Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [305]
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, should have been educated gratuitously, he humbly begged the reverend prioress to allow him to offer the community, as indemnity for the five years which Cosette 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 in it. He was henceforth in possession 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 neighbourhood, 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 humble dwellings, and of a poor appearance, in two neighbourhoods widely distant from each other, one in the Rue de l‘Ouest, the other in the Rue de l’Homme Armé.
He went from time to time, now to the Rue de l‘Homme Armé and now to the Rue de l’Ouest, to spend a month or six weeks, with Cosette, without taking Toussaint. He was waited upon by the porters, and gave himself out for a man of some means of the suburbs, having a foothold in the city. This lofty virtue had three domiciles in Paris in order to escape from the police.
2 (5)
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 impression 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