. He had known worse things. Whoever has served a long prison sentence has learned the art of adapting his body to the means of escape. Flight, to the prisoner, is like the crisis in a grave illness that either kills or cures. A successful escape is a cure, and what will a man not do to be cured? To be carted away in a nailed box and kept in it for some hours husbanding one’s breath, half-suffocating but not dying, all this was well within the dark powers of Jean Valjean. Indeed, the convict’s expedient of a living man in a coffin has been used even by emperors. If we are to believe the monk Austin Castillejo, it was the means whereby Charles V, wishing to pay a last visit to La Plombe after his abdication, was taken into the Monastery of Saint-Just and out again.

  Recovering his wits, Fauchelevent cried:

  ‘But how are you to breathe? The thought appals me.’

  ‘You have a brace-and-bit, I suppose, or a gimlet. You must bore a few small holes in the lid over my mouth. And you need not nail the lid too tightly.’

  ‘All right. But what if you cough or sneeze?’

  ‘An escaping prisoner does not cough or sneeze. We must make up our minds to it, Père Fauchelevent,’ said Valjean. ‘I must either be caught here or go out on that hearse.’

  We all know the habit of cats of hesitating in an open doorway. Which of us has not said to a cat, ‘Well, come in if you want to?’ There are men who, in moments when a decision is called for, hover uncertainly like the cat, at the risk of being crushed by the closing of the door. These cautious spirits may run greater risks than those who are more daring. Fauchelevent was by nature one of them, but Valjean’s imperturbability was too much for him. He muttered:

  ‘Well, I suppose so. There’s no other way.’

  ‘What worries me,’ said Valjean, ‘is what will happen at the cemetery.’

  ‘Well, at least that’s no problem,’ said Fauchelevent. ‘If you can survive the coffin I can get you out of the grave. The grave-digger’s an old wine-bibber of my acquaintance, Père Mestienne, a real soak. He’ll be easy to handle. I can tell you what will happen. We’ll get there just before dusk, three-quarters of an hour before the cemetery closes. The hearse takes you right to the grave with me walking behind, that being part of my job. I’ll have a few tools in my pocket. They put a rope round the coffin and lower it into the grave, the priest says a few prayers, sprinkles holy water, makes the sign of the cross and then off they go, leaving me and Père Mestienne on our own, we’re friends, you see. Well, perhaps he’s drunk already, or perhaps he isn’t. If he isn’t I say to him, “Come and have a glass while the Bon Coing is still open.” I get him properly soused, which won’t take long because he’s always halfway there; I leave him under the table and borrow his pass to the cemetery and come back alone. Or if he’s drunk enough already I say, “You go on home and I’ll do the job for you.” Either way there’ll be only me and I’ll soon have you out of the grave.’

  Jean Valjean reached out his hand and Fauchelevent clasped it with a touching display of peasant devotion.

  ‘Then that is settled, Père Fauchelevent. We shall have no trouble.’

  ‘Provided nothing goes wrong,’ reflected Fauchelevent. ‘But oh my Lord, if it does!’

  V

  Not even grave-diggers are immortal

  On the following afternoon the rare pedestrians on the Boulevard du Maine removed their hats at the passing of an old-style hearse ornamented with skulls, crossbones, and falling tears. The coffin on the hearse was draped in a white pall embroidered with a black cross so large that it resembled a dead man with his arms hanging. It was followed by a draped carriage in which were a priest in his surplice and a choir-boy wearing a red cap. Two pall-bearers in uniforms of grey with black trimmings walked on either side of the hearse, and behind the carriage walked an old man with a limp, from the pocket of whose workman’s overall there protruded the handle of a hammer, the blade of a chisel, and the double grip of a pair of pincers.

  The procession was making for the Cimetière Vaugirard, which was exceptional among Paris cemeteries in that it had its own customs, besides having a main gateway and a smaller gate, known to the older inhabitants of the quarter who clung to old forms, as the carriage-gate and the foot-gate. As we have said, the Bernardine-Benedictines of the Petit-Picpus had secured the right to be buried in their own corner and at nightfall, the land having formerly belonged to their community. The grave-diggers, being thus obliged to work in the evening, and by darkness in winter, were required to observe special rules. At that time the Paris cemeteries closed at sundown, and the Cimetière Vaugirard had to conform to this regulation like the rest. The carriage-gate and the foot-gate stood side by side, and adjoining them was a small lodge, designed by the architect Perronet, which was the dwelling of the cemetery-keeper. Both wrought-iron gates were closed directly the sun sank behind the dome of the Invalides. If a grave-digger was still in the cemetery he could only get out by means of the special pass issued to him by the Municipality. There was a sort of letter-box in one of the shutters of the keeper’s lodge. He thrust his card through this, and the keeper, hearing it drop, pulled the cord that opened the foot-gate. If he had forgotten to bring his card he shouted his name, and the keeper, who was sometimes in bed and asleep, got up and after identifying him opened the gate with his key. In this event the grave-digger paid a fine of fifteen francs.

  These singularities, so jarring to administrative susceptibilities, brought about the official closing of the cemetery soon after 1830. It was succeeded by the Cimetière de Montparnasse, known as the Eastern Cemetery, but was in some sort perpetuated by the celebrated wine-house Au Bon Coing, of which the sign was a painting of a quince, and which stood on the fringe of the cemetery, with tables on one side and tombstones on the other.

  At the time of which we write the Cimetière Vaugirard was already falling into disuse. Moss was invading it, and its flowers were vanishing. Respectable citizens had little desire to be buried there; it had a smell of pauperdom. Père-Lachaise, for example, was quite another matter; it was like mahogany furniture, a symbol of elegance. Vaugirard was an ancient enclosure laid out like an old French garden, with straight paths flanked by box and juniper and holly, old tombs under old yews and long grass.

  The sun had still not set when the hearse and carriage entered the avenue leading to the cemetery gate, with Fauchelevent limping behind them. Fauchelevent was in a state of high delight. Everything had gone according to plan, the interment of Mère Crucifixion in the vault under the altar, the removal of Cosette, the introduction of Jean Valjean into the mortuary chamber and then into the empty coffin. The two conspiracies in which he had been involved, one with the nuns and the other with Monsieur Madeleine, one at the bidding of the convent and the other unknown to it, had both been carried through without a hitch. Valjean’s massive calm was infectious. Fauchelevent no longer doubted their complete success. What remained to be done was trifling. He had helped the rubicund Père Mestienne, the grave-digger, to get drunk a dozen times in the past two years. He had Père Mestienne in his pocket; he could do what he liked with him, make him dance to whatever tune he chose. Fauchelevent had no misgivings. As they approached the gates he rubbed his big hands together, muttering, ‘What a lark!’

  The procession pulled up at the gates, where the burial-permit had to be shown. During the brief colloquy which ensued between the chief pall-bearer, representin
g the Municipality, and the keeper, a stranger joined the party, taking his place beside Fauchelevent. He was some sort of workman, clad in a smock with large pockets and carrying a pickaxe under his arm.

  Fauchelevent looked at him in some surprise and asked:

  ‘Who are you?’

  The man replied: ‘I’m the grave-digger.’

  The effect on Fauchelevent was as though he had been hit by a cannon-ball.

  ‘The grave-digger!’

  ‘That’s right.”

  ‘But – but Père Mestienne is the grave-digger.’

  ‘Used to be.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  Fauchelevent had been prepared for anything except this, that a grave-digger should die. Yet the thing does happen, even grave-diggers die in the end. In digging the graves of others they prepare the way for their own.

  Fauchelevent stared open-mouthed, finding scarcely the strength to stammer:

  ‘It’s impossible!’

  ‘It’s a fact.’

  ‘But,’ said Fauchelevent weakly, ‘Père Mestienne has always been the grave-digger.’

  ‘Not any more. After Napoleon, Louis XVIII. After Mestienne, Gribier. My name is Gribier.’

  Fauchelevent gazed wanly at this Gribier. He was a tall, thin, sallow man with a face of flawless solemnity. He looked like a failed doctor who had taken up grave-digging. Fauchelevent burst out laughing.

  ‘The things that happen! So Mestienne is dead, poor old Père Mestienne! But Père Lenoir is still alive. Do you know Père Lenoir? – the jug of wine on the counter, the flagon of good red Paris wine. Père Mestienne is dead and I grieve for him. He enjoyed life. But you too, comrade, you enjoy life. Don’t you? We must have a glass together in a little while.’

  The man replied: ‘I’ve had schooling. I reached the fourth grade. I don’t drink.’

  The procession was again in motion, moving along the main avenue of the cemetery. Fauchelevent had fallen a little behind, limping as much from agitation as from infirmity. He was again examining the unexpected Gribier, who was one of those men who look old while still young and although slight of build are very strong.