Basque, without waiting for Jean Valjean to come up to him, addressed him as follows:
“Monsieur the Baron told me to ask monsieur whether he desires to go upstairs or to remain below?”
“To remain below,” answered Jean Valjean.
Basque, who was moreover absolutely respectful, opened the door of the basement room and said: “I will inform madame.”
The room which Jean Valjean entered was an arched and damp basement, used as a cellar when necessary, looking upon the street paved with red tiles, and dimly lighted by a window with an iron grating.
The room was not of those which are harassed by the brush, the duster, and the broom. In it the dust was tranquil. There the persecution of the spiders had not been organised. A fine web, broadly spread out, very black, adorned with dead flies, ornamented one of the window-panes. The room, small and low, was furnished with a pile of empty bottles heaped up in one corner. The wall had been washed with a wash of yellow ochre, which was scaling off in large flakes. At the end was a wooden mantel, painted black, with a narrow shelf. A fire was kindled, which indicated that somebody had anticipated Jean Valjean’s answer:
To remain below.
Two arm-chairs were placed at the corners of the fireplace. Between the chairs was spread, in guise of a carpet, an old bed-side rug, showing more warp than wool.
Suddenly he started up. Cosette was behind him.
He had not seen her come in, but he had felt that she was coming.
He turned. He gazed at her. She was adorably beautiful. But what he looked upon with that deep look, was not her beauty but her soul.
“Ah, well!” exclaimed Cosette, “father, I knew that you were singular, but I should never have thought this. What an idea! Marius tells me that it is you who wish me to receive you here.”
“Yes, it is I.”
“I expected the answer. Well, I warn you that I am going to make a scene. Let us begin at the beginning. Father, kiss me.”
And she offered her cheek.
Jean Valjean remained motionless.
“You do not stir. I see it. You act guilty. But it is all the same, I forgive you. Jesus Christ said: ‘Offer the other cheek.’ Here it is.”
And she offered the other cheek.
Jean Valjean did not move. It seemed as if his feet were nailed to the floor.
“This is getting serious,” said Cosette. “What have I done to you? I declare I am confounded. You owe me amends. You will dine with us.”
“I have dined.”
“That is not true. I will have Monsieur Gillenormand scold you. Grandfathers are made to scold fathers. Come. Go up to the parlour with me. Immediately.”
“Impossible.”
Cosette here lost ground a little. She ceased to order and passed to questions.
“But why not? and you choose the ugliest room in the house to see me in. It is horrible here.”
“You know, madame, I am peculiar, I have my whims.”
Cosette clapped her little hands together.
“Madame! Still again! What does this mean?”
Jean Valjean fixed upon her that distressing smile to which he sometimes had recourse:
“You have wished to be madame. You are so.”
“Not to you, father.”
“Don’t call me father any more.”
“What.”
“Call me Monsieur Jean. Jean, if you will.”
“You are no longer father? I am no longer Cosette? Monsieur Jean? What does this mean? but these are revolutions, these are! what then has happened? look me in the face now. And you will not live with us! And you will not have my room! What have I done to you? what have I done to you? Is there anything the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Well then?”
“All is as usual.”
“Why do you change your name?”
“You have certainly changed yours.”
He smiled again with that same smile and added:
“Since you are Madame Pontmercy I can surely be Monsieur Jean.”
“I don’t understand anything about it. It is all nonsense; I shall ask my husband’s permission for you to be Monsieur Jean. I hope that he will not consent to it. You make me a great deal of trouble. You may have whims, but you must not grieve your darling Cosette. It is wrong. You have no right to be naughty, you are too good.”
He made no answer.
She seized both his hands hastily and, with an irresistible impulse, raising them towards her face, she pressed them against her neck under her chin, which is a deep token of affection.
“Oh!” said she to him, “be good!”
And she continued:
“This is what I call being good: being nice, coming to stay here, there are birds here as well as in the Rue Plumet, living with us, leaving that hole in the Rue de l‘Homme Armé, not giving us riddles to guess, being like other people, dining with us, breakfasting with us, being my father.”
He disengaged his hands.
“You have no more need of a father, you have a husband.”
Cosette could not contain herself.
“I no more need of a father! To things like that which have no common sense, one really doesn’t know what to say!”
“If Toussaint was here,” replied Jean Valjean, like one who is in search of authorities and who catches at every straw, “she would be the first to acknowledge that it is true that I always had my peculiar ways. There is nothing new in this. I have always liked my dark corner.”
“But it is cold here. We can’t see clearly. It is horrid, too, to want to be Monsieur Jean. I don’t want you to talk so to me.”
“Just now, on my way here,” answered Jean Valjean, “I saw a piece of furniture in the Rue Saint Louis. At a cabinet maker’s. If I were a pretty woman, I should make myself a present of that piece of furniture. A very fine toilet table; in the present style. What you call rosewood, I think. It is inlaid. A pretty large glass. There are drawers in it. It is handsome.”
“Oh! the ugly bear!” replied Cosette.
And with a bewitching sauciness, pressing her teeth together and separating her lips, she blew upon Jean Valjean. It was a Grace copying a kitten.
“I am furious,” she said. “Since yesterday, you all make me rage. Everybody spites me. I don’t understand. You don’t defend me against Marius. Marius doesn’t uphold me against you, I am all alone. I arrange a room handsomely. If I could have put the good God into it, I would have done it. You leave me my room upon my hands. My tenant bankrupts me. I order Nicolette to have a nice little dinner. Nobody wants your dinner, madame. And my father Fauchelevent, wishes me to call him Monsieur Jean, and to receive him in a hideous, old, ugly, mouldy cellar, where the walls have a beard, and where there are empty bottles for vases, and spiders’ webs for curtains. You are singular, I admit, that is your way, but a truce is granted to people who get married. You should not have gone back to being singular immediately. So you are going to be well satisfied with your horrid Rue de l‘Homme Armé. I was very forlorn there, myself! What have you against me? You give me a great deal of trouble. Fie!”
And, growing suddenly serious, she looked fixedly at Jean Valjean, and added:
“So you don’t like it that I am happy?”
Artlessness, unconsciously, sometimes penetrates very deep. This ques tion, simple to Cosette, was severe to Jean Valjean. Cosette wished to scratch; she tore.
Jean Valjean grew pale. For a moment he did not answer, then, with an indescribable accent and talking to himself, he murmured:
“Her happiness was the aim of my life. Now, God may beckon me away. Cosette, you are happy; my time is full.”
“Ah, you have called me Cosette!” exclaimed she.
And she sprang upon his neck.
Jean Valjean, in desperation, clasped her to his breast wildly. It seemed to him almost as if he were taking her back.
“Thank you, father!” said Cosette to him.
The transport was becoming poignant to Jean Valjean. He gently put away Cosette’s arms, and took his hat.
“Well?” said Cosette.
Jean Valjean answered:
“I will leave you, madame; they are waiting for you.”
And, from the door, he added:
“I called you Cosette. Tell your husband that that shall not happen again. Pardon me.”
Jean Valjean went out, leaving Cosette astounded at that enigmatic farewell.
2
OTHER STEPS BACKWARD
THE FOLLOWING DAY, at the same hour, Jean Valjean came.
Cosette put no questions to him, was no longer astonished, no longer exclaimed that she was cold, no longer talked of the parlour, she avoided saying either father or Monsieur Jean. She let him speak as he would. She allowed herself to be called madame. Only she betrayed a certain diminution of joy. She would have been sad, if sadness had been possible for her.
It is probable that she had had one of those conversations with Marius, in which the beloved man says what he pleases, explains nothing, and satisfies the beloved woman. The curiosity of lovers does not go very far beyond their love.
The basement room had been cleaned up a little. Basque had suppressed the bottles, and Nicolette the spiders.
Every succeeding morrow brought Jean Valjean at the same hour. He came every day, not having the strength to take Marius’ words otherwise than literally. Marius made his arrangements, so as to be absent at the hours when Jean Valjean came. The house became accustomed to M. Fauchelevent’s new mode of life. Toussaint aided:
“Monsieur always was just so,”
she repeated. The grandfather issued this decree: “He is an original!” and all was said. Besides, at ninety, no further tie is possible; all is juxtaposition; a new-comer is an annoyance. There is no more room; all the habits are formed.
Nobody caught a glimpse of the nether gloom. Who could have guessed such a thing, moreover? There are such marshes in India; the water seems strange, inexplicable, quivering when there is no wind; agitated where it should be calm. You see upon the surface this causeless boiling; you do not perceive the Hydra crawling at the bottom.
Certain strange habits, coming at the time when others are gone, shrinking away while others make a display, wearing on all occasions what might be called a wall-coloured cloak, seeking the solitary path, preferring the deserted street, not mingling in conversations, avoiding gatherings and festivals, seeming well-off but living like a pauper, coming in by the side door, going up the back stairs, all these insignificant peculiarities, wrinkles, air bubbles, fugitive folds on the surface, often come from a formidable deep.
Several weeks passed thus. A new life gradually took possession of Cosette; the relations which marriage creates, the visits, the care of the house, the pleasures, those grand affairs. Cosette’s pleasures were not costly; they consisted in a single one: being with Marius. Going out with him, staying at home with him, this was the great occupation of her life. It was a joy to them for ever new, to go out arm in arm, in the face of the sun, in the open street, without hiding, in sight of everybody, all alone with each other. Cosette had one vexation. Toussaint could not agree with Nicolette, the wedding of two old maids being impossible, and went away. The grandfather was in good health; Marius argued a few cases now and then; Aunt Gillenormand peacefully led by the side of the new household, that lateral life which was enough for her. Jean Valjean came every day
The disappearance of familiarity, the madame, the Monsieur Jean, all this made him different to Cosette. The care which he had taken to detach her from him, succeeded with her. She became more and more cheerful, and less and less affectionate. However, she still loved him very much, and he felt it. One day she suddenly said to him, “You were my father, you are no longer my father, you were my uncle, you are no longer my uncle, you were Monsieur Fauchelevent, you are Jean. Who are you then? I don’t like all that. If I did not know you were so good, I should be afraid of you.”
He still lived in the Rue de l‘Homme Armé, unable to resolve to move further from the neighborhood in which Cosette dwelt.
At first he stayed with Cosette only a few minutes, then went away.
Little by little he got into the habit of making his visits longer. One would have said that he took advantage of the example of the days which were growing longer: he came earlier and went away later.
One day Cosette inadvertently said to him: “Father.” A flash of joy illu minated Jean Valjean’s gloomy old face. He replied to her: “Say Jean.” “Ah! true,” she answered with a burst of laughter, “Monsieur Jean.” “That is right,” said he, and he turned away that she might not see him wipe his eyes.
3
THEY REMEMBER THE GARDEN IN THE RUE PLUMET
THAT WAS the last time. From that last gleam onward, there was complete extinction. No more familiarity, no more good-day with a kiss, never again that word so intensely sweet: Father! he was, upon his own demand and through his own complicity, driven in succession from every happiness; and he had this misery, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he had been obliged afterwards to lose her again little by little.
The eye at last becomes accustomed to the light of a cellar. In short, to have a vision of Cosette every day sufficed him. His whole life was concentrated in that hour. He sat by her side, he looked at her in silence, or rather he talked to her of the years long gone, of her childhood, of the convent, of her friends of those days.
One afternoon—it was one of the early days of April, already warm, still fresh, the season of the great cheerfulness of the sunshine, the gardens which lay about Marius’ and Cosette’s windows felt the emotion of awakening, the hawthorn was beginning to peep, a jewelled array of gilliflowers displayed themselves upon the old walls, the rosy wolf-mouths gaped in the cracks of the stones, there was a charming beginning of daisies and buttercups in the grass, the white butterflies of the year made their first appearance, the wind, that minstrel of the eternal wedding, essayed in the trees the first notes of that grand auroral symphony which the old poets called the
renouveau
—Marius said to Cosette: “We have said that we would go to see our garden in the Rue Plumet again. Let us go. We must not be ungrateful.” And they flew away like two swallows towards the spring. This garden in the Rue Plumet had the effect of the dawn upon them. They had behind them in life already something which was like the spring time of their love. The house in the Rue Plumet being taken on a lease, still belonged to Cosette. They went to this garden and this house. In it they found themselves again; they forgot themselves. At night, at the usual hour, Jean Valjean came to the Rue des Filles du Calvaire. “Madame has gone out with monsieur, and has not returned yet,” said Basque to him. He sat down in silence, and waited an hour. Cosette did not return. He bowed his head and went away.