Joy is the ebb of terror.
Fauchelevent found almost as much difficulty in recovering himself as Jean Valjean had.
“So you are not dead!
Oh! How wise you are!
I called you so much that you came back.
When I saw your eyes shut, I said:
‘Good! there he is, stifled,’ I should have gone raving mad, mad enough for a strait jacket.
They would have put me in Bicetre.
What do you suppose I should have done if you had been dead?
And your little girl?
There’s that fruit-seller,—she would never have understood it!
The child is thrust into your arms, and then—the grandfather is dead!
What a story! good saints of paradise, what a tale!
Ah! you are alive, that’s the best of it!”
“I am cold,” said Jean Valjean.
This remark recalled Fauchelevent thoroughly to reality, and there was pressing need of it.
The souls of these two men were troubled even when they had recovered themselves, although they did not realize it, and there was about them something uncanny, which was the sinister bewilderment inspired by the place.
“Let us get out of here quickly,” exclaimed Fauchelevent.
He fumbled in his pocket, and pulled out a gourd with which he had provided himself.
“But first, take a drop,” said he.
The flask finished what the fresh air had begun, Jean Valjean swallowed a mouthful of brandy, and regained full possession of his faculties.
He got out of the coffin, and helped Fauchelevent to nail on the lid again.
Three minutes later they were out of the grave.
Moreover, Fauchelevent was perfectly composed.
He took his time.
The cemetery was closed.
The arrival of the grave-digger Gribier was not to be apprehended.
That “conscript” was at home busily engaged in looking for his card, and at some difficulty in finding it in his lodgings, since it was in Fauchelevent’s pocket.
Without a card, he could not get back into the cemetery.
Fauchelevent took the shovel, and Jean Valjean the pick-axe, and together they buried the empty coffin.
When the grave was full, Fauchelevent said to Jean Valjean:—
“Let us go.
I will keep the shovel; do you carry off the mattock.”
Night was falling.
Jean Valjean experienced some difficulty in moving and in walking.
He had stiffened himself in that coffin, and had become a little like a corpse.
The rigidity of death had seized upon him between those four planks.
He had, in a manner, to thaw out, from the tomb.
“You are benumbed,” said Fauchelevent.
“It is a pity that I have a game leg, for otherwise we might step out briskly.”
“Bah!” replied Jean Valjean, “four paces will put life into my legs once more.”
They set off by the alleys through which the hearse had passed.
On arriving before the closed gate and the porter’s pavilion Fauchelevent, who held the grave-digger’s card in his hand, dropped it into the box, the porter pulled the rope, the gate opened, and they went out.
“How well everything is going!” said Fauchelevent; “what a capital idea that was of yours, Father Madeleine!”
They passed the Vaugirard barrier in the simplest manner in the world.
In the neighborhood of the cemetery, a shovel and pick are equal to two passports.
The Rue Vaugirard was deserted.
“Father Madeleine,” said Fauchelevent as they went along, and raising his eyes to the houses,
“Your eyes are better than mine.
Show me No. 87.”