Hours seemed to pass before his tears were at an end. Afterwards, Valjean remained as he was, prone on the bedspread with his face buried in scented black wool: there did not seem to be a point in getting up. There did not seem to be a point in anything anymore. With his arm for a pillow and still kneeling on the floor, Valjean fell into a reverie, and then into uneasy slumber.
He did not know what roused him, but when he came to, Valjean was certain that something had happened in the house during his sleep. He raised his face from the bedspread. Had there been a noise? The house was deadly quiet and unbearably cold; Valjean's knees and legs had gotten chilled to the bone marrow against the icy wooden floorboards.
Valjean looked out the window. It was snowing, and must have been for some time now: an even layer of virgin white covered the courtyard flowerbeds, and heavy snow garlands adorned the bare branches of the sickly trees. There was a light on in the portress' lodge: her companion must have returned from her night's work at the tavern.
Perhaps it was the light that woke me, thought Valjean uncertainly.
Then somewhere above Toussaint's garret, in the attic, a plank creaked dolefully – the one Valjean had never gotten around to replacing. Almost as though in response to it, the wind picked up outside, whistling and whooshing against the frosted windowpanes.
Ah, thought Valjean.
The sleep did not refresh him. Wakefulness came in the middle of a not-quite-nightmare where Valjean found himself wrestling with a corpse. The particulars were already fading from his mind, but Valjean could still recall that the corpse was unusually strong – inhumanly so – and had a countenance that was weary but mulish, which Valjean found at once strange and also utterly familiar. At one point, Valjean remembered, the idea came to him that an animated corpse is an undead thing and as such might ostensibly be afraid of the sign of the Cross; however, before he had even raised his hand to make the sign over the thick grey cloth covering the corpse's breast, the corpse had himself quickly freed one of his arms from Valjean's grip and made the sign over Valjean himself. At that point, it became obvious to Valjean that the corpse he was wrestling with was actually his own.
Now that he was awake, Valjean didn't quite know what to do with himself.
Ought I make a fire? he thought. But neither Cosette nor Toussaint are here - is there really need to waste firewood on myself alone?
Valjean glanced out the window again. The wind's whistle was rising to a howl; the snow was coming down harder and harder. Valjean thought for a moment that he had perceived a dark figure standing on the street by the portress' lodge, illuminated by the weak light from her window, but then another gust of flurries blurred everything before his eyes and when he looked at that spot again, there was no one there.