Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [311]
His happiness was so great, that the frightful discovery of the Thénardiers, made in the Jondrette den, and so unexpectedly, had in some sort glided over him. He had succeeded in escaping; his trace was lost, what mattered the rest! he thought of it only to grieve over those wretches. “They are now in prison, and can do no harm in future,” thought he, “but what a pitiful family in distress!”
BOOK FIVE
THE END OF WHICH IS UNLIKE THE BEGINNING
1(2)
FEARS OF COSETTE
IN THE FIRST FORTNIGHT in April, Jean Valjean went on a journey. This, we know, happened with him from time to time, at very long intervals. He remained absent one or two days at the most. Where did he go? nobody knew, not even Cosette. Once only, on one of these trips, she had accompanied him in a fiacre as far as the corner of a little cul-de-sac, on which she read: Impasse de la Planchette. There he got out, and the fiacre took Cosette back to the Rue de Babylone. It was generally when money was needed for the household expenses that Jean Valjean made these little journeys.
Jean Valjean then was absent. He had said: “I shall be back in three days.”
In the evening, Cosette was alone in the parlour. To amuse herself, she had opened her piano and began to sing, playing an accompaniment, the chorus from Euryanthe: Hunters wandering in the woods! which is perhaps the finest piece in all music.eh
All at once it seemed to her that she heard a step in the garden.
It could not be her father, he was absent; it could not be Toussaint, she was in bed. It was ten o‘clock at night.
She went to the window shutter which was closed and put her ear to it.
It appeared to her that it was a man’s step, and that he was treading very softly.
She ran immediately up to the first story, into her room, opened a slide in her blind, and looked into the garden. The moon was full. She could see as plainly as in broad day.
There was nobody there.
She opened the window. The garden was absolutely silent and all that she could see of the street was as deserted as it always was.
Cosette thought she had been mistaken. She had imagined she heard this noise. It was a hallucination produced by Weber’s sombre and majestic chorus, which opens before the mind startling depths, which trembles before the eye like a bewildering forest, and in which we hear the crackling of the dead branches beneath the anxious step of the hunters dimly seen in the twilight.
She thought no more about it.
Moreover, Cosette by nature was not easily startled. There was in her veins the blood of the gipsy and of the adventuress who goes barefoot. It must be remembered she was rather a lark than a dove. She was wild and brave at heart.
The next day, not so late, at nightfall, she was walking in the garden. In the midst of the confused thoughts which filled her mind, she thought she heard for a moment a sound like the sound of the evening before, as if somebody were walking in the darkness under the trees, not very far from her, but she said to herself that nothing is more like a step in the grass than the rustling of two limbs against each other, and she paid no attention to it. Moreover, she saw nothing.
She left “the bush;” she had to cross a little green grass-plot to reach the steps. The moon, which had just risen behind her, projected, as Cosette came out from the shrubbery, her shadow before her upon this grass-plot.
Cosette stood still, terrified.
By the side of her shadow, the moon marked out distinctly upon the sward another shadow singularly frightful and terrible, a shadow with a round hat.
It was like the shadow of a man who might have been standing in the edge of the shrubbery, a few steps behind Cosette.
For a moment she