ld be wise to go abroad, if only for a few months, and to set out for London.
Well, they would go.
What difference did it make to him whether he was in France or in England, provided he had Cosette beside him?
Cosette was his nation.
Cosette sufficed for his happiness; the idea that he, perhaps, did not suffice for Cosette''s happiness, that idea which had formerly been the cause of his fever and sleeplessness, did not even present itself to his mind. He was in a state of collapse from all his past sufferings, and he was fully entered on optimism.
Cosette was by his side, she seemed to be his; an optical illusion which every one has experienced. He arranged in his own mind, with all sorts of felicitous devices, his departure for England with Cosette, and he beheld his felicity reconstituted wherever he pleased, in the perspective of his revery.
As he paced to and fro with long strides, his glance suddenly encountered something strange.
In the inclined mirror facing him which surmounted the sideboard, he saw the four lines which follow:--
"My dearest, alas! my father insists on our setting out immediately. We shall be this evening in the Rue de l''Homme Arme, No. 7. In a week we shall be in England.
COSETTE.
June 4th."
Jean Valjean halted, perfectly haggard.
Cosette on her arrival had placed her blotting-book on the sideboard in front of the mirror, and, utterly absorbed in her agony of grief, had forgotten it and left it there, without even observing that she had left it wide open, and open at precisely the page on which she had laid to dry the four lines which she had penned, and which she had given in charge of the young workman in the Rue Plumet. The writing had been printed off on the blotter.