,
which rendered her talkative. There remained to her from her past, two
teeth,--one above, the other below,--which she was continually knocking
against each other. She had questioned Cosette, who had not been able
to tell her anything, since she knew nothing herself except that she had
come from Montfermeil. One morning, this spy saw Jean Valjean, with
an air which struck the old gossip as peculiar, entering one of the
uninhabited compartments of the hovel. She followed him with the step
of an old cat, and was able to observe him without being seen, through a
crack in the door, which was directly opposite him. Jean Valjean had his
back turned towards this door, by way of greater security, no doubt. The
old woman saw him fumble in his pocket and draw thence a case, scissors,
and thread; then he began to rip the lining of one of the skirts of his
coat, and from the opening he took a bit of yellowish paper, which he
unfolded. The old woman recognized, with terror, the fact that it was
a bank-bill for a thousand francs. It was the second or third only that
she had seen in the course of her existence. She fled in alarm.

A moment later, Jean Valjean accosted her, and asked her to go and
get this thousand-franc bill changed for him, adding that it was his
quarterly income, which he had received the day before. "Where?" thought
the old woman. "He did not go out until six o'clock in the evening, and
the government bank certainly is not open at that hour." The old
woman went to get the bill changed, and mentioned her surmises. That
thousand-franc note, commented on and multiplied, produced a vast
amount of terrified discussion among the gossips of the Rue des Vignes
Saint-Marcel.

A few days later, it chanced that Jean Valjean was sawing some wood, in
his shirt-sleeves, in the corridor. The old woman was in the chamber,
putting things in order. She was alone. Cosette was occupied in admiring
the wood as it was sawed. The old woman caught sight of the coat hanging
on a nail, and examined it. The lining had been sewed up again. The good
woman felt of it carefully, and thought she observed in the skirts and
revers thicknesses of paper. More thousand-franc bank-bills, no doubt!

She also noticed that there were all sorts of things in the pockets.
Not only the needles, thread, and scissors which she had seen, but a big
pocket-book, a very large knife, and--a suspicious circumstance--several
wigs of various colors. Each pocket of t