About the middle of the last century, a chief justice in the Parliament of Paris, having a mistress and concealing the fact, had a little house built in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the deserted Rue Blomet, which is now called Rue Plumet. This house was composed of a single-storied pavilion: two rooms on the ground floor, two chambers on the first, a kitchen downstairs, a boudoir upstairs, an attic under the roof, the whole preceded by a garden with a large gate opening on the street. Behind the pavilion there was a narrow courtyard, and at the end of the courtyard a low building destined to conceal a child and nurse in case of need. This building communicated in the rear by a masked door, which opened by a secret spring, with a long, narrow, paved winding corridor, open to the sky, hemmed in with two lofty walls, hidden with wonderful art between garden enclosures, and ending in another door, a quarter of a league away, at the solitary extremity of the Rue du Babylone. Through this the chief justice entered, so that even those who were spying on him would never have suspected that to go to the Rue de Babylone was to go to the Rue Blomet. Later on he had sold in little parcels the lots adjoining the corridor, and the proprietors on both sides thought they had a party wall before their eyes. Only the birds beheld this curiosity. It is probable that the linnets and tomtits of the last century gossiped a great deal about the chief justice. The pavilion, built of stone in the taste of Mansard, had something discreet, coquettish, and solemn about it, as befits a caprice of love and magistracy.
This house and corridor, which have now disappeared, were in existence fifteen years ago. In '93 a coppersmith had purchased the house with the idea of demolishing it, but had not been able to pay the price. The nation made him bankrupt. So that it was the house which demolished the coppersmith. After that, the house remained uninhabited, and fell slowly to ruin. It remained fitted with its old furniture, always for sale or to let, and the ten or a dozen people who passed through the Rue Plumet were warned of the fact by a yellow and illegible bit of writing which had hung on the garden wall since 1819. Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers-by might have noticed that the bill had disappeared, and even that the shutters on the first floor were open. The house was occupied. The windows had short curtains, a sign that there was a woman about. In the month of October, 1829, a man of a certain age had presented himself and had hired the house just as it stood, including the back building and the lane which ended in the Rue de Babylone. He had had the secret openings of the two doors to this passage repaired. He had ordered some repairs, added what was lacking, and had finally installed himself there with a young girl and an elderly maid-servant, without commotion, rather like a person who is slipping in than like a man who is entering his own house. The neighbors did not gossip about him, for the reason that there were no neighbors. This unobtrusive tenant was Jean Valjean. The young girl was Cosette. The servant was a woman named Toussaint, whom he had saved from the hospital and from wretchedness, and who was elderly, a stammerer, and from the provinces, three qualities which had decided him to take her with him. He had hired the house under the name of Fauchelevent, independent gentleman.
Why had Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Petit-Picpus? What had happened? Nothing had happened. He was happy in the convent, so happy that his conscience finally took the alarm. He saw Cosette every day. He felt paternity spring up and develop within him more and more. He said to himself that she was his, that nothing could take her from him, that she would certainly become a nun, that the convent was henceforth the universe for her as it was for him, that, delightful hope, no separation was possible. On reflecting upon this, he fell into perplexity. He asked himself if all that happiness were really his, if it were not composed of the happiness of another, of the happiness of that child which he, an old man, was confiscating and stealing. He said to himself that this child had a right to know life before renouncing it, that to deprive her in advance, without consulting her, of all joys, under the pretext of saving her from all trials, was to rob a human creature of its nature and to lie to God. And who knows if, when she came to be aware of all this some day, Cosette would not come to hate him. He resolved to quit the convent. Five years' sojourn between these four walls had destroyed or dispersed the elements of fear. He could return tranquilly among men. Who would recognise him now? And then, to face the worst, there was danger only for himself, and he had no right to condemn Cosette to the cloister for the reason that he had been condemned to the galleys. Old Fauchelevent died. Jean Valjean told the prioress that, having come into a little inheritance at the death of his brother, he should leave and take his daughter with him, and he offered five thousand francs as indemnity for the five years Cosette had spent there. On leaving, he took in his own arms the little valise the key to which he still wore on his person, and would permit no porter to touch it. This puzzled Cosette, because of the odor of embalming which proceeded from it. This trunk never quitted him more. Cosette laughed at it, and called this valise his inseparable, saying: I am jealous of it. Nevertheless, he did not reappear in the open air without profound anxiety. He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet, and hid himself from sight there. Henceforth he was in the possession of the name Ultime Fauchelevent. At the same time he hired two other apartments in Paris, very pitiable, far remote from each other, the one in the Rue de l'Ouest, the other in the Rue de l'Homme Armé, in order that he might not again be caught unprovided as on the night when he had so miraculously escaped from Javert. He went from time to time to pass a month or six weeks, without taking Toussaint, giving himself out as a gentleman from the suburbs. This lofty virtue had three domiciles in Paris for the sake of escaping from the police.
