The purse fell on Père Mabeuf’s foot and awakened him. He picked it up and opened it in amazement. It had two compartments, in one of which was some small change while in the other there were six napoleons.
In high excitement Monsieur Mabeuf took it to his housekeeper.
‘It must have fallen from Heaven,’ said Mère Plutarque.
Book Five
Of Which the End Does Not Resemble
the Beginning
I
Solitude and the barracks
COSETTE’S STATE of unhappiness, so acute and poignant only a few months earlier, was growing less, even in her own despite. Youth and springtime, her love for her father, the brightness of birds and flowers, were by gradual degrees fostering in that young and virginal spirit something akin to forgetfulness. Did it mean that the fire was quite extinguished, or were the embers still glowing beneath a crust of ashes? The fact is that now she scarcely ever felt any sharp stab of pain. One day, recalling Marius, she thought, ‘I don’t even think of him!’
It was a few days after this that she observed, passing their garden gate, a handsome young cavalry officer with a wasp waist and a waxed moustache, fair hair and blue eyes, and with a sabre at his side, splendidly elegant in his uniform, a dashing, vainglorious figure, in all respects the opposite of Marius. He was smoking a cigar. Cosette supposed that he belonged to the regiment then quartered in the barracks in the Rue de Babylone.
She saw him again next day, and noted the time. After that – could it have been by accident? – she saw him almost daily as he sauntered past.
The young man’s brother officers were not slow to detect that the overgrown garden behind that tiresome rococo gate harboured a good-looking wench who nearly always contrived to be on hand when the lieutenant (whom the reader has already met and whose name was Théodule Gillenormand) went that way.
‘There’s a girl who’s got her eye on you,’ they said. ‘You ought to give her a glance.’ To which he replied: ‘Do you really think I’ve time to stare at all the girls who stare at me?’
This happened at precisely the time when Marius, in the depths of despair, was saying to himself, ‘If I could see her just once more before I die!’ If he had had his wish and seen Cosette gazing at the young lancer he would have died on the spot.
Which of them was to be blamed? Neither. Marius was one of those who embrace sorrow and dwell in it; but Cosette was one of those who feel it deeply but recover.
Cosette, in any case, was going through that dangerous stage, fetal to womanhood left to its own devices, when the heart of a lonely girl resembles the tendrils of a vine which may attach itself, as chance dictates, to a marble column or an inn-sign. It is a brief, decisive phase, crucial for any motherless girl whether she be rich or poor, for riches are no defence against error. Misalliance may occur at any level, and the real misalliance is between souls. An unknown young man without birth or fortune may nevertheless be the marble pillar sustaining a temple of lofty sentiments and splendid thought, just as your opulent man of the world, if one looks not at his elegant exterior but at his inner nature, which is the special domain of women, may be no better than a witless wooden post, the resort of violent, drunken passions – an inn-sign, in short.
What was really the state of Cosette’s heart? It was a state of passion assuaged or slumbering; of love in flux, limpid and gleaming, tremulous to a certain depth, but sombre below this. The picture of the handsome officer was reflected on the surface, but did a memory still linger in the deepest depths? Perhaps she herself did not know.
And then a singular incident occurred.
II
Cosette’s alarm
During the first fortnight of April Jean Valjean went on a journey. As we know, it was a thing he occasionally did, at very long intervals. He would be away for a day or two, three at the most. No one knew where he went, not even Cosette; but on one occasion she had accompanied him in a fiacre as far as the corner of a small cul-de-sac bearing the name of the Impasse de la Planchette. Here he had got out and the fiacre had taken Cosette back to the Rue de Baby-lone. As a rule it was when the household was running short of money that he went on these excursions.
So Valjean was away, having said that he would be back in three days’ time. Cosette spent the evening alone in the salon, and to relieve the monotony she sat down at her piano-organ and played and sang the chorus, ‘Huntsmen astray in the woods!’ from Weber’s opera Euryanthe, which is perhaps the most beautiful piece of music ever composed. When she had finished she sat musing.
Suddenly she thought she heard the sound of footsteps in the garden.
It was ten o’clock. Her father was away and Toussaint was in bed. She went to one of the closed shutters and stood listening with her ear to it.
The footsteps sounded like those of a man walking very softly. Cosette ran up to her bedroom, opened the peep-hole in the shutter, and peered out. It was a night of full moon and everything was clearly visible.
There was no one to be seen. She opened the window. The garden was quite empty, and what little could be seen of the street was deserted as usual.
Cosette decided that she was mistaken and that the sound she thought she had heard had been simply an hallucination conjured up by Weber’s dark, magnificent chorus, with its terrifying depths, evoking in the minds of its audience the magical forest in which can be heard the snapping of twigs beneath the restless feet of huntsmen half-seen in the dusk.
She thought no more about it; but then, Cosette was not nervous by nature. There was gipsy blood in her veins, that of a barefooted adventuress. We may recall that she was more like a lark than a dove. She had a wild but courageous heart.
At a somewhat earlier hour next day, when it was only beginning to grow dark, she went out into the garden. Intruding upon her random thoughts, she fancied that now and then she heard a sound like that of the previous night, as though someone were walking under the trees quite close to her; but she told herself that nothing more resembled the sound of footsteps in the grass than the sound of two branches rubbing together, and, in any case, she could see nothing.
She emerged from the ‘shrubbery’ and began to cross the small patch of grass between it and the steps of the villa. The moon, which was at her back, threw her shadow across the grass as she entered its light. And suddenly she stood still, terror-struck.
Beside her own shadow was another and singularly alarming one, a shadow wearing a round hat; it looked like that of a man walking a few paces behind her.
She stayed motionless for a moment, unable to cry out or even to turn her head. Finally, summoning all her courage, she looked round.
There was no one to be seen; and, looking down, she saw that the shadow had vanished. She went bravely back into the shrubbery and searched it, venturing even as far as the gate, but she found nothing.
She was truly alarmed. Could this be another hallucination, the second in two days? She might believe in one hallucination, but to believe in two was not so easy. And, most disturbing, it could not have been a ghost. Ghosts do not wear round hats. Jean Valjean returned home next day and she told him what had happened, expecting to be reassured and to hear him say lightly, ‘You’re a silly child.’ But instead he looked troubled. ‘It can’t have been anything,’ he said.
He made an excuse to leave her and went out into the garden, and she saw him carefully examining the gate.
She awoke during the night, and this time she was certain. She could distinctly hear the sound of footsteps beneath her window. She ran to the peep-hole in the shutter and looked out. A man was standing in the garden with a heavy cudgel in his hand. She was about to utter a cry when the moonlight fell upon his face. It was her father. She got back into bed thinking, ‘He must be very worried!’
Jean Valjean passed all that night, and the two nights which followed, in the garden. She saw him through her peep-hole.
On the third night, at about one o’clock, when the moon was beginning t
o wane and rising later, she was awakened by a great burst of laughter and her father’s voice calling to her, ‘Cosette!’ She sprang out of bed, put on her dressing-gown and opened the window. Her father was standing on the lawn.
‘I woke you up to tell you everything’s all right,’ he said. ‘Look. Here’s your shadow in a round hat!’
He pointed to a shadow on the grass which did indeed look not unlike that of a man wearing a round hat. It was that of a cowled metal chimney belonging to a near-by house.
Cosette, too, began to laugh, with all her fears dispelled, and at breakfast next morning she was very gay on the subject of gardens haunted by the ghosts of chimney-stacks.
Jean Valjean recovered all his calm, and Cosette herself did not give much thought to the question of whether the chimney was really in the line of the shadow she had seen, or thought she had seen, or whether the moon was at the same point in the sky; nor did she question the singular behaviour of a chimney that beats a retreat when it is in danger of being caught – for the shadow had disappeared when she turned back to look for it, she was certain of that. She was quite convinced, and the notion that a stranger had entered their garden vanished from her thoughts.
But a few days later another incident occurred.
III
The remarks of Toussaint
There was a stone seat in the garden, close by the railing along the street, sheltered by a hedgerow from the gaze of the passer-by but so near to it that it might have been touched, at a pinch, by anyone reaching an arm through the railing and the hedge. Cosette was sitting on it one evening that April when Valjean was out. She was musing, overtaken by that feeling of sadness that assails us in the dusk and which perhaps arises – who can say? – from the mystery of the grave, of which we have intimations at that hour. Perhaps her mother, Fantine, lurked somewhere in the shadows.
The breeze was freshening. She got up and walked slowly round the garden, through the dew-soaked grass, reflecting idly, in her mood of melancholy abstraction, that she should wear thicker shoes when she went out at that time or she would catch cold.
She returned to the bench, but as she was in the act of sitting down she noticed, in the place where she had been sitting before, a fairly large stone which had not been there a few minutes earlier. She stood looking at it, and it occurred to her, since the stone could not have got there by itself, that it must have been placed there by someone reaching through the hedge. The thought startled her, and this time she was genuinely alarmed. There could be no doubt about the reality of the stone. She did not touch it, but ran back into the house without looking round and hurriedly closed and barred the shutters and bolted the front door. She said to Toussaint:
‘Has my father come home?’
‘Not yet, Mademoiselle.’
(We have mentioned that Toussaint had a stammer, and we hope to be forgiven for not constantly reproducing it. We dislike the musical notation of an infirmity.)
Valjean, with his fondness for solitary nocturnal walks, often did not return until late at night.
‘You’re always careful to see that the shutters are properly barred, are you not, Toussaint?’ said Cosette. ‘Especially on the garden side. And you put those little metal pegs in the rings?’
‘Of course, Mademoiselle.’
It was a duty that Toussaint never neglected. Cosette was well aware of the fact, but she could not refrain from adding:
‘This is a very lonely spot.’
‘Well, that’s the truth,’ said Toussaint ‘We could be murdered in our beds before you could say knife, especially with Monsieur not sleeping in the villa. But you needn’t worry; I lock the place up as though it were a prison. It’s not a nice thing, two women alone in a house. Just imagine. You wake suddenly and there’s a man in your room, and he tells you to hold your tongue while he cuts your throat! It isn’t so much dying one’s afraid of, because we’ve all got to come to that, but it’s dreadful to think of being touched by those brutes. Besides which, their knives are probably blunt.’
‘That will do,’ said Cosette. ‘Just make sure of our locks and bars.’
Terrified by this vividly improvised drama, and perhaps recalling her visions of a week or two before, Cosette was afraid to ask Toussaint to go out and look at the stone on the garden bench, from fear that if they opened the front door a party of villains would burst in. After locking and bolting every door and window in the house, and sending Toussaint to inspect the attics and cellars, she locked herself in her bedroom, peered under the bed and that night slept badly, haunted in her dreams by a stone the size of a mountain that was filled with caves.
But the next morning – it being the property of the sunrise to cause us to laugh at our terrors of the night, and our laughter being always proportionate to our fears – Cosette dismissed the whole thing, saying to herself: ‘What was I thinking of? It’s the same as those footsteps I thought I heard, and the shadow that was nothing but a chimney-stack. Am I turning into a frightened kitten?’ And the sunlight, shining through the half-opened shutters and glowing redly through the curtains, so reassured her that she brushed it all away, even the stone. ‘It didn’t exist, any more than the man in the round hat. I simply imagined it.’
She dressed and ran out into the garden to the bench, and a shiver ran down her spine. The stone was still there.
But her alarm lasted only for a moment. What is terror after dark becomes merely curiosity by daylight. ‘Well,’ she thought. ‘Let me see.’
The stone was quite large. She picked it up and saw that there was something underneath it. It was a white envelope, unaddressed and unsealed. But it was not empty. There was something that looked like a sheaf of folded paper inside. Cosette explored it with her fingers, with a feeling that was no longer one of fear or simple curiosity, but rather the dawning of a new apprehension. Extracting the contents, she found them to be a small paper-covered notebook of which every page was numbered and bore a few lines of very small and, she thought, very elegant handwriting. She looked for a name but found none; the writing was unsigned. For whom was it intended? Presumably for herself, since it had been deposited on her garden bench. Where had it come from? Seized with an overpowering fascination, she sought in vain to look away from the written pages fluttering in her hand, staring at the sky and at the street, at the acacias, bathed in sunshine, and at the pigeons flying over a near-by roof; but her gaze was drawn irresistibly back to the manuscript; she had to know what it had to say.
What follows is what she read.
IV
The heart beneath the stone
The reduction of the universe to the compass of a single being, and the extension of a single being until it reaches God – that is love.
Love is the salute of the angels to the stars.
How sad the heart is when rendered sad by love!
How great is the void created by the absence of the being who alone fills the world. How true it is that the beloved becomes God. It is understandable that God would grow jealous if the Father of All Things had not so evidently created all things for the soul, and the soul for love.
It needs no more than a smile, glimpsed beneath a hat of white crêpe adorned with lilac, for the soul to be transported into the palace of dreams.
God is behind all things, but all things conceal God. Objects are black and human creatures are opaque. To love a person is to render them transparent.
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars – all the beauties of creation. And why should they not? All the works of God are designed to serve love,
and love has the power to charge all nature with its messages.
Oh, spring, you are a letter which I send her!
The future belongs far more to the heart than to the mind. Love is the one thing that can fill and fulfil eternity. The infinite calls for the inexhaustible.
Love partakes of the soul, being of the same nature. Like the soul, it is the divine spark, incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is the fiery particle that dwells in us, immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine and nothing extinguish. We feel its glow in the marrow of our bones and see its brightness reaching to the depths of Heaven.
Oh, love, adoration, the rapture of two spirits which know each other, two hearts which are exchanged, two looks which interpenetrate! You will come to me, will you not, this happiness! To walk together in solitude! Blessed and radiant days! I have sometimes thought that now and then moments may be detached from the lives of angels to enrich the lives of men.
God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love except to make it unending. After a lifetime of love an eternity of love is indeed an increase; but to heighten the intensity, the ineffable happiness that love confers upon the spirit in this world, is an impossibility, even for God. God is the wholeness of Heaven; love is the wholeness of man.
We look up at a star for two reasons, because it shines and because it is impenetrable. But we have at our side a gentler radiance and a greater mystery, that of women.
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 95
