I wrote a small ficlet once about convent husbands and Valjean dealing with his own griefs. I don’t know if Valjean would ever deal or think about all his traumas in canon, but I would like to think that he might consider it, with Fauchelevant around.
The Tree Pruner and the Linden Tree
Once upon a time, there had been a Linden Tree.
Valjean found his thoughts as scattered as the circling crows in the reddish sky, after their nest has been suddenly disturbed. Outside the walls, calmness prevailed. Valjean had slept fitfully the past night. The linden tree appeared in his dreams again and again for the third night in a row. He thought of the heart-shaped leaves changing from a deep green to yellow, the sweet scent of its flowers, the sticky nectar of its fruit, and the shelter among its boughs. A linden tree had brought Cosette and Valjean to their sanctuary two years ago.
Once upon a time, in Faverolles (why did Valjean’s stories start with Faverolles, he did not know), there had been a tree and children who sat playing in its shade. The tree offered up its branches to the people to sell and they in turn took care of it. Before long, winter came, and with it cruel men who wanted to uproot the tree entirely. The Linden Tree was taken away on a cart with strong chains wrapped around its sturdy bough. As a result, the land stayed barren for many years, with the children feeling its loss deeply. The Linden tree was also attached to the children. It sorrowed and withered after being uprooted so cruelly and suddenly...
It had been one such tree, where his nieces and nephews hid, to drink milk and eat the fruits; several times he had pruned its branches. He knew how to use the fruits of the tree as medicine and how to use its bark. His mind had not wandered to Faverolles in years, he could no longer picture the village or the faces of his nieces, nephews or his sister, he could only picture that sturdy linden tree, over and over, as if in an obsessive haze that sometimes came over him while he was walking in the garden during the dim twilight.
He walked alone during those hours, absentmindedly moving through the garden as a spectre. He walked with little regard to his person, ever focused on how he was not worthy of the saintly Bishop Myriel or of the nuns who shut themselves up to pray all day, ever focused on humility, never on his happiness. He did not give a second thought to the cold air and the gently falling snow and walked without a coat or a hat, barefoot on the white carpet laid on the grass.
Once upon a time, many years later, there was a fair young mother who loved her child a lot, but was forced to part with the child by the devious wolf-dogs who had tricked her.
The turmoil in his soul grew as he, wrestled with feelings of unworthiness and griefs that had stayed too long and formed a chasm in his soul. He had been holding onto several griefs without having time to think about them: his nieces and nephews, his sister, Fantine, the poor and the unfortunate souls of his fellow inmates drowning in a sea without society throwing them a lifeboat. No one person can hold all the threads of grief in their hand without being pulled into the ocean of grief. He knelt in prayer and cried before going to bed. He woke up after an uneasy dream, in the hours when it became difficult to tell night and day apart. In the thin, shimmering light that was reflected on the rooftops behind them, the dew drops on the leaves looked like pearls.
‘I want to hear more of the story, Papa,’ Cosette had said, insisting that she would not fall asleep until the story was finished. Valjean smiled and continued attaching one thread of a tale he had heard, with another he sifted from memory, till he saw Cosette’s tired head nodding off.
In the early hours of the morning, he lit the candle, shielding its light from Cosette’s bed so as to not wake her. Fauchelevant was already shuffling around and appeared with tea and bread. Cosette slept peacefully still, no spectres from Montfermeil or their chase across Paris troubling her sleep and in the morning light fell on her person and radiated from her fresh morning face as she ran towards the school building.
Most days they would drink the tea in silence, each thinking of the morning’s work that lay ahead. The birds in their formation dipped momentarily towards Fauchelevant already tying the bell on his leg as he shuffled slowly towards the garden to shake the night’s frost from the melon leaves. As the day begans to inch towards dim light, and cockerels began strutting up and down in the hen houses to announce the day, Cosette in her shining morning uniform appeared, ready to start her morning classes. She kissed her Papa and her uncle Fauvent good morning and bit a piece of bread thoughtfully, her eyes darting to Fauvent and Valjean's faces all the whole, before she ran off to the morning prayers and classes. Light radiated on her thin face, her eyes beamed with laughter as any other child’s.
Once upon a time, there was a happy child and the fairies looked over the child and bestowed gifts on her. Her mama loved her even though she had little.
‘And was her Papa also happy?’ Cosette asked as she prepared for bed.
‘Yes, my child. Her Papa was happy because she was happy.’
Fauchelevant saw the look on Valjean’s face and busied himself in thinking of how best to cheer this saintly being. He never asked the questions that anyone else in his place would surely have. Instead he asked many others: about the weather, about the seedlings, about the weeds, all in his rustic tone, a pipe trailing tobacco in his hands, for this veritable gardener had so thoroughly understood Monsieur Madeleine the Saint, as well as the man Valjean. He called him a brother with that deep understanding. It was the second time in Valjean’s life that someone had called him a brother.
There had been some moments, when Mother Innocent had referred to Valjean as the other Fauvent, and he had kept his head bowed in silence, trying to test the name on his lips. It felt more and more like his name, because it had been a name given willingly by Fauchelevant. ‘You do not accept gifts, you forget kindnesses you have done, you are my brother, in name and in work,’ Fauchelevant had insisted. Valjean felt that in accepting this gift of a name, he had become closer to the man who had so willingly bestowed the gift, as if Fauchelevant’s words were the ones he had known all along in his soul. He had a name: Fauchelevent.
Then too, his heart was filled with Cosette, he could not imagine a time when he had not been thinking of and worrying about her. He could not think of himself as a separate being other than Cosette’s father. That was another of his identities which felt more and more true to him. A state of being that he had supposed to be temporary but which had seeped into his soul and felt the truest of his identities. If I should be anything, I should want to be Cosette’s Papa, he had said this to himself many times, often when the child was sleeping peacefully. Sometimes when she would wake up in the middle of the night recollecting the dream of being chased by La Thenardier or shadows in the dark, Valjean and Fauvent would listen to her nightmares, told with a childish simplicity and would comfort her by telling her stories, of brave children who fought monsters as well as some fairy tales by Perrault.
Once upon a time there were large wolf-dogs, who having tricked the mother, wanted to devour the child and whose howls could be heard for miles. The child, blessed with the fairies gifts, braved the howling winds to find the cottage of a witch who would help her. She met a kindly stranger in the woods...
There were monsters who sometimes appeared to Cosette while she was asleep, sometimes in her dreams she was back in the howling woods, running away from La Thenardier whose presence grew to enormous heights, but a soothing tea and her Papa’s stories full of odd coincidences drove the shadows away.
Cosette had been trying to explore the boundaries between timidness from her years spent with the Thenardiers to the natural adventurousness of children her age and had more and more days where she was curious and adventurous. Both Fauvent and Valjean indulged this natural curiosity in her. She became bolder in their presence, but still sometimes hesitated in front of the nuns.
Fauchelevant grumbled about the little white insects killing half of his young plants after a sudden frost the previous winter had killed many saplings already. He listened as Valjean talked about the best ways to protect the vulnerable little plants. In the afternoon they made boughs with little sticks to help the young shoots to become sturdy. Valjean thought of the linden tree again, and of trees which helped the shoots around them to grow. He showed Fauvent how to graft two branches together to produce two different kinds of apples. Fauvent was delighted, cultivation of the garden was important to him and he spent many hours in deep contemplation, worrying about his garden.
Valjean wanted to protect Cosette, from nightmares, from all the melancholy that life might bring, as the older trees do for the younger ones, even when the old trees are worn down with the effect of the elements. Sometimes in his stories, Valjean’s voice became heavy as he trailed off in remembrances of Fantine, while Cosette listened with a concentration and sadness in her eyes that came over young children sometimes in the presence of death. In those moments he kissed the young child, whose startlingly blue eyes reminded him so much of the saintly Fantine who struggled all her life.
Cosette was allowed to help Valjean and Fauvent with the garden on her days off from school. She grew roses, fragile beings who would wilt and die as soon as the first frost touched them, and she would weep at the deaths of her plants, already grasping at the edges of the understanding of life and death. Valjean trembled when she asked if the dead remained behind a veil and whether we could see them.
She wondered what ghosts did all day, did they sleep in preparation for haunting at night? She had many questions. She had been reading a story where ghosts lived in a house, despite Mother Superior thinking it unwise for young girls to indulge in such nonsense.
The only reason she had not confiscated it was because it was not sufficiently romantic and also because the girls were ingenious with their hiding places. Nevertheless, the girls had to spend one afternoon writing on the board with chalk that they would not indulge in sensational stories which were unsuitable for little girls. They had thought the punishment worthwhile and were planning a way to get back at Mother Superior by putting frogs in her desk. Cosette was the bravest, so she volunteered.
Cosette and her friends had hidden books, little paper notes, even a live mouse that one of them had found. The teacher had been horrified to discover the frogs in her desk, the girls had only laughed. Their pranks had become daring, Cosette brought bugs from the garden sometimes in a jar with holes in it, instead of studying her books on geography. They quizzed each other on place names and dates, hours before the exam and made sure none of them were failed by Mother Innocent who had a rather stern mouth.
Cosette imagined that she would grow up to look like her since she had been told often that she was not pretty. That thought did not concern her much, when there were so many wild creatures to explore in the garden and all her friends to play with. The girls ran around the gardens, chasing each other, their school bonnets flying in the air.
Afterwards, Cosette would come sit with Valjean in silence.
‘Do you want to hear a story today, Cosette?’
Cosette shook her head, but she took her Papa’s hand in hers, lest he mind that they were not going to be telling stories. Today, she was happy and wanted to spend time with him, looking at the sunset and the garden and talking about her plans for her own garden and what she would grow in it.
There was a certainty in this kind of existence, it was more concrete, more knowable. Valjean measured his day with the previous one, and the mundane happiness of each filled him with joy. He spent the days taking care of the garden with Fauvent, both their faces roughly creased from the worries of trying to get their plants to survive through the frosts each winter. There was a kind of knowing that existed between the two Fauvents, they did not have to talk to make themselves heard by each other, there was a kind of peace in such relationships that made Valjean almost happy. With the passing seasons, plants heal, birds migrate, small kittens grow into cats, all such things are inevitable, and Valjean, with the help of the attention from Fauvent and Cosette, slowly began to resemble the Linden tree before it became withered, a place of shelter and comfort. Gardeners were capable of resurrecting plants back to life. Cosette wanted to hear the story of the Linden Tree again, a year later.
Once upon a time there was a Linden tree, much bowed down with the weight of all that it had gone through, its worries were visible on its bark. It had almost withered from the cruelty of men. But there was a child that still cared for that tree for that tree had cared for that child and offered up its bark and shade and nourishment from its fruits, once. A gardener seeing the child’s care had helped the tree recover its strength.
‘You are a good person,’ Fauvent reminded him as they stood marveling at Cosette's strawberries, ‘You do not have to be more than that for us, for me and Cosette.’ Cosette took Valjean’s hand in her small one at this sentence, her clear blue eyes gazing at him out of the adoration young children have for their parents.
This time, a tear was in Valjean’s eyes, but it was one of happiness. He believed Fauvent’s words. He had seen young saplings grow into trees, he had used the ordinary nettles for medicine, he had been awed by the sturdy trees recovering after a storm destroyed them. There had to be hope, Valjean thought, there had to be, of things growing and recovering in the presence of a gentle hand.
