1488 Les Miserables
self 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 neigh-
bors 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 Tous-
saint, whom Jean Valjean had saved from the hospital and
from wretchedness, and who was elderly, a stammerer, and
from the provinces, three qualities which had decided Jean
Valjean to take her with him. He had hired the house under
the name of M. Fauchelevent, independent gentleman. In
all that has been related heretofore, the reader has, doubt-
less, been no less prompt than Thenardier to recognize Jean
Va lj e a n.
Why had Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Petit-
Picpus? What had happened?
Nothing had happened.
It will be remembered that Jean Valjean 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 brooded over
the soul of that child, he said to himself that she was his,
that nothing could take her from him, that this would last
indefinitely, that she would certainly become a nun, being
thereto gently incited every day, that thus the convent was
henceforth the universe for her as it was for him, that he
should grow old there, and that she would grow up there,
that she would grow old there, and that he should die there;