Cloistered — Les Misérables

Cosette continued to hold her tongue in the convent. It was quite natural that she should think herself Jean Valjean's daughter. As she knew nothing, she could say nothing, and she would not have said anything in any case. Nothing trains children to silence like unhappiness. Cosette had suffered so much that she feared everything, even to speak or to breathe. A single word had so often brought down an avalanche upon her. She speedily became accustomed to the convent. Only she regretted Catherine, but she dared not say so. Once, however, she did say to Jean Valjean: Father, if I had known, I would have brought her away with me. On becoming a scholar she had to don the garb of the house. Jean Valjean locked the mourning suit from the Thenardiers' inn, plus the stockings and the shoes, with camphor and the convent's aromatics, in a little valise on a chair near his bed. He always carried the key about his person. Father, Cosette asked him one day, what is there in that box which smells so good? Fauchelevent was happier, had less work, and used three times as much snuff, because Madeleine paid. The nuns did not adopt the name of Ultime. They called Jean Valjean the other Fauvent. The lame man ran every outside errand. Eyes fixed on God did not spy. Javert watched the quarter for more than a month. The convent was an island surrounded by gulfs. Those four walls were his world. He saw enough of the sky there to keep his serenity, and Cosette enough to remain happy.

A very sweet life began. He inhabited the old hut at the end of the garden with Fauchelevent. He worked in the garden every day. He had formerly been a pruner of trees, and he gladly found himself a gardener once more. He budded the wild orchard and made it produce excellent fruit. Cosette had permission to pass an hour with him every day. The sisters were melancholy and he was kind. The child made comparisons and adored him. At the appointed hour she flew to the hut. When she entered the lowly cabin, she filled it with paradise. For Cosette laughed now. A smile is the same as sunshine. It banishes winter from the human countenance. At recreation he distinguished her laugh from that of the rest. When she went into the house again, he gazed at the windows of her class-room, and at night he rose to look at the windows of her dormitory. Virtue adjoins pride on one side. A bridge built by the devil exists there. So long as he had compared himself only to the Bishop, he had regarded himself as unworthy and had remained humble. For some time past he had been comparing himself to men in general, and pride was beginning to spring up. He might have ended by returning very gradually to hatred. The convent stopped him on that downward path.

This was the second place of captivity which he had seen. After the galleys he saw the cloister, and he confronted the two in his own mind with anxiety. Sometimes he crossed his arms and leaned on his hoe, and slowly descended the endless spirals of reverie. There, men bound only with chains, numbered, under the cudgel. Here, women chained by faith, sleeping on straw, woken from first slumber to pray on ice-cold stones. The others were men who had stolen and murdered. These were women who had done nothing whatever. Two strongholds of slavery: in the first, escape; in the second, perpetuity, and that faint light of liberty which men call death. He understood the expiation for one's self. He trembled at the other. A voice within his conscience replied: the most divine of human generosities, the expiation for others. The scaling of the wall, the painful ascent he had made to escape from that other place, he had made in order to gain entrance into this one. These lofty walls which he had seen around tigers, he now beheld once more around lambs. In these meditations, his pride vanished. Cosette through love, the convent through humility. Sometimes at eventide, in the twilight, he could be seen on his knees in the walk that skirted the chapel, turned toward the sister making reparation. Thus he prayed as he knelt before the sister. It seemed as though he dared not kneel directly before God. Two houses of God had received him: the first when society rejected him, the second when the galleys were again yawning. His whole heart melted in gratitude, and he loved more and more. Many years passed in this manner. Cosette was growing up.