dead, that is well.'' When the doctor has signed the passport for paradise, the undertaker''s company sends a coffin.
If it is a mother, the mothers lay her out; if she is a sister, the sisters lay her out.
After which, I nail her up.
That forms a part of my gardener''s duty.
A gardener is a bit of a grave-digger. She is placed in a lower hall of the church which communicates with the street, and into which no man may enter save the doctor of the dead.
I don''t count the undertaker''s men and myself as men.
It is in that hall that I nail up the coffin. The undertaker''s men come and get it, and whip up, coachman! that''s the way one goes to heaven.
They fetch a box with nothing in it, they take it away again with something in it.
That''s what a burial is like.
De profundis."
A horizontal ray of sunshine lightly touched the face of the sleeping Cosette, who lay with her mouth vaguely open, and had the air of an angel drinking in the light.
Jean Valjean had fallen to gazing at her.
He was no longer listening to Fauchelevent.
That one is not listened to is no reason for preserving silence. The good old gardener went on tranquilly with his babble:--
"The grave is dug in the Vaugirard cemetery.
They declare that they are going to suppress that Vaugirard cemetery.
It is an ancient cemetery which is outside the regulations, which has no uniform, and which is going to retire.