"The meaning of it is, that you dropped your card out of your pocket, that I found it on the ground after you were gone, that I have buried the corpse, that I have filled the grave, that I have done your work, that the porter will return your card to you, and that you will not have to pay fifteen francs.
There you have it, conscript."
"Thanks, villager!" exclaimed Gribier, radiant.
"The next time I will pay for the drinks."
BOOK EIGHTH.--CEMETERIES TAKE THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED THEM
CHAPTER VIII
A SUCCESSFUL INTERROGATORY
An hour later, in the darkness of night, two men and a child presented themselves at No. 62 Rue Petit-Picpus. The elder of the men lifted the knocker and rapped.
They were Fauchelevent, Jean Valjean, and Cosette.
The two old men had gone to fetch Cosette from the fruiterer's in the Rue du Chemin-Vert, where Fauchelevent had deposited her on the preceding day.
Cosette had passed these twenty-four hours trembling silently and understanding nothing.
She trembled to such a degree that she wept.
She had neither eaten nor slept. The worthy fruit-seller had plied her with a hundred questions, without obtaining any other reply than a melancholy and unvarying gaze. Cosette had betrayed nothing of what she had seen and heard during the last two days.
She divined that they were passing through a crisis. She was deeply conscious that it was necessary to "be good." Who has not experienced the sovereign power of those two words, pronounced with a certain accent in the ear of a terrified little being: Say nothing!
Fear is mute.
Moreover, no one guards a secret like a child.
But when, at the expiration of these lugubrious twenty-four hours, she beheld Jean Valjean again, she gave vent to such a cry of joy, that any thoughtful person who had chanced to hear that cry, would have guessed that it issued from an abyss.
Fauchelevent belonged to the convent and knew the pass-words. All the doors opened.