Fauchelevent, who was seated, sprang up as though a bomb had burst under his chair.
"You!"
"Why not?"
Jean Valjean gave way to one of those rare smiles which lighted up his face like a flash from heaven in the winter.
"You know, Fauchelevent, what you have said:
`Mother Crucifixion is dead.'
and I add:
`and Father Madeleine is buried.'
"Ah! good, you can laugh, you are not speaking seriously."
"Very seriously, I must get out of this place."
"Certainly."
"l have told you to find a basket, and a cover for me also,"
"Well?"
"The basket will be of pine, and the cover a black cloth."
"In the first place, it will be a white cloth.
Nuns are buried in white."
"Let it be a white cloth, then."
"You are not like other men, Father Madeleine."
To behold such devices, which are nothing else than the savage and daring inventions of the galleys, spring forth from the peaceable things which surrounded him, and mingle with what he called the "petty course of life in the convent," caused Fauchelevent as much amazement as a gull fishing in the gutter of the Rue Saint-Denis would inspire in a passer-by.
Jean Valjean went on:--