





It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.

Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea. As in the ocean,
the diver may disappear there.

The transition was an unheard-of one. In the very heart of the city,
Jean Valjean had escaped from the city, and, in the twinkling of an
eye, in the time required to lift the cover and to replace it, he had
passed from broad daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to
midnight, from tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the
stagnation of the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even
than that of the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most
absolute obscurity.

An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret trap-door
of Paris; to quit that street where death was on every side, for that
sort of sepulchre where there was life, was a strange instant. He
remained for several seconds as though bewildered; listening,
stupefied. The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him.
Celestial goodness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery.
Adorable ambuscades of providence!

Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know
whether that which he was carrying in that grave was a living being or
a dead corpse.

His first sensation was one of blindness. All of a sudden, he could see
nothing. It seemed to him too, that, in one instant, he had become
deaf. He no longer heard anything. The frantic storm of murder which
had been let loose a few feet above his head did not reach him, thanks
to the thickness of the earth which separated him from it, as we have
said, otherwise than faintly and indistinctly, and like a rumbling, in
the depths. He felt that the ground was solid under his feet; that was
all; but that was enough. He extended one arm and then the other,
touched the walls on both sides, and perceived that the passage was
narrow; he slipped, and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. He
cautiously put forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some gulf; he
discovered that the paving continued. A gust of fetidness informed him
of the place in which he stood.

After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind. A little
light fell through the man-hole through which he had descended, and his
eyes became accustomed to this cavern. He began to distinguish
something. The passage in which he had burrowed—no other word can
better express the situation—was walled in behind him. It was one of
those blind alleys, which the special jargon terms branches. In front
of him there was another wall, a wall like night. The light of the
air-hole died out ten or twelve paces from the point where Jean Valjean
stood, and barely cast a wan pallor on a few metres of the damp walls
of the sewer. Beyond, the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate thither
seemed horrible, an entrance into it appeared like an engulfment. A man
could, however, plunge into that wall of fog and it was necessary so to
do. Haste was even requisite. It occurred to Jean Valjean that the
grating which he had caught sight of under the flag-stones might also
catch the eye of the soldiery, and that everything hung upon this
chance. They also might descend into that well and search it. There was
not a minute to be lost. He had deposited Marius on the ground, he
picked him up again,—that is the real word for it,—placed him on his
shoulders once more, and set out. He plunged resolutely into the gloom.

The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied.
Perils of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them,
perchance. After the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the
cavern of miasmas and traps; after chaos, the sewer. Jean Valjean had
fallen from one circle of hell into another.

When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt. A problem
presented itself. The passage terminated in another gut which he
encountered across his path. There two ways presented themselves. Which
should he take? Ought he to turn to the left or to the right? How was
he to find his bearings in that black labyrinth? This labyrinth, to
which we have already called the reader’s attention, has a clue, which
is its slope. To follow to the slope is to arrive at the river.

This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.

He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer des Halles; that
if he were to choose the path to the left and follow the slope, he
would arrive, in less than a quarter of an hour, at some mouth on the
Seine between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf, that is to say, he
would make his appearance in broad daylight on the most densely peopled
spot in Paris. Perhaps he would come out on some man-hole at the
intersection of streets. Amazement of the passers-by at beholding two
bleeding men emerge from the earth at their feet. Arrival of the
police, a call to arms of the neighboring post of guards. Thus they
would be seized before they had even got out. It would be better to
plunge into that labyrinth, to confide themselves to that black gloom,
and to trust to Providence for the outcome.

He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.

When he had turned the angle of the gallery, the distant glimmer of an
air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell upon him once more,
and he became blind again. Nevertheless, he advanced as rapidly as
possible. Marius’ two arms were passed round his neck, and the former’s
feet dragged behind him. He held both these arms with one hand, and
groped along the wall with the other. Marius’ cheek touched his, and
clung there, bleeding. He felt a warm stream which came from Marius
trickling down upon him and making its way under his clothes. But a
humid warmth near his ear, which the mouth of the wounded man touched,
indicated respiration, and consequently, life. The passage along which
Jean Valjean was now proceeding was not so narrow as the first. Jean
Valjean walked through it with considerable difficulty. The rain of the
preceding day had not, as yet, entirely run off, and it created a
little torrent in the centre of the bottom, and he was forced to hug
the wall in order not to have his feet in the water.

Thus he proceeded in the gloom. He resembled the beings of the night
groping in the invisible and lost beneath the earth in veins of shadow.

Still, little by little, whether it was that the distant air-holes
emitted a little wavering light in this opaque gloom, or whether his
eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision returned
to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea, now of the wall
which he touched, now of the vault beneath which he was passing. The
pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune and ends
by finding God there.

It was not easy to direct his course.

The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of the streets
which lie above it. There were then in Paris two thousand two hundred
streets. Let the reader imagine himself beneath that forest of gloomy
branches which is called the sewer. The system of sewers existing at
that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of eleven
leagues. We have said above, that the actual network, thanks to the
special activity of the last thirty years, was no less than sixty
leagues in extent.

Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder. He thought that he was
beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it was a pity that it was not so.
Under the Rue Saint-Denis there is an old stone sewer which dates from
Louis XIII. and which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the
Grand Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation of
the ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-Martin
sewer, whose four arms describe a cross. But the gut of the
Petite-Truanderie the entrance to which was in the vicinity of the
Corinthe wine-shop has never communicated with the sewer of the Rue
Saint-Denis; it ended at the Montmartre sewer, and it was in this that
Jean Valjean was entangled. There opportunities of losing oneself
abound. The Montmartre sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the
ancient network. Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind him the
sewer of the markets whose geometrical plan presents the appearance of
a multitude of parrots’ roosts piled on top of each other; but he had
before him more than one embarrassing encounter and more than one
street corner—for they are streets—presenting itself in the gloom like
an interrogation point; first, on his left, the vast sewer of the
Plâtrière, a sort of Chinese puzzle, thrusting out and entangling its
chaos of Ts and Zs under the Post-Office and under the rotunda of the
Wheat Market, as far as the Seine, where it terminates in a Y;
secondly, on his right, the curving corridor of the Rue du Cadran with
its three teeth, which are also blind courts; thirdly, on his left, the
branch of the Mail, complicated, almost at its inception, with a sort
of fork, and proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag until it ends in the
grand crypt of the outlet of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in
every direction; and lastly, the blind alley of a passage of the Rue
des Jeûneurs, without counting little ducts here and there, before
reaching the belt sewer, which alone could conduct him to some issue
sufficiently distant to be safe.

Had Jean Valjean had any idea of all that we have here pointed out, he
would speedily have perceived, merely by feeling the wall, that he was
not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis. Instead of the
ancient stone, instead of the antique architecture, haughty and royal
even in the sewer, with pavement and string courses of granite and
mortar costing eight hundred livres the fathom, he would have felt
under his hand contemporary cheapness, economical expedients, porous
stone filled with mortar on a concrete foundation, which costs two
hundred francs the metre, and the bourgeoise masonry known as _à petits
matériaux_—small stuff; but of all this he knew nothing.

He advanced with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing, knowing
nothing, buried in chance, that is to say, engulfed in providence.

By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. The gloom
which enveloped him penetrated his spirit. He walked in an enigma. This
aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in a dizzy fashion.
It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows. Jean
Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route without seeing
it. In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last. How
was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he find it in time?
would that colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cavities, allow
itself to be penetrated and pierced? should he there encounter some
unexpected knot in the darkness? should he arrive at the inextricable
and the impassable? would Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of
hunger? should they end by both getting lost, and by furnishing two
skeletons in a nook of that night? He did not know. He put all these
questions to himself without replying to them. The intestines of Paris
form a precipice. Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.

All at once, he had a surprise. At the most unforeseen moment, and
without having ceased to walk in a straight line, he perceived that he
was no longer ascending; the water of the rivulet was beating against
his heels, instead of meeting him at his toes. The sewer was now
descending. Why? Was he about to arrive suddenly at the Seine? This
danger was a great one, but the peril of retreating was still greater.
He continued to advance.

It was not towards the Seine that he was proceeding. The ridge which
the soil of Paris forms on its right bank empties one of its watersheds
into the Seine and the other into the Grand Sewer. The crest of this
ridge which determines the division of the waters describes a very
capricious line. The culminating point, which is the point of
separation of the currents, is in the Sainte-Avoye sewer, beyond the
Rue Michel-le-Comte, in the sewer of the Louvre, near the boulevards,
and in the Montmartre sewer, near the Halles. It was this culminating
point that Jean Valjean had reached. He was directing his course
towards the belt sewer; he was on the right path. But he did not know
it.

Every time that he encountered a branch, he felt of its angles, and if
he found that the opening which presented itself was smaller than the
passage in which he was, he did not enter but continued his route,
rightly judging that every narrower way must needs terminate in a blind
alley, and could only lead him further from his goal, that is to say,
the outlet. Thus he avoided the quadruple trap which was set for him in
the darkness by the four labyrinths which we have just enumerated.

At a certain moment, he perceived that he was emerging from beneath the
Paris which was petrified by the uprising, where the barricades had
suppressed circulation, and that he was entering beneath the living and
normal Paris. Overhead he suddenly heard a noise as of thunder, distant
but continuous. It was the rumbling of vehicles.

He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according to the
calculation which he made in his own mind, and he had not yet thought
of rest; he had merely changed the hand with which he was holding
Marius. The darkness was more profound than ever, but its very depth
reassured him.

All at once, he saw his shadow in front of him. It was outlined on a
faint, almost indistinct reddish glow, which vaguely empurpled the
flooring vault underfoot, and the vault overhead, and gilded to his
right and to his left the two viscous walls of the passage. Stupefied,
he turned round.

Behind him, in the portion of the passage which he had just passed
through, at a distance which appeared to him immense, piercing the
dense obscurity, flamed a sort of horrible star which had the air of
surveying him.

It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the sewer.

In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about in a
confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible.






On the day of the sixth of June, a battue of the sewers had been
ordered. It was feared that the vanquished might have taken to them for
refuge, and Prefect Gisquet was to search occult Paris while General
Bugeaud swept public Paris; a double and connected operation which
exacted a double strategy on the part of the public force, represented
above by the army and below by the police. Three squads of agents and
sewermen explored the subterranean drain of Paris, the first on the
right bank, the second on the left bank, the third in the city. The
agents of police were armed with carabines, with bludgeons, swords and
poignards.

That which was directed at Jean Valjean at that moment, was the lantern
of the patrol of the right bank.

This patrol had just visited the curving gallery and the three blind
alleys which lie beneath the Rue du Cadran. While they were passing
their lantern through the depths of these blind alleys, Jean Valjean
had encountered on his path the entrance to the gallery, had perceived
that it was narrower than the principal passage and had not penetrated
thither. He had passed on. The police, on emerging from the gallery du
Cadran, had fancied that they heard the sound of footsteps in the
direction of the belt sewer. They were, in fact, the steps of Jean
Valjean. The sergeant in command of the patrol had raised his lantern,
and the squad had begun to gaze into the mist in the direction whence
the sound proceeded.

This was an indescribable moment for Jean Valjean.

Happily, if he saw the lantern well, the lantern saw him but ill. It
was light and he was shadow. He was very far off, and mingled with the
darkness of the place. He hugged the wall and halted. Moreover, he did
not understand what it was that was moving behind him. The lack of
sleep and food, and his emotions had caused him also to pass into the
state of a visionary. He beheld a gleam, and around that gleam, forms.
What was it? He did not comprehend.

Jean Valjean having paused, the sound ceased.

The men of the patrol listened, and heard nothing, they looked and saw
nothing. They held a consultation.

There existed at that epoch at this point of the Montmartre sewer a
sort of crossroads called _de service_, which was afterwards
suppressed, on account of the little interior lake which formed there,
swallowing up the torrent of rain in heavy storms. The patrol could
form a cluster in this open space. Jean Valjean saw these spectres form
a sort of circle. These bull-dogs’ heads approached each other closely
and whispered together.

The result of this council held by the watch dogs was, that they had
been mistaken, that there had been no noise, that it was useless to get
entangled in the belt sewer, that it would only be a waste of time, but
that they ought to hasten towards Saint-Merry; that if there was
anything to do, and any “bousingot” to track out, it was in that
quarter.

From time to time, parties re-sole their old insults. In 1832, the word
bousingot formed the interim between the word jacobin, which had become
obsolete, and the word demagogue which has since rendered such
excellent service.

The sergeant gave orders to turn to the left, towards the watershed of
the Seine.

If it had occurred to them to separate into two squads, and to go in
both directions, Jean Valjean would have been captured. All hung on
that thread. It is probable that the instructions of the prefecture,
foreseeing a possibility of combat and insurgents in force, had
forbidden the patrol to part company. The patrol resumed its march,
leaving Jean Valjean behind it. Of all this movement, Jean Valjean
perceived nothing, except the eclipse of the lantern which suddenly
wheeled round.

Before taking his departure, the sergeant, in order to acquit his
policeman’s conscience, discharged his gun in the direction of Jean
Valjean. The detonation rolled from echo to echo in the crypt, like the
rumbling of that titanic entrail. A bit of plaster which fell into the
stream and splashed up the water a few paces away from Jean Valjean,
warned him that the ball had struck the arch over his head.

Slow and measured steps resounded for some time on the timber work,
gradually dying away as they retreated to a greater distance; the group
of black forms vanished, a glimmer of light oscillated and floated,
communicating to the vault a reddish glow which grew fainter, then
disappeared; the silence became profound once more, the obscurity
became complete, blindness and deafness resumed possession of the
shadows; and Jean Valjean, not daring to stir as yet, remained for a
long time leaning with his back against the wall, with straining ears,
and dilated pupils, watching the disappearance of that phantom patrol.






This justice must be rendered to the police of that period, that even
in the most serious public junctures, it imperturbably fulfilled its
duties connected with the sewers and surveillance. A revolt was, in its
eyes, no pretext for allowing malefactors to take the bit in their own
mouths, and for neglecting society for the reason that the government
was in peril. The ordinary service was performed correctly in company
with the extraordinary service, and was not troubled by the latter. In
the midst of an incalculable political event already begun, under the
pressure of a possible revolution, a police agent, “spun” a thief
without allowing himself to be distracted by insurrection and
barricades.

It was something precisely parallel which took place on the afternoon
of the 6th of June on the banks of the Seine, on the slope of the right
shore, a little beyond the Pont des Invalides.

There is no longer any bank there now. The aspect of the locality has
changed.

On that bank, two men, separated by a certain distance, seemed to be
watching each other while mutually avoiding each other. The one who was
in advance was trying to get away, the one in the rear was trying to
overtake the other.

It was like a game of checkers played at a distance and in silence.
Neither seemed to be in any hurry, and both walked slowly, as though
each of them feared by too much haste to make his partner redouble his
pace.

One would have said that it was an appetite following its prey, and
purposely without wearing the air of doing so. The prey was crafty and
on its guard.

The proper relations between the hunted pole-cat and the hunting dog
were observed. The one who was seeking to escape had an insignificant
mien and not an impressive appearance; the one who was seeking to seize
him was rude of aspect, and must have been rude to encounter.

The first, conscious that he was the more feeble, avoided the second;
but he avoided him in a manner which was deeply furious; any one who
could have observed him would have discerned in his eyes the sombre
hostility of flight, and all the menace that fear contains.

The shore was deserted; there were no passers-by; not even a boatman
nor a lighter-man was in the skiffs which were moored here and there.

It was not easy to see these two men, except from the quay opposite,
and to any person who had scrutinized them at that distance, the man
who was in advance would have appeared like a bristling, tattered, and
equivocal being, who was uneasy and trembling beneath a ragged blouse,
and the other like a classic and official personage, wearing the
frock-coat of authority buttoned to the chin.

Perchance the reader might recognize these two men, if he were to see
them closer at hand.

What was the object of the second man?

Probably to succeed in clothing the first more warmly.

When a man clothed by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order
to make of him a man who is also clothed by the state. Only, the whole
question lies in the color. To be dressed in blue is glorious; to be
dressed in red is disagreeable.

There is a purple from below.

It is probably some unpleasantness and some purple of this sort which
the first man is desirous of shirking.

If the other allowed him to walk on, and had not seized him as yet, it
was, judging from all appearances, in the hope of seeing him lead up to
some significant meeting-place and to some group worth catching. This
delicate operation is called “spinning.”


What renders this conjecture entirely probable is that the buttoned-up
man, on catching sight from the shore of a hackney-coach on the quay as
it was passing along empty, made a sign to the driver; the driver
understood, evidently recognized the person with whom he had to deal,
turned about and began to follow the two men at the top of the quay, at
a foot-pace. This was not observed by the slouching and tattered
personage who was in advance.

The hackney-coach rolled along the trees of the Champs-Élysées. The
bust of the driver, whip in hand, could be seen moving along above the
parapet.

One of the secret instructions of the police authorities to their
agents contains this article: “Always have on hand a hackney-coach, in
case of emergency.”


While these two men were manœuvring, each on his own side, with
irreproachable strategy, they approached an inclined plane on the quay
which descended to the shore, and which permitted cab-drivers arriving
from Passy to come to the river and water their horses. This inclined
plane was suppressed later on, for the sake of symmetry; horses may die
of thirst, but the eye is gratified.

It is probable that the man in the blouse had intended to ascend this
inclined plane, with a view to making his escape into the
Champs-Élysées, a place ornamented with trees, but, in return, much
infested with policemen, and where the other could easily exercise
violence.

This point on the quay is not very far distant from the house brought
to Paris from Moret in 1824, by Colonel Brack, and designated as “the
house of François I.” A guard house is situated close at hand.

To the great surprise of his watcher, the man who was being tracked did
not mount by the inclined plane for watering. He continued to advance
along the quay on the shore.

His position was visibly becoming critical.

What was he intending to do, if not to throw himself into the Seine?

Henceforth, there existed no means of ascending to the quay; there was
no other inclined plane, no staircase; and they were near the spot,
marked by the bend in the Seine towards the Pont de Jéna, where the
bank, growing constantly narrower, ended in a slender tongue, and was
lost in the water. There he would inevitably find himself blocked
between the perpendicular wall on his right, the river on his left and
in front of him, and the authorities on his heels.

It is true that this termination of the shore was hidden from sight by
a heap of rubbish six or seven feet in height, produced by some
demolition or other. But did this man hope to conceal himself
effectually behind that heap of rubbish, which one need but skirt? The
expedient would have been puerile. He certainly was not dreaming of
such a thing. The innocence of thieves does not extend to that point.

The pile of rubbish formed a sort of projection at the water’s edge,
which was prolonged in a promontory as far as the wall of the quay.

The man who was being followed arrived at this little mound and went
round it, so that he ceased to be seen by the other.

The latter, as he did not see, could not be seen; he took advantage of
this fact to abandon all dissimulation and to walk very rapidly. In a
few moments, he had reached the rubbish heap and passed round it. There
he halted in sheer amazement. The man whom he had been pursuing was no
longer there.

Total eclipse of the man in the blouse.

The shore, beginning with the rubbish heap, was only about thirty paces
long, then it plunged into the water which beat against the wall of the
quay. The fugitive could not have thrown himself into the Seine without
being seen by the man who was following him. What had become of him?

The man in the buttoned-up coat walked to the extremity of the shore,
and remained there in thought for a moment, his fists clenched, his
eyes searching. All at once he smote his brow. He had just perceived,
at the point where the land came to an end and the water began, a large
iron grating, low, arched, garnished with a heavy lock and with three
massive hinges. This grating, a sort of door pierced at the base of the
quay, opened on the river as well as on the shore. A blackish stream
passed under it. This stream discharged into the Seine.

Beyond the heavy, rusty iron bars, a sort of dark and vaulted corridor
could be descried. The man folded his arms and stared at the grating
with an air of reproach.

As this gaze did not suffice, he tried to thrust it aside; he shook it,
it resisted solidly. It is probable that it had just been opened,
although no sound had been heard, a singular circumstance in so rusty a
grating; but it is certain that it had been closed again. This
indicated that the man before whom that door had just opened had not a
hook but a key.

This evidence suddenly burst upon the mind of the man who was trying to
move the grating, and evoked from him this indignant ejaculation:

“That is too much! A government key!”


Then, immediately regaining his composure, he expressed a whole world
of interior ideas by this outburst of monosyllables accented almost
ironically: “Come! Come! Come! Come!”


That said, and in the hope of something or other, either that he should
see the man emerge or other men enter, he posted himself on the watch
behind a heap of rubbish, with the patient rage of a pointer.

The hackney-coach, which regulated all its movements on his, had, in
its turn, halted on the quay above him, close to the parapet. The
coachman, foreseeing a prolonged wait, encased his horses’ muzzles in
the bag of oats which is damp at the bottom, and which is so familiar
to Parisians, to whom, be it said in parenthesis, the Government
sometimes applies it. The rare passers-by on the Pont de Jéna turned
their heads, before they pursued their way, to take a momentary glance
at these two motionless items in the landscape, the man on the shore,
the carriage on the quay.






Jean Valjean had resumed his march and had not again paused.

This march became more and more laborious. The level of these vaults
varies; the average height is about five feet, six inches, and has been
calculated for the stature of a man; Jean Valjean was forced to bend
over, in order not to strike Marius against the vault; at every step he
had to bend, then to rise, and to feel incessantly of the wall. The
moisture of the stones, and the viscous nature of the timber framework
furnished but poor supports to which to cling, either for hand or foot.
He stumbled along in the hideous dung-heap of the city. The
intermittent gleams from the air-holes only appeared at very long
intervals, and were so wan that the full sunlight seemed like the light
of the moon; all the rest was mist, miasma, opaqueness, blackness. Jean
Valjean was both hungry and thirsty; especially thirsty; and this, like
the sea, was a place full of water where a man cannot drink. His
strength, which was prodigious, as the reader knows, and which had been
but little decreased by age, thanks to his chaste and sober life, began
to give way, nevertheless. Fatigue began to gain on him; and as his
strength decreased, it made the weight of his burden increase. Marius,
who was, perhaps, dead, weighed him down as inert bodies weigh. Jean
Valjean held him in such a manner that his chest was not oppressed, and
so that respiration could proceed as well as possible. Between his legs
he felt the rapid gliding of the rats. One of them was frightened to
such a degree that he bit him. From time to time, a breath of fresh air
reached him through the vent-holes of the mouths of the sewer, and
reanimated him.

It might have been three hours past midday when he reached the
belt-sewer.

He was, at first, astonished at this sudden widening. He found himself,
all at once, in a gallery where his outstretched hands could not reach
the two walls, and beneath a vault which his head did not touch. The
Grand Sewer is, in fact, eight feet wide and seven feet high.

At the point where the Montmartre sewer joins the Grand Sewer, two
other subterranean galleries, that of the Rue de Provence, and that of
the Abattoir, form a square. Between these four ways, a less sagacious
man would have remained undecided. Jean Valjean selected the broadest,
that is to say, the belt-sewer. But here the question again came
up—should he descend or ascend? He thought that the situation required
haste, and that he must now gain the Seine at any risk. In other terms,
he must descend. He turned to the left.

It was well that he did so, for it is an error to suppose that the
belt-sewer has two outlets, the one in the direction of Bercy, the
other towards Passy, and that it is, as its name indicates, the
subterranean girdle of the Paris on the right bank. The Grand Sewer,
which is, it must be remembered, nothing else than the old brook of
Ménilmontant, terminates, if one ascends it, in a blind sack, that is
to say, at its ancient point of departure which was its source, at the
foot of the knoll of Ménilmontant. There is no direct communication
with the branch which collects the waters of Paris beginning with the
Quartier Popincourt, and which falls into the Seine through the Amelot
sewer above the ancient Isle Louviers. This branch, which completes the
collecting sewer, is separated from it, under the Rue Ménilmontant
itself, by a pile which marks the dividing point of the waters, between
upstream and downstream. If Jean Valjean had ascended the gallery he
would have arrived, after a thousand efforts, and broken down with
fatigue, and in an expiring condition, in the gloom, at a wall. He
would have been lost.

In case of necessity, by retracing his steps a little way, and entering
the passage of the Filles-du-Calvaire, on condition that he did not
hesitate at the subterranean crossing of the Carrefour Boucherat, and
by taking the corridor Saint-Louis, then the Saint-Gilles gut on the
left, then turning to the right and avoiding the Saint-Sebastian
gallery, he might have reached the Amelot sewer, and thence, provided
that he did not go astray in the sort of F which lies under the
Bastille, he might have attained the outlet on the Seine near the
Arsenal. But in order to do this, he must have been thoroughly familiar
with the enormous madrepore of the sewer in all its ramifications and
in all its openings. Now, we must again insist that he knew nothing of
that frightful drain which he was traversing; and had any one asked him
in what he was, he would have answered: “In the night.”


His instinct served him well. To descend was, in fact, possible safety.

He left on his right the two narrow passages which branch out in the
form of a claw under the Rue Laffitte and the Rue Saint-Georges and the
long, bifurcated corridor of the Chaussée d’Antin.

A little beyond an affluent, which was, probably, the Madeleine branch,
he halted. He was extremely weary. A passably large air-hole, probably
the man-hole in the Rue d’Anjou, furnished a light that was almost
vivid. Jean Valjean, with the gentleness of movement which a brother
would exercise towards his wounded brother, deposited Marius on the
banquette of the sewer. Marius’ blood-stained face appeared under the
wan light of the air-hole like the ashes at the bottom of a tomb. His
eyes were closed, his hair was plastered down on his temples like a
painter’s brushes dried in red wash; his hands hung limp and dead. A
clot of blood had collected in the knot of his cravat; his limbs were
cold, and blood was clotted at the corners of his mouth; his shirt had
thrust itself into his wounds, the cloth of his coat was chafing the
yawning gashes in the living flesh. Jean Valjean, pushing aside the
garments with the tips of his fingers, laid his hand upon Marius’
breast; his heart was still beating. Jean Valjean tore up his shirt,
bandaged the young man’s wounds as well as he was able and stopped the
flowing blood; then bending over Marius, who still lay unconscious and
almost without breathing, in that half light, he gazed at him with
inexpressible hatred.

On disarranging Marius’ garments, he had found two things in his
pockets, the roll which had been forgotten there on the preceding
evening, and Marius’ pocketbook. He ate the roll and opened the
pocketbook. On the first page he found the four lines written by
Marius. The reader will recall them:

“My name is Marius Pontmercy. Carry my body to my grandfather, M.
Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais.”


Jean Valjean read these four lines by the light of the air-hole, and
remained for a moment as though absorbed in thought, repeating in a low
tone: “Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, number 6, Monsieur Gillenormand.” He
replaced the pocketbook in Marius’ pocket. He had eaten, his strength
had returned to him; he took Marius up once more upon his back, placed
the latter’s head carefully on his right shoulder, and resumed his
descent of the sewer.

The Grand Sewer, directed according to the course of the valley of
Ménilmontant, is about two leagues long. It is paved throughout a
notable portion of its extent.

This torch of the names of the streets of Paris, with which we are
illuminating for the reader Jean Valjean’s subterranean march, Jean
Valjean himself did not possess. Nothing told him what zone of the city
he was traversing, nor what way he had made. Only the growing pallor of
the pools of light which he encountered from time to time indicated to
him that the sun was withdrawing from the pavement, and that the day
would soon be over; and the rolling of vehicles overhead, having become
intermittent instead of continuous, then having almost ceased, he
concluded that he was no longer under central Paris, and that he was
approaching some solitary region, in the vicinity of the outer
boulevards, or the extreme outer quays. Where there are fewer houses
and streets, the sewer has fewer air-holes. The gloom deepened around
Jean Valjean. Nevertheless, he continued to advance, groping his way in
the dark.

Suddenly this darkness became terrible.




WHICH IS TREACHEROUS


He felt that he was entering the water, and that he no longer had a
pavement under his feet, but only mud.

It sometimes happens, that on certain shores of Bretagne or Scotland a
man, either a traveller or a fisherman, while walking at low tide on
the beach far from shore, suddenly notices that for several minutes
past, he has been walking with some difficulty. The beach under foot is
like pitch; his soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is
bird-lime. The strand is perfectly dry, but at every step that he
takes, as soon as the foot is raised, the print is filled with water.
The eye, however, has perceived no change; the immense beach is smooth
and tranquil, all the sand has the same aspect, nothing distinguishes
the soil that is solid from that which is not solid; the joyous little
cloud of sand-lice continues to leap tumultuously under the feet of the
passer-by.

The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns towards the land, endeavors
to approach the shore. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is
conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at
every step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or
three inches. Decidedly, he is not on the right road; he halts to get
his bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have
disappeared. The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out of the
sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more
deeply than before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free
from it and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he
flings himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with
indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a
quicksand, and that he has beneath him that frightful medium in which
neither man can walk nor fish can swim. He flings away his burden, if
he have one, he lightens himself, like a ship in distress; it is too
late, the sand is above his knees.

He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually
gains on him; if the beach is deserted, if the land is too far away, if
the bank of sand is too ill-famed, there is no hero in the
neighborhood, all is over, he is condemned to be engulfed. He is
condemned to that terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable,
which it is impossible to either retard or hasten, which lasts for
hours, which will not come to an end, which seizes you erect, free, in
the flush of health, which drags you down by the feet, which, at every
effort that you attempt, at every shout that you utter, draws you a
little lower, which has the air of punishing you for your resistance by
a redoubled grasp, which forces a man to return slowly to earth, while
leaving him time to survey the horizon, the trees, the verdant country,
the smoke of the villages on the plain, the sails of the ships on the
sea, the birds which fly and sing, the sun and the sky. This engulfment
is the sepulchre which assumes a tide, and which mounts from the depths
of the earth towards a living man. Each minute is an inexorable
layer-out of the dead. The wretched man tries to sit down, to lie down,
to climb; every movement that he makes buries him deeper; he
straightens himself up, he sinks; he feels that he is being swallowed
up; he shrieks, implores, cries to the clouds, wrings his hands, grows
desperate. Behold him in the sand up to his belly, the sand reaches to
his breast, he is only a bust now. He uplifts his hands, utters furious
groans, clenches his nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that
ashes, supports himself on his elbows in order to raise himself from
that soft sheath, and sobs frantically; the sand mounts higher. The
sand has reached his shoulders, the sand reaches to his throat; only
his face is visible now. His mouth cries aloud, the sand fills it;
silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand closes them, night. Then
his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above the sand; a hand
projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves and disappears.
Sinister obliteration of a man.

Sometimes a rider is engulfed with his horse; sometimes the carter is
swallowed up with his cart; all founders in that strand. It is
shipwreck elsewhere than in the water. It is the earth drowning a man.
The earth, permeated with the ocean, becomes a pitfall. It presents
itself in the guise of a plain, and it yawns like a wave. The abyss is
subject to these treacheries.

This melancholy fate, always possible on certain sea beaches, was also
possible, thirty years ago, in the sewers of Paris.

Before the important works, undertaken in 1833, the subterranean drain
of Paris was subject to these sudden slides.

The water filtered into certain subjacent strata, which were
particularly friable; the foot-way, which was of flag-stones, as in the
ancient sewers, or of cement on concrete, as in the new galleries,
having no longer an underpinning, gave way. A fold in a flooring of
this sort means a crack, means crumbling. The framework crumbled away
for a certain length. This crevice, the hiatus of a gulf of mire, was
called a _fontis_, in the special tongue. What is a _fontis?_ It is the
quicksands of the seashore suddenly encountered under the surface of
the earth; it is the beach of Mont Saint-Michel in a sewer. The soaked
soil is in a state of fusion, as it were; all its molecules are in
suspension in soft medium; it is not earth and it is not water. The
depth is sometimes very great. Nothing can be more formidable than such
an encounter. If the water predominates, death is prompt, the man is
swallowed up; if earth predominates, death is slow.

Can any one picture to himself such a death? If being swallowed by the
earth is terrible on the seashore, what is it in a cesspool? Instead of
the open air, the broad daylight, the clear horizon, those vast sounds,
those free clouds whence rains life, instead of those barks descried in
the distance, of that hope under all sorts of forms, of probable
passers-by, of succor possible up to the very last moment,—instead of
all this, deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a tomb
already prepared, death in the mire beneath a cover! slow suffocation
by filth, a stone box where asphyxia opens its claw in the mire and
clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death-rattle;
slime instead of the strand, sulfuretted hydrogen in place of the
hurricane, dung in place of the ocean! And to shout, to gnash one’s
teeth, and to writhe, and to struggle, and to agonize, with that
enormous city which knows nothing of it all, over one’s head!

Inexpressible is the horror of dying thus! Death sometimes redeems his
atrocity by a certain terrible dignity. On the funeral pile, in
shipwreck, one can be great; in the flames as in the foam, a superb
attitude is possible; one there becomes transfigured as one perishes.
But not here. Death is filthy. It is humiliating to expire. The supreme
floating visions are abject. Mud is synonymous with shame. It is petty,
ugly, infamous. To die in a butt of Malvoisie, like Clarence, is
permissible; in the ditch of a scavenger, like Escoubleau, is horrible.
To struggle therein is hideous; at the same time that one is going
through the death agony, one is floundering about. There are shadows
enough for hell, and mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and
the dying man knows not whether he is on the point of becoming a
spectre or a frog.

Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is deformed.

The depth of the _fontis_ varied, as well as their length and their
density, according to the more or less bad quality of the sub-soil.
Sometimes a _fontis_ was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or
ten; sometimes the bottom was unfathomable. Here the mire was almost
solid, there almost liquid. In the Lunière fontis, it would have taken
a man a day to disappear, while he would have been devoured in five
minutes by the Philippeaux slough. The mire bears up more or less,
according to its density. A child can escape where a man will perish.
The first law of safety is to get rid of every sort of load. Every
sewerman who felt the ground giving way beneath him began by flinging
away his sack of tools, or his back-basket, or his hod.

The fontis were due to different causes: the friability of the soil;
some landslip at a depth beyond the reach of man; the violent summer
rains; the incessant flooding of winter; long, drizzling showers.
Sometimes the weight of the surrounding houses on a marly or sandy soil
forced out the vaults of the subterranean galleries and caused them to
bend aside, or it chanced that a flooring vault burst and split under
this crushing thrust. In this manner, the heaping up of the Parthénon,
obliterated, a century ago, a portion of the vaults of Saint-Geneviève
hill. When a sewer was broken in under the pressure of the houses, the
mischief was sometimes betrayed in the street above by a sort of space,
like the teeth of a saw, between the paving-stones; this crevice was
developed in an undulating line throughout the entire length of the
cracked vault, and then, the evil being visible, the remedy could be
promptly applied. It also frequently happened, that the interior
ravages were not revealed by any external scar, and in that case, woe
to the sewermen. When they entered without precaution into the sewer,
they were liable to be lost. Ancient registers make mention of several
scavengers who were buried in fontis in this manner. They give many
names; among others, that of the sewerman who was swallowed up in a
quagmire under the man-hole of the Rue Carême-Prenant, a certain Blaise
Poutrain; this Blaise Poutrain was the brother of Nicholas Poutrain,
who was the last grave-digger of the cemetery called the Charnier des
Innocents, in 1785, the epoch when that cemetery expired.

There was also that young and charming Vicomte d’Escoubleau, of whom we
have just spoken, one of the heroes of the siege of Lérida, where they
delivered the assault in silk stockings, with violins at their head.
D’Escoubleau, surprised one night at his cousin’s, the Duchesse de
Sourdis’, was drowned in a quagmire of the Beautreillis sewer, in which
he had taken refuge in order to escape from the Duke. Madame de
Sourdis, when informed of his death, demanded her smelling-bottle, and
forgot to weep, through sniffling at her salts. In such cases, there is
no love which holds fast; the sewer extinguishes it. Hero refuses to
wash the body of Leander. Thisbe stops her nose in the presence of
Pyramus and says: “Phew!”







Jean Valjean found himself in the presence of a fontis.

This sort of quagmire was common at that period in the subsoil of the
Champs-Élysées, difficult to handle in the hydraulic works and a bad
preservative of the subterranean constructions, on account of its
excessive fluidity. This fluidity exceeds even the inconsistency of the
sands of the Quartier Saint-Georges, which could only be conquered by a
stone construction on a concrete foundation, and the clayey strata,
infected with gas, of the Quartier des Martyrs, which are so liquid
that the only way in which a passage was effected under the gallery des
Martyrs was by means of a cast-iron pipe. When, in 1836, the old stone
sewer beneath the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in which we now see Jean
Valjean, was demolished for the purpose of reconstructing it, the
quicksand, which forms the subsoil of the Champs-Élysées as far as the
Seine, presented such an obstacle, that the operation lasted nearly six
months, to the great clamor of the dwellers on the riverside,
particularly those who had hotels and carriages. The work was more than
unhealthy; it was dangerous. It is true that they had four months and a
half of rain, and three floods of the Seine.

The fontis which Jean Valjean had encountered was caused by the
downpour of the preceding day. The pavement, badly sustained by the
subjacent sand, had given way and had produced a stoppage of the water.
Infiltration had taken place, a slip had followed. The dislocated
bottom had sunk into the ooze. To what extent? Impossible to say. The
obscurity was more dense there than elsewhere. It was a pit of mire in
a cavern of night.

Jean Valjean felt the pavement vanishing beneath his feet. He entered
this slime. There was water on the surface, slime at the bottom. He
must pass it. To retrace his steps was impossible. Marius was dying,
and Jean Valjean exhausted. Besides, where was he to go? Jean Valjean
advanced. Moreover, the pit seemed, for the first few steps, not to be
very deep. But in proportion as he advanced, his feet plunged deeper.
Soon he had the slime up to his calves and water above his knees. He
walked on, raising Marius in his arms, as far above the water as he
could. The mire now reached to his knees, and the water to his waist.
He could no longer retreat. This mud, dense enough for one man, could
not, obviously, uphold two. Marius and Jean Valjean would have stood a
chance of extricating themselves singly. Jean Valjean continued to
advance, supporting the dying man, who was, perhaps, a corpse.

The water came up to his arm-pits; he felt that he was sinking; it was
only with difficulty that he could move in the depth of ooze which he
had now reached. The density, which was his support, was also an
obstacle. He still held Marius on high, and with an unheard-of
expenditure of force, he advanced still; but he was sinking. He had
only his head above the water now and his two arms holding up Marius.
In the old paintings of the deluge there is a mother holding her child
thus.

He sank still deeper, he turned his face to the rear, to escape the
water, and in order that he might be able to breathe; anyone who had
seen him in that gloom would have thought that what he beheld was a
mask floating on the shadows; he caught a faint glimpse above him of
the drooping head and livid face of Marius; he made a desperate effort
and launched his foot forward; his foot struck something solid; a point
of support. It was high time.

He straightened himself up, and rooted himself upon that point of
support with a sort of fury. This produced upon him the effect of the
first step in a staircase leading back to life.

The point of support, thus encountered in the mire at the supreme
moment, was the beginning of the other watershed of the pavement, which
had bent but had not given way, and which had curved under the water
like a plank and in a single piece. Well built pavements form a vault
and possess this sort of firmness. This fragment of the vaulting,
partly submerged, but solid, was a veritable inclined plane, and, once
on this plane, he was safe. Jean Valjean mounted this inclined plane
and reached the other side of the quagmire.

As he emerged from the water, he came in contact with a stone and fell
upon his knees. He reflected that this was but just, and he remained
there for some time, with his soul absorbed in words addressed to God.

He rose to his feet, shivering, chilled, foul-smelling, bowed beneath
the dying man whom he was dragging after him, all dripping with slime,
and his soul filled with a strange light.




DISEMBARKING


He set out on his way once more.

However, although he had not left his life in the fontis, he seemed to
have left his strength behind him there. That supreme effort had
exhausted him. His lassitude was now such that he was obliged to pause
for breath every three or four steps, and lean against the wall. Once
he was forced to seat himself on the banquette in order to alter
Marius’ position, and he thought that he should have to remain there.
But if his vigor was dead, his energy was not. He rose again.

He walked on desperately, almost fast, proceeded thus for a hundred
paces, almost without drawing breath, and suddenly came in contact with
the wall. He had reached an elbow of the sewer, and, arriving at the
turn with head bent down, he had struck the wall. He raised his eyes,
and at the extremity of the vault, far, very far away in front of him,
he perceived a light. This time it was not that terrible light; it was
good, white light. It was daylight. Jean Valjean saw the outlet.

A damned soul, who, in the midst of the furnace, should suddenly
perceive the outlet of Gehenna, would experience what Jean Valjean
felt. It would fly wildly with the stumps of its burned wings towards
that radiant portal. Jean Valjean was no longer conscious of fatigue,
he no longer felt Marius’ weight, he found his legs once more of steel,
he ran rather than walked. As he approached, the outlet became more and
more distinctly defined. It was a pointed arch, lower than the vault,
which gradually narrowed, and narrower than the gallery, which closed
in as the vault grew lower. The tunnel ended like the interior of a
funnel; a faulty construction, imitated from the wickets of
penitentiaries, logical in a prison, illogical in a sewer, and which
has since been corrected.

Jean Valjean reached the outlet.

There he halted.

It certainly was the outlet, but he could not get out.

The arch was closed by a heavy grating, and the grating, which, to all
appearance, rarely swung on its rusty hinges, was clamped to its stone
jamb by a thick lock, which, red with rust, seemed like an enormous
brick. The keyhole could be seen, and the robust latch, deeply sunk in
the iron staple. The door was plainly double-locked. It was one of
those prison locks which old Paris was so fond of lavishing.

Beyond the grating was the open air, the river, the daylight, the
shore, very narrow but sufficient for escape. The distant quays, Paris,
that gulf in which one so easily hides oneself, the broad horizon,
liberty. On the right, downstream, the bridge of Jéna was discernible,
on the left, upstream, the bridge of the Invalides; the place would
have been a propitious one in which to await the night and to escape.
It was one of the most solitary points in Paris; the shore which faces
the Grand-Caillou. Flies were entering and emerging through the bars of
the grating.

It might have been half-past eight o’clock in the evening. The day was
declining.

Jean Valjean laid Marius down along the wall, on the dry portion of the
vaulting, then he went to the grating and clenched both fists round the
bars; the shock which he gave it was frenzied, but it did not move. The
grating did not stir. Jean Valjean seized the bars one after the other,
in the hope that he might be able to tear away the least solid, and to
make of it a lever wherewith to raise the door or to break the lock.
Not a bar stirred. The teeth of a tiger are not more firmly fixed in
their sockets. No lever; no prying possible. The obstacle was
invincible. There was no means of opening the gate.

Must he then stop there? What was he to do? What was to become of him?
He had not the strength to retrace his steps, to recommence the journey
which he had already taken. Besides, how was he to again traverse that
quagmire whence he had only extricated himself as by a miracle? And
after the quagmire, was there not the police patrol, which assuredly
could not be twice avoided? And then, whither was he to go? What
direction should he pursue? To follow the incline would not conduct him
to his goal. If he were to reach another outlet, he would find it
obstructed by a plug or a grating. Every outlet was, undoubtedly,
closed in that manner. Chance had unsealed the grating through which he
had entered, but it was evident that all the other sewer mouths were
barred. He had only succeeded in escaping into a prison.

All was over. Everything that Jean Valjean had done was useless.
Exhaustion had ended in failure.

They were both caught in the immense and gloomy web of death, and Jean
Valjean felt the terrible spider running along those black strands and
quivering in the shadows. He turned his back to the grating, and fell
upon the pavement, hurled to earth rather than seated, close to Marius,
who still made no movement, and with his head bent between his knees.
This was the last drop of anguish.

Of what was he thinking during this profound depression? Neither of
himself nor of Marius. He was thinking of Cosette.






In the midst of this prostration, a hand was laid on his shoulder, and
a low voice said to him:

“Half shares.”


Some person in that gloom? Nothing so closely resembles a dream as
despair. Jean Valjean thought that he was dreaming. He had heard no
footsteps. Was it possible? He raised his eyes.

A man stood before him.

This man was clad in a blouse; his feet were bare; he held his shoes in
his left hand; he had evidently removed them in order to reach Jean
Valjean, without allowing his steps to be heard.

Jean Valjean did not hesitate for an instant. Unexpected as was this
encounter, this man was known to him. The man was Thénardier.

Although awakened, so to speak, with a start, Jean Valjean, accustomed
to alarms, and steeled to unforeseen shocks that must be promptly
parried, instantly regained possession of his presence of mind.
Moreover, the situation could not be made worse, a certain degree of
distress is no longer capable of a crescendo, and Thénardier himself
could add nothing to this blackness of this night.

A momentary pause ensued.

Thénardier, raising his right hand to a level with his forehead, formed
with it a shade, then he brought his eyelashes together, by screwing up
his eyes, a motion which, in connection with a slight contraction of
the mouth, characterizes the sagacious attention of a man who is
endeavoring to recognize another man. He did not succeed. Jean Valjean,
as we have just stated, had his back turned to the light, and he was,
moreover, so disfigured, so bemired, so bleeding that he would have
been unrecognizable in full noonday. On the contrary, illuminated by
the light from the grating, a cellar light, it is true, livid, yet
precise in its lividness, Thénardier, as the energetic popular metaphor
expresses it, immediately “leaped into” Jean Valjean’s eyes. This
inequality of conditions sufficed to assure some advantage to Jean
Valjean in that mysterious duel which was on the point of beginning
between the two situations and the two men. The encounter took place
between Jean Valjean veiled and Thénardier unmasked.

Jean Valjean immediately perceived that Thénardier did not recognize
him.

They surveyed each other for a moment in that half-gloom, as though
taking each other’s measure. Thénardier was the first to break the
silence.

“How are you going to manage to get out?”


Jean Valjean made no reply. Thénardier continued:

“It’s impossible to pick the lock of that gate. But still you must get
out of this.”


“That is true,” said Jean Valjean.

“Well, half shares then.”


“What do you mean by that?”


“You have killed that man; that’s all right. I have the key.”


Thénardier pointed to Marius. He went on:

“I don’t know you, but I want to help you. You must be a friend.”


Jean Valjean began to comprehend. Thénardier took him for an assassin.

Thénardier resumed:

“Listen, comrade. You didn’t kill that man without looking to see what
he had in his pockets. Give me my half. I’ll open the door for you.”


And half drawing from beneath his tattered blouse a huge key, he added:

“Do you want to see how a key to liberty is made? Look here.”


Jean Valjean “remained stupid”—the expression belongs to the elder
Corneille—to such a degree that he doubted whether what he beheld was
real. It was Providence appearing in horrible guise, and his good angel
springing from the earth in the form of Thénardier.

Thénardier thrust his fist into a large pocket concealed under his
blouse, drew out a rope and offered it to Jean Valjean.

“Hold on,” said he, “I’ll give you the rope to boot.”


“What is the rope for?”


“You will need a stone also, but you can find one outside. There’s a
heap of rubbish.”


“What am I to do with a stone?”


“Idiot, you’ll want to sling that stiff into the river, you’ll need a
stone and a rope, otherwise it would float on the water.”


Jean Valjean took the rope. There is no one who does not occasionally
accept in this mechanical way.

Thénardier snapped his fingers as though an idea had suddenly occurred
to him.

“Ah, see here, comrade, how did you contrive to get out of that slough
yonder? I haven’t dared to risk myself in it. Phew! you don’t smell
good.”


After a pause he added:

“I’m asking you questions, but you’re perfectly right not to answer.
It’s an apprenticeship against that cursed quarter of an hour before
the examining magistrate. And then, when you don’t talk at all, you run
no risk of talking too loud. That’s no matter, as I can’t see your face
and as I don’t know your name, you are wrong in supposing that I don’t
know who you are and what you want. I twig. You’ve broken up that
gentleman a bit; now you want to tuck him away somewhere. The river,
that great hider of folly, is what you want. I’ll get you out of your
scrape. Helping a good fellow in a pinch is what suits me to a hair.”


While expressing his approval of Jean Valjean’s silence, he endeavored
to force him to talk. He jostled his shoulder in an attempt to catch a
sight of his profile, and he exclaimed, without, however, raising his
tone:

“Apropos of that quagmire, you’re a hearty animal. Why didn’t you toss
the man in there?”


Jean Valjean preserved silence.

Thénardier resumed, pushing the rag which served him as a cravat to the
level of his Adam’s apple, a gesture which completes the capable air of
a serious man:

“After all, you acted wisely. The workmen, when they come to-morrow to
stop up that hole, would certainly have found the stiff abandoned
there, and it might have been possible, thread by thread, straw by
straw, to pick up the scent and reach you. Some one has passed through
the sewer. Who? Where did he get out? Was he seen to come out? The
police are full of cleverness. The sewer is treacherous and tells tales
of you. Such a find is a rarity, it attracts attention, very few people
make use of the sewers for their affairs, while the river belongs to
everybody. The river is the true grave. At the end of a month they fish
up your man in the nets at Saint-Cloud. Well, what does one care for
that? It’s carrion! Who killed that man? Paris. And justice makes no
inquiries. You have done well.”


The more loquacious Thénardier became, the more mute was Jean Valjean.

Again Thénardier shook him by the shoulder.

“Now let’s settle this business. Let’s go shares. You have seen my key,
show me your money.”


Thénardier was haggard, fierce, suspicious, rather menacing, yet
amicable.

There was one singular circumstance; Thénardier’s manners were not
simple; he had not the air of being wholly at his ease; while affecting
an air of mystery, he spoke low; from time to time he laid his finger
on his mouth, and muttered, “hush!” It was difficult to divine why.
There was no one there except themselves. Jean Valjean thought that
other ruffians might possibly be concealed in some nook, not very far
off, and that Thénardier did not care to share with them.

Thénardier resumed:

“Let’s settle up. How much did the stiff have in his bags?”


Jean Valjean searched his pockets.

It was his habit, as the reader will remember, to always have some
money about him. The mournful life of expedients to which he had been
condemned imposed this as a law upon him. On this occasion, however, he
had been caught unprepared. When donning his uniform of a National
Guardsman on the preceding evening, he had forgotten, dolefully
absorbed as he was, to take his pocket-book. He had only some small
change in his fob. He turned out his pocket, all soaked with ooze, and
spread out on the banquette of the vault one louis d’or, two five-franc
pieces, and five or six large sous.

Thénardier thrust out his lower lip with a significant twist of the
neck.

“You knocked him over cheap,” said he.

He set to feeling the pockets of Jean Valjean and Marius, with the
greatest familiarity. Jean Valjean, who was chiefly concerned in
keeping his back to the light, let him have his way.

While handling Marius’ coat, Thénardier, with the skill of a
pickpocket, and without being noticed by Jean Valjean, tore off a strip
which he concealed under his blouse, probably thinking that this morsel
of stuff might serve, later on, to identify the assassinated man and
the assassin. However, he found no more than the thirty francs.

“That’s true,” said he, “both of you together have no more than that.”


And, forgetting his motto: “half shares,” he took all.

He hesitated a little over the large sous. After due reflection, he
took them also, muttering:

“Never mind! You cut folks’ throats too cheap altogether.”


That done, he once more drew the big key from under his blouse.

“Now, my friend, you must leave. It’s like the fair here, you pay when
you go out. You have paid, now clear out.”


And he began to laugh.

Had he, in lending to this stranger the aid of his key, and in making
some other man than himself emerge from that portal, the pure and
disinterested intention of rescuing an assassin? We may be permitted to
doubt this.

Thénardier helped Jean Valjean to replace Marius on his shoulders, then
he betook himself to the grating on tiptoe, and barefooted, making Jean
Valjean a sign to follow him, looked out, laid his finger on his mouth,
and remained for several seconds, as though in suspense; his inspection
finished, he placed the key in the lock. The bolt slipped back and the
gate swung open. It neither grated nor squeaked. It moved very softly.

It was obvious that this gate and those hinges, carefully oiled, were
in the habit of opening more frequently than was supposed. This
softness was suspicious; it hinted at furtive goings and comings,
silent entrances and exits of nocturnal men, and the wolf-like tread of
crime.

The sewer was evidently an accomplice of some mysterious band. This
taciturn grating was a receiver of stolen goods.

Thénardier opened the gate a little way, allowing just sufficient space
for Jean Valjean to pass out, closed the grating again, gave the key a
double turn in the lock and plunged back into the darkness, without
making any more noise than a breath. He seemed to walk with the velvet
paws of a tiger.

A moment later, that hideous providence had retreated into the
invisibility.

Jean Valjean found himself in the open air.




THE EFFECT OF BEING DEAD


He allowed Marius to slide down upon the shore.

They were in the open air!

The miasmas, darkness, horror lay behind him. The pure, healthful,
living, joyous air that was easy to breathe inundated him. Everywhere
around him reigned silence, but that charming silence when the sun has
set in an unclouded azure sky. Twilight had descended; night was
drawing on, the great deliverer, the friend of all those who need a
mantle of darkness that they may escape from an anguish. The sky
presented itself in all directions like an enormous calm. The river
flowed to his feet with the sound of a kiss. The aerial dialogue of the
nests bidding each other good night in the elms of the Champs-Élysées
was audible. A few stars, daintily piercing the pale blue of the
zenith, and visible to reverie alone, formed imperceptible little
splendors amid the immensity. Evening was unfolding over the head of
Jean Valjean all the sweetness of the infinite.

It was that exquisite and undecided hour which says neither yes nor no.
Night was already sufficiently advanced to render it possible to lose
oneself at a little distance and yet there was sufficient daylight to
permit of recognition at close quarters.

For several seconds, Jean Valjean was irresistibly overcome by that
august and caressing serenity; such moments of oblivion do come to men;
suffering refrains from harassing the unhappy wretch; everything is
eclipsed in the thoughts; peace broods over the dreamer like night;
and, beneath the twilight which beams and in imitation of the sky which
is illuminated, the soul becomes studded with stars. Jean Valjean could
not refrain from contemplating that vast, clear shadow which rested
over him; thoughtfully he bathed in the sea of ecstasy and prayer in
the majestic silence of the eternal heavens. Then he bent down swiftly
to Marius, as though the sentiment of duty had returned to him, and,
dipping up water in the hollow of his hand, he gently sprinkled a few
drops on the latter’s face. Marius’ eyelids did not open; but his
half-open mouth still breathed.

Jean Valjean was on the point of dipping his hand in the river once
more, when, all at once, he experienced an indescribable embarrassment,
such as a person feels when there is some one behind him whom he does
not see.

We have already alluded to this impression, with which everyone is
familiar.

He turned round.

Some one was, in fact, behind him, as there had been a short while
before.

A man of lofty stature, enveloped in a long coat, with folded arms, and
bearing in his right fist a bludgeon of which the leaden head was
visible, stood a few paces in the rear of the spot where Jean Valjean
was crouching over Marius.

With the aid of the darkness, it seemed a sort of apparition. An
ordinary man would have been alarmed because of the twilight, a
thoughtful man on account of the bludgeon. Jean Valjean recognized
Javert.

The reader has divined, no doubt, that Thénardier’s pursuer was no
other than Javert. Javert, after his unlooked-for escape from the
barricade, had betaken himself to the prefecture of police, had
rendered a verbal account to the Prefect in person in a brief audience,
had then immediately gone on duty again, which implied—the note, the
reader will recollect, which had been captured on his person—a certain
surveillance of the shore on the right bank of the Seine near the
Champs-Élysées, which had, for some time past, aroused the attention of
the police. There he had caught sight of Thénardier and had followed
him. The reader knows the rest.

Thus it will be easily understood that that grating, so obligingly
opened to Jean Valjean, was a bit of cleverness on Thénardier’s part.
Thénardier intuitively felt that Javert was still there; the man spied
upon has a scent which never deceives him; it was necessary to fling a
bone to that sleuth-hound. An assassin, what a godsend! Such an
opportunity must never be allowed to slip. Thénardier, by putting Jean
Valjean outside in his stead, provided a prey for the police, forced
them to relinquish his scent, made them forget him in a bigger
adventure, repaid Javert for his waiting, which always flatters a spy,
earned thirty francs, and counted with certainty, so far as he himself
was concerned, on escaping with the aid of this diversion.

Jean Valjean had fallen from one danger upon another.

These two encounters, this falling one after the other, from Thénardier
upon Javert, was a rude shock.

Javert did not recognize Jean Valjean, who, as we have stated, no
longer looked like himself. He did not unfold his arms, he made sure of
his bludgeon in his fist, by an imperceptible movement, and said in a
curt, calm voice:

“Who are you?”


“I.”


“Who is ‘I’?”


“Jean Valjean.”


Javert thrust his bludgeon between his teeth, bent his knees, inclined
his body, laid his two powerful hands on the shoulders of Jean Valjean,
which were clamped within them as in a couple of vices, scrutinized
him, and recognized him. Their faces almost touched. Javert’s look was
terrible.

Jean Valjean remained inert beneath Javert’s grasp, like a lion
submitting to the claws of a lynx.

“Inspector Javert,” said he, “you have me in your power. Moreover, I
have regarded myself as your prisoner ever since this morning. I did
not give you my address with any intention of escaping from you. Take
me. Only grant me one favor.”


Javert did not appear to hear him. He kept his eyes riveted on Jean
Valjean. His chin being contracted, thrust his lips upwards towards his
nose, a sign of savage reverie. At length he released Jean Valjean,
straightened himself stiffly up without bending, grasped his bludgeon
again firmly, and, as though in a dream, he murmured rather than
uttered this question:

“What are you doing here? And who is this man?”


He still abstained from addressing Jean Valjean as _thou_.

Jean Valjean replied, and the sound of his voice appeared to rouse
Javert:

“It is with regard to him that I desire to speak to you. Dispose of me
as you see fit; but first help me to carry him home. That is all that I
ask of you.”


Javert’s face contracted as was always the case when any one seemed to
think him capable of making a concession. Nevertheless, he did not say
“no.”


Again he bent over, drew from his pocket a handkerchief which he
moistened in the water and with which he then wiped Marius’
blood-stained brow.

“This man was at the barricade,” said he in a low voice and as though
speaking to himself. “He is the one they called Marius.”


A spy of the first quality, who had observed everything, listened to
everything, and taken in everything, even when he thought that he was
to die; who had played the spy even in his agony, and who, with his
elbows leaning on the first step of the sepulchre, had taken notes.

He seized Marius’ hand and felt his pulse.

“He is wounded,” said Jean Valjean.

“He is a dead man,” said Javert.

Jean Valjean replied:

“No. Not yet.”


“So you have brought him thither from the barricade?” remarked Javert.

His preoccupation must indeed have been very profound for him not to
insist on this alarming rescue through the sewer, and for him not to
even notice Jean Valjean’s silence after his question.

Jean Valjean, on his side, seemed to have but one thought. He resumed:

“He lives in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, with his
grandfather. I do not recollect his name.”


Jean Valjean fumbled in Marius’ coat, pulled out his pocket-book,
opened it at the page which Marius had pencilled, and held it out to
Javert.

There was still sufficient light to admit of reading. Besides this,
Javert possessed in his eye the feline phosphorescence of night birds.
He deciphered the few lines written by Marius, and muttered:
“Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du Calvaire, No. 6.”


Then he exclaimed: “Coachman!”


The reader will remember that the hackney-coach was waiting in case of
need.

Javert kept Marius’ pocket-book.

A moment later, the carriage, which had descended by the inclined plane
of the watering-place, was on the shore. Marius was laid upon the back
seat, and Javert seated himself on the front seat beside Jean Valjean.

The door slammed, and the carriage drove rapidly away, ascending the
quays in the direction of the Bastille.

They quitted the quays and entered the streets. The coachman, a black
form on his box, whipped up his thin horses. A glacial silence reigned
in the carriage. Marius, motionless, with his body resting in the
corner, and his head drooping on his breast, his arms hanging, his legs
stiff, seemed to be awaiting only a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of
shadow, and Javert of stone, and in that vehicle full of night, whose
interior, every time that it passed in front of a street lantern,
appeared to be turned lividly wan, as by an intermittent flash of
lightning, chance had united and seemed to be bringing face to face the
three forms of tragic immobility, the corpse, the spectre, and the
statue.






At every jolt over the pavement, a drop of blood trickled from Marius’
hair.

Night had fully closed in when the carriage arrived at No. 6, Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire.

Javert was the first to alight; he made sure with one glance of the
number on the carriage gate, and, raising the heavy knocker of beaten
iron, embellished in the old style, with a male goat and a satyr
confronting each other, he gave a violent peal. The gate opened a
little way and Javert gave it a push. The porter half made his
appearance yawning, vaguely awake, and with a candle in his hand.

Everyone in the house was asleep. People go to bed betimes in the
Marais, especially on days when there is a revolt. This good, old
quarter, terrified at the Revolution, takes refuge in slumber, as
children, when they hear the Bugaboo coming, hide their heads hastily
under their coverlet.

In the meantime Jean Valjean and the coachman had taken Marius out of
the carriage, Jean Valjean supporting him under the armpits, and the
coachman under the knees.

As they thus bore Marius, Jean Valjean slipped his hand under the
latter’s clothes, which were broadly rent, felt his breast, and assured
himself that his heart was still beating. It was even beating a little
less feebly, as though the movement of the carriage had brought about a
certain fresh access of life.

Javert addressed the porter in a tone befitting the government, and the
presence of the porter of a factious person.

“Some person whose name is Gillenormand?”


“Here. What do you want with him?”


“His son is brought back.”


“His son?” said the porter stupidly.

“He is dead.”


Jean Valjean, who, soiled and tattered, stood behind Javert, and whom
the porter was surveying with some horror, made a sign to him with his
head that this was not so.

The porter did not appear to understand either Javert’s words or Jean
Valjean’s sign.

Javert continued:

“He went to the barricade, and here he is.”


“To the barricade?” ejaculated the porter.

“He has got himself killed. Go waken his father.”


The porter did not stir.

“Go along with you!” repeated Javert.

And he added:

“There will be a funeral here to-morrow.”


For Javert, the usual incidents of the public highway were
categorically classed, which is the beginning of foresight and
surveillance, and each contingency had its own compartment; all
possible facts were arranged in drawers, as it were, whence they
emerged on occasion, in variable quantities; in the street, uproar,
revolt, carnival, and funeral.

The porter contented himself with waking Basque. Basque woke Nicolette;
Nicolette roused great-aunt Gillenormand.

As for the grandfather, they let him sleep on, thinking that he would
hear about the matter early enough in any case.

Marius was carried up to the first floor, without any one in the other
parts of the house being aware of the fact, and deposited on an old
sofa in M. Gillenormand’s antechamber; and while Basque went in search
of a physician, and while Nicolette opened the linen-presses, Jean
Valjean felt Javert touch him on the shoulder. He understood and
descended the stairs, having behind him the step of Javert who was
following him.

The porter watched them take their departure as he had watched their
arrival, in terrified somnolence.

They entered the carriage once more, and the coachman mounted his box.

“Inspector Javert,” said Jean, “grant me yet another favor.”


“What is it?” demanded Javert roughly.

“Let me go home for one instant. Then you shall do whatever you like
with me.”


Javert remained silent for a few moments, with his chin drawn back into
the collar of his great-coat, then he lowered the glass and front:

“Driver,” said he, “Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7.”







They did not open their lips again during the whole space of their
ride.

What did Jean Valjean want? To finish what he had begun; to warn
Cosette, to tell her where Marius was, to give her, possibly, some
other useful information, to take, if he could, certain final measures.
As for himself, so far as he was personally concerned, all was over; he
had been seized by Javert and had not resisted; any other man than
himself in like situation would, perhaps, have had some vague thoughts
connected with the rope which Thénardier had given him, and of the bars
of the first cell that he should enter; but, let us impress it upon the
reader, after the Bishop, there had existed in Jean Valjean a profound
hesitation in the presence of any violence, even when directed against
himself.

Suicide, that mysterious act of violence against the unknown which may
contain, in a measure, the death of the soul, was impossible to Jean
Valjean.

At the entrance to the Rue de l’Homme Armé, the carriage halted, the
way being too narrow to admit of the entrance of vehicles. Javert and
Jean Valjean alighted.

The coachman humbly represented to “monsieur l’Inspecteur,” that the
Utrecht velvet of his carriage was all spotted with the blood of the
assassinated man, and with mire from the assassin. That is the way he
understood it. He added that an indemnity was due him. At the same
time, drawing his certificate book from his pocket, he begged the
inspector to have the goodness to write him “a bit of an attestation.”


Javert thrust aside the book which the coachman held out to him, and
said:

“How much do you want, including your time of waiting and the drive?”


“It comes to seven hours and a quarter,” replied the man, “and my
velvet was perfectly new. Eighty francs, Mr. Inspector.”


Javert drew four napoleons from his pocket and dismissed the carriage.

Jean Valjean fancied that it was Javert’s intention to conduct him on
foot to the post of the Blancs-Manteaux or to the post of the Archives,
both of which are close at hand.

They entered the street. It was deserted as usual. Javert followed Jean
Valjean. They reached No. 7. Jean Valjean knocked. The door opened.

“It is well,” said Javert. “Go upstairs.”


He added with a strange expression, and as though he were exerting an
effort in speaking in this manner:

“I will wait for you here.”


Jean Valjean looked at Javert. This mode of procedure was but little in
accord with Javert’s habits. However, he could not be greatly surprised
that Javert should now have a sort of haughty confidence in him, the
confidence of the cat which grants the mouse liberty to the length of
its claws, seeing that Jean Valjean had made up his mind to surrender
himself and to make an end of it. He pushed open the door, entered the
house, called to the porter who was in bed and who had pulled the cord
from his couch: “It is I!” and ascended the stairs.

On arriving at the first floor, he paused. All sorrowful roads have
their stations. The window on the landing-place, which was a
sash-window, was open. As in many ancient houses, the staircase got its
light from without and had a view on the street. The street-lantern,
situated directly opposite, cast some light on the stairs, and thus
effected some economy in illumination.

Jean Valjean, either for the sake of getting the air, or mechanically,
thrust his head out of this window. He leaned out over the street. It
is short, and the lantern lighted it from end to end. Jean Valjean was
overwhelmed with amazement; there was no longer any one there.

Javert had taken his departure.






Basque and the porter had carried Marius into the drawing-room, as he
still lay stretched out, motionless, on the sofa upon which he had been
placed on his arrival. The doctor who had been sent for had hastened
thither. Aunt Gillenormand had risen.

Aunt Gillenormand went and came, in affright, wringing her hands and
incapable of doing anything but saying: “Heavens! is it possible?” At
times she added: “Everything will be covered with blood.” When her
first horror had passed off, a certain philosophy of the situation
penetrated her mind, and took form in the exclamation: “It was bound to
end in this way!” She did not go so far as: “I told you so!” which is
customary on this sort of occasion. At the physician’s orders, a camp
bed had been prepared beside the sofa. The doctor examined Marius, and
after having found that his pulse was still beating, that the wounded
man had no very deep wound on his breast, and that the blood on the
corners of his lips proceeded from his nostrils, he had him placed flat
on the bed, without a pillow, with his head on the same level as his
body, and even a trifle lower, and with his bust bare in order to
facilitate respiration. Mademoiselle Gillenormand, on perceiving that
they were undressing Marius, withdrew. She set herself to telling her
beads in her own chamber.

The trunk had not suffered any internal injury; a bullet, deadened by
the pocket-book, had turned aside and made the tour of his ribs with a
hideous laceration, which was of no great depth, and consequently, not
dangerous. The long, underground journey had completed the dislocation
of the broken collar-bone, and the disorder there was serious. The arms
had been slashed with sabre cuts. Not a single scar disfigured his
face; but his head was fairly covered with cuts; what would be the
result of these wounds on the head? Would they stop short at the hairy
cuticle, or would they attack the brain? As yet, this could not be
decided. A grave symptom was that they had caused a swoon, and that
people do not always recover from such swoons. Moreover, the wounded
man had been exhausted by hemorrhage. From the waist down, the
barricade had protected the lower part of the body from injury.

Basque and Nicolette tore up linen and prepared bandages; Nicolette
sewed them, Basque rolled them. As lint was lacking, the doctor, for
the time being, arrested the bleeding with layers of wadding. Beside
the bed, three candles burned on a table where the case of surgical
instruments lay spread out. The doctor bathed Marius’ face and hair
with cold water. A full pail was reddened in an instant. The porter,
candle in hand, lighted them.

The doctor seemed to be pondering sadly. From time to time, he made a
negative sign with his head, as though replying to some question which
he had inwardly addressed to himself.

A bad sign for the sick man are these mysterious dialogues of the
doctor with himself.

At the moment when the doctor was wiping Marius’ face, and lightly
touching his still closed eyes with his finger, a door opened at the
end of the drawing-room, and a long, pallid figure made its appearance.

This was the grandfather.

The revolt had, for the past two days, deeply agitated, enraged and
engrossed the mind of M. Gillenormand. He had not been able to sleep on
the previous night, and he had been in a fever all day long. In the
evening, he had gone to bed very early, recommending that everything in
the house should be well barred, and he had fallen into a doze through
sheer fatigue.

Old men sleep lightly; M. Gillenormand’s chamber adjoined the
drawing-room, and in spite of all the precautions that had been taken,
the noise had awakened him. Surprised at the rift of light which he saw
under his door, he had risen from his bed, and had groped his way
thither.

He stood astonished on the threshold, one hand on the handle of the
half-open door, with his head bent a little forward and quivering, his
body wrapped in a white dressing-gown, which was straight and as
destitute of folds as a winding-sheet; and he had the air of a phantom
who is gazing into a tomb.

He saw the bed, and on the mattress that young man, bleeding, white
with a waxen whiteness, with closed eyes and gaping mouth, and pallid
lips, stripped to the waist, slashed all over with crimson wounds,
motionless and brilliantly lighted up.

The grandfather trembled from head to foot as powerfully as ossified
limbs can tremble, his eyes, whose corneæ were yellow on account of his
great age, were veiled in a sort of vitreous glitter, his whole face
assumed in an instant the earthy angles of a skull, his arms fell
pendent, as though a spring had broken, and his amazement was betrayed
by the outspreading of the fingers of his two aged hands, which
quivered all over, his knees formed an angle in front, allowing,
through the opening in his dressing-gown, a view of his poor bare legs,
all bristling with white hairs, and he murmured:

“Marius!”


“Sir,” said Basque, “Monsieur has just been brought back. He went to
the barricade, and....”


“He is dead!” cried the old man in a terrible voice. “Ah! The rascal!”


Then a sort of sepulchral transformation straightened up this
centenarian as erect as a young man.

“Sir,” said he, “you are the doctor. Begin by telling me one thing. He
is dead, is he not?”


The doctor, who was at the highest pitch of anxiety, remained silent.

M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with an outburst of terrible laughter.

“He is dead! He is dead! He is dead! He has got himself killed on the
barricades! Out of hatred to me! He did that to spite me! Ah! You
blood-drinker! This is the way he returns to me! Misery of my life, he
is dead!”


He went to the window, threw it wide open as though he were stifling,
and, erect before the darkness, he began to talk into the street, to
the night:

“Pierced, sabred, exterminated, slashed, hacked in pieces! Just look at
that, the villain! He knew well that I was waiting for him, and that I
had had his room arranged, and that I had placed at the head of my bed
his portrait taken when he was a little child! He knew well that he had
only to come back, and that I had been recalling him for years, and
that I remained by my fireside, with my hands on my knees, not knowing
what to do, and that I was mad over it! You knew well, that you had but
to return and to say: ‘It is I,’ and you would have been the master of
the house, and that I should have obeyed you, and that you could have
done whatever you pleased with your old numskull of a grandfather! you
knew that well, and you said:

“No, he is a Royalist, I will not go! And you went to the barricades,
and you got yourself killed out of malice! To revenge yourself for what
I said to you about Monsieur le Duc de Berry. It is infamous! Go to bed
then and sleep tranquilly! he is dead, and this is my awakening.”


The doctor, who was beginning to be uneasy in both quarters, quitted
Marius for a moment, went to M. Gillenormand, and took his arm. The
grandfather turned round, gazed at him with eyes which seemed
exaggerated in size and bloodshot, and said to him calmly:

“I thank you, sir. I am composed, I am a man, I witnessed the death of
Louis XVI., I know how to bear events. One thing is terrible and that
is to think that it is your newspapers which do all the mischief. You
will have scribblers, chatterers, lawyers, orators, tribunes,
discussions, progress, enlightenment, the rights of man, the liberty of
the press, and this is the way that your children will be brought home
to you. Ah! Marius! It is abominable! Killed! Dead before me! A
barricade! Ah, the scamp! Doctor, you live in this quarter, I believe?
Oh! I know you well. I see your cabriolet pass my window. I am going to
tell you. You are wrong to think that I am angry. One does not fly into
a rage against a dead man. That would be stupid. This is a child whom I
have reared. I was already old while he was very young. He played in
the Tuileries garden with his little shovel and his little chair, and
in order that the inspectors might not grumble, I stopped up the holes
that he made in the earth with his shovel, with my cane. One day he
exclaimed: Down with Louis XVIII.! and off he went. It was no fault of
mine. He was all rosy and blond. His mother is dead. Have you ever
noticed that all little children are blond? Why is it so? He is the son
of one of those brigands of the Loire, but children are innocent of
their fathers’ crimes. I remember when he was no higher than that. He
could not manage to pronounce his Ds. He had a way of talking that was
so sweet and indistinct that you would have thought it was a bird
chirping. I remember that once, in front of the Hercules Farnese,
people formed a circle to admire him and marvel at him, he was so
handsome, was that child! He had a head such as you see in pictures. I
talked in a deep voice, and I frightened him with my cane, but he knew
very well that it was only to make him laugh. In the morning, when he
entered my room, I grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to me, all
the same. One cannot defend oneself against those brats. They take hold
of you, they hold you fast, they never let you go again. The truth is,
that there never was a cupid like that child. Now, what can you say for
your Lafayettes, your Benjamin Constants, and your Tirecuir de
Corcelles who have killed him? This cannot be allowed to pass in this
fashion.”


He approached Marius, who still lay livid and motionless, and to whom
the physician had returned, and began once more to wring his hands. The
old man’s pallid lips moved as though mechanically, and permitted the
passage of words that were barely audible, like breaths in the death
agony:

“Ah! heartless lad! Ah! clubbist! Ah! wretch! Ah! Septembrist!”


Reproaches in the low voice of an agonizing man, addressed to a corpse.

Little by little, as it is always indispensable that internal eruptions
should come to the light, the sequence of words returned, but the
grandfather appeared no longer to have the strength to utter them, his
voice was so weak, and extinct, that it seemed to come from the other
side of an abyss:

“It is all the same to me, I am going to die too, that I am. And to
think that there is not a hussy in Paris who would not have been
delighted to make this wretch happy! A scamp who, instead of amusing
himself and enjoying life, went off to fight and get himself shot down
like a brute! And for whom? Why? For the Republic! Instead of going to
dance at the Chaumière, as it is the duty of young folks to do! What’s
the use of being twenty years old? The Republic, a cursed pretty folly!
Poor mothers, beget fine boys, do! Come, he is dead. That will make two
funerals under the same carriage gate. So you have got yourself
arranged like this for the sake of General Lamarque’s handsome eyes!
What had that General Lamarque done to you? A slasher! A chatter-box!
To get oneself killed for a dead man! If that isn’t enough to drive any
one mad! Just think of it! At twenty! And without so much as turning
his head to see whether he was not leaving something behind him! That’s
the way poor, good old fellows are forced to die alone, nowadays.
Perish in your corner, owl! Well, after all, so much the better, that
is what I was hoping for, this will kill me on the spot. I am too old,
I am a hundred years old, I am a hundred thousand years old, I ought,
by rights, to have been dead long ago. This blow puts an end to it. So
all is over, what happiness! What is the good of making him inhale
ammonia and all that parcel of drugs? You are wasting your trouble, you
fool of a doctor! Come, he’s dead, completely dead. I know all about
it, I am dead myself too. He hasn’t done things by half. Yes, this age
is infamous, infamous and that’s what I think of you, of your ideas, of
your systems, of your masters, of your oracles, of your doctors, of
your scape-graces of writers, of your rascally philosophers, and of all
the revolutions which, for the last sixty years, have been frightening
the flocks of crows in the Tuileries! But you were pitiless in getting
yourself killed like this, I shall not even grieve over your death, do
you understand, you assassin?”


At that moment, Marius slowly opened his eyes, and his glance, still
dimmed by lethargic wonder, rested on M. Gillenormand.

“Marius!” cried the old man. “Marius! My little Marius! my child! my
well-beloved son! You open your eyes, you gaze upon me, you are alive,
thanks!”


And he fell fainting.




