However, properly speaking, he lived in the Rue Plumet, and he had
arranged his existence there in the following fashion:—
Cosette and the servant occupied the pavilion; she had the big
sleeping-room with the painted pier-glasses, the boudoir with the
gilded fillets, the justice’s drawing-room furnished with tapestries
and vast armchairs; she had the garden. Jean Valjean had a canopied bed
of antique damask in three colors and a beautiful Persian rug purchased
in the Rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul at Mother Gaucher’s, put into
Cosette’s chamber, and, in order to redeem the severity of these
magnificent old things, he had amalgamated with this bric-à-brac all
the gay and graceful little pieces of furniture suitable to young
girls, an étagère, a bookcase filled with gilt-edged books, an
inkstand, a blotting-book, paper, a work-table incrusted with mother of
pearl, a silver-gilt dressing-case, a toilet service in Japanese
porcelain. Long damask curtains with a red foundation and three colors,
like those on the bed, hung at the windows of the first floor. On the
ground floor, the curtains were of tapestry. All winter long, Cosette’s
little house was heated from top to bottom. Jean Valjean inhabited the
sort of porter’s lodge which was situated at the end of the back
courtyard, with a mattress on a folding-bed, a white wood table, two
straw chairs, an earthenware water-jug, a few old volumes on a shelf,
his beloved valise in one corner, and never any fire. He dined with
Cosette, and he had a loaf of black bread on the table for his own use.
When Toussaint came, he had said to her: “It is the young lady who is
the mistress of this house.”—“And you, monsieur?” Toussaint replied in
amazement.—“I am a much better thing than the master, I am the father.”
Cosette had been taught housekeeping in the convent, and she regulated
their expenditure, which was very modest. Every day, Jean Valjean put
his arm through Cosette’s and took her for a walk. He led her to the
Luxembourg, to the least frequented walk, and every Sunday he took her
to mass at Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, because that was a long way off.
As it was a very poor quarter, he bestowed alms largely there, and the
poor people surrounded him in church, which had drawn down upon him
Thénardier’s epistle: “To the benevolent gentleman of the church of
Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.” He was fond of taking Cosette to visit the
poor and the sick. No stranger ever entered the house in the Rue
Plumet. Toussaint brought their provisions, and Jean Valjean went
himself for water to a fountain nearby on the boulevard. Their wood and
wine were put into a half-subterranean hollow lined with rock-work
which lay near the Rue de Babylone and which had formerly served the
chief-justice as a grotto; for at the epoch of follies and “Little
Houses” no love was without a grotto.
In the door opening on the Rue de Babylone, there was a box destined
for the reception of letters and papers; only, as the three inhabitants
of the pavilion in the Rue Plumet received neither papers nor letters,
the entire usefulness of that box, formerly the go-between of a love
affair, and the confidant of a love-lorn lawyer, was now limited to the
tax-collector’s notices, and the summons of the guard. For M.
Fauchelevent, independent gentleman, belonged to the national guard; he
had not been able to escape through the fine meshes of the census of