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Updated: May 13, 2025
Among these details the reader will encounter two or three improbable circumstances, which we preserve out of respect for the truth. On the afternoon following the visit of Javert, M. Madeleine went to see Fantine according to his wont. Before entering Fantine's room, he had Sister Simplice summoned.
On entering the order of Saint Vincent de Paul, she had taken the name of Simplice by special choice. Simplice of Sicily, as we know, is the saint who preferred to allow both her breasts to be torn off rather than to say that she had been born at Segesta when she had been born at Syracuse a lie which would have saved her. This patron saint suited this soul.
This pious woman had conceived an affection for Fantine, probably feeling a latent virtue there, and she had devoted herself almost exclusively to her care. M. Madeleine took Sister Simplice apart and recommended Fantine to her in a singular tone, which the sister recalled later on. On leaving the sister, he approached Fantine.
"I was there; I broke a bar of one of the windows; I let myself drop from the top of a roof, and here I am. I am going up to my room; go and find Sister Simplice for me. She is with that poor woman, no doubt." The old woman obeyed in all haste. He gave her no orders; he was quite sure that she would guard him better than he should guard himself.
Sister Simplice was white, with a waxen pallor. Beside Sister Perpetue, she was the taper beside the candle.
She smiled now and then. Five o'clock struck. Then the sister heard her say, very low and gently, "He is wrong not to come to-day, since I am going away to-morrow." Sister Simplice herself was surprised at M. Madeleine's delay. In the meantime, Fantine was staring at the tester of her bed. She seemed to be endeavoring to recall something.
This ideal was realized in the living person of Sister Simplice: she had never been young, and it seemed as though she would never grow old. No one could have told Sister Simplice's age. She was a person we dare not say a woman who was gentle, austere, well-bred, cold, and who had never lied. She was so gentle that she appeared fragile; but she was more solid than granite.
The servant informed Sister Simplice in a very low tone, that the mayor had set out that morning before six o'clock, in a little tilbury harnessed to a white horse, cold as the weather was; that he had gone alone, without even a driver; that no one knew what road he had taken; that people said he had been seen to turn into the road to Arras; that others asserted that they had met him on the road to Paris.
And in speaking of Sister Simplice, as never having told even "a white lie," Victor Hugo quotes a letter from the Abbé Sicard, to his deaf-mute pupil Massieu, on this point: "Can there be such a thing as a white lie, an innocent lie? Lying is the absolute of evil. Lying a little is not possible. The man who lies tells the whole lie.
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