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Updated: June 4, 2025
But the difficulty was Cosette; there was no thought of abandoning her. First, Jean Valjean procured a rope from the lamppost, for the lamps had not been lit that night owing to the moonlight. This he fastened round the child, taking the other end between his teeth. Half a minute later he was on his knees on the top of the wall. Cosette watched him in silence.
On the 22d of April, 1796, the victory of Montenotte, won by the general-in-chief of the army of Italy, whom the message of the Directory to the Five Hundred, of the 2d of Floreal, year IV., calls Buona-Parte, was announced in Paris; on that same day a great gang of galley-slaves was put in chains at Bicetre. Jean Valjean formed a part of that gang.
Cosette was no less terrified, but in a different way. She did not understand; what she beheld did not seem to her to be possible; at length she cried: "Father! What are those men in those carts?" Jean Valjean replied: "Convicts." "Whither are they going?" "To the galleys."
Moreover, Jean Valjean began vaguely to surmise that he was being shown the door. On the following day, he underwent something like a shock on entering the ground-floor room. The arm-chairs had disappeared. There was not a single chair of any sort. "Ah, what's this!" exclaimed Cosette as she entered, "no chairs! Where are the arm-chairs?" "They are no longer here," replied Jean Valjean.
The work was more than unhealthy; it was dangerous. It is true that they had four months and a half of rain, and three floods of the Seine. The fontis which Jean Valjean had encountered was caused by the downpour of the preceding day. The pavement, badly sustained by the subjacent sand, had given way and had produced a stoppage of the water. Infiltration had taken place, a slip had followed.
The realism of the latter author is converted without difficulty into the former's romanticism, or, rather, the alloy of romanticism is so considerable in Balzac's work that there is little conversion to make. Ferragus and Vautrin are prototypes of Valjean, just as Valjean's Cosette exploited by Madame Thenardier is an adaptation of Ferragus' daughter or Doctor Minoret's Ursula.
Jean Valjean found himself in a sort of garden which was very vast and of singular aspect; one of those melancholy gardens which seem made to be looked at in winter and at night.
The five years of his stay in the convent had cost only five thousand francs. Jean Valjean set the two candlesticks on the chimney-piece, where they glittered to the great admiration of Toussaint. Moreover, Jean Valjean knew that he was delivered from Javert.
Then she beheld a most unprecedented thing, a thing so unprecedented that nothing equal to it had appeared to her even in the blackest deliriums of fever. She beheld Javert, the police spy, seize the mayor by the collar; she saw the mayor bow his head. It seemed to her that the world was coming to an end. Javert had, in fact, grasped Jean Valjean by the collar.
On the preceding evening, Jean Valjean handed to Marius, in the presence of M. Gillenormand, the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs. As the marriage was taking place under the regime of community of property, the papers had been simple. Henceforth, Toussaint was of no use to Jean Valjean; Cosette inherited her and promoted her to the rank of lady's maid.
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