Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [183]
“What do you want me to do?” he added.
“I will explain. You have a room?”
“I have a solitary shanty, over there, behind the ruins of the old convent, in a corner that nobody ever sees. There are three rooms.”
The shanty was in fact so well concealed behind the ruins, and so well arranged, that no one should see it—that Jean Valjean had not seen it.
“Good,” said Jean Valjean. “Now I ask of you two things.”
“What are they, Monsieur Madeleine?”
“First, that you will not tell anybody what you know about me. Second, that you will not attempt to learn anything more.”
“As you please. I know that you can do nothing dishonourable, and that you have always been a man of God. And then, besides, it was you that put me here. It is your place, I am yours.”
“Very well. But now come with me. We will go for the child.”
“Ah!” said Fauchelevent, “there is a child!”
He said not a word more, but followed Jean Valjean as a dog follows his master.
In half an hour Cosette, again become rosy before a good fire, was asleep in the old gardener’s bed. Jean Valjean had put on his cravat and coat; his hat, which he had thrown over the wall, had been found and brought in. While Jean Valjean was putting on his coat, Fauchelevent had taken off his knee-cap with the bell attached, which now, hanging on a nail near a shutter, decorated the wall. The two men were warming themselves, with their elbows on a table, on which Fauchelevent had set a piece of cheese, some brown bread, a bottle of wine, and two glasses, and the old man said to Jean Valjean, putting his hand on his knee:
“Ah! Father Madeleine! you didn’t know me at first? You save people’s lives and then you forget them? Oh! that’s bad; they remember you. You are ungrateful!”
10
IN WHICH IS EXPLAINED HOW JAVERT LOST HIS PREY
THE EVENTS, the reverse side of which, so to speak, we have just seen, had been brought about under the simplest conditions.
When Jean Valjean, on the night of the very day that Javert arrested him at the death-bed of Fantine, escaped from the municipal prison of M—sur M—, the police supposed that the escaped convict would start for Paris. Paris is a maelstrom in which everything is lost; and everything disappears in this navel of the world as in the whirlpool of the sea. No forest conceals a man like this multitude. Fugitives of all kinds know this. They go to Paris to be swallowed up; there are swallowings-up which save. The police know it also, and it is in Paris that they search for what they have lost elsewhere. They searched there for the ex-mayor of M—sur M—. Javert was summoned to Paris to aid in the investigation. Javert, in fact, was of great aid in the recapture of Jean Valjean. The zeal and intelligence of Javert on this occasion were remarked by M. Chabouillet, Secretary of the Prefecture, under Count Angles. M. Chabouillet, who had already helped to advance Javert’s career, secured the transfer of the inspector of M—sur M—to the police of Paris. There Javert rendered himself in various ways, and, let us say, although the word seems unusual for such service, honourably, useful.
He thought no more of Jean Valjean—with these hounds always upon the scent, the wolf of to-day banishes the memory of the wolf of yesterday—when, in December, 1823, he read a newspaper, he who never read the newspapers; but Javert, as a monarchist, made a point of knowing the details of the triumphal entry of the “Prince generalissimo” into Bayonne. Just as he finished the article which interested him, a name—the name of Jean Valjean—at the bottom of the page attracted his attention. The newspaper announced that the convict Jean Valjean was dead, and published the fact in terms so explicit, that Javert had no doubt of it. He merely said: “That settles it.”bm Then he threw aside the paper, and thought no more of it.
Some time afterwards it happened that a police notice was transmitted by the Prefecture of Seine-et-Oise to the Prefecture of Police of Paris in relation to the kidnapping