Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [368]
With calmness, Cosette, his single engrossing care, returned to his thoughts. Not that he was troubled about this headache, a petty disturbance of the nerves, a young girl’s pouting, the cloud of a moment, in a day or two it would be gone; but he thought of the future, and, as usual, he thought of it pleasantly. After all, he saw no obstacle to their happy life resuming its course. At certain hours, everything seems impossible; at other hours, everything appears easy; Jean Valjean was in one of those happy hours. To have left the Rue Plumet without complication and without accident, was already a piece of good fortune. Perhaps it would be prudent to leave the country, were it only for a few months, and go to London. Well, they would go. To be in France, to be in England, what did that matter, if he had Cosette with him? Cosette was his nation. Cosette sufficed for his happiness; the idea that perhaps he did not suffice for Cosette’s happiness, this idea, which formerly had caused him insomnia, did not even present itself to his mind. All his past griefs had disappeared, and he was in full tide of optimism. Cosette, being near him, seemed to belong to him; an optical effect which everybody has experienced. He arranged in his own mind and with every possible facility, the departure for England with Cosette, and he saw his happiness reconstructed, no matter where, in the perspective of his reverie.
While yet walking up and down, with slow steps, his eye suddenly met something strange.
He perceived facing him, in the tilted mirror above the sideboard, and distinctly read these lines:
“My beloved, alas! my father wishes to leave immediately. We shall be to-night in the Rue de l‘Homme Armé, No. 7. In a week we shall be in London. COSETTE. June 4th.”
Jean Valjean stood aghast.
Cosette, on arriving, had laid her blotter on the sideboard before the mirror, and, wholly absorbed in her sorrowful anguish, had forgotten it there, without even noticing that she left it wide open, and open exactly at the page upon which she had dried the five lines written by her, and which she had given to the young workman passing through the Rue Plumet. The writing was imprinted upon the blotter.
The mirror reflected the writing.
It was simple and withering.
Jean Valjean went to the mirror. He read the five lines again, but he did not believe it. They produced upon him the effect of an apparition in a flash of lightning. It was a hallucination. It was impossible. It was not.
Little by little his perception became more precise; he looked at Cosette’s blotter, and the consciousness of the real fact returned to him. He took the blotter and said: “It comes from that.” He feverishly examined the five lines imprinted on the blotter, the reversal of the letters made a fantastic scrawl of them, and he saw no sense in them. Then he said to himself: “But that does not mean anything, there is nothing written there.” And he drew a long breath, with an inexpressible sense of relief. Who has not felt these silly joys in moments of horror? The soul does not give itself up to despair until it has exhausted all illusions.
He held the blotter in his hand and gazed at it, stupidly happy, almost laughing at the hallucination of which he had been the dupe. All at once his eyes fell upon the mirror, and he saw the vision again. This time it was not a mirage. The second sight of a vision is a reality, it was palpable, it was the writing restored by the mirror. He understood.
Jean Valjean tottered, let the blotter fall, and sank down into the old armchair by the sideboard, his head drooping, his eyes glassy, bewildered. He said to himself that it was clear, and that the light of the world was for ever eclipsed, and that Cosette had written that to somebody. Then he heard his soul, again become terrible, give a sullen roar in the darkness.
A circumstance strange and sad, Marius at that moment had not yet Cosette’s letter; chance had brought it, like