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“You!”

“Why not?”

Jean Valjean had one of those rare smiles which came over him like the aurora in a winter sky.

“You know, Fauchelevent, that you said: Mother Crucifixion is dead, and that I added: and Father Madeleine is buried. It will be so.”

“Ah! good, you are laughing, you are not talking seriously.”

“Very seriously. I must get out!”

“Undoubtedly.”

“And I told you to find a basket and a cover for me also.”

“Well!”

“The basket will be of pine, and the cover will be of black cloth.”

“In the first place, a white cloth. The nuns are buried in white.”

“Well, a white cloth.”

“You are not like other men, Father Madeleine.”

To see such devices, which are nothing more than the savage and fool-hardy inventions of the galleys, appear in the midst of the peaceful things that surrounded him and mingled with what he called the “little jog-jog of the convent,” was to Fauchelevent an astonishment comparable to that of a person who should see a seagull fishing in the gutter in the Rue St. Denis.

Jean Valjean continued:

“The question is, how to get out without being seen. This is the means. But in the first place tell me, how is it done? where is this coffin?”

“The empty one?”

“Yes.”

“Down in what is called the dead-room. It is on two sawhorses and under the pall.”

“How long is the coffin?”

“Six feet.”

“What is the dead-room?”

“It is a room on the ground floor, with a grated window towards the garden, closed on the outside with a shutter, and two doors; one leading to the convent, the other to the church.”

“What church?”

“The church on the street, the church for everybody.”

“Have you the keys of those two doors?”

“No. I have the keys of the door that opens into the convent; the porter has the key of the door that opens into the church.”

“When does the porter open that door?”

“Only to let in the undertaker’s helpers, who come after the coffin; as soon as the coffin goes out, the door is closed again.”

“Who nails up the coffin?”

“I do.”

“Who puts the cloth on it?”

“I do.”

“Are you alone?”

“No other man, except the police physician, can enter the dead-room. That is even written upon the wall.”

“Could you, to-night, when all are asleep in the convent, hide me in that room?”

“No. But I can hide you in a little dark closet which opens into the dead-room, where I keep my burial tools, and of which I have the care and the key.”

“At what hour will the hearse come after the coffin to-morrow?”

“About three o‘clock in the afternoon. The burial takes place at the Vaugirard cemetery, a little before night. It is not very near.”

“I shall remain hidden in your tool-closet all night and all the morning. And about eating? I shall be hungry.”

“I will bring you something.”

“You can come and nail me up in the coffin at two o‘clock.”

Fauchelevent started back, and began to snap his fingers.

“But it is impossible!”

“Pshaw! to take a hammer and drive some nails into a board?”

What seemed unheard-of to Fauchelevent was, we repeat, simple to Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean had been in worse straits. He who has been a prisoner knows the art of making himself small according to the dimensions of the place for escape. The prisoner is subject to flight as the sick man is to the crisis which cures or kills him. An escape is a cure. What does not one undergo to be cured? To be nailed up and carried out in a chest like a bundle, to live a long time in a box, to find air where there is none, to economise the breath for entire hours, to know how to be stifled without dying—that was one of the somber talents of Jean Valjean.

Moreover, a coffin in which there is a living being, that convict’s expedient, is also an emperor’s expedient. If we can believe the monk Austin Castillejo, this was the means which Charles V, desiring after his abdication to see La Plombes again a last time, employed to bring her into the monastery of St. Juste and to take her out again.

Fauchelevent, recovering a little, exclaimed:

“But how will you manage to breathe?”

“I shall breathe.