Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 22, 2025
At the moment when the convoy entered the avenue leading to the cemetery, Fauchelevent glanced cheerfully at the hearse, and said half aloud, as he rubbed his big hands: "Here's a fine farce!" All at once the hearse halted; it had reached the gate. The permission for interment must be exhibited. The undertaker's man addressed himself to the porter of the cemetery.
"I will make that my special business." The prioress's face, up to that moment troubled and clouded, grew serene once more. She made the sign of a superior dismissing an inferior to him. Fauchelevent went towards the door. As he was on the point of passing out, the prioress raised her voice gently:
He who empties his glass empties his heart. You must come and have a drink with me. Such a thing cannot be refused." "Business first." Fauchelevent thought: "I am lost." They were only a few turns of the wheel distant from the small alley leading to the nuns' corner. The grave-digger resumed: "Peasant, I have seven small children who must be fed. As they must eat, I cannot drink."
He inhabited the old hut at the end of the garden, in company with Fauchelevent. This hovel, built of old rubbish, which was still in existence in 1845, was composed, as the reader already knows, of three chambers, all of which were utterly bare and had nothing beyond the walls.
It was to this interrogation point that Fauchelevent responded: "There are the little girls." "What little girls?" asked Jean Valjean. Just as Fauchelevent opened his mouth to explain the words which he had uttered, a bell emitted one stroke. "The nun is dead," said he. "There is the knell." And he made a sign to Jean Valjean to listen. The bell struck a second time.
Jean Valjean continued: "I do not think that I shall escape from this place. But if, by chance, I do, I live, under the name of Fauchelevent, in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7." Javert snarled like a tiger, which made him half open one corner of his mouth, and he muttered between his teeth: "Have a care." "Go," said Jean Valjean.
If a man could survive the blow of a cannon-ball full in the breast, he would make the same face that Fauchelevent made. "The grave-digger?" "Yes." "You?" "Father Mestienne is the grave-digger." "He was." "What! He was?" "He is dead." Fauchelevent had expected anything but this, that a grave-digger could die. It is true, nevertheless, that grave-diggers do die themselves.
You would be very quickly discovered. They would shriek: 'Oh! a man! There is no danger to-day. There will be no recreation hour. The day will be entirely devoted to prayers. You hear the bell. As I told you, a stroke each minute. It is the death knell." "I understand, Father Fauchelevent. There are pupils." And Jean Valjean thought to himself: "Here is Cosette's education already provided."
There was a void in his memory, a black spot, an abyss excavated by four months of agony. Many things had been lost therein. He had come to the point of asking himself whether it were really a fact that he had seen M. Fauchelevent, so serious and so calm a man, in the barricade. This was not, however, the only stupor which the apparitions and the disappearances of the past had left in his mind.
This remark summed up the situation and aroused Jean Valjean from his revery. The two men took counsel together. "In the first place," said Fauchelevent, "you will begin by not setting foot outside of this chamber, either you or the child. One step in the garden and we are done for." "That is true."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking