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Updated: May 22, 2025
Fauchelevent slackened his pace, but he could not detain the hearse. Fortunately, the soil, which was light and wet with the winter rains, clogged the wheels and retarded its speed. He approached the grave-digger. "They have such a nice little Argenteuil wine," murmured Fauchelevent. "Villager," retorted the man, "I ought not be a grave-digger. But he had reverses. He had losses on 'change.
At certain moments, all these beings of the past, returned and present, formed a circle around him, and overshadowed him; then he thought of Cosette, and recovered his serenity; but nothing less than this felicity could have sufficed to efface that catastrophe. M. Fauchelevent almost occupied a place among these vanished beings.
One would have said that they were two criminals. Cosette, who was radiant, continued to gaze at both of them. There was something in her eyes like gleams of paradise. "I have caught you in the very act," said Cosette. "Just now, I heard my father Fauchelevent through the door saying: 'Conscience . . . doing my duty . . . That is politics, indeed it is. I will not have it.
There were some peculiarities here and there, it is true, but they were not noticed; one of the interested parties had his eyes blindfolded by love, the others by the six hundred thousand francs. Cosette learned that she was not the daughter of that old man whom she had so long called father. He was merely a kinsman; another Fauchelevent was her real father.
Fauchelevent did not recoil in the face of this almost chimerical undertaking; this poor peasant of Picardy without any other ladder than his self-devotion, his good will, and a little of that old rustic cunning, on this occasion enlisted in the service of a generous enterprise, undertook to scale the difficulties of the cloister, and the steep escarpments of the rule of Saint-Benoit.
Cosette once put to bed, Jean Valjean and Fauchelevent had, as we have already seen, supped on a glass of wine and a bit of cheese before a good, crackling fire; then, the only bed in the hut being occupied by Cosette, each threw himself on a truss of straw. Before he shut his eyes, Jean Valjean said: "I must remain here henceforth." This remark trotted through Fauchelevent's head all night long.
The principal one had been given up, by force, for Jean Valjean had opposed it in vain, to M. Madeleine, by Father Fauchelevent. The walls of this chamber had for ornament, in addition to the two nails whereon to hang the knee-cap and the basket, a Royalist bank-note of '93, applied to the wall over the chimney-piece, and of which the following is an exact facsimile:
An offer of a drink was the evident result of the novel situation created by the new grave-digger, and it was necessary to make this offer, but the old gardener left the proverbial quarter of an hour named after Rabelais in the dark, and that not unintentionally. As for himself, Fauchelevent did not wish to pay, troubled as he was. The grave-digger went on with a superior smile: "One must eat.
"Ah!" said Madeleine. "In the galleys at Toulon." Madeleine turned pale. Meanwhile, the cart continued to sink slowly. Father Fauchelevent rattled in the throat, and shrieked: "I am strangling! My ribs are breaking! a screw! something! Ah!" Madeleine glanced about him. "Is there, then, no one who wishes to earn twenty louis and save the life of this poor old man?" No one stirred. Javert resumed:
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 " "Is buried," said Jean Valjean, smiling sadly. Fauchelevent caught the word.
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