Chapter 148 Nine Hidden

After Cosette arrived in the convent, she still didn't talk much. Cosette very naturally thinks that she is Jean Valjean's daughter.Besides, knowing nothing, she could say nothing, and she would not say anything under any circumstances.We have just pointed out that there is no other force that can make children the habit of keeping their mouths shut more than suffering.Cosette had suffered so much that she was wary of anything, even speaking or breathing.She was often beaten for a sentence!Since she followed Jean Valjean, she began to feel more relaxed.She got used to life in the convent very quickly.But she often missed Catherine, but dared not say it.But once she said to Jean Valjean: "Father, if I had known, I would have brought her here."

Cosette became a boarding student in the seminary and changed into the student uniform prescribed by the seminary.Jean Valjean obtained permission to take back the clothes she had changed.It was the mourning dress he had put on her when she left Thenardier's.Not too shabby.Jean Valjean put away these old clothes, together with woolen stockings and shoes, in a small suitcase which he had managed to obtain, in which were contained a great deal of camphor and various spices, which were much used in the convent. thing.He put the suitcase on a chair beside his bed, and always carried the key with him.Cosette asked him one day: "Father, what kind of box is this that smells so good?"

Lord Fauchelevent, in addition to the honor which we have just described and which he himself did not realize, also received rewards for his good deeds, firstly, he was happy in what he did; secondly, he His work was shared, which lightened his own burden; at last, he was very fond of smoking, and lived with M. Madeleine, and it was so convenient that he consumed three times as much tobacco as before. The richness is also incomparable with that of the past, because the tobacco leaves are supplied by Mr. Madeleine. The nuns ignored the name Uldim, and called Jean Valjean "Two." If the nuns had Javert's eyesight, they might have noticed that when the gardening in the garden required someone to run errands, it was always Monsieur Fauchelevent, the old, sick, lame one, who never It was the other, and they didn't notice it at all, maybe because the eyes that are always looking at God are not good at scouting, maybe because they prefer to spend their energy on spying on each other.

Jean Valjean, fortunately, remained quite still.Javert watched the area for more than a month. The convent seemed to Jean Valjean an island surrounded by precipices.Those four walls are from now on his sphere of activity.From there he could see the sky, which was enough for his comfort, and the sight of Cosette was enough for his happiness. For him, a very quiet life began again. He lived with old Fauchelevent in the shabby house in the garden.The dilapidated house was built with broken bricks and tiles, and it was still there in 1845. We know that there are three rooms in total, bare, with nothing but walls.The principal room had been surrendered by Fauchelevent to M. Madeleine against Jean Valjean's refusal.On the wall of the main room, apart from the two nails for hanging the lap belt and the back basket, there is only a piece of banknote issued by the royalist party in 1993 nailed to the fireplace. The following is its correct copy:

The Vendée military coupon had been nailed to the wall by the former gardener, an old Juan who had died in the convent, and had been succeeded by Fauchelevent. Jean Valjean worked all day in the garden, which was very useful.He used to be a tree trimmer, and a gardener was just what he wanted.We remember that he had many methods and tricks in the cultivation of plants.He can use it now.The fruit trees were almost all wild, and he made them bear delicious fruit by grafting. Cosette was allowed to visit him for an hour every day.Compared with the sad faces of the nuns and his kindness, the boy loved him all the more.Every day at a certain hour, she ran to the shabby house.As soon as she came in, the poor house became a paradise at once.Jean Valjean beamed, thinking that he could make Cosette happy, and his own happiness was increased by it.The joy we give to others has such a touching quality that it is not always weaker than the light source like ordinary reflections, but when it returns to us, it will be more brilliant.During the recess, Jean Valjean watched Cosette play and run from a distance, and he could distinguish her laughter from the laughter of many people.

For now Cosette could laugh. Even Cosette's countenance was altered in some degree.That depressed look was gone.Smile is sunshine, it can eliminate the winter color on people's faces. Cosette, who had never been beautiful, became more lovable.She said a lot of little things that made sense in her soft child's voice. When the recess was over and Cosette returned to her class, Jean Valjean looked at the window of her classroom, and at midnight he also got up to look at the window of her bedroom. There is also God's will in this, and the monastery, like Cosette, also supports and completes the bishop's work in Jean Valjean's heart.It is true that good moral character often leads people to the side of pride and complacency.There is a bridge built by the devil.When Providence left Jean Valjean in the Priory of Petit Piquebus, he may have already approached that side and that bridge unconsciously.As long as he compared himself with the Bishop, he could always feel his own inadequacy, and he could bow his head; but lately he had begun to compare himself with others, and he grew complacent.who knows?Perhaps he will gradually return to the path of hatred.

The convent held him down on the slope. The monastery was the second place of imprisonment he had seen.In his youth, that is, at the beginning of his life, and even after that, until recently, he had seen a different kind of prison, a heinous place, and he always felt that the severe laws there It is the crime of law and the injustice of punishment.Now, after the penal cell, he saw the convent, he thought to himself that he had been a member of the penal cell, and now he was, so to speak, a spectator of the convent, and he put the two Compare mentally. Sometimes, he leaned on the handle of the hoe with both hands, and slowly pondered deep into the bottomless whirling of his thoughts.

He recalled those old comrades, how miserable their lives were, they had to get up at dawn and toil until late at night, they had almost no time to sleep, they slept on camp beds, and they were allowed to use only two-inch thick mattresses , in those big sleeping houses, all the year round, with fire only during the hardest months; they wore hideous red prison coats, and were blessed with a pair of coarse trousers in hot weather, and a pair of coarse trousers in cold weather Wear a rough woolen sweater; they eat alcohol and meat only when they are "doing heavy work."They no longer have names, they are all separated by numbers, as if their personalities are just numbers; they lower their eyes, speak in low voices, have their hair shaved, and live under sticks and humiliation.

Then his thoughts turned back to the people before him. These people also have hair loss, low eyes, and low voices. Although they are not living in humiliation, they are being ridiculed by the world. Although their backs are not beaten, their shoulders are tortured by the rules and regulations until they are bloody.Their names have also disappeared in the crowd, and they only survive under some dignified names.They never ate meat, never drank wine, and often they did not eat from morning till night, and though they wore no red coats, they wore shrouds of black wool, which made them feel too heavy in summer and too light in winter , can neither be subtracted nor added, even if they want to change into a cloth or woolen coat with the seasons; they have to wear serge shirts for six months in a year, so they often suffer from fever.What they live in is not the kind of big house that is only lit in the cold season, but a quiet room that never has a fire; what they sleep on is not two-inch thick mattresses, but straw.As a result, they do not even have the chance to sleep, and after a hard day's work, they have to wake up every night just as the rest begins, when they are sleepy, when they fall asleep, or when they feel warm from sleep. , got up, went to the cold, dark altar, knelt on the stone, and said prayers.

On certain days, each of them had to kneel on the stone slab in turn, or prostrate himself on the ground with his head on the ground, arms outstretched, like a cross, for twelve hours in a row. Those are men and these are women. What did those men do?They stole, raped, robbed, killed, assassinated.Those were bandits, liars, poisoners, arsonists, murderers, kinslayers.What have these women done?They did nothing. On the one hand, there is robbery, theft, fraud, rape, adultery, murder, all kinds of evil, all kinds of crimes, and on the other hand, there is only one thing: innocence. The perfect innocence is almost as good as the Yide of the Virgin Mary, and she is similar to a virtuous and virtuous in the world, but she is close to the sanctuary in heaven.

There are whispered confessions of sin on the one hand, and loud confessions of faults on the other.And what a crime!What kind of fault is it! On the one hand, it is a stench, and on the other hand, it is a faint fragrance.On the one hand, it is a spiritual plague, which slowly devours patients under the supervision of gunpoint; on the other hand, it is a bright and clean flame that smelts the soul.Darkness over there, darkness here, but a darkness full of light and radiant light. Both places are places of slavery, but in the first place there is still a possibility of salvation, there is always a legal deadline in sight, and besides, absconding is possible.In the second place, endless, the only hope is a gleam hanging at the end of the ages, the gleam of deliverance, which is what people call death. In the one place men are bound only by chains; in the other they are bound by their beliefs. What emerges from the first place?It is the general curse of the crowd, the gnashing of hatred, the viciousness of success or failure, the roar of anger and the mocking of God. What comes out of the second place?Favor and adoration. In these two very similar but very different places, two very different people are accomplishing the same thing: atonement for sin. Jean Valjean knew very well the compensation of the first kind, personal compensation, compensation for himself.But he did not understand the compensation of the others, the compensation of the innocent, the unstained, and he asked with trembling fear: "What is compensation? How?" A voice answered in his heart: "It is the most outstanding kindness of human beings, and it is compensation for others." Here, our own set of theories is preserved, and we are just relayers, expressing his impression from the perspective of Jean Valjean. He saw the pinnacle of self-denial, the pinnacle of unique virtue, the innocence of pardoning and bearing, the servitude borne, the torment borne, the plea of ​​the innocent to the rescue of the fallen. Tortures to come, blended with the love of God without being confused with it.The love of human beings who plead with all their hearts, those who are so sad as if they are condemned and smile, and who are kind and weak like they are rewarded. At the same time, he recalled how he dared to harbor resentment in the past! Often, in the middle of the night, when he arose to listen to the thanksgiving songs of the innocent nuns who suffered under discipline, and thought of the blasphemy of those duly punished looking to heaven, he himself, a fool, He also raised his fist to God, and he felt the blood in his veins become cold. There was one thing that caused him the most soul-stirring thought, as if it was a kind of warning whispered in his ear by the gods: he had escaped from prison by climbing over the wall before, regardless of life and death, and vowed to succeed in his plan, and then went through all kinds of hardships to get it. Progress, all these efforts to get out of that place of penance for sins are all made to get into this one.Was this the characteristic of his destiny? The monastery, too, was a kind of prison, and had such a grim resemblance to the place from which he had escaped that it had never occurred to him before. He saw iron gates, iron gate bolts, and iron window bars again. Who was he guarding against?To guard against some angels. The high walls that surrounded the tigers, as he had seen them before, now surrounded the lambs. It was a place of compensation, not of punishment, but it was harsher, more miserable, more ruthless than the other.These virgins were more severely crushed than those convicts.There was once a sharp, hard wind, the same wind that froze his youth, through the iron prison where the owl was held; now another colder, more biting cold was blowing A cage for white doves. Why? When he thought of all this, his mood completely merged with this miraculous realm. In these brooding reveries his pride vanished.He asked himself many times how small and weak he felt, and he cried countless times.Everything that had happened to him during the past six months had led him back to the virtues of the bishop, Cosette with the heart of a child, and the convent with the virtue of compassion. Sometimes, in the evening, when there is no traffic in the garden, you will see him kneeling in the middle of the path by the altar wall, before the window he peeped at the night he first arrived, and he knew where it was. A nun was lying on the ground, praying for the atonement of the world, and his face was turned there.He just knelt down before the nun and prayed. It seemed to him that he dared not kneel directly before God. Everything around him, the secluded garden, those fragrant flowers, those laughing and cheering children, those dignified and simple women, that solemn monastery, slowly seeped into his heart, and his heart gradually became As silent as the monastery, as fragrant as the flowers, as peaceful as the garden, as simple as the women, as joyful as the children.He also thought that it was the holy place taken by God twice in a row in critical moments in his life, the first time was when he was rejected by human society and all gates did not allow him to enter, and the second time was when human society again At the time when he was hunted down to send him to the penitentiary, if there hadn't been the first holy place, he would have fallen into the fire of crime again, and if there hadn't been a second holy place, he would have fallen into the pain of prison again. go. His heart melted completely in gratitude. Several years passed in this way, and Cosette grew up.