Part 115 (1/2)
Fauchelevent replied:--
”Yes, reverend Mother.”
”You are her father?”
Fauchelevent replied:--
”Her grandfather.”
The vocal mother said to the prioress in a low voice
”He answers well.”
Jean Valjean had not uttered a single word.
The prioress looked attentively at Cosette, and said half aloud to the vocal mother:--
”She will grow up ugly.”
The two mothers consulted for a few moments in very low tones in the corner of the parlor, then the prioress turned round and said:--
”Father Fauvent, you will get another knee-cap with a bell. Two will be required now.”
On the following day, therefore, two bells were audible in the garden, and the nuns could not resist the temptation to raise the corner of their veils. At the extreme end of the garden, under the trees, two men, Fauvent and another man, were visible as they dug side by side. An enormous event. Their silence was broken to the extent of saying to each other: ”He is an a.s.sistant gardener.”
The vocal mothers added: ”He is a brother of Father Fauvent.”
Jean Valjean was, in fact, regularly installed; he had his belled knee-cap; henceforth he was official. His name was Ultime Fauchelevent.
The most powerful determining cause of his admission had been the prioress's observation upon Cosette: ”She will grow up ugly.”
The prioress, that p.r.o.nounced prognosticator, immediately took a fancy to Cosette and gave her a place in the school as a charity pupil.
There is nothing that is not strictly logical about this.
It is in vain that mirrors are banished from the convent, women are conscious of their faces; now, girls who are conscious of their beauty do not easily become nuns; the vocation being voluntary in inverse proportion to their good looks, more is to be hoped from the ugly than from the pretty. Hence a lively taste for plain girls.
The whole of this adventure increased the importance of good, old Fauchelevent; he won a triple success; in the eyes of Jean Valjean, whom he had saved and sheltered; in those of grave-digger Gribier, who said to himself: ”He spared me that fine”; with the convent, which, being enabled, thanks to him, to retain the coffin of Mother Crucifixion under the altar, eluded Caesar and satisfied G.o.d. There was a coffin containing a body in the Pet.i.t-Picpus, and a coffin without a body in the Vaugirard cemetery, public order had no doubt been deeply disturbed thereby, but no one was aware of it.
As for the convent, its grat.i.tude to Fauchelevent was very great.
Fauchelevent became the best of servitors and the most precious of gardeners. Upon the occasion of the archbishop's next visit, the prioress recounted the affair to his Grace, making something of a confession at the same time, and yet boasting of her deed. On leaving the convent, the archbishop mentioned it with approval, and in a whisper to M. de Latil, Monsieur's confessor, afterwards Archbishop of Reims and Cardinal. This admiration for Fauchelevent became widespread, for it made its way to Rome. We have seen a note addressed by the then reigning Pope, Leo XII., to one of his relatives, a Monsignor in the Nuncio's establishment in Paris, and bearing, like himself, the name of Della Genga; it contained these lines: ”It appears that there is in a convent in Paris an excellent gardener, who is also a holy man, named Fauvent.”
Nothing of this triumph reached Fauchelevent in his hut; he went on grafting, weeding, and covering up his melon beds, without in the least suspecting his excellences and his sanct.i.ty. Neither did he suspect his glory, any more than a Durham or Surrey bull whose portrait is published in the London Ill.u.s.trated News, with this inscription: ”Bull which carried off the prize at the Cattle Show.”
CHAPTER IX--CLOISTERED
Cosette continued to hold her tongue in the convent.
It was quite natural that Cosette should think herself Jean Valjean's daughter. Moreover, as she knew nothing, she could say nothing, and then, she would not have said anything in any case. As we have just observed, 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.