Page 896 - les-miserables

shall I save him? Just the same.’
But what a problem it was to manage to have him re-
main in the convent! Fauchelevent did not recoil in the face
of this almost chimerical undertaking; this poor peasant of
Picardy without any other ladder than his self-devotion, his
good will, and a little of that old rustic cunning, on this
occasion enlisted in the service of a generous enterprise, un-
dertook to scale the difficulties of the cloister, and the steep
escarpments of the rule of Saint-Benoit. Father Fauchelev-
ent was an old man who had been an egoist all his life, and
who, towards the end of his days, halt, infirm, with no inter-
est left to him in the world, found it sweet to be grateful, and
perceiving a generous action to be performed, flung himself
upon it like a man, who at the moment when he is dying,
should find close to his hand a glass of good wine which he
had never tasted, and should swallow it with avidity. We
may add, that the air which he had breathed for many years
in this convent had destroyed all personality in him, and
had ended by rendering a good action of some kind abso-
lutely necessary to him.
So he took his resolve: to devote himself to M. Made-
leine.
We have just called him a poor peasant of Picardy. That
description is just, but incomplete. At the point of this story
which we have now reached, a little of Father Fauchelevent’s
physiology becomes useful. He was a peasant, but he had
been a notary, which added trickery to his cunning, and
penetration to his ingenuousness. Having, through vari-
ous causes, failed in his business, he had descended to the

896 Les Miserables