In the same coffer he had placed his other treasures, the Bishop's candlesticks.
It will be remembered that he had carried off the candlesticks when he made his escape from Montreuil-sur-Mer. The man seen one evening for the first time by Boulatruelle, was Jean Valjean.
Later on, every time that Jean Valjean needed money, he went to get it in the Blaru-bottom. Hence the absences which we have mentioned.
He had a pickaxe somewhere in the heather, in a hiding-place known to himself alone.
When he beheld Marius convalescent, feeling that the hour was at hand, when that money might prove of service, he had gone to get it; it was he again, whom Boulatruelle had seen in the woods, but on this occasion, in the morning instead of in the evening.
Boulatreulle inherited his pickaxe.
The actual sum was five hundred and eighty-four thousand, five hundred francs.
Jean Valjean withdrew the five hundred francs for himself.--"We shall see hereafter," he thought.
The difference between that sum and the six hundred and thirty thousand francs withdrawn from Laffitte represented his expenditure in ten years, from 1823 to 1833.
The five years of his stay in the convent had cost only five thousand francs.
Jean Valjean set the two candlesticks on the chimney-piece, where they glittered to the great admiration of Toussaint.
Moreover, Jean Valjean knew that he was delivered from Javert. The story had been told in his presence, and he had verified the fact in the Moniteur, how a police inspector named Javert had been found drowned under a boat belonging to some laundresses, between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf, and that a writing left by this man, otherwise irreproachable and highly esteemed by his superiors, pointed to a fit of mental aberration and a suicide.--"In fact," thought Jean Valjean, "since he left me at liberty, once having got me in his power, he must have been already mad."
BOOK FIFTH.--GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER
CHAPTER VI
THE TWO OLD MEN DO EVERYTHING, EACH ONE AFTER HIS OWN FASHION, TO RENDER COSETTE HAPPY
Everything was made ready for the wedding.
The doctor, on being consulted, declared that it might take place in February. It was then December.
A few ravishing weeks of perfect happiness passed.
The grandfather was not the least happy of them all.
He remained for a quarter of an hour at a time gazing at Cosette.
"The wonderful, beautiful girl!" he exclaimed.
"And she has so sweet and good an air! she is, without exception, the most charming girl that I have ever seen in my life.
Later on, she'll have virtues with an odor of violets.
How graceful! one cannot live otherwise than nobly with such a creature.
Marius, my boy, you are a Baron, you are rich, don't go to pettifogging, I beg of you."
Cosette and Marius had passed abruptly from the sepulchre to paradise. The transition had not been softened, and they would have been stunned, had they not been dazzled by it.
"Do you understand anything about it?" said Marius to Cosette.