"Nonsense! To take a hammer and drive nails into a board?"
What seemed to Fauchelevent extraordinary was, we repeat, quite simple to Jean Valjean, for he had gone through worse straits; and any man who has been a prisoner knows how to reduce himself to the diameter of the mode of escape. A prisoner is affected by flight just as a sick man is by the crisis which saves or destroys him, and an escape is a cure. What will not a man undergo for the sake of being cured? To be nailed up and carried in a box, to live for a long time in a packing-case, to find air where there is none, to economize one's breath for hours, to manage to choke without dying, was one of Jean Valjean's melancholy talents.
Besides, a coffin in which there is a living body, this convict's expedient, is also an imperial expedient. If we may believe the monk Austin Castillejo, it was the way employed by Charles V., who, wishing to see La Plombes for the last time after his abdication, contrived to get her in and out of the monastery of St. Yuste. Fauchelevent, when he had slightly recovered, exclaimed,—
"But how will you manage to breathe?"
"I will manage it."
"In that box? Why, the mere idea of it chokes me.
"You have a gimlet. You will make a few holes round the mouth, and nail down the lid, without closing it tightly."
"Good! and suppose you cough or sneeze?"
"A man who is escaping does not do such a thing."
And Jean Valjean added,—