CHAPTER I ­ THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES-

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 net-work, 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 Jeuneurs, 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 a petits materiaux ­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 water-sheds 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 Michelle-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.

Chapter II ­
explanation

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 cross-roads 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.

Chapter III ­
the “Spun” Man

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-Elysees.  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 manoeuvring, 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-Elysees, 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 Francois 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 Jena, 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 Jena 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.

Chapter IV ­
he also bears his cross

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 re-animated 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 Menilmontant, 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 Menilmontant.  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 Menilmontant 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 Chaussee 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, N, 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 Menilmontant, 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.

Chapter V ­
in the case of sand as in that of woman, there is A fineness
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 cess-pool?  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 Luniere 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 Parthenon, obliterated, a century ago, a portion of the vaults of Saint-Genevieve 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 Lerida, where they delivered the assault in silk stockings, with violins at their head.  D’Escoubleau, surprised one night at his cousin’s, the Duchess 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!”

Chapter VI ­
the fontis

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-Elysees, 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-Honore, in which we now see Jean Valjean, was demolished for the purpose of reconstructing it, the quicksand, which forms the subsoil of the Champs-Elysees 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 water-shed 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.

Chapter vVII ­
one sometimes runs aground when one fancies that one is
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, down stream, the bridge of Jena 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.

Chapter VIII ­
the torn coat-tail

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 Thenardier.

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 Thenardier himself could add nothing to this blackness of this night.

A momentary pause ensued.

Thenardier, 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, Thenardier, 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 Thenardier unmasked.

Jean Valjean immediately perceived that Thenardier did not recognize him.

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

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

Jean Valjean made no reply.  Thenardier 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.”

Thenardier 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.  Thenardier took him for an assassin.

Thenardier 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 Thenardier.

Thenardier 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.

Thenardier 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.

Thenardier 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 Thenardier became, the more mute was Jean Valjean.

Again Thenardier shook him by the shoulder.

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

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

There was one singular circumstance; Thenardier’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 Thenardier did not care to share with them.

Thenardier 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.

Thenardier 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, Thenardier, 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.

Thenardier 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.

Thenardier 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.

Chapter IX ­
Marius produces on some one who is A judge of the matter,
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-Elysees was audible.  A few stars, daintily piercing the pale blue of the zenith, and visible to revery 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 Thenardier’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-Elysees, which had, for some time past, aroused the attention of the police.  There he had caught sight of Thenardier 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 Thenardier’s part.  Thenardier 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.  Thenardier, 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 Thenardier 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 revery.  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, N.”

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.

Chapter X ­
return of the son who was prodigal of his life

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

Night had fully closed in when the carriage arrived at N, 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 Arme, N.”

Chapter XI ­
concussion in the absolute

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 Thenardier 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 Arme, 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 napoléons 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 N.  Jean Valjean knocked.  The door opened.

“It is well,” said Javert.  “Go up stairs.”

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.

Chapter XII ­
the grandfather

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 corneae 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 lé 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, now-adays.  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.