Don’t remind me, don’t remind me: I’m a month behind on
LesMis Project. At least. Valjean is turning in his coffin. (That’s what’s
known as foreshadowing in the literary trades, BTW.)
But! This is the end of Volume 2: Cosette. Soon I will move
on to Marius! First, though –
 |
| No more sweeping! Hooray! |
Book Eighth – Cemeteries Take That Which is Committed Them
So, poor Fauchelevent is totally confounded about how
Valjean and this kid appeared in his garden, but he’s committed to helping
them, even though no men are allowed in the convent. He “understood nothing of
the matter. How had M. Madeline got there, when the walls were what they were?
Cloister walls are not to be stepped over. How did he get there with a child?
One cannot scale a perpendicular wall with a child in one’s arms.” (p.354)
(Well, not unless you’re Valjean you can’t, apparently.) But hey, Valjean had
risked his life to save Fauchelevent, so turn about is fair play and all.
Fortunately for Valjean (who, let’s face it, does manage to
get himself fortuitously out of as many scrapes as he gets himself in, at least
since the initial 19 year prison term), one of the nuns is dying. This means a
couple of things: everyone else will be distracted praying for her, and when
she dies, outsiders have to enter to sign the death certificate and bring out
her coffin. Fauchelevent and Valjean cook up a plan wherein Fauchelevent will
stick Cosette in a basket and haul her off to a fruit-seller friend of his to
await the next move. Meanwhile, somehow or another Valjean will get out then they
will reenter under guise of Fauchelevent’s brother and niece, the one to be the
gardener’s assistant, the other to join the convent school.
The nun dies, and Fauchelevent is summoned to the prioress.
Now, Fauchelevent is actually a kinda clever guy, but he looks and acts like a
simple guy. “The whole convent thought him stupid.” (p.359) So they don’t know
that he recognizes all the bells and signals that happen in the place just like
another language, and think he’s the old, lame, slow, totally unthreatening guy
he makes out to be, which is perfect for their needs.
Reverend Mother starts an interrogation, and Fauchelevent
his counter-interrogation, and eventually they come to the two essential
points: he has a brother who he wants to come join him to help with the things
he’s too infirm to do, and she wants him to pretend to send the dead nun to the
cemetery but really put her (in the coffin she’s used as a bed for many years) (as you do) in the crypt under the convent. He mentions various legal and moral objections,
which she adeptly bats aside, and logistical objections, which she tells him to
figure out, and he finally agrees. As he’s leaving, she says his brother and
niece can move in the day after the nun’s mortal remains are dealt with as she
wishes. (He tries to get Valjean brought in to help with moving the slab that
covers the crypt, describing his strength: “A perfect Turk!” (p.366) but
Reverend Mother assures him he can do it on his own.)
“The strides of a lame man are like the ogling glances of a
one-eyed man; they do not reach their goal very promptly.” (p.367) But
eventually Fauchelevent gets back to the gardener’s cottage to relay the
prioress’s plan. He still doesn’t know how he’s going to get Valjean out of the
convent, though.
Valjean, of course, has a plan. Instead of sticking dirt in
the dummy coffin to go to the cemetery, he’ll stick himself. “Jean Valjean gave
way to one of those rare smiles which lighted up his face like a flash from
heaven in the winter. ‘You know, Fauchelevent, what you have said: “Mother
Crucifixion is dead.” And I add: “and Father Madeline is buried.’” (p.368)
Despite the jokes, he convinces Fauchelevent that he’s serious, so they figure
out the logistics of where to hide him pre-coffinization, and what kinds of air
holes and provisions he’ll need, etc.
“What seemed unprecedented to Fauchelevent was, we repeat, a
simple matter to Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean had been in worse straits than
this. Any man who has been a prisoner understands how to contract himself to
fit the diameter of the escape…. An escape is a cure. What does not a man
undergo for the sake of a cure?” (p.369) Besides, “to live for a long time in a
box, to find air where there is none, to economize his breath for hours, to
know how to stifle without dying – this was one of Jean Valjean’s gloomy
talents.” (p.369) (Dude, I am so not suited to the life of a convict.)
The plan also calls for Fauchelevent to send his friend the
gravedigger off to drink while he “buries” the body, in reality releasing
Valjean and sending him off to collect Cosette from the fruit-seller. Finally
they iron out all the obstacles. “’That is settled, Father Fauchelevent. All
will go well.’ ‘Provided nothing goes wrong,’ thought Fauchelevent. ‘In that
case, it would be terrible.’” (p.370) (See, Hugo knows about foreshadowing,
too!)
MINOR hiccup: Fauchelevent’s gravedigger friend? Dead. The
new guy? Not a drunken sot who can easily be sent off. Or difficultly sent off.
No matter what Fauchelevent tries – even offering to buy the drinks himself! –
the new guy is going to bury the body before he leaves the cemetery.
So Valjean’s coffin is lowered into the grave. “He had a
certain sensation of cold.” (p.375) (Understatement is another literary
technique.) He heard the priest and choir boy chanting Latin over his head. He
heard a shovelful of dirt hit the coffin lid. And another. And a third. At the
fourth: “There are things which are too strong for the strongest man. Jean
Valjean lost consciousness.” (p.376)
Finally Fauchelevent hits upon a desperate plan to stop this
new gravedigger from burying his pal. There’s a system of cards to do with
locking the cemetery gates and the guard and fines, and when he pick-pockets
the gravedigger’s card, he’s able to convince him to run home and look for it
before he gets fined, offering to bury the coffin himself. The gravedigger
gratefully agrees and rushes off, and Fauchelevent hops into the grave to pry
up the coffin lid. He freaks the heck out to find Valjean possibly dead, then
freaks out again to see Valjean alive. “To see a corpse is alarming, to behold
a resurrection is almost as much so.” (p.379)
They get out of the grave, though, and bury the coffin,
dropping the gravediggers tools off at his place and letting him know the
burial was over and that Fauchelevent had “found” his missing gate-card, so now
the gravedigger thinks that Fauchelevent is the best guy ever.
The nuns and religious community also think Fauchelevent is
the best guy ever, for putting the dead nun in the crypt. Goodwill just surrounds
the guy. His “brother” “Ultime Fauchelevent” becomes his assistant with no
problems, Cosette charms the nuns by looking like someone who will grow up to
be ugly (apparently nuns love that in a kid – easier to cure them of vanity
that way) and she becomes a charity pupil at the convent school. So although
“Javert watched the quarter for more than a month,” (p.384) Cosette and Valjean
were safely hidden. (There’s lots of sad stuff here about how easy it was for
Cosette to keep her secrets from her classmates, because of the awful training
in terror and silence via the Thenardiers, yikes. Poor kid.)
It was a little paradise for Valjean. Safety, the garden (he
always liked working with crops), Cosette growing and laughing and spending
time with him when she wasn’t in school, and a kind of salvation. You see,
Valjean had started to forget the lessons of the Bishop with the silver, and to
compare his actions with those of man (against whom he tended to look rather
saintly) as opposed to comparing them to what God would like (against which he
was scraping by.) So he was able to swing back to the side of the angels.
He compared captivity in prison to that in the convent: In
prison, “the lived nameless, designated only by numbers, and converted, after a
manner, into cipers themselves, with downcast eyes, with lowered voices, with
shorn heads, beneath the cudgel and in disgrace.” (p.385) The nuns “also lived
with shorn heads, with downcast eyes, with lowered voices, not in disgrace, but
amid the scoffs of the world, not with their backs bruised with the cudgel, but
with their shoulders lacerated with their discipline.” (p.385) “What had those
men done? They had stolen, violated, pillaged, murdered, assassinated. They
were bandits, counterfeiters, poisoners, incendiaries, murderers, parricides.
What had these women done? They had done nothing whatever.” (p.386) It goes on
for a while in this vein, but basically: Valjean is moved by the ‘imprisonment’
of the nuns, and the fact that their devout community has allowed him to regain
his own faith and communion with God. And, yes, he’s noticed that twice now
when he was in his most desperate straits, he was saved by his encounters with
religious people.
“Many years passed….” (p.388) and that’s the end of Volume
2: Cosette.
