Chapter Text
After they left the apartment in the Rue de l’Ouest, the young man from the Luxembourg did not find them again, but Jean Valjean remained discontent. True, he had kept Cosette safe for now, from some ninny with no more wit than to follow them home in daylight—but the next young man might not be so easily put off.
And Paris was full of young men—now that the fear had been planted in his heart, he saw them everywhere: loitering in gardens, lounging outside cafés, roving the streets four abreast without giving way, whistling, smoking, laughing. That another, cannier and better practiced at deceit, might set his eyes on Cosette seemed inevitable. That Cosette might look back—
She had never seemed even to notice the fool in the Luxembourg; and yet since the move she had been quiet, wrapped in a melancholy he could neither understand nor remedy. Under her modesty and obedience, had she noticed the attention after all—even regretted its loss? Had she—as young as he was old, and with her horizons necessarily set wider—already cracked the chrysalis, and merely waited for her outspread wings to dry? A kind Providence might delay the day, but it had not spared to make her beautiful, and surely it would not waste so much beauty on Jean Valjean.
(In this, he was mistaken: spendthrift Nature is lavish with starlight even where all eyes sleep, and with the colors of the aurora borealis over the untrodden ice of the Pole. Beauty is not wasted. The Infinite, patient observer, does not miss the blush of a single rose.)
In this mood, he took them on a day in late September to the garden of the Tuileries. It was a garden for walking, not sitting; they promenaded, Cosette on his arm, a gentle wind tossing the spray of artificial ferns that trimmed her bonnet. Jean Valjean was not immune to a certain pride in escorting Spring itself through Autumn’s vulgar display—but he was aware, uncomfortably, that this pride fed on the gazes of others: that the confirmation of Cosette’s continued love, in her own pride in walking out with him, was paid for with the attention of the crowd; and while he no longer feared the world’s gaze on himself, he feared it more every day for Cosette’s sake. He regretted all over again taking them from the convent.
He was jolted from these ruminations, at all once, by a voice calling, from some distance, “Cosette!” He might have taken it for some phantom of his own mind, already missing and grasping at her; but Cosette’s wordless cry of recognition and sudden pressure on his arm made clear its reality. He followed Cosette’s gaze, his mind racing ahead of his eyes—despite all their precautions, some admirer had already gained Cosette’s name, and who knew what else?
But the quiver of the silk ferns pointed to his quarry as surely as the trembling bracken spoke to the tracking hound. Far down the gravel path, a young lady hurried towards them. “Cosette!” she called again; and, as she halted to drop a curtsey, “M’sieur Fauvent!”
It was merely one of the little girls from the convent. Or not so little; as she rose from her curtsey—and rose, and rose—he placed her, a girl about Cosette’s age, taller than any of the grown sisters, taller even than Jean Valjean himself. A matron in widow’s weeds swept up behind her, nearly as tall as the girl and clearly her mother. “Mama, this is my friend Cosette Fauchelevent from the convent and her father!” the girl said, at the same time Cosette said, “Papa, it’s Cécilia Aubert! You remember Cécilia.”
Mme. Aubert inclined her head in greeting and commenced a polite interrogation while the two young ladies, falling into step a pace in front of them, bent their heads together and caught up rapidly on everything each had done since Cosette had left the convent. Jean Valjean answered, briefly and mildly, that he had been the convent gardener; that he was now retired, having come into a small inheritance; that he and Cosette lived very quietly near the Invalides. Jean Valjean had dressed so as not to embarrass Cosette in her walking clothes; if Mme. Aubert had any notions of how a retired gardener should look—or doubts of how appropriate an acquaintance he was for her young daughter—they were put to rest as much by his snowy linen and unfashionable broad-brimmed hat as by his answers.
Beneath the mild tone, Jean Valjean was dizzy with elated relief. From staring down the path that ended in his worst fears, he had been startled out of this dismal reverie by a fear only slightly less awful—public recognition—but the threat had turned out to be no threat at all: a girl Cosette’s own age, a respectable matron, a reinforcement of his public identity as Fauchelevent.
Cosette and Cécilia were still chattering merrily; all Cosette’s melancholy had dissipated at once, like frost in sunlight. A chance to speak to her school friend—perhaps that was all she had needed. She was young, yes, and the young needed amusement, but there were other amusements than intrigue. A stroll with a young lady whose only departure from perfect respectability was inordinate height, in the company of the lady’s mother—what could be safer for Cosette, or more fitting?
Buoyed by this good turn of fortune, his answers to Mme. Aubert—that he was a National Guardsman; that they attended Mass at least weekly, sometimes twice—were delivered with a comfortable assurance that, combined with Cosette’s fashionable dress and modest manner, cemented Mademoiselle Fauchelevent in that lady’s mind as a suitable friend for her daughter, and after an hour’s walk in this manner she invited Cosette and her father to call upon them in the faubourg Saint-Germain. Seeing Cosette’s hopeful face, Jean Valjean could only give his assent.