“The nun is dead,” said he. “There is the knell.”
And he made a sign to Jean Valjean to listen.
The bell struck a second time.
“It is the knell, Monsieur Madeleine. The bell will continue to strike once a minute for twenty-four hours, until the body is taken from the church.—You see, they play. At recreation hours it suffices to have a ball roll aside, to send them all hither, in spite of prohibitions, to hunt and rummage for it all about here. Those cherubs are devils.”
“Who?” asked Jean Valjean.
“The little girls. You would be very quickly discovered. They would shriek: ‘Oh! a man!’ There is no danger today. There will be no recreation hour. The day will be entirely devoted to prayers. You hear the bell. As I told you, a stroke each minute. It is the death knell.”
“I understand, Father Fauchelevent. There are pupils.”
And Jean Valjean thought to himself:—
“Here is Cosette’s education already provided.”
Fauchelevent exclaimed:—
“Pardine! There are little girls indeed! And they would bawl around you! And they would rush off! To be a man here is to have the plague. You see how they fasten a bell to my paw as though I were a wild beast.”
Jean Valjean fell into more and more profound thought.—“This convent would be our salvation,” he murmured.
Then he raised his voice:—
“Yes, the difficulty is to remain here.”