I. THE SECRET HOUSE

Towards the middle of the last century, a velvet-capped president of the Parlement of Paris having a
mistress and concealing it, for in those days the great lords exhibited their mistresses and the bour-
geois concealed theirs, had "une petite mason" built in the Faubourg Saint Germain, in the deserted
Rue de Blomet, now called the Rue Plumet, not far from the spot which then went by the name of the
Combat des Animaux.

This was a summer-house of but two stories; two rooms on the ground floor, two chambers in the second
story, a kitchen below, a boudoir above, a garret next the roof, the whole fronted by a garden with a
large iron grated gate opening on the street. This garden contained about an acre. This was all that
the passers-by could see; but in the rear of the house there was a small yard, at the further end of
which there was a low building, two rooms only and a cellar, a convenience intended to conceal a child
and nurse in case of need. This building communicated, from the rear, by a masked door opening sec-
retly, with a long narrow passage, paved, winding, open to the sky, bordered by two high walls, and
which, concealed with wonderful art, and as it were lost between the inclosures of the gardens and
fields, all the corners and turnings of which it followed, came to an end at another door, also con-
cealed, which opened a third of a mile away, almost in another quartier, upon the unbuilt end of
the Rue de Babylon°

The president came in this way, so that those even who might have watched and followed him, and those
who might have observed that the president went somewhere mysteriously every day, could not have
suspected that going to the Rue de Rithylone was going to the Rue Blomet. By skilful purchases of
land, the ingenious magistrate was enabled to have this secret mute to his house made upon his own
ground, and consequently without supervision. He had afterwards sold off the lots of ground bordering
on the passage in little parcels for flower and vegetable gardens, and the proprietors of these lots
of ground supposed on both sides that what they saw was a partition wall, and did not even suspect
the existence of that long ribbon of pavement winding between two walls among. their beds and fruit
trees. The birds alone saw this curi-osity. It is probable that the larks and the sparrows of the
last century had a good deal of chattering about the president.

The house, built of stone in the Mansard style, wainscoted, and furnished in the Watteau style, rock-
work within, peruke without, walled about with a triple hedge of flowers, had a discreet, coquettish,
and solemn appearance about it, suitable to a caprice of love and of magistracy.

This house and this passage, which have since disappeared, were still in existence fifteen years ago.
In '93, a coppersmith bought the house to pull it down, but not being able to pay the price for it,
the nation sent him into bankruptcy. So that it was the house Out pulled down the coppersmith. There-
after the house remained empty, and fell slowly into ruin, like all dwellings to which the presence of
man no longer communicates life. It remained, furnished with its old furniture, and always for sale
or to let, and the ten or twelve persons who Fussed through the Rue Plumet in the course of a year
were notified of this by a yellow and illegible piece of paper which had hung upon the railing of the
garden since 1810.

Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers might have noticed that the paper bad disap-
peared, and that, also, tin shutters of the upper story were open. The house was indeed occupied.
The windows had "little curtains," a sign that there was a woman there.

In the month of October 1829, a man of a certain age had ark mired and hired the house as it stood,
including, of course, the building in the rear, and the passage which ran out to the Rue de Baby-
lone. He had the secret openings of the two doors of this passage repaired. The house, as we have
just said, was still nearly furnished with the president's old furniture. The new tenant had order-
ed a few repairs, added here and there what was lacking, put in a few flags in the yard, a few bricks
in the basement, a few steps in in the staircase, a few tiles in the floors, a few panes in the windows,
and finally came and installed himself with a young girl and an aged servant, without any noise,
rather like somebody stealing in than like a man who enters his own house. The neighbours did not
OM about it, for the reason that there were no neighbours.

This tenant, to partial extent, was Jean Valjean; the young girl was Cosette. The servant was a spin-
ster named Toussaint, whom Jean Valjean had saved from the hospital and misery. and who was old,
stuttering, and a native of a province, three qualities which had determined Jean Valiant to take
her with him. He hired the house under the name of Monsieur Fauchclevent, gentleman. In what has
been related hitherto, the reader doubtless recognised Jean Valjean even before Thenardier did.

Why had Jean Valjean left the convent of the Petit Picpus? What had happened?

Nothing had happened.

As we remember, Jean Valjean was happy in the convent, so happy that his conscience at last began
to be troubled. He saw Cosette every day, he felt paternity springing up and developing within him
more and more, he brooded this child with his soul, he said to himself that she was his, that nothing
could take her from him, that this would be so indefinitely, that certainly she would become a nun,
being every day gently led on towards it, that thus the convent was henceforth the universe to her
as well as to him, that he would grow old there and she would grow up there, that she would grow old
there and he would die there; that finally, ravishing hope, no separation was possible. In reflecting
upon this, he at last began to find difficulties. He questioned himself. He asked himself if all
this happiness were really his own, if it were not made up of the happiness of another, of the hap-
piness of this child whom he was appropriating and plundering, he, an old man; if this was not a rob-
bery? He said to himself that this child had a right to know what life was before renouncing it; that
to cut her off, in advance, and, in some sort, without consulting her, from all pleasure, under pre-
tence of saving her from all trial, to take advantage of her ignorance and isolation to give her an
artificial vocation, was to outrage a human creature and to lie to God. And who knows but, thinking
over all this some day, and being a nun with regret, Cosette might come to hate him! a final thought,
which was almost selfish and less heroic than the others, but which was insupportable to him. He re-
solved to leave the convent.

He resolved it, he recognised with despair that it must be done. As to objections, there were none.
Five years of sojourn between those four walls, and of absence from among men, had necessarily des-
troyed or dispersed the elements of alarm. He might return tranquilly among men. He had grown old,
and all had changed. Who would recognize him now? And then, to look at the worst, there was no danger
save for himself, and he had no right to condemn Cosette to the cloister for the reason that he had
been condemned to the galleys. What, moreover, is danger in presence of duty? Finally, nothing pre-
vented him from being prudent, and taking proper precautions.

As to Cosette's education, it was almost finished and complete. His determination once formed, he
awaited an opportunity. It was not slow to present itself. Old Fauchelevent died.

Jean Valjean asked an audience of the reverend prioress, and told her that having received a small
inheritance on the death of his brother; which enabled him to live henceforth without labour, he
would leave the service of the convent, and take away his daughter but that, as it was not just
that Cosette, not taking her vows, shook have been educated gratuitously, he humbly begged the
reverent prioress to allow hint to offer the community, as indemnity for th five years which Cos-
ette had passed there, the sum of five thousand francs.

Thus Jean Valjean left the convent of the Perpetual Adoration.

On leaving the convent, he took in his own hands, and would not entrust to any assistant, the little
box, the key of which he always had about him. This box puzzled Cosette, on account of the odour
of embalming which came from it.

Let us say at once, that henceforth this box never left him more. He always had it in his room. It
was the first, and sometimes the only thing that he carried away in his changes of abode. Cosette
laughed about it, and called this box the inseparable, saying: "I am jealous of it."

Jean Valjean nevertheless did not appear again in the open city without deep anxiety.

He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet, and buried himself it it. He was henceforth in posses-
sion of the name of Ultimus Fauchelevent.

At the same time he hired two other lodgings in Paris, in order to attract less attention than if he
always remained in the same quartier, to be able to change his abode on occasion, at the slightest
anxiety which he might feel, and finally, that he might not again find himself in such a strait as on
the night when he had so miraculously escaped from Javert. These two lodgings were two very

III. FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS*

The garden thus abandoned to itself for more than half a century, had become very strange and
very pleasant. The passers-by of forty years ago stopped in the street to look at it, without suspect-
ing the secrets which it concealed behind its fresh green thickets. More than one dreamer of that day
has many a time allowed his eyes and his thoughts indiscreetly to penetrate through the bars of the
ancient gate which was padlocked, twisted, tottering; secured by two green and mossy pillars, and
grotesquely crowned with a pediment of indecipherable arabesque.

There was a stone seat in a corner, one or two mouldy statues, some trellises loosened by time and
rotting upon the wall; no walks, moreover, nor turf; dog-grass everywhere. Horticulture had de-
parted, and nature had returned. Weeds were abundant, a wonderful hap for a poor bit of earth. The
heyday of the gilliflowers was splendid. Nothing in this garden opposed the sacred effort of things
towards life; venerable growth was at home there. The trees bent over towards the briers, the bri-
ers mounted towards the trees, the shrub had climbed, the branch had bowed, that which runs upon
the ground had attempted to find that which blooms in the air, that which floats in the wind had
stooped towards that which trails in the moss; trunks, branches, leaves, twigs, tufts, tendrils,
shoots, thorns, were mingled, crossed, married, confounded; vegetation, in a close and strong em-
brace, had celebrated and accomplished there under the satisfied eye of the Creator, in this in-
closure of three hundred feet square, the sacred mystery of its fraternity, symbol of human fra-
ternity. This garden was no longer a garden; it was a colossal bush, that is to say, something
which is as impenetrable as a forest, populous as a city, tremulous as a nest, dark as a cathedral,
odorous as a bouquet, solitary as a tomb, full of life as a multitude.

In Floreal, this enormous shrub, free behind its grating and within its four walls, warmed into
the deep labour of universal germination, thrilled at the rising sun almost like a stag which in-
hales the air of universal love and feels the April sap mounting and boiling in his veins, and
shaking its immense green antlers in the wind, scattered over the moist ground, over the broken
statues, over the sinking staircase of the summer-house, and even over the pavement of the de-
serted street, flowers in stars, dew in pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy, perfume. At noon,
a thousand white butterflies took refuge in it, and it was a heavenly sight to see this living
snow of summer whirling about in flakes in the shade. There, in this gay darkness of verdure,
a multitude of innocent voices spoke softly to the soul, and what the warbling had forgotten to
say, the humming completed. At night, a dreamy vapour arose from the garden and wrapped it
around; a shroud of mist, a calm and celestial sadness, covered it: the intoxicating odour of
honeysuckles and bindweed rose on all sides like an exquisite and subtle poison; you heard the
last appeal of the woodpecker, and the wagtails drowsing under the branches, you felt the sacred
intimacy of bird and tree; by day the wings rejoiced the leaves; by night the leaves protected
the wings.

In winter, the bush was black, wet, bristling, shivering, and let the house be seen in part. You
perceived, instead of the flowers in the branches and the dew in the flowers, the long silver
ribbons of the snails upon the thick and cold carpet of yellow leaves; but in every way, under
every aspect, in every season, spring, winter, summer, autumn, this little inclosure exhaled
melancholy, contemplation, solitude, liberty, the absence of man, the presence of God, and
the old rusty grating appeared to say: "This garden is mine."

In vain was the pavement of Paris all about it, the clank and splendid residences of the Rue
de Varennes within a few steps, the dome of the Invalides suite near, the Chamber of Deputies
not far off; in vain did the carriages of the Rue de Bourgogne and the Rue Saint Dominique
roll pompously in its neighbourhood, in vain did the yellow, brown, white, and red omnibuses
pass each other in the adjoining square, the Rue Plumet was a solitude; and the death of the
old proprietors, the passage of a revolution, the downfall of ancient fortunes, absence, obliv-
ion, forty years of abandonment and of widowhood, had sufficed to call back into this priv-
ileged place the ferns, the mulleins, the hemlocks, the milfoils, the tall weeds, the great
flaunting plants with large leaves of a pale greenish drab, the lizards, the beetles, the
restless and rapid insects; to bring out of the depths of the earth, and display within these
four walls, an indescribably wild and savage grandeur; and that nature, who avows the mean
arrangements of man, and who always gives her whole self where she gives herself at all, as
well in the ant as in the eagle, should come to display herself in a poor little Parisian gar-
den with as much severity and majesty as in a virgin forest of the New World.

Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this. Al-
though indeed no absolute satisfaction be vouchsafed to philosophy, no more in circumscrib-
ing the cause than in limiting the effect, the contemplator falls into unfathomable ecsta-
sies in view of all these decompositions of forces resulting in unity. All works for all.

Algebra applies to the clouds; the radiance of the star benefits the rose; no thinker would
dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who then can
calculate the path of the molecule? how do we know that the creations of world are not det-
ermined by the fall of grains of sand? Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of
the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being,
and the avalanches of creation? A flesh-worm is of account; the small is great, the great
is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity; fearful vision for the mind. There are marv-
ellous relations between beings and things; in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to grub,
there is to scorn; all need each other. Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes into the
azure depths without knowing what it does with them; light distributes the stellar essence
to the sleeping plants. Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.
Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's bill breaking the
egg, and it leads forward the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of Socrates. Where the
telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view? Choose. A
bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars. The same promiscuity, and
still more wonderful, between the things of the intellect and the things of matter. Elements and
principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another, to such a degree as to
bring the material world and the moral world into the same light. Phenomena are perpetually
folded back upon themselves. In the vast cosmical changes, the universal life comes and
goes in unknown quantities, rolling all in the invisible mystery of the emanations, losing
no dream from no single sleep, sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillat-
ing and winding, making a force of light and an element of thought, disseminated and indi-
visible, dissolving all, save that geometrical point, the me; reducing everything to the
soul-atom; making everything blossom into God; entangling, from the highest to the lowest,
all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, hanging the flight of an insect
upon the movement of the earth, subordinating, who knows? were it only by the identity of
the law, the evolutions of the comet in the firmament to the circling of the infusoria in
the drop of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, whose first moter is the
gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac.

IV. CHANGE OF GRATING

IT seemed as if this garden, first made to conceal licentious mysteries, had been tran-
sformed and rendered fit for the shelter of chaste mysteries. There were no longer in it
either bowers, or lawns, or arbours. or grottoes; there was a magnificent dishevelled ob-
scurity falling like a veil upon all sides; Paphos had become Eden again. Some secret re-
pentance had purified this retreat. This flower-girl now offered its flowers to the soul.
This coquettish garden, once so very free, had returned to virginity and modesty. A pres-
ident assisted by a gardener, a goodman who thought he was a second Lamoignon, and a-
nother goodman who thought he was a second Lenotre, had distorted it, pruned it, crum-
pled it, bedizened it, fashioned it for gallantry; nature had taken it again, had filled it with
shade, and had arranged it for love.

There was also in this solitude a heart which was all ready. Love had only to show him-
self; there was a temple there composed of verdure, of grass, of moss, of the sighs of
bards, of soft shade, of agitated branches, and a soul made up of gentleness, of faith,
of candour, of hope, of aspiration, and of illusion.

Cosette had left the convent, still almost a child; she was a little more than fourteen
years old, and she was "at the ungrateful age; as we have said, apart from her eyes, she
seemed rather homdy than pretty; she had, however, no ungraceful features, but she ws
awkward, thin, timid, and bold at the same time, a big child in short.

Her education was finished; that is to say, she had been taugst religion, and also, and
above all, devotion; then "history," that u. the thing which they call thus in the con-
vent, geography, grammar. the participles, the kings of France, a little music, to draw
profile. etc., but further than this she was ignorant of everything, which is a charm
and a peril. The soul of a young girl ought not to be left in obscurity; in after life
there spring up too sudden and too vivid mirages, as in a camera obscura. She should
be gently and discreetly enlightened, rather by the reflection of realities than by their
direct and stern light. A useful and graciously severe half light which dissipates puerile
fear and prevents a fall. Nothing but the maternal intstinct, a wonderful intuition into
which enter the memories of the maiden and the experience of the woman, knows how
this should be applied, and of what it should be formed. Nothing supplies this instinct.
To form the mind of a young girl, all the nuns in the world are not equal to one mother.

Cosette had had no mother. She had only had many mothers, in the plural.

As to Jean Valjean, there was indeed within him all manner of tenderness and all manner
of solicitude; but he was only an old man who knew nothing at all.

Now, in this work of education, in this serious matter of the preparation of a woman for
life, how much knowledge is needed to struggle against that ignorance which we call in-
nocence.

Nothing prepares a young girl for passions like the convent. The convent turns the
thoughts in the direction of the unknown. The heart, thrown back upon itself, makes for
itself a channel, being unable to overflow, and deepens, being unable to expand. From
thence visions, suppositions, conjectures, romances sketched out, longings for adven-
tures, fantastic constructions, whole castles built in the interior obscurity of the
mind, dark and secret dwellings where the passions find an immediate lodging as soon
as the grating is crossed and they are permitted to enter. The convent is a commission
which, in order to triumph over the human heart, must continue through the whole life.

On leaving the convent, Cosette could have found nothing more grateful and more danger-
ous than the house on the Rue Hornet. It was the continuation of solitude with the be-
ginning of liberty; an inclosed garden, but a sharp, rich, voluptuous, and odorous na-
ture; the same dreams as in the convent, but with glimpses of young men; a grating, but
upon the street.

Still, we repeat, when she came there she was but a child. jean Valjeann gave ber this
uncultivated garden. "Do whatever you like with it," said he to her. It delighted Cos-
ette; she ransacked every thicket and turned over every stone, she sought for "ani-
mals;" she played while she dreamed; she loved this garden for the insects which she
found in the grass under her feet, while she loved it for the stars which she saw in
the branches over her head.

And then she loved her father, that is to say, Jean Nraljean, with all her heart, with
a frank filial passion which made the good man a welcome and very pleasant companion
for her. We remember that M. Madeleine was a great reader; Jean Valjean continued it;
through this he had come to talk very well; he had the secret wealth and the eloquence
of a humble and earnest intellect which has secured its own culture. He retained just
enough harshness to flavour his goodness; he had a rough mind and a gentle heart. At
the Luxembourg in their conversations, he gave long explanations of everything, draw-
ing from what he had read, drawing also from what he had suffered. As she listened.
Cosette's eyes wandered dreamily.

This simple man was sufficient for Cosette's thought, even as this wild garden was to
her eyes. When she had had a good chase after the butterflies, she would come up to
him breathless and say, "Oh! how I have run!" He would kiss her forehead.

Cosette adored the good man. She was always running after him. Where Jean Valjean was,
was happiness. As Jean Valjean did not live in the summer-house or the garden, she
found more pleasure in the paved backyard than in the inclosure full of flowers, and
in the little bedroom furnished with straw chairs than in the great parlour hung with
tapestry, where she could recline on silken annchoirs. Jean Valjean sometimes said to
her, smiling with the happiness of being teased: "Why don't you go home? why don't
you leave me alone?"

She would give him those charming little scalding:1 which are so full of grace coming
from the daughter to the father.

"Father, I am very cold in your house; why don't you put in a carpet and a stove here?"

"Dear child, there are many people who are better than I, who have not even a roof over their
heads."

"Then why do I have a fire and all things comfortable?"

"Because you are a woman and a child."

"Pshaw! men then ought to be cold and uncomfortable?"

"Some men."

"Well, I will come here so often that you will be obliged to have a fire."

Again she said to him:

"Father, why do you eat miserable bread like that?" "Because, my daughter."

"Well, if you eat it, I shall eat it."

Then, so that Cosette should not eat black bread, Jean Valjean ate white bread.

Cosette had but vague remembrance of her childhood. She prayed morning and evening for her mother,
whom she had never known, The Thenardiers had remained to her like two hideous faces of some dream.
She remembered that she had been "one day, at night," sent into a wood after water. She thought that
that was very far from Paris. It seemed to her that she had commenced life in an abyss, and that Jean
Valjean had drawn her out of it. Her childhood impressed her as a time when there were only centipedes,
spiders, and snakes about her. When she was dozing at night, before going to sleep, as she had no very
clear idea of being Jean Valjean's daughter, and that he was her father, she imagined that her mother's
soul had passed into this goodman and come to live with her

When he sat down, she would rest her cheek on his white hair and silently drop a tear, saying to her-
self: "This is perhaps my mother, this man!"

Cosette, although this may be a strange statement, in her profound ignorance as a girl brought up in a
convent, maternity moreover being absolutely unintelligible to virginity, had come to imagine that she
had had as little of a mother as possible. She did not even know her name. Whenever she happened to ask
Jean Valjean what it was Jean Valjean was silent. If she repeated her question, he answered by a smile.
Once she insisted; ted. the smile ended with a tear.

This silence of Jean Valjean's covered Fantine with night.

Was this prudence? was it respect? was it a fear to give up that name to the chances of another memory
than his own?

While Cosette was a little girl, Jean Valjean had been fond of talking with her about her mother; when
she was a young maiden, this was impossible for him. It seemed to him that he no longer dared. Was
this on account of Cosette? was it on account of Famine? He felt a sort of religious horror at intro-
ducing that shade into Cosette's thoughts, and at bringing in the dead as a third sharer of their des-
tiny. The more sacred that shade was to him, the more formidable it scented to him. He thought of Fan-
tine and felt overwhelmed with silence. He saw dimly in the darkness something which resembled a fin-
ger on a mouth. Had all that modesty which had once been Fantine 's and which, during her life, had
been forced out of her by violence, returned after her death to take its place over her, to watch,
indignant, over the peace of the dead woman, and to guard her fiercely in her tomb? Did Jean Valjean,
without knowing it, feel its influence? We who believe in death are not of those who would reject t
his mysterious explanation. Hence the impossibility of pronouncing, even at Cosettes desire, this
name: Fantine.

One day Cosette said to him:

"Father, I saw my mother in a dream last night. She had two great wings. My mother must have attained
to sanctity in her life." "Through martyrdom," answered Jean Valjean.

Still, Jean Valjean was happy.

When Cosette went out with him, she leaned upon his arm, proud, happy, in the fulness of her heart.
Jean Valjean, at all these marks of a tenderness so exclusive and so fully satisfied with hint alone,
felt his thought melt into delight. The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he de-
clared in his transport that this would last'through life; he said to himself that he really had not
suffered enough to descn'e such radiant happiness and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for
having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.

V. THE ROSE DISCOVERS THAT SHE IS AN ENGINE OF WAR

One day Cosette happened to look in; her mirror, and she said to herself: "What!" It seemed to her
almost that she was pretty. This threw her into strange anxiety. Up to this moment she had never
thought of her face. She had seen herself in her glass, but she had not looked at herself. And then,
she had often been told that she was homely; Jean Valjean alone would quietly say: "Why no! why!
no!" However that might be, Cosette had always thought herself homely, and had grown up in that
idea with the pliant resignation of childhood. And now suddenly her mirror said like Jean Valjean:
"Why no!" She had no sleep that night. "If I were pretty!" thought she, "how funny it would be if
I should be pretty!" And she called to mind those of her companions whose beauty had made an im-
pression in the convent, and said: "What! I should be like Mademoiselle Such-a-one!"

The next day she looked at herself, but not by chance, and she doubted. "Where were my wits gone?"
said she, "no, I am homely." She had merely slept badly, her eyes were dark and she was pale. She
had not felt very happy the evening before, in the thought that she was beautiful, but she was
sad at thinking so no longer. She did not look at herself again, and for more than a fortnight
she tried to dress her hair with her back to the mirror.

In the evening after dinner, she regularly made tapestry or did some convent work in the parlour,
while Jean Valjean read by her side. Once, on raising her eyes from her work, she was very much
surprised at the anxious way in which her father was looking at her.

At another time, she was passing along the street, and it seemed to her that somebody behind her,
whom she did not see, said: "Pretty woman! but badly dressed." "Pshaw!" thought she, "that is not
me. I am well dressed and homely." She had on at the time her plush hat and merino dress.

At last, she was in the garden one day, and heard poor old Toussaint saying: "Monsieur, do you no-
tice how pretty mademoiselle is growing? " Cosette did not hear what her father answered. Tous-
saint's words threw her into a sort of commotion. She ran out of the garden, went up to her
room, hurried to the glass, it was three months since she had looked at herself, and uttered a cry.
She was dazzled by herself.

She was beautiful and handsome; she could not help being of Tous-saint's and her mirror's opinion.
Her form was complete, her skin had become white, her hair had grown lustrous, an unknown splendour
was lighted up in her blue eyes. The consciousness of her beauty came to her entire, in a moment,
like broad daylight when it bursts upon us; others noticed it moreover, Toussaint said so, it was
of her evidently that the passer had spoken, there was no more doubt; she went down into the gar-
den again, thinking herself a queen, hearing the birds sing, it was in winter seeing the sky golden,
the sunshine in the trees, flowers among the shill berg, wild, mad, in an inexpressible rapture.

For his part, Jean Valjean felt a deep and undefinable anguish in his heart.

He had in fact, for some time past, been contemplating with terror that beauty which appeared every
day more radiant upon Cosette's sweet face. A dawn, charming to all others, dreary to him.

Cosette had been beautiful for some time before she perceived it. But, from the first day, this
unexpected light which slowly rose and by degrees enveloped the young girl's whole person, wounded
Jean Valjean's gloomy eyes: He felt that it was a change in a happy life, so happy that he dared
not stir for fear of disturbing something. This man who had passed through every distress, who was
still all bleeding from the lacerations of his destiny, who had been almost evil, and who had become
almost holy, who, after having dragged the chain of the galleys, now dragged the invisible but heavy
chain of indefinite infamy, this man whom the law had not released, and who might be at any instant
retaken, and led back from the obscurity of his virtue to the broad light of public shame, this man
accepted all, excused all, pardoned all, blessed all, wished well to all, and only asked of Provi-
dence, of men, of the laws, of society, of nature, of the world, this one thing, that Cosette should
love him!

That Cosette should continue to love him! That God would not prevent the heart of this child from
coming to him, and remaining his! Loved by Cosette, he felt himself healed, refreshed soothed, sat-
isfied, rewarded, crowned. Loved by Cosette, he was content! he asked nothing more. Had anybody said
to him: "Do you desire anything better?" he would have answered: "No." Had God said to him: "Do you
desire heaven?" he would have answered: "I should be the loser."

Whatever might affect this condition, were it only on the surface, made him shudder as if it were
the commencement of another. He had never known very clearly what the beauty of a woman was; but,
by instinct, he understood, that it was terrible.

This beauty which was blooming out more and more triumphant and superb beside him, under his eyes,
upon the ingenuous and fearful brow of this child--he looked upon it, from the depths of his ug-
liness, his old age, his misery, his reprobation, and his dejection, with dismay.

He said to himself: "How beautiful she is! What will become of me?"

Here in fact was the difference between his tenderness and the tenderness of a mother. What he saw
with anguish, a mother would have seen with delight.

The first symptoms were not slow to manifest themselves.

From the morrow of the day on which she had said: "Really, I am handsome!" Cosette gave attention
to her dress. She recalled the words of the passer: "Pretty, but badly dressed," breath of an oracle
which had passed by her and vanished after depositing in her heart one of the two germs which must
afterwards fill the whole life of the woman, coquetry.

Love is the other.

With faith in her beauty, the entire feminine soul blossomed within her. She was horrified at the
merino and ashamed of the plush. Her father had never refused her anything. She knew at once the whole
science of the hat, the dress, the cloak, the boot, the cuff, the stuff which sits well, the colour
which is becoming, that science which makes the Parisian woman something so charming, so deep, and so
dangerous. The phrase heady woman was invented for her.

In less than a month little Cosette was, in that Thebaid of the Rue de Babylone, not only one of the
prettiest women, which is something, but one of "the best dressed" in Paris, which is much more. She
would have liked to meet "her passer" to hear what he would say, and "to show him!" The truth is that
she was ravishing in every point, and that she distinguished marvellously well between a Gerard hat
and an Herbaut hat.

Jean Valjean beheld these ravages with anxiety. He, who felt that he could never more than creep, or
walk at the most, saw wings growing on Cosette.

Still, merely by simple inspection of Cosette's toilette, a woman would have recognised that she had
no mother. Certain little proprieties, certain special conventionalities, were not observed by Cosette.
A mother, for instance, would have told her that a young girl does not wear damask.

The first day that Cosette went out with her dress and mantle of black damask and her white crape hat
she came to take Jean Valjean's arm, gay, radiant, rosy, proud, and brilliant. "Father," said she,
"how do you like this?" Jean Valjean answered in a voice which resembled the bitter voice of envy:
"Charming!" He seemed as usual during the walk. When they came back he asked Cosette:

"Are you not going to wear your dress and hat any more?"

This occurred in Cosette's room. Cosette turned towards the wardrobe where her boarding-school dress
was hanging.

"That disguise!" said she. "Father, what would you have me dc with it? Oh! to be sure, no. I shall
never wear those horrid things again. With that machine on my head, I look like Madame Mad. dog."

Jean Valjean sighed deeply.

From that day, he noticed that Cosette, who previously was al ways asking to stay in, saying: "Father,
I enjoy myself better herc with you," was now always asking to go out. Indeed, what is the 1154 of hav-
ing a pretty face and a delightful dress, if you do not show them?

He also noticed that Cosette no longer had the same taste for the back-yard. She now preferred to stay
in the garden, walking even without displeasure before the grating. Jean Valjean, ferocious, did not
set his foot in the garden. He stayed in his back-yard, like a dog.

Cosette, by learning that she was beautiful, lost the grace of not knowing it; an exquisite grace, for
beauty heightened by artlessness is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as dazzling innocence, go-
ing on her way, and holding in her hand, all unconscious, the key of a paradise. But what she lost
in ingenuous grace, she gained in pensive and serious charm. Her whole person, pervaded by the
joys of youth, and beauty breathed a splendid melancholy.

It was at this period that Marius, after the lapse of six months, saw her again at the Luxembourg.

VI. THE BATTLE COMMENCES

Cosette, in her seclusion, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire. Destiny, with its myster-
ious and fatal patience, was slowly bringing these two beings near each other, fully charged and all
languishing with the stormy electricities of passion,--these two souls which held love as two clouds
hold lightning, and which were to meet and mingle in a glance like clouds in a flash.

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come 'to be disbelieved in.
Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other.
Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only. The rest is only the.rest, and comes
afterwards. Nothing is more real than these great shocks which two souls give each other in exchang-
ing this spark.

At that particular moment when Cosette unconsciously looked with this glance which so affected Marius,
Marius had no suspicion that he also had a glance which affected Cosette.

She received from him the same harm and the same blessing.

For a long time now she had seen and scrutinised him as young girls scrutinise and see, while looking
another way. Marius still thought Cosette ugly, while Cosette already began to think Marius beautiful.
But as lie paid no attention to her, this young man was quite indifferent to her.

Still she could not help saying to herself that he had beautiful hair, beautiful eyes, beautiful teeth,
a charming voice, when she heard him talking with his comrades; that he walked with an awkward
gait, if you will, but with a grace of his own; that he did not appear altogether stupid; that his whole
person was noble, gentle, natural, and proud, and finally that he had a poor appearance, but that he
had a good appearance.

On the day their eyes met and at last said abruptly to both those first obscure and ineffable things
which the glance stammers out, Cosette at first did not comprehend. She went back pensivly to the house
in the Rue de l'Ouest, to which Jean Valjcan, according to his custom, had gone to spend six weeks.
The next day, on waking, she thought of this unknown young man, so long indifferent and icy, who now
seemed to give some attention to her, and it did not seem to her that this attention was in the least
degree pleasant. She was rather a little angry at this disdainful beau. An under-current of war was
excited in her. It seemed to her, and she felt a pleasure in it still altogether childish, that at
last she should be avenged.

Knowing that she was beautiful, she felt thoroughly, although in an indistinct way, that she had a
weapon. Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.

We remember Marius' hesitations, his palpitations, his terrors: He remained at his seat and did not
approach, which vexed Cosette. One day she said to Jean Valjean: "Father, let us walk a little this
way." Seeing that Marius was not coming to her, she went to him. In such a case, every woman resem-
bles Mahomet. And then, oddly enough, the first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity, in
a young woman, boldness. This is surprising, and yet nothing is more natural. It is the two sexes
tending to unite, and each acquiring the qualities of the other.

That day Cosette's glance made Marius mad, Marius' glance made Cosette tremble. Marius went away
confident, and Cosette anxious. From that day onward, they adored each other.

The first thing that Cosette felt was a vague yet deep sadness. It seemed to her that since yes-
terday her soul had become black. She no longer recognised herself. The whiteness of soul of young
girls, which is composed of coldness and gaiety, is like snow. It melts before love, which is its
sun.

Cosette did not know what love was. She had never heard the word uttered in its earthly sense.
In the books of profane music which came into the convent, amour was replaced by tambour, or Pan-
dour. This made puzzles which exercised the imagination of the great girls, such as: Oh! how de-
ligtful is the tambour! or: Pity is not a Pandour! But Cosette had left while yet too young to be
much concerned about the "tambour." She did not know, therefore, what name to give to what she
now experienced. Is one less sick for not knowing the name of the disease?

She loved with so much the more passion as she loved with ignorance, She did not know whether it
were good or evil, beneficent or danger necessary or accidental, eternal or transitory, permit-
ted or prohibited: she loved. She would have been very much astonished if anybody had said to
her: "You are sleepless; that is forbidden! You do not eat! that is very wrong! You have sink-
ings and palpitations of the heart that is not right. You blush and you turn pale when a cer-
tain being dressed in black appears at the end of a certain green walk! that is abominable!"
She would not have understood it, and she would have answered: "How can I be to blame in a
thing in which I can do nothing, and of which I know nothing?"

It proved that the love which presented itself was precisely that which best suited the condi-
tion of her soul. It was a sort of far-off worship, a mute contemplation, a deification by an
unknown votary. It was the apprehension of adolescence by adolescence, the dream of her nights
become a romance and remaining a dream, the wished-for phantom realised at last, and made flesh,
but still having neither name, nor wrong, nor stain, nor need, nor defect; in a word, a lover
distant and dwelling in the ideal, a chimera having a form. Any closer and more palpable en-
counter would at this first period have terrified Cosette, still half buried in the magnifying
mirage of the cloister. She had all the terrors of children and all the terrors of nuns comming-
led. The spirit of the convent, with which she had been imbued for five years, was still slowly
evaporating from her whole person, and made everything tremulous about her. In this condition,
it was not a lover that she needed, it was not even an admirer, it was a vision. She began to
adore Marius as something charming, luminous, and impossible.

As extreme artlessness meets extreme coquetry, she smiled upon him, very frankly.

She waited impatiently every day the hour for her walk, she found Marius there, she felt herself
inexpressibly happy, and sincerely believed that she uttered her whole thought when she said to
Jean Valjean: "What a delightful garden the Luxembourg is!"

Marius and Cosette were in the dark in regard to each other. They did not speak, they did not
bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and, like the stars in the sky separated by
millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other.

Thus it was that Cosette gradually became a woman, and beautiful and loving, grew with consci-
ousness of her beauty, and in ignorance of her love. Coquettish withal, through innocence.

VII. TO SADNESS, SADNESS AND A HALF

Every condition has its instinct. The old and eternal mother, Nature. silently warned Jean Valjean
of the presence of Marius. Jean Valjean shuddered in the darkest of his mind. Jean Valjean saw
nothing, knew nothing, but still gazed with persistent fixedness at the darkness which surrounded
him, as if he perceived on one side something which was building, and on the other something which
was falling down. Marius, also warned, and, according to the deep law of God, by this same mother,
Nature, did all that he could to hide himself from the "father." It happened, however, that Jean
Valjcan sometimes perceived him. Marius' ways were no longer at all natural. He had an equivocal
prudence and an awkward boldness. He ceased to come near them as formerly; he sat down at a dis-
tance, and remained there in an ecstasy; he had a book and pretended to be raiding; why did he
pretend? Formerly he came with his old coat, now he had his new coat on every shy it was not very
certain that he did not curl his hair, he had strange eyes, he wore gloves in short, Jean Valjean
cordially detested this young man.

Cosette gave no ground for suspicion. Without knowing exactly what affected her, she had a very
definite feeling that it was something, and that it must be concealed.

There was between the taste for dress which had arisen in Cosette and the habit of wearing new
coats which had grown upon this unknown man, a parallelism which made Jean Valjean anxious. It
was an accident perhaps, doubtless, certainly, but a threatening accident.

He had never opened his mouth to Cosette about the unknown man. One day, however, he could not
contain himself, and with that uncertain despair which hastily drops the plummet into its un-
happiness, he said to her: "What a pedantic air that young man has!"

Cosette, a year before, an unconcerned little girl, would have answered: "Why no he is charm-
ing." Ten years later, with the love of Marius in her heart, she would have answered: "Pedan-
tic and insupportable to the sight! you are quite right!" At the period of life and of heart
in which she then was, she merely answered with supreme calmness: "That young man!"

As if she saw him for the first time in her life.

"How stupid I am!" thought Jean Valjean. "She had not even noticed him. I have shown him to
her myself."

O simplicity of the old! depth of the young!

There is another law of these young years of suffering and care, of these sharp struggles of
the first love against the first obstacles, the young girl doesnot allow herself to be caught
in any toil, the young man falls into all. Jean Valjean had commenced a sullen war against Mar-
ius, which Marhis, with the sublime folly of his passion and his age, did not guess. Jean
Valjean spread around him a multitude of snares; he changed his hours, he changed his seat,
he forgot his handkerchief, he went to the Luxembourg alone; Marius fell headlong into eve-
ry trap; and to all these interrogation points planted upon his path by Jean Valjean he an-
swered ingenuously, yes. Meanwhile Cosette was still walled in in her apparent unconcern and
her imperturable tranquillity, so that Jean Valjean came to this conclusion: "This booby is
madly in love with Cosette, but Cosette does not even know of his existence! "

There was nevertheless a painful tremor in the heart. The moment when Cosette would fall in
love might come at any instant. Does not everything begin by indifference?

Once only Cosette made a mistake, and startled him. He rose from the seat to go, after sit-
ting there three hours, and she said: "So soon!"

Jean Valjean had not discontinued the promenades in the Luxembourg, not wishing to do any-
thing singular, and above all dreading to excite any suspicion in Cosette; but during those
hours so sweet to the two lovers, while Cosette was sending her smile to the intoxicated
Marius, who perceived nothing but that, and now saw nothing in the world save one radiant,
adored face, Jean Valjean fixed upon Marius glaring and terrible eyes. He who had come to
believe that he was no longer capable of a malevolent feeling, had moments in which, when
Marius was there, he thought that he was again becoming savage and ferocious, and felt o-
pening and upheaving against this young man those old depths of his soul where there had
once been so much wrath. It seemed to him almost as if the unknown craters were forming
within him again.

What? he was there, that creature. What did he come for? He came to pry, to scent, to ex-
amine, to attempt: he came to say, "Eh, why not?" he came to prowl about his, Jean Val-
jean's life!--to prowl about his happiness, to clutch it an carry it away!

Jean Valjean added: "Yes, that is it! what is he looking for? an adventure? What does he
want? an amour! An amour!--and as for me! What! I, after having been the most miser-
able of men, shall be the most unfortunate; I shall have spent sixty years of life upon
my knees; I shall have suffered all that a man can suffer; I shall have grown old without
having been young; I shall have lived with no family, no relatives, no friends, no wife,
no children! I shall have left my blood on every stone, on every thorn, on every post,
along every wall; I shall have been mild, although the world was harsh to me, and good,
although it was evil; I shall have become an honest man in spite of all; I shall have rep-
ented of the wrong which I have done, and pardoned the wrongs which have been done
to me, and the moment that I am rewarded, the moment that it is over, the moment
that I reach the end, the moment that I have what I desire, rightfully and justly; I have
paid for it, I have earned it; it will all disappear, it will all vanish, and I shall lose Cos-
ette. and I shall lose my life, my joy, my soul, because a great booby has been pleased
to come and lounge about the Luxembourg."

Then his eyes filled with a strange and dismal light. It was no longer a man looking upon
a man; it was not an enemy looking upon an enemy. It was a dog looking upon a robber.

We know the rest. The insanity of Marius continued. One day be followed Cosette to the
Rue de i'Ouest. Another day lie spoke to the porter: the porter in his turn spoke, and
said to Jean Valjcan: "Monsieur, who is that curious young man who has been asking for
you?" The next day, Jean Valjean cast that glance at Marius which Marius finally per-
ceived. A week after, Jean Valjean had moved. He resolved that he would never set his
foot again either in the Luxembourg, or in the Rue de l'Ouest. He returned to the Rue
Plumet.

Cosette did not complain, she said nothing, she asked no questions, she did not seek to
know any reason: she was already at that point at which one fears discovery and self-
betrayal. Jean Valjean had no experience of this misery, the only misery which is charm-
ing, and the only misery which he did not know; for this reason, he did not understand
the deep significance of Cosette's silence. He noticed only that she had become sad,
and he became gloomy. There was on either side an armed inexperience.

Once he made a trial. He asked Cosette:

"Would you like to go to the Luxembourg?"

A light illumined Cosette's pale face.

"Yes," said she.

They went. Three months had passed. Marius went there no longer. Marius was not there.

The next clay, Jean Valjean asked Cosette again:

"Would you like to go to the Luxembourg?"

She answered sadly and quietly:

"No!"

Jean Valjean was hurt by this sadness, and harrowed by this gentleness.

What was taking place in this spirit so young, and already so impenetrable? What was in course
of accomplishment in it? what was happening to Cosette's soul? Sometimes, instead of going to
bed, Jean Valjean sat by his bedside with his bead in his bands, and he spent whole nights ask-
ing himself: "What is there in Cosette's mind?" and thinking what things she could be thinking
about.

Oh! in those hours, what mournful looks he turned towards the cloister, that chaste summit, that
abode of angels, that inaccessible glacier of virtue! With what despairing rapture he contem-
plated that convent garden, full of unknown flowers and secluded maidens; where all perfumes and
all souls rose straight towards Heaven! How he worshipped that Eden, now closed for ever, from
which he had voluntarily departed, and from which he had foolishly descended! How he regretted
his self-denial, his madness in having brought Cosette back to the world, poor hero of sacrifice,
caught and thrown to the ground by his very devotedness! How lie said to himself: "What have
I clone?"

Still nothing of this was exhibited towards Cosette: neither capriciousness nor severity. Always
the same serene and kind face. Jean Valjean's manner was more tender and more paternal than ever.
If anything could have raised a suspicion that there was less happiness, it was the greater gen-
tleness.

For her part, Cosette was languishing. She suffered from the absence of Marius, as she had re-
joiced in his presence, in a peculiar way, without really knowing it. When Jean Valjean ceased
to take her on their usual walk, her woman's instinct murmured confusedly in the depths of her
heart, that she must not appear to cling to the Luxembourg: and that if it were indifferent to
her, her father would take her back there. But days, weeks, and months passed away. Jean
Valjean had tacitly accepted Cosette's tacit consent. She regretted it. It was too late. The day
she returned to the Luxembourg, Marius was no longer there. Marius then had disappeared;
it was all over; what could she do? Would she ever find him again? She felt a constriction of
her heart, which nothing relaxed, and which was increasing every day; she no longer knew whether
it was winter or summer, sunshine or rain, whether the birds sang, whether it was the season for
dahlias or daisies, whether the Luxembourg was more charming than the Tuileries, whether the
linen which the washerwoman brought home was starched too much, or not enough, whether Toussaint
did "her marketing" well or ill; and she became dejected, absorbed, intent upon a single thought,
her eye wild and fixed, as when one looks into the night at the deep black place where an appari-
tion has vanished.

Still she did not let Jean Valjean see anything, except her paleness. She kept her face sweet
for him.

This paleness was more than sufficient to make Jean Valjean anxious. Sometimes he asked her:

"What is the matter with you?"

She answered:

"Nothing."

And after a silence, as she felt that he was sad also, she continued: "And you. father, is not
something the matter with you?" "Me? nothing," said he.

These two beings, who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so touching a love, and who
had lived so long for each other, were now suffering by each other, and through each other; with-
out speaking of it, without harsh feeling, and smiling the while.

VIII. THE CHAIN

THE more unhappy of the two was Jean Valjean. Youth, even in its sorrows, always has a brillian-
cy of its own.

At certain moments, Jean Valjean suffered so much that he became puerile. It is the peculiarity
of grief to bring out the childish side of man.He felt irresistibly that Cosette was escaping
him. He would have been glad to put forth an effort, to hold her fast, to rouse her enthusiasm by
something external and striking. These ideas, puerile, as we have just said, and at the same time
senile, gave him by their very childishness a just idea of the influence of gewgaws over the ima-
gination of young girls. He chanced once to see a general pass in the street on horseback in full
uniform, Count Coutard, Commandant. of Paris. He envied this gilded man, he thought what happiness
it would be to be able to put on that coat, which was an incontestable thing, that if Cosette saw
him thus it would dazzle her, that when he should give his arm to Cosette and pass before the
gate of the Tuileries they would present arms to him, and that that would so satisfy Cosette that
it would destroy her inclination to look at the young men.

An unexpected shock came to him in the midst of these sad thoughts.

In the isolated life which they were leading, and since they had come to live in the Rue Plumet,
they had formed a habit. They sometimes made a pleasure excursion to go and see the sun rise, a
gentle joy suited to those who are entering upon life and those who are leaving it.

A walk at early dawn, to him who loves solitude, is equivalent to a walk at night, with the gai-
ety of nature added. The streets are empty and the birds are singing. Cosette, herself, a bird,
usually awoke early. These morning excursions were arranged the evening before. He proposed, she
accepted. They were planned as a conspiracy, they went out before day, and these were so many
pleasant hours for Cosette. Such innocent eccentricities have a charm for the young.

Jean Valjean's inclination was, we know, to go to unfrequented spots, to solitary nooks, to neg-
lected places. There were at that time in the neighbourhood of the barrieres of Paris some poor
fields, almost in the city, where there grew in summer a scanty crop of wheat, and which in au-
tumn, after this was gathered, appeared not to have been harvested, but stripped. Jean Vaijean
had a predilection for these fields. Cosette did not dislike them. To him it was solitude, to her
it was liberty. There she became a little. girl again. she could run and almost play, she took
off her hat, laid it CM Jean Valjean's knees, and gathered flowers. She looked at the butterflies
upon the blossoms, but did not catch them; gentleness and tenderness are born with love, and the
young girl who has in her heart a trembling and fragile idea, feels pity for a butterfly's wink
She wove garlands of wild poppies which she put upon her head. and which, lit up and illuminated
in the sunshine, and blazing like a flame, made a crown of fire for her fresh and rosy face.

Even after their life had been saddened, they continued their habit of mornina° walks.

So one October morning, tempted by the deep serenity of the autumn of 1831, they had gone out,
and found themselves at daybreak near the Barriere du Maine. It was not day, it was dawn; wild
and ravishing moment. A few constellations here and there in the deep pale heavens, the earth
all black, the sky all white, a shivering in the spears of grass,everywhere the mysterious
thrill of the twilight. A lark, which seemed among the stars, was singing at this enormous
height, and one would have said that this hymn from littleness to the infinite was calming
the immensity. In the cast the Val de Grace carved out upon the clear horizon, with the sharp-
ness of steel, its obscure mass; Venus was rising in splendour behind that dome like a soul
escaping from a dark edifice.

All was peace and silence; nobody upon the highway; on the footpaths a few scattered working-men,
hardly visible, going to their work.

Jean Valjean was seated in the side walk, upon some timbers lying by the gate of a lumber-yard.
He had his face turned towards the road, and his back towards the light; he had forgotten the sun
which was just rising; he had fallen into one of those deep meditations in which the whole mind
is absorbed, which even imprison the senses, and which are equivalent to four walls. There are
some meditations which may be called vertical; when one is at the bottom it takes time to return
to the surface of the earth. Jean Valjean had descended into one of these reveries. He was think-
ing of Cosette, of the happiness possible if nothing came between her and him, of that light with
which she filled his life, a light which was the atmosphere of his soul. He was almost happy in
his reverie. Cosette, starding near him, was watching The clouds as they became ruddy.

Suddenly, Cosette exclaimed: "Father, I should think somebody was coming down there." Jean Val-
jean looked up.

Cosette was right.

The highway which leads to the ancient Barrier° du Maine is a prolongation, as everybody knows,
of the Rue de Sevres, and is intersected at a right angle by the interior boulevard. At the corner
of the highway and the boulevard, at the point where they diverge, a sound was heard, difficult of
explanation at such an hour, and a kind of moving confusion appeared. Some shapeless thing which
came from the boulevard was entering upon the highway.

It grew larger, it seemed to move in order, still it was bristling and quivering; it looked like
a waggon, but they could not make out the load. There were horses, wheels, cries; whips were crack-
ing. By degrees the features became definite, although enveloped in darkness. It was in fact a wag-
gon which had just turned out of the boulevard into the road, and which was making its way towards
the barriere, near which Jean Valjean was; a second, of the same appearance, followed it, then a
third, then a fourth; seven vehicles turned in in succession, the horses' heads touching the rear
of the waggons. Dark forms were moving upon these waggons, flashes were seen in the twilight as if
of drawn swords, a clanking was heard which resembled the rattling of chains; it advanced, the voi-
ces grew louder, and it was as terrible a thing as comes forth from the cavern of dreams.

As it approached it took form, and outlined itself behind the trees with the pallor of an appari-
tion; the mass whitened; daylight, which was rising little by little, spread a palid gleam over
this crawling thing, which vas at once sepulchral and alive, the heads of the shadows became the
faces of corpses, and it was this:

Seven waggons were moving in file upon the road. Six of them were of a peculiar structure. They
resembled coopers' drays; they were a sort of long ladder placed upon two wheels, forming thills
at the forward end. Each dray, or better, each ladder, was drawn by four horses tandem. Upon these
ladders strange clusters of men were carried. In the little light that there was, these men were
not seen, they were only guessed. Twenty-four on each waggon, twelve on each side, back to back,
their faces towards the passers-by, their legs hanging clown, these men were travelling thus; and
they had behind them something which clanked and which was a chain, and at their necks something
which shone and which was an iron collar. Each had his collar, but the chain was for all; so that
these twenty-four men, if they should chance to get down from the dray and walk, would be made sub-
ject to a sort of inexorable unity, and have to wiggle over the ground with the chain for a back-
bone, very much like centipedes. In front and rear of each waggon, two men, armed with muskets,
stood, each having an end of the chain under his foot. The collars were square. The seventh waggon,
a huge cart with racks, but without a cover, had four wheels and six horses, and carried a resound-
ing pile of iron kettles, inciting pots, furnaces, and chains, over which were scattered a number
of men, who were bound and lying at full length, and who appeared to be sick. This cart, entirely
exposed to view, was furnished with broken hurdles which seemed to have served in the ancient pun-
ishments.

These waggons kept the middle of the street. At either side marched a row of guards of infamous
appearance, wearing three-pronged bats like the soldiers of the Directory, stained, torn, filthy.
muffled up in Invalides' uniforms and hearse-boys' trousers, half grey and half blue, almost in
tatters, with red epaulets, yellow cross-belts, sheath-knives, muskets, and clubs: a species of
servant-soldiers. These shirri seemed a compound of the abjectness of the beggar and the authority
of the executioner. The one who appeared to be their chief had a horsewhip in his hand. All these
details, blurred by the twilight, were becoming clearer and clearer in the growing light. At the
head and the rear of the convoy, gendarmes marched on horseback, sole, and with drawn swords.
This cortege was so long that when the first waggon reached the barriere. the last had hardly
turned out of the boulevard.

A crowd, come from nobody knows where, and gathered in a twinkling: as is frequently the case in
Paris, were pushing along the two sides of the highway and looking on. In the neighbouring lanes
there were heard people shouting and calling each other, and the wooden shoes of the market gar-
deners who were running to see.

The men heaped upon the drays were silent as they were jolted along. They were livid with the
chill of the morning. They all had tow trousers, and their bare feet were in wooden shoes. The
rest of their costume was according to the fancy of misery. Their dress was hideously variegat-
ed: nothing is more dismal than the harlequin of rags. Felt hats jammed out of shape, glazed
caps, horrible cloth caps, and beside the linen monkey-jacket, the black coat out at the elbows;
several had women's hats others had baskets on their heads; hairy breasts could be seen, and
through the holes in their clothing tattooings could be discerned; temples of love, burning
hearts, cupids; eruptions, and red sores could also be seen. Two or three had a rope of straw
fixed to the bars of the dray, and hung beneath them like a stirrup, which sustained their feet.
One of them held in his hand and carried to his mouth something which looked like a black stone,
which he seemed to be gnawing; it was bread which he was eating. There were none but dry eyes
among them; they were rayless, or lighted with an evil light. The troop of escort was cursing,
the chained did not whisper; from time to time there was heard the sound of the blow of a club
upon their shoulders or their heads; some of these men were yawning; their rags were terrible;
their feet hung down, their shoulders swung, their heads struck together, their irons rattled,
their eyes glared fiercely, their fists were clenched or open inertly like the hands of the dead;
behind the convoy a troop of children were bursting with laughter.

This file of waggons, whatever it was, was dismal. It was evident that to-morrow, that in an
hour, a shower might spring up, that it would be followed by another, and another, and that the
worn-out clothing would be soaked through, that once wet, these men would never get dry, that
once chilled, they would never get warm again, that their tow trousers would be fastened to
their skin by the rain, that water would fill their wooden shoes, that blows of the whip could
not prevent the chattering of their jaws, that the chain would continue to hold them by the neck,
that their feet would continue to swing; and it was impossible not to shudder at seeing these
human creatures thus bound and passive under the chilling clouds of autumn and given up to the
rain, to the wind, to all the fury of the elements, like trees and stones.

The clubs did not spare even the sick, who lay tied with ropes and motionless in the seventh wag-
gon, and who seemed to have been thrown there like sacks filled with misery.

Suddenly, the sun appeared; the immense radiance of the Orient burst forth, and one would have
said that it set all these savage heads on fire. Their tongues were loosed, a conflagration of
sneers, of oaths, and songs burst forth. The broad horizontal light cut the whole file in two, il-
luminating their heads and their bodies, leaving their feet and the wheels in the dark. Their
thoughts appeared upon their faces; the moment was appalling; demons visible with their masks
fallen off, ferocious souls laid bare. Lighted up, this group was still dark. Some, who were gay,
had quills in their mouths from which they blew vermin among the crowd, selecting the women; the
dawn intensified these mournful profiles by the blackness of the shade; not one of these beings
who was not deformed by misery; and it was so monstrous that one would have said that it changed
the sunbeams into the gleam of the lightning's flash. The waggon load which led the cortege had
struck up and were singing at the top of their voices with a ghastly joviality a medley of Des-
augiers, then famous, to Fatale; the trees shivered drearily on the side walks, the bourgeois
listened with faces of idiotic bliss to these obscenities chanted by spectres.

Every form of distress was present in this chaos of a cortege; there was the facial angle of ev-
ery beast, old men, youths, bald heads, grey beards, cynical monstrosities, dogged resignation,
savage grimaces, insane attitudes, snouts set-off with caps, heads like those of young girls with
corkscrews over their temples, child faces horrifying on that account, thin skeleton faces which
lacked nothing but death. On the first waggon was a negro, who, perhaps, had been a slave and
could compare chains. The fearful leveller, disgrace, had passed over these brows; at this de-
gree of abasement the last transformation had taken place in all of its utmost degree; and igno-
rance, changed into stupidity, was the equal of intelligence changed into despair. No possible
choice among these men who seemed by their appearance the elite of the mire. It was clear that
the marshal, whoever he was, of this foul procession had not classified them. These beings had
been bound and coupled pell-mell, probably in alphabetic disorder, and loaded haphazard upon
these waggons. The aggregation of horrors, however, always ends by evolving a resultant; the
addition of misfortune gives a total; there came from each chain a common soul, and each cart-
load had its own physiognomy. Beside the one which was singing, there was one which was howling;
a third was begging; one was seen gnashing his teeth; another was threatening the bystanders,
another blaspheming God; the last was silent as the tomb. Dante would have thought he saw the
seven circles of Hell on their passage.

A passage from condemnation towards punishment, made drearily, wit upon the formidable flashing
car of the Apocalypse, but snore dismal still upon a hangman's cart.

One of the guard, who had a hook on the end of his club, from time to time made a semblance of
stirring up this heap of human ordure. An old woman in the crowd pointed them out with her finger
ton little boy five years old, and said:"Whelp, That will teach you!"

As the songs and the blasphemy increased, he who seemed the captain of the escort cracked his
whip, and upon that signal, a fearful, sullen, and promiscuous cudgelling, which sounded like
hail, fell upon the seven waggons; many roared and foamed; which re-doubled the joy of the gamins
who had collected, a swarm of flies upon these wounds.

Jean Valjean's eye had become frightful. It was no longer an eye; it was that deep window, which
takes the place of the look in certain unfortunate beings, who seem unconscious of reality, and
from which flashes out the reflection of horrors and catastrophes. He was not looking upon a
sight; a vision was appearing to him. He endeavoured to rise, to flee, to escape; he could not
move a limb. Sometimes things which you see, clutch you and hold you. He was spell-bound, stupe-
fied, petrified, asking himself, through a vague unutterable anguish, what was the meaning of
this sepulchral persecution, and whence came this pandemonium which was pursuing him. All at
once he raised his hand to his forehead, a common gesture with those to whom memory suddenly
returns; he remembered that this was really the route, that this detour was usual to avoid meet-
ing the king, which was always possible on the Fontainebleau road, and that, thirty-five years
before, he had passed through this barriere.

Cosette, though from another cause, was equally terrified. She did not comprehend; her breath
failed her; what she saw did not seem possible to her; at last she exclaimed;

"Father! what can there be in those waggons?"

Jean Valjean answered:

"Convicts."

"And where are they going?"

"To the galleys."

At this moment the cudgelling, multiplied by a hundred hands, reached its climax; blows with the
flat of the sword joined in; it was a fury of whips and dubs; the galley slaves crouched down,
a hideous obedience was produced by the punishment, and all were silent with the look of chained
wolves. Cosette trembled in every limb: she continued:

"Father. are they still men?"

"Sometimes," said the wretched man.

It was in fact the chain which, setting out before day from Bicetre, took the Mans road to avoid
Fontainebleau, where the king then was. This detour made the terrible journey last three or four
days longer; but to spare the royal person the sight of the punishment, it may well be prolonged.

Jean Valjean returned home overwhelmed. Such encounters are shocks. and the memory which they
gave resembles a convulsion.

Jean Valjean, however, on the way back to the Rue de Babylon with Costae, did not notice that she
asked him other questions regarding what they had just seen; perhaps he was himself too much ab-
sorbed in his own dejection to heed her words or to answer them.

But at night, as Cosette was leaving him to go to bed, he heard her say in an undertone, and as if
talking to herself: "It seems to me that if I should meet one of those men in any path, O my God, I
should die just from seeing him near me!"

Fortunately it happened that on the morrow of this tragic day there were, in consequence of some
official celebration, fetes in Paris, a review in the Champ de Mars, rowing matches upon the Seine,
theatricals in the Champs-Elysees, fireworks at l'Etoile, illuminations everywhere. Jean Valjean,
doing violence to his habits, took Cosette to these festivities, for the purpose of diverting her
mind from the memories of the day before, and of effacing under the laughing tumult of all Paris,
the abominable thing which had passed before her. The review, which enlivened the fete, made the
display of uniforms quite natural; Jean Valjean put on his National Guard uniform with the vague
interior feeling of a man who is taking refuge. Yet the object of this walk seemed attained. Cos-
ette, whose law it was to please her father, and for whom, moreover, every sight was new, accepted
the diversion with the easy and blithe grace of youth, and did not look too disdainfully upon that
promiscuous bowl of joy which is called a public fete; so that jean Valjean could believe that he
had succeeded, and that no trace remained of the hideous vision.

Some days later, one morning, when the sun was bright, and they were both upon the garden steps,
another infraction of the rules which Jean Valjean seemed to have imposed upon himself, and of the
habit of staying in her room which sadness had imposed upon Cosette, Cosette, in her dressing-gown,
was standing in that undress of the morning hour which is charmingly becoming to young girls. and
which has the appearance of a cloud upon a star; and, with her head in the light, rosy from having
slept well, under the tender gaze of the gentle goodman, she was picking a daisy in pieces. Cosette
was ignorant of the transporting legend, I love thee a little, passionately, etc.; who should have
taught it to her? She was fingering this flower, by instinct, innocently, without suspecting that
to pick a daisy in pieces is to pluck a heart. Were there a fourth Grace wad Melancholy, and were
it smiling, she would have seemed that Grace.

Jean Valjean was fascinated by the contemplation of her slender fingers upon that flower, forget-
ting everything in the radiance of this child. A redbreast was twittering in the shrubbery beside
them. White clouds were crossing the sky so gaily that one would have said they had just been set
at liberty. Cosette continued picking her flower attentively: she seemed to be thinking of some-
thing; but that must have been pleasant. Suddenly she turned her head over her shoulder with the
delicate motion of the swan, and said to Jean Valijean: "Father, what are they then, the galley slaves?"