This specimen of Vendean paper money had been nailed to the wall bythe preceding gardener, an old Chouan, who had died in the convent, andwhose place Fauchelevent had taken.

  Jean Valjean worked in the garden every day and made himself veryuseful. He had formerly been a pruner of trees, and he gladly foundhimself a gardener once more. It will be remembered that he knew allsorts of secrets and receipts for agriculture. He turned these toadvantage. Almost all the trees in the orchard were ungrafted, and wild.He budded them and made them produce excellent fruit.

  Cosette had permission to pass an hour with him every day. As thesisters were melancholy and he was kind, the child made comparisons andadored him. At the appointed hour she flew to the hut. When she enteredthe lowly cabin, she filled it with paradise. Jean Valjean blossomedout and felt his happiness increase with the happiness which he affordedCosette. The joy which we inspire has this charming property, that, farfrom growing meagre, like all reflections, it returns to us more radiantthan ever. At recreation hours, Jean Valjean watched her running andplaying in the distance, and he distinguished her laugh from that of therest.

  For Cosette laughed now.

  Cosette's face had even undergone a change, to a certain extent. Thegloom had disappeared from it. A smile is the same as sunshine; itbanishes winter from the human countenance.

  Recreation over, when Cosette went into the house again, Jean Valjeangazed at the windows of her class-room, and at night he rose to look atthe windows of her dormitory.

  God has his own ways, moreover; the convent contributed, like Cosette,to uphold and complete the Bishop's work in Jean Valjean. It is certainthat virtue adjoins pride on one side. A bridge built by the devilexists there. Jean Valjean had been, unconsciously, perhaps, tolerablynear that side and that bridge, when Providence cast his lot in theconvent of the Petit-Picpus; so long as he had compared himself only tothe Bishop, he had regarded himself as unworthy and had remained humble;but for some time past he had been comparing himself to men in general,and pride was beginning to spring up. Who knows? He might have ended byreturning very gradually to hatred.

  The convent stopped him on that downward path.

  This was the second place of captivity which he had seen. In his youth,in what had been for him the beginning of his life, and later on, quiterecently again, he had beheld another,--a frightful place, a terribleplace, whose severities had always appeared to him the iniquity ofjustice, and the crime of the law. Now, after the galleys, he saw thecloister; and when he meditated how he had formed a part of the galleys,and that he now, so to speak, was a spectator of the cloister, heconfronted the two in his own mind with anxiety.

  Sometimes he crossed his arms and leaned on his hoe, and slowlydescended the endless spirals of revery.

  He recalled his former companions: how wretched they were; they rose atdawn, and toiled until night; hardly were they permitted to sleep; theylay on camp beds, where nothing was tolerated but mattresses two inchesthick, in rooms which were heated only in the very harshest months ofthe year; they were clothed in frightful red blouses; they were allowed,as a great favor, linen trousers in the hottest weather, and a woollencarter's blouse on their backs when it was very cold; they drank nowine, and ate no meat, except when they went on "fatigue duty." Theylived nameless, designated only by numbers, and converted, after amanner, into ciphers themselves, with downcast eyes, with loweredvoices, with shorn heads, beneath the cudgel and in disgrace.

  Then his mind reverted to the beings whom he had under his eyes.

  These beings also lived with shorn heads, with downcast eyes, withlowered voices, not in disgrace, but amid the scoffs of the world,not with their backs bruised with the cudgel, but with their shoulderslacerated with their discipline. Their names, also, had vanished fromamong men; they no longer existed except under austere appellations.They never ate meat and they never drank wine; they often remained untilevening without food; they were attired, not in a red blouse, but in ablack shroud, of woollen, which was heavy in summer and thin in winter,without the power to add or subtract anything from it; without havingeven, according to the season, the resource of the linen garment or thewoollen cloak; and for six months in the year they wore serge chemiseswhich gave them fever. They dwelt, not in rooms warmed only duringrigorous cold, but in cells where no fire was ever lighted; they slept,not on mattresses two inches thick, but on straw. And finally, they werenot even allowed their sleep; every night, after a day of toil, theywere obliged, in the weariness of their first slumber, at the momentwhen they were falling sound asleep and beginning to get warm, to rousethemselves, to rise and to go and pray in an ice-cold and gloomy chapel,with their knees on the stones.

  On certain days each of these beings in turn had to remain for twelvesuccessive hours in a kneeling posture, or prostrate, with face upon thepavement, and arms outstretched in the form of a cross.

  The others were men; these were women.

  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 haddone nothing whatever.

  On the one hand, highway robbery, fraud, deceit, violence, sensuality,homicide, all sorts of sacrilege, every variety of crime; on the other,one thing only, innocence.

  Perfect innocence, almost caught up into heaven in a mysteriousassumption, attached to the earth by virtue, already possessingsomething of heaven through holiness.

  On the one hand, confidences over crimes, which are exchanged inwhispers; on the other, the confession of faults made aloud. And whatcrimes! And what faults!

  On the one hand, miasms; on the other, an ineffable perfume. On the onehand, a moral pest, guarded from sight, penned up under the range ofcannon, and literally devouring its plague-stricken victims; onthe other, the chaste flame of all souls on the same hearth. There,darkness; here, the shadow; but a shadow filled with gleams of light,and of gleams full of radiance.

  Two strongholds of slavery; but in the first, deliverance possible,a legal limit always in sight, and then, escape. In the second,perpetuity; the sole hope, at the distant extremity of the future, thatfaint light of liberty which men call death.

  In the first, men are bound only with chains; in the other, chained byfaith.

  What flowed from the first? An immense curse, the gnashing of teeth,hatred, desperate viciousness, a cry of rage against human society, asarcasm against heaven.

  What results flowed from the second? Blessings and love.

  And in these two places, so similar yet so unlike, these two speciesof beings who were so very unlike, were undergoing the same work,expiation.

  Jean Valjean understood thoroughly the expiation of the former; thatpersonal expiation, the expiation for one's self. But he did notunderstand that of these last, that of creatures without reproach andwithout stain, and he trembled as he asked himself: The expiation ofwhat? What expiation?

  A voice within his conscience replied: "The most divine of humangenerosities, the expiation for others."

  Here all personal theory is withheld; we are only the narrator; weplace ourselves at Jean Valjean's point of view, and we translate hisimpressions.

  Before his eyes he had the sublime summit of abnegation, the highestpossible pitch of virtue; the innocence which pardons men their faults,and which expiates in their stead; servitude submitted to, tortureaccepted, punishment claimed by souls which have not sinned, for thesake of sparing it to souls which have fallen; the love of humanityswallowed up in the love of God, but even there preserving its distinctand mediatorial character; sweet and feeble beings possessing the miseryof those who are punished and the smile of those who are recompensed.

  And he remembered that he had dared to murmur!

  Often, in the middle of the night, he rose to listen to the gratefulsong of those innocent creatures weighed down with severities, and theblood ran cold in his veins at the thought that those who were justlychastised raised their voices heavenward only in blasphemy, and that he,wretch that he was, had shaken his fist at God.

  There was one striking thing which caused him to meditate deeply, likea warning whisper from Providence itself: the scaling of that wall, thepassing of those barriers, the adventure accepted even at the risk ofdeath, the painful and difficult ascent, all those efforts even, whichhe had made to escape from that other place of expiation, he had made inorder to gain entrance into this one. Was this a symbol of his destiny?This house was a prison likewise and bore a melancholy resemblance tothat other one whence he had fled, and yet he had never conceived anidea of anything similar.

  Again he beheld gratings, bolts, iron bars--to guard whom? Angels.

  These lofty walls which he had seen around tigers, he now beheld oncemore around lambs.

  This was a place of expiation, and not of punishment; and yet, it wasstill more austere, more gloomy, and more pitiless than the other.

  These virgins were even more heavily burdened than the convicts. A cold,harsh wind, that wind which had chilled his youth, traversed the barredand padlocked grating of the vultures; a still harsher and more bitingbreeze blew in the cage of these doves.

  Why?

  When he thought on these things, all that was within him was lost inamazement before this mystery of sublimity.

  In these meditations, his pride vanished. He scrutinized his own heartin all manner of ways; he felt his pettiness, and many a time he wept.All that had entered into his life for the last six months had led himback towards the Bishop's holy injunctions; Cosette through love, theconvent through humility.

  Sometimes at eventide, in the twilight, at an hour when the garden wasdeserted, he could be seen on his knees in the middle of the walk whichskirted the chapel, in front of the window through which he had gazed onthe night of his arrival, and turned towards the spot where, as he knew,the sister was making reparation, prostrated in prayer. Thus he prayedas he knelt before the sister.

  It seemed as though he dared not kneel directly before God.

  Everything that surrounded him, that peaceful garden, those fragrantflowers, those children who uttered joyous cries, those grave and simplewomen, that silent cloister, slowly permeated him, and little by little,his soul became compounded of silence like the cloister, of perfume likethe flowers, of simplicity like the women, of joy like the children.And then he reflected that these had been two houses of God which hadreceived him in succession at two critical moments in his life: thefirst, when all doors were closed and when human society rejected him;the second, at a moment when human society had again set out in pursuitof him, and when the galleys were again yawning; and that, had it notbeen for the first, he should have relapsed into crime, and had it notbeen for the second, into torment.

  His whole heart melted in gratitude, and he loved more and more.

  Many years passed in this manner; Cosette was growing up.

  [THE END OF VOLUME II. "COSETTE"]

  VOLUME III--MARIUS.

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  BOOK FIRST.--PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM