Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [182]
Meanwhile the goodman had taken off his cap, and was exclaiming, tremulously:
“Ah! my God! how did you come here, Father Madeleine? How did you get in, O Lord? Did you fall from the sky? There is no doubt, if you ever do fall, you will fall from there. And what has happened to you? You have no cravat, you have no hat, you have no coat? Do you know that you would have frightened anybody who did not know you? No coat? Merciful heavens! are the saints all crazy now? But how did you get in?”
One word did not wait for another. The old man spoke with a rustic volubility in which there was nothing disquieting. All this was said with a mixture of astonishment, and frank good nature.
“Who are you? and what is this house!” asked Jean Valjean.
“Oh! indeed, that is good now,” exclaimed the old man. “I am the one you got the place for here, and this house is the one you got me the place in. What! you don’t remember me?”
“No,” said Jean Valjean. “And how does it happen that you know me?”
“You saved my life,” said the man.
He turned, a ray of the moon lighted up his side face, and Jean Valjean recognised old Fauchelevent.
“Ah!” said Jean Valjean, “it is you? yes, I remember you.”
“That is very fortunate!” said the old man, in a reproachful tone.
“And what are you doing here?” added Jean Valjean.
“Oh! I am covering my melons.”
Old Fauchelevent had in his hand, indeed, at the moment when Jean Valjean accosted him, the end of a piece of awning which he was stretching out over the melon patch. He had already spread out several in this way during the hour he had been in the garden. It was this work which made him go through the peculiar motions observed by Jean Valjean from the shed.
He continued:
“I said to myself: the moon is bright, there is going to be a frost. Suppose I put their jackets on my melons? And,” added he, looking at Jean Valjean, with a loud laugh, “you would have done well to do as much for yourself? but how did you come here?”
Jean Valjean, finding that he was known by this man, at least under his name of Madeleine, went no further with his precautions. He multiplied questions. Oddly enough their parts seemed reversed. It was he, the intruder, who put questions.
“And what is this bell you have on your knee?”
“That!” answered Fauchelevent, “that is so that they may keep away from me.”
“How! keep away from you?”
Old Fauchelevent winked in an indescribable manner.
“Ah! Bless me! there’s nothing but women in this house; plenty of young girls. It seems that I am dangerous to meet. The bell warns them. When I come they go away.”
“What is this house?”
“Why, you know very well.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Why, you got me this place here as gardener.”
“Answer me as if I didn’t know.”
“Well, it is the Convent of the Petit Picpus, then.”
Jean Valjean remembered. Chance, that is to say, Providence, had thrown him precisely into this convent of the Quartier Saint Antoine, to which old Fauchelevent, crippled by his fall from his cart, had been admitted, upon his recommendation, two years before. He repeated as if he were talking to himself:
“The Convent of the Petit Picpus!”
“But now, really,” resumed Fauchelevent, “how the deuce did you manage to get in, you, Father Madeleine? It is no use for you to be a saint, you are a man; and no men come in here.”
“But you are here.”
“There is none but me.”
“But,” resumed Jean Valjean, “I must stay here.”
“Oh! my God,” exclaimed Fauchelevent.
Jean Valjean approached the old man, and said to him in a grave voice:
“Father Fauchelevent, I saved your life.”
“I was first to remember it,” answered Fauchelevent.
“Well, you can now do for me what I once did for you.”
Fauchelevent grasped in his old wrinkled and trembling hands the robust hands of Jean Valjean, and it was some seconds before he could speak; at last he exclaimed:
“Oh! that would be a blessing of God if I could do something for you, in return for that! I save your life! Monsieur Mayor, the old man is at your disposal.”
A wonderful joy had, as