What is her name?”
“Cosette.”
“She is your daughter?
You are her grandfather, that is?”
“Yes.”
“It will be easy enough for her to get out of here.
I have my service door which opens on the courtyard.
I knock.
The porter opens; I have my vintage basket on my back, the child is in it, I go out.
Father Fauchelevent goes out with his basket—that is perfectly natural.
You will tell the child to keep very quiet.
She will be under the cover.
I will leave her for whatever time is required with a good old friend, a fruit-seller whom I know in the Rue Chemin-Vert, who is deaf, and who has a little bed.
I will shout in the fruit-seller’s ear, that she is a niece of mine, and that she is to keep her for me until to-morrow.
Then the little one will re-enter with you; for I will contrive to have you re-enter.
It must be done.
But how will you manage to get out?”
Jean Valjean shook his head.
“No one must see me, the whole point lies there, Father Fauchelevent.
Find some means of getting me out in a basket, under cover, like Cosette.”
Fauchelevent scratched the lobe of his ear with the middle finger of his left hand, a sign of serious embarrassment.
A third peal created a diversion.
“That is the dead-doctor taking his departure,” said Fauchelevent. “He has taken a look and said:
‘She is dead, that is well.’
When the doctor has signed the passport for paradise, the undertaker’s company sends a coffin.
If it is a mother, the mothers lay her out; if she is a sister, the sisters lay her out.
After which, I nail her up.
That forms a part of my gardener’s duty.
A gardener is a bit of a grave-digger.
She is placed in a lower hall of the church which communicates with the street, and into which no man may enter save the doctor of the dead.
I don’t count the undertaker’s men and myself as men.
It is in that hall that I nail up the coffin.
The undertaker’s men come and get it, and whip up, coachman! that’s the way one goes to heaven.
They fetch a box with nothing in it, they take it away again with something in it.
That’s what a burial is like.
De profundis.”
A horizontal ray of sunshine lightly touched the face of the sleeping Cosette, who lay with her mouth vaguely open, and had the air of an angel drinking in the light.
Jean Valjean had fallen to gazing at her.
He was no longer listening to Fauchelevent.
That one is not listened to is no reason for preserving silence.
The good old gardener went on tranquilly with his babble:—
“The grave is dug in the Vaugirard cemetery.
They declare that they are going to suppress that Vaugirard cemetery.
It is an ancient cemetery which is outside the regulations, which has no uniform, and which is going to retire.
It is a shame, for it is convenient.
I have a friend there, Father Mestienne, the grave-digger.
The nuns here possess one privilege, it is to be taken to that cemetery at nightfall.
There is a special permission from the Prefecture on their behalf.
But how many events have happened since yesterday!
Mother Crucifixion is dead, and Father Madeleine—”