بخش 3 کتاب 8

BOOK EIGHT

THE BAD PAUPER

MARIUS LOOKS FOR A GIRL IN A HAT AND MEETS A MAN IN A CAP

SUMMER PASSED, THEN autumn; winter came. Neither Monsieur Leblanc nor the young girl had set foot in the Luxembourg again. Marius now had only one thought, to see that sweet, adorable face again. He looked endlessly, he looked everywhere; he found nothing. He was no longer Marius the keen dreamer, the man who was resolute, ardent, and strong, the reckless provocateur of fate, the brain full of schemes for the future, the fresh mind full of plans, projects, points of pride, ideas, and desires; he was a lost dog. He fell into a black well of sadness. It was all over. Work disgusted him, walking wearied him, solitude bored him; the whole wide world of nature, once filled with shapes, limpid revelations, voices, counsel, perspectives, horizons, teachings, was now empty in his eyes. It seemed to him that everything had evaporated.

He went on thinking still, for he could hardly do otherwise; but he no longer took any pleasure in his thoughts. To everything that they suggested to him, gently but persistently, he would reply: What’s the use?

He chided himself many times over. “Why did I have to go and follow her? I was so happy just seeing her! She looked at me, didn’t that mean the world to me? She looked as though she loved me. Wasn’t that everything? What more did I want? There’s nothing more after that. I was a fool. It’s all my fault.” And so on and so forth. Courfeyrac, to whom he confided nothing—that was his nature—but who guessed just about everything—which was his nature—started off congratulating him for being in love, though he was utterly amazed; then, when he saw Marius plunged into the depths of melancholy like this, he wound up confronting him: “I see you’re human after all. So, come to the Chaumière!” Once, lulled by the beautiful September sunshine, Marius had let himself be dragged off to the Sceaux Ball by Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and Grantaire, hoping against hope—what a dream!—that he might, perhaps, find her there. Naturally, he did not see the girl he was looking for. “But this is the place, if you’re looking for lost women,” Grantaire growled behind his back. Marius left his friends at the ball and returned home on foot, alone, weary, feverish, his eyes sad and cloudy in the night, stunned by the racket and the dust kicked up by the riotous old rattletraps full of carousing people that rolled past him, coming back from the party, while he, downhearted, breathed in the acrid scent of the walnut trees along the road to clear his head.

He reverted to living more and more on his own again, distraught, stricken, totally ruled by his inner anguish, crashing around in his pain like a wolf in a trap, searching everywhere for the missing girl, punch-drunk with love.

Another time, he had an encounter that had a powerful effect on him. In one of the little streets in the neighbourhood of the boulevard des Invalides, he had come across a man dressed like a workman and wearing a cap with a long peak from which strands of very white hair escaped. Marius was struck by the beauty of this white hair and studied the man carefully as he trudged slowly along as though absorbed in painful meditation. The strange thing was that he thought he recognized Monsieur Leblanc. It was the same hair, the same profile, as far as you could tell with that cap, the same pace, only sadder. But why the workman’s getup? What was that about? What did this disguise mean? Marius was truly astounded. When he snapped out of it, his first impulse was to follow the man; who knows if he would not then at last stumble on the trail he was looking for? In any case, he needed to see the man again up close and clear up the enigma. But he hit on the idea too late, the man was already nowhere to be seen. He had taken some tiny side street and Marius could not find him again. This encounter worried him for a few days, then faded. “After all,” he told himself, “it’s probably just a resemblance.” A FIND

MARIUS HAD NOT stopped living at the Gorbeau slum. He paid no attention to anyone there.

At the time, it is true, there were no other residents in the slum apart from himself and the Jondrettes, whose rent he had once paid without ever having actually spoken either to the father or the mother or the daughters. The other tenants had either moved or died, or had been evicted for not paying the rent.

One day that winter the sun had shown itself a little in the afternoon, but it was February 2, that ancient feast of Candlemas whose treacherous sun, harbinger of six weeks of cold, inspired in Mathieu Laensberg these two lines that have rightly become classic: Whether it gleams or it glimmers,

The bear goes back to its lair.

Marius had just emerged from his. Night was coming down. It was time for dinner; for he was forced to eat once more, alas! Oh, the weakness of ideal passions! He had just stepped outside his door, where Ma Bougon was at that moment sweeping the doorstep while delivering this memorable monologue: “What’s cheap these days? Everything’s dear. The only thing that’s cheap is the world’s troubles; they come for nothing, the world’s troubles!” Marius ambled slowly up the boulevard toward the barrière on the way to the rue Saint-Jacques. He was thinking as he walked, his head down.

All of a sudden he felt himself elbowed in the gathering gloom; he wheeled round and saw two young girls in rags, one tall and thin, the other a bit shorter, running past fast, out of breath, scared; they looked as though they were running from something; they had been heading his way, had not seen him and had run into him in passing. In the twilight, Marius could just make out their livid faces, their thin matted hair, their awful bonnets, their tattered skirts and bare feet. They were talking to each other as they ran. The taller one said in a very low voice: “The cops came. They nearly nabbed me.” The other one replied: “I saw. Did I make a run for it!”

Marius understood by this sinister slang that the two girls had just missed being apprehended by gendarmes or police officers and that they had escaped.

They dived under the trees in the boulevard behind him and were a dim white smudge in the darkness for a few seconds before vanishing altogether.

Marius had stopped for a moment. But just as he was about to continue on his way, he saw a small greyish packet on the ground at his feet. He bent down and picked it up. It was a sort of envelope that felt like it contained papers.

“Right,” he said to himself, “those poor girls must have dropped this!”

He turned back after them and called out, but he knew he’d never find them now; he reckoned they were already a fair way off and so he put the packet in his pocket and went to dinner.

On his way, he saw in an alley off the rue Mouffetard a child’s coffin covered in a black cloth, placed on three chairs and lit by a candle. The two girls in the gloaming came back to him.

“Poor mothers!” he thought. “There’s only one thing sadder than seeing your children die and that’s seeing them go bad.” Then these shadows that shifted his sadness for a moment vanished from his mind and he lapsed into his usual woes. He set to thinking once more of his six months of love and happiness out in the open air under the beautiful trees of the Luxembourg, in the sun.

“How gloomy my life has become!” he said to himself. “Young girls still appear to me. Only, once upon a time they were angels; now they are ghouls.” QUADRIFRONS

THAT EVENING, AS he was undressing for bed, he felt in his coat pocket and came across the packet he had picked up on the boulevard. He’d forgotten all about it. He thought it might be useful to open it, for it might well contain the girls’ address, if in fact it belonged to them, or at least the information necessary to restore it to whoever had lost it.

He opened the envelope, which was not sealed; it contained four letters, all addressed, but also not sealed. All four reeked of cheap tobacco.

The first letter was addressed: To Madame, Madame la marquise de Grucheray, square opposite the Chamber of Deputies,2 no. —— Marius told himself that he would probably find the clues he was looking for inside and that in any case the letter was not sealed, so it was likely that it could be read without impropriety.

This is how it went:

Madame la marquise,

The virtue of clemency and piety is what most tightly binds society. Give your Christian feeling an airing and look with compassion upon this unfortunate Spaniard, victim of loyalty and attachment to the sacred cause of legitimacy, which he has paid for with his blood, to which he has consecrated his fortune, holey, to defend this cause, and today finds himself in the greatest missery. He has no doubt that your honourable person will grant him sucur to preeserv an existence extreemly painful for a miltary man of educashon and honour, riddled with wounds. Count in advance on the humanity that move you and on the interest that Madame la marquise bears such an unhappy nation. Their prayer will not be in vain and their gratitude will preeserv her charming memry.

Of my respeckful sentiments which I have the honnour to be,

Madame,

DON ALVAREZ, Spanish captain of cavallery, royalist refugee in

France that finds himself on a voyage for his homeland and lack in funds

to continue his voyage.

No address followed the signature. Marius hoped to find the address in the second letter, whose formal address was set out as: To Madame, Madame la contesse de Montvernet, rue Cassette, no. 9.

This is what Marius read in this one:

Madame la contesse,

This is an unforttunat muther of a family of six children, the last one being only eight months old. Am sick since my last lye-in, abandoned by my husband for five months not haveing any ressorse in the world in the most awfull indigance.

In the hope of Madame la contesse, she has the honnour to be, madame, with deep respect.

Wife BALIZARD.

Marius went on to the third letter, which was a begging letter like the preceding; it read:

Monsieur Pabourgeot, elector,3 hosery holesaler, rue Saint-Denis, at the corner of the rue aux Fers.

I take the liberty of addressing this letter to you to beg you to grant me the preshous favour of your simpathies and to interest you in a man of letters who has just sent a play to the Théâtre-Français. The subject of it is historic and the action happens in Auvergne in the days of the Empire. The style, I think, is natural in it, pithie, and may have some merit. There are verses to sing in four places. The comic, the serious, the unpredictable, blend in it with the variety of the characters and with a tinge of romantisism lightly spred all threw the plot which works misteriously and goes, by striking twists and terns, to come to a head amid several wunderful stage coups.

My main aim is to satisfie the desire that is progressivly driving the man of our century, that is to say THE FASHION, that caprishous and bizarre wether vane that changes at each new wind almost.

Despite these qualities I have grownds to fear that jelousy and the selfishness of privilidged authors, obtain my exclusion from the theatre, for I am well aware of the difficultees new comers are bombarded with.

Monsieur Pabourgeot, your just reputation as enlightened patron of literary fokes emboldens me to send you my daughter who will revel our indigant situation, lacking bread and fire in this wynter season. To tell you that I beg you to accept the hommage I desire to make you of my play and all those that I will do, is to prove to you how ambishous I am of the honnour of sheltering under your eegis, and of adorning my writings with your name. If you daine to honnor me with the most modest offering, I’ll get bisy straight away and do a piese in verss to pay you my tribut of gratitude. This piese, that I will try and make as perfeck as possible, will be sente to you before being inserted at the beginning of the play and reeled off on stage.

To Monsieur,

And Madame Pabourgeot,

My most respeckful hommages,

GENFLOT, man of letters.

P.S. If only forty sous.

Pardon me for sending my daughter and for not presenting myself myself,

but sad grownds of dress do not permit me, alas! to go out …

Finally Marius opened the fourth letter. The address ran: To the benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.4 It contained these few lines: Benevolent man,

If you daine to accompany my daughter, you will see a misserable calamity and I will show you my certificates.

At the site of these writings your generous soul will be moved by a feeling of markt benevolence, for true philosophers always experience lively emotions.

Agree, compashionate man, that you have to experience the crullest want and that it is truly painfull, to obtain some releef, to have it attested by the authorities as if we wernt free to suffer and to die of starvashion waiting for someone to releev our missery. The fates are truly fatal for some and too profliget or too protectiv for others.

I await your presance or your offering, if you daine make one, and I beg you to accept the respeckful feelings with which I honnour myself to be, truly magnanimus man,

your very humble

and very obediant servant,

P. FABANTOU, dramatic artiste.

After reading these letters, Marius did not find himself any the wiser. First, none of the signatories gave their address. Then they seemed to come from four different individuals, Don Alvarez, wife Balizard, the poet Genflot, and the dramatic artiste Fabantou, but the letters had one strange feature in common and that was that they were all four written in the same handwriting. What could you conclude from that except that they came from the same person?

On top of that, and this made the conjecture even more convincing, the paper, which was coarse and yellowed, was the same for all four, the smell of tobacco was the same, and even though efforts had been made to vary the style, the same spelling mistakes recurred with profound complacency, Genflot the man of letters being no more exempt than the Spanish captain.

There was no point trying to unravel this little mystery. If he hadn’t found the bundle of letters by accident, it would have looked like a hoax. Marius was too sad even to laugh at a random joke or join in some game the streets of Paris apparently wanted to play with him. He felt like the blind man in a game of blind man’s buff with the four letters poking fun at him.

Besides, nothing indicated that the letters belonged to the girls Marius had run into on the boulevard. After all, they were obviously worthless bits of paper. Marius shoved them back in the envelope, threw the bundle into a corner, and went to bed.

At around seven o’clock the next morning, he had just got up and had breakfast and was trying to get down to work when someone knocked gently on his door.

As he owned nothing, he never took his key out of the door, except sometimes, very rarely, when he was working on some urgent job. And anyway, even when he wasn’t there, he left the key in the door.

“You’ll get yourself robbed,” Ma Bougon used to say.

“What of?” Marius would reply.

The fact is that one day someone did take an old pair of boots, to Ma Bougon’s great triumph.

There was a second knock, as gentle as the first.

“Come in,” said Marius.

The door opened.

“What do you want, Ma Bougon?” Marius said, without taking his eyes off the books and manuscripts on his table.

A voice, which was not that of Ma Bougon, answered: “Pardon me, Monsieur—”

It was a dull, broken, strangled, rasping voice, the rough voice of an old man made husky by brandy and spirits.

Marius turned round and saw a young girl.

A ROSE IN MISERY

A VERY YOUNG girl was standing in the half-open doorway. The garret’s dormer window, where daylight now appeared, was directly opposite the door and lit up this figure with a wan light. She was a haggard, sickly, emaciated creature, with nothing but a chemise and a skirt over shivering, freezing nakedness. A bit of string for a belt, a bit of string for a hair band, bony shoulders poking up out of the chemise, a blond lymphatic pallor, collarbones covered in dirt, red hands, a slack and depraved mouth, missing teeth, dull, defiant, mean eyes in which a corrupt old woman looked out of the body of an aborted young girl; fifty years were packed into fifteen, in one of those beings that are both weak and repulsive together and that make you shudder when they don’t make you weep.

Marius had stood and was studying her in a sort of stupor, this being so very like the shadows that flit through our dreams.

What was especially harrowing was that the girl had not come into the world to be ugly. In early infancy, she must even have been pretty. The grace of a child was still struggling with the ghastly premature aging brought on by debauchery and poverty. A trace of lingering beauty was dying in this sixteen-year-old face, like pale sunlight smothered by grim clouds at dawn on a winter’s day.

The face was not absolutely unfamiliar to Marius. He thought he remembered seeing it somewhere.

“What do you want, Mademoiselle?” he asked.

The young girl answered in her drunken galley slave’s voice: “There’s a letter for you, Monsieur Marius.” She called Marius by his name; he could not doubt that her business was with him; but who was this girl? How did she know his name?

Without waiting for an invitation, she sauntered in, giving the room and the unmade bed the once-over with an assurance that made your heart sink. Her feet were bare. Big rips in her skirt gave a glimpse of her long skinny legs and her bony knees. She was shivering.

She did in fact have a letter in her hand and she handed it to Marius.

Marius opened the letter and noticed that the enormous blob of sealing wax was still wet. The message could not have come far. He read: My very kind naybor, young man!

I have learned of your good deeds on my behalf, that you paid my rent six months ago, I bless you, young man. My elder daughter will tell you that we have been without a scrap of bred for two days, four persons, and my missus crook. If I’m not deceeved in my thinking, I beleeve I can hope that your generous heart will melt at this report and you will be overcome with the desire to smile upon me by daining to bestowe a small kindness upon me.

I am, with the distinguished consideration that we owe the benefactors of humanity,

JONDRETTE.

P.S. My daughter will await your orders, dear Monsieur Marius.

This letter, cropping up in the middle of the obscure episode that had been worrying Marius since the night before, was a candle in a cave. Everything was suddenly clear as day. This letter had come from the same place as the other four. It was the same writing, the same style, same spelling, same paper, same reek of tobacco.

There were five missives, five tales, five names, five signatures, and a single signatory. The Spanish captain Don Alvarez, the unhappy Balizard, the dramatic poet Genflot, the aging actor Fabantou were all four named Jondrette, if indeed Jondrette’s name really was Jondrette.

As we might have mentioned, in all the fairly long time that Marius had lived in the building so far, he had only rarely had occasion to see, or even glimpse, what neighbours there were. His mind was elsewhere and where your mind is, your eyes follow. He must have crossed paths with the Jondrettes in the hallway or on the stairs; but for him they were mere silhouettes; he had taken so little notice of them that, the night before, he had knocked into the Jondrette girls on the boulevard without recognizing them. For it was obviously them; but even now, when this one had come into his room, it was only with great difficulty that he vaguely recalled, through the pity and disgust she aroused in him, having run into her somewhere else.

Now he saw it all clearly. He understood that the business his neighbour Jondrette was in, in his distress, was to exploit the charitable, that he procured the addresses of people he had sized up as rich and compassionate and wrote them, under assumed names, letters that the girls delivered by hand, at their peril, for this father had sunk so low as to put his own daughters at risk; he was playing a game with fate and they were the pawns. Marius understood that probably, judging by their flight the night before, their breathlessness, their terror, and the words of slang that he had heard, these sorry girls were also practising all sorts of dark trades—and that the net result of the whole sordid business was two miserable beings who were neither children nor girls nor women, monsters of a sort at once foul and innocent, produced by dire poverty, smack in the middle of human society as we know it.

Sad creatures, without name, without age, without sex, already beyond good and evil, emerging from childhood into the world already stripped of everything, with neither liberty, nor virtue, nor any responsibility left. Souls blossoming only yesterday, but today faded like flowers fallen in the street, spattered by mud from all directions before being crushed under a wheel.

Yet while Marius pinned her with a stunned and sorrowful look, the young girl was pacing up and down the garret as though she owned the place, with the audacity of a revenant. She thrashed about completely oblivious to her nakedness. At times her unbuttoned and torn chemise nearly fell down to her waist. She moved the chairs around, she rearranged the toiletries on the chest of drawers, she felt Marius’s clothes, she fumbled through the pockets.

“Well, well!” she said, “you have a mirror!”

And quite as if she were alone, she hummed snatches of vaudeville tunes, playful refrains that her raucous, guttural voice turned sinister. Beneath the daring, something forced, anxious, and abashed broke through. Effrontery is a form of shame.

Nothing could be more mournful than to see her frolicking and flitting, so to speak, about the room, like a bird with a broken wing, frightened by daylight. You felt that in different circumstances, with an education and a different life, the girl’s carefree, chirpy manner might have been sweet and charming. Never in the animal kingdom does a creature born to be a dove turn into a rapacious white-tailed eagle. This only happens among men.

Marius was thinking his thoughts and let her carry on. She went to the table.

“Ah!” she said. “Books!”

A light flashed in her glassy eyes. As she went on, her tone expressed the joy of being able to boast about something no human being is immune to: “I can read, you know!” She swiftly grabbed the book that lay open on the table and read fairly fluently: “… General Bauduin received the order to take the five battalions of his brigade and capture the château of Hougoumont, which is in the middle of the plain of Waterloo—” She broke off: “Ah! Waterloo! I know about that. It was a battle long ago. My father was there. My father served in the army. We are Bonapartist as all get-out at home, you know! It was against the English, Waterloo.” She put the book back down, took a pen and cried: “And I can write, too!”

She dipped the pen in the ink and turned to Marius: “Do you want to see? Look, I’ll write something to show you.” And before he had time to answer, she wrote on a blank sheet of paper that was lying on the table: “The cops are here.” Then she tossed the pen aside: “There are no spelling mistakes. You can see for yourself. We’ve had education, my sister and me. We haven’t always been what we are. We weren’t made to—” Here she stopped, fixed her lacklustre eye on Marius and burst out laughing before saying, in a tone that contained extreme anguish smothered by extreme cynicism: “Gah!!” And she began to croon these words to a very merry tune:

I’m hungry, father.

No stew.

I’m cold, mother.

No woolies.

Shiver,

Lolotte!

Sob,

Jacquot!

She had barely finished this verse when she cried:

“Do you sometimes go to shows, Monsieur Marius? I do. I’ve got a little brother who’s friends with the artists and he sometimes gives me tickets. For one thing, I don’t like balcony seats. You don’t have any room and it’s uncomfortable. There’s sometimes real riffraff there and there’s also a lot of smelly people.” She studied Marius, then adopted an odd look and said: “You know, Monsieur Marius, you are a very good-looking boy?” The same thought struck them both at the same time, which made her smile and made him blush. She walked over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder.

“You never notice me, but I know you, Monsieur Marius. I run into you here on the stairs and then I see you visiting a man named Father Mabeuf who lives over Austerlitz way, sometimes, when I’m out walking around there. It suits you, you know, your hair sticking up like that.” Her voice struggled to sound soft and sweet but only managed to go very low. Some of her words were lost in the journey from larynx to lips as on a keyboard that is missing some notes.

Marius had quietly backed away.

“Mademoiselle,” he said with cold gravity, “I have here a packet that is, I believe, yours. Allow me to give it back to you.” And he held out to her the envelope containing the four letters.

She clapped her hands together and cried: “We looked everywhere!”

Then she swiftly grabbed the packet and opened the envelope, prattling away as she did so: “God in heaven! We looked high and low, did we ever, my sister and me! And you found them! On the boulevard, I bet? It must have been on the boulevard? You see, they fell when we were running. It’s my brat of a sister who slipped like an idiot. When we got home we couldn’t find them anywhere. Since we didn’t want to get the strap, there’s no point, I mean, what for? whatever for? we told them at home that we’d taken the letters to the people and they told us, nothing doing! And here they are, the poor old letters! How could you tell they were mine—but, ah, of course! The writing! So it was you we bumped into last night when we were going past. We couldn’t see, naturally! I said to my sister: Was that some sort of gent? My sister said: I reckon!” She had by now unfolded the begging letter addressed to “the benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.” “Look!” she said. “This one’s for the old geezer who goes to mass. Actually, it’s on right now. I think I’ll take it to him. Maybe he’ll give us something so we can have breakfast.” Then she started laughing again and added: “You know what it’ll mean if we have breakfast today? It’ll mean we’ll have had our breakfast for the day before yesterday, our dinner for the day before yesterday, our breakfast for yesterday, our dinner for yesterday—all in the one meal, this morning! Well, so what? Like it or lump it, or drop dead, dogs!” This reminded Marius of what the poor sorry creature had come to his room for. He fumbled in his jacket, and found nothing. The young girl went on regardless, talking as though she were no longer conscious of Marius’s being there.

“Sometimes I take off at night. Sometimes I don’t come back. Before we were here, last winter, we lived under the arches of bridges. We huddled together so as not to freeze. My little sister cried. Water, God it’s sad! I thought of drowning myself, but then I thought: No, it’s too cold. I go off on my own when I feel like it, sometimes I sleep in a ditch. You know, at night, when I’m walking on the boulevard, I see trees like forks, I see houses all black and as big as the towers of Notre-Dame, I pretend that the white walls are the river, and I say to myself: Look, there’s water here! The stars are like little paper lanterns all lit up, you’d say they were smoking and that the wind then snuffs them out, it gives me the shivers, as if I had horses breathing in my ear all of a sudden. Even though it’s night, I can hear Barbary organs and the machines in the mills spinning, I don’t know. I feel like they’re people and they’re throwing stones at me. I run for it, I don’t even know I’m doing it, everything’s spinning, it’s all a whirl. When you haven’t eaten, you feel funny.” And she stared at him, wild-eyed.

After digging deep into his pockets, Marius finally got five francs sixteen sous together. It was, at that moment, all he had in the world.

“This will do for my dinner today,” he thought. “Tomorrow, we’ll see.”

He kept the sixteen sous and gave the five francs to the girl. She ripped it out of his hand.

“Hooray!” she said. “The sun’s out!”

And as if this sun had the property of causing avalanches of slang to melt in her brain, she went on: “A fiver! A shiner! A monarch! In this joint! I’ll be blowed! Knock me down with a feather! You beauty! You’re not a bad sort. Hats off. Never say die! Two days of pine cones! Muck for meat and slosh for grub! We’ll stuff our faces, don’t think we won’t!” She hitched her chemise back onto her shoulders, gave Marius a deep bow, then a cheeky wave of the hand and tripped to the door: “I’m on my way, Monsieur. Hell’s bells. I’m off to find the old man.” As she passed, she spotted a crust of dry bread gathering mould in the dust on top of the chest of drawers and she fell upon it and bit into it, muttering: “Good! Nice and hard! I can cut my teeth on it!” And with that, she left.

THE JUDAS OF PROVIDENCE

FOR FIVE YEARS Marius had lived in poverty, in deprivation, even in distress, but he realized he had never known real misery. Real misery, he had just seen. It was the spectre that had just passed before his very eyes. Actually, anyone who has seen the misery of men only, has seen nothing, you have to see the misery of women; anyone who has seen the misery of women only, has seen nothing, you have to see the misery of a child.

When a man has hit rock bottom and death is not far off, he comes to the end of his tether, his wit’s end, at the same time. Woe to the defenceless beings around him! Work, wages, bread, heat, courage, goodwill—he lacks everything at once. The light of day seems to go out without, the moral light goes out within; in the these dark shadows, men come up against the weakness of women and children, and bend them brutally to ignominious ends.

Then all horrors may break loose. Despair is penned in by the flimsiest walls, all of them opening onto vice or crime.

Health, youth, honour, the sacred and fierce fragility of still-fresh young flesh, the heart, virginity, modesty, that skin of the soul, are sinisterly twisted and misused by this groping in the dark after resources, which comes up against infamy and accommodates it. Fathers, mothers, children, brothers, sisters, men, women, girls, cling together and form a mass almost like some mineral outcrop, in this murky promiscuity of sexes, relationships, ages, foul deeds, innocent acts. They squat down on their haunches, back to back, in a kind of slum destiny, eyeing each other miserably. O, the poor unfortunates! Look how pale they are! See how cold they are! They seem to be on a planet a lot farther away from the sun than we are.

This young girl was for Marius a sort of emissary from the darkest depths. She revealed to him a whole dreadful side of the night.

Marius almost reproached himself for being so absorbed in the daydreams and passion that had kept him from casting so much as a glance at his neighbours until that day. To have cobbled together their rent was a mechanical gesture, anyone would have done the same thing; but he, Marius, should have done more. For God’s sake! A mere wall separated him from these abandoned beings that lived groping around in the dark, beyond the land of the living. He rubbed shoulders with them, he was in a way the last link in the chain of the human race that they touched, he could hear them living or, rather, groaning in agony, right next to him and he had taken no notice! Every day, at every moment, through the wall, he could hear them walking, coming and going, talking, and he hadn’t even listened! And among those words there were moans, and he hadn’t even registered! His thoughts were elsewhere, lost in dreams, in wild fantasies, in love in the open air, in giddy delusions, and yet these human beings, his brothers in Jesus Christ, his brothers in the common people, were dying in agony right next to him! Dying pointlessly! He even contributed to their misfortune, and he exacerbated it. For, if they had had a different neighbour, a less fanciful and more attentive neighbour, a normal, charitable man, obviously their destitution would not have gone unnoticed, their distress signals would have been seen, and for a long time already, perhaps, they would have been rescued and saved! Of course, they seemed utterly depraved, utterly corrupt, utterly vile, utterly odious even, but they are rare, those who have fallen without being damaged on the way down; besides, there is a point where the unfortunate and the ignominious mingle and fuse, poor bastards, in a single word, a deadly word, outcasts, les misérables, and whose fault is that? And then again, shouldn’t charity be the greater, the deeper the fall into darkness?

While he lectured himself in this vein, for there were times when Marius, like all truly honest souls, was his own schoolmaster, chastising himself more than he deserved, he studied the flimsy partition that separated him from the Jondrettes, as though he could drill his deeply compassionate gaze through it and warm those poor people up. The wall was nothing more than a thin layer of plaster supported by laths and joists and which, as we have just heard, allowed words and voices to be made out perfectly clearly. Only a dreamer like Marius could have failed to realize this already. There was no wallpaper pasted over the wall, either on the Jondrettes’ side or on Marius’s; the crummy construction was laid bare for all to see. Almost without being aware of it, Marius examined the partition; sometimes reverie examines, observes, scrutinizes much the same as thought would. Suddenly he bolted upright; almost at the very top, near the ceiling, he spotted a triangular hole where three laths had left a gap between them. The rubblework that should have filled up this gap was not there and by standing on the chest of drawers you could see through the hole into the Jondrettes’ garret. Commiseration has, and should have, its curiosity. This hole created a sort of judas—a peephole. You are allowed to spy on misfortune as a traitor if you are going to relieve it.

“Let’s take a bit of a peek at what these people are like,” thought Marius, “and see how bad things really are.” He hopped up on the chest of drawers, put his eye to the crevice, and looked.

FERAL MAN IN HIS LAIR

TOWNS, LIKE FORESTS, have their dens where the nastiest and most terrifying creatures they harbour hide. Only, in towns, what hides like this is ferocious, filthy, and small, in other words, ugly; in forests, what hides is ferocious, wild, and big, that is, beautiful. As lairs go, those of beasts are preferable to those of men. Caves are better than ratholes.

What Marius saw was a rathole.

Marius was poor and his room was fairly bare; but, just as his poverty was noble, his attic was clean. The pigsty he had a bird’s-eye view of at that moment was abject, dirty, fetid, putrid, dark, sordid. All it had for furniture was a straw chair, a rickety table, a few old shards of pottery, and, in two of the corners, two straw mattresses that defy description; all it had for light was a dormer window with four panes, draped in cobwebs. There was just enough light coming in through this window for a man’s face to appear like the face of a phantom. The walls had a leprous look and were covered in cuts and scars like a face disfigured by some horrible disease. They oozed a kind of rheumy damp. Obscene drawings could be made out on them, roughly drawn in charcoal.

The room Marius occupied was tiled with dilapidated used bricks; this one had neither tiles nor floorboards; you walked straight on top of the tenament’s undressed antique plaster, which had gone black from all the feet. On this uneven ground, where the dirt was more or less encrusted, and which was virgin soil only as far as the broom went, constellations of old shoes, ratty slippers, and awful rags were bunched willy-nilly; but the room had a fireplace and so it was rented at forty francs a year. There was a bit of everything in this fireplace, a stove, a cooking pot, some broken boards, rags hanging on nails, a birdcage, ashes, and even a bit of a fire. A tiny handful of embers was smoking away sadly.

One thing added further to the garret’s horror and that was that it was big. It had projections, corners, black holes, recesses where the roof dipped down, bays, and ridges jutting out. Hence the frightening, unfathomable nooks and crannies where it seemed spiders as fat as your fist, wood lice as broad as your foot, and even, perhaps, some unspeakable human monsters had to be curled up snugly.

One of the pallets was close to the door, the other close to the window. Both of them touched the hearth at one end and were facing Marius.

In a corner next to the opening Marius was looking through, hanging on the wall in a black wooden frame, was a coloured engraving at the bottom of which was written in capital letters THE DREAM. This represented a sleeping woman and a sleeping child, the child on the woman’s knee, an eagle in a cloud with a crown in its beak, and the woman taking the crown off the child’s head, and without its waking up, too; in the background, Napoléon in a blaze of glory was leaning on a fat blue column with a yellow capital adorned with this inscription: MARINGO

AUSTERLITS

IENA

WAGRAMME

ELOT

Below the framed engraving a sort of wooden panel that was taller than it was wide had been placed on the floor leaning against the wall at an angle. This looked to be a painting turned round back to front, a stretcher probably daubed with paint on the other side, some kind of pier glass taken down from a wall and forgotten there, waiting to be hung back up again.

At the table, on which Marius spotted a pen and ink and some paper, a man about sixty was sitting; he was small, thin, livid, haggard, with a cunning, cruel, and fretful look about him; a grisly evildoer.

If Lavater2 had been able to study the man’s face he would have found in it the vulture mingled with the prosecutor, the bird of prey and the pettifogging shyster bringing the worst out in each and completing each other, the shyster making the bird of prey ignoble, the bird of prey making the shyster appalling.

The man had a long grey beard. He was dressed in a woman’s chemise that exposed his hairy chest and his bare arms bristling with grey hair. Under the chemise you could make out mud-caked trousers and boots with his toes sticking out. He had a pipe clamped in his mouth and was puffing on it. There may have been no bread left in the rathole but there was still some tobacco. He was writing, probably a letter like the ones Marius had read.

On one corner of the table was an old odd volume with a reddish cover; its format, which was the old duodecimo of reading rooms, revealed a novel. On the cover the title spread in bold capital letters: GOD, THE KING, HONOUR AND THE LADIES, BY DUCRAY-DUMINIL.3 1814.

While he wrote, the man talked out loud and Marius heard what he said: “To think there’s no equality, not even when you’re dead! You’ve only got to look at Père-Lachaise! The bigwigs, the nobs, are at the top, along the pathway where the acacias are, where it’s paved. They get to arrive in a carriage. The little people, the poor people, the unlucky, in a word! they’re stuck at the bottom, where there’s mud up to your knees, in holes, in the muck. They put them there so they’ll rot faster! You can’t go and see them without getting stuck in the ground.” Here he stopped, banged the table with his fist, and added, grinding his teeth: “Oh! I could eat the whole rotten world!” A big woman who could have been anywhere between forty and a hundred was squatting on her bare heels close to the fire. She, too, was dressed in a chemise as well as a knitted woolen skirt patched with bits of old sheeting. An apron of coarse canvas hid half the skirt. Although this woman was bent double, crouching and hugging herself, you could see that she was very tall. Next to her husband, she was a kind of giant. She had awful hair, a rusty blond going grey, and she pushed it back now and again with her enormous shiny flat-nailed hands.

Lying next to her on the floor, wide open, was a volume of the same format as the other one and probably of the same novel.

On one of the pallets, Marius glimpsed a sort of skinny whey-faced girl sitting, almost naked, with her feet dangling, looking as though she couldn’t hear or see, and was not, in fact, alive. No doubt the younger sister of the one who had come to his room.

She looked eleven or twelve. If you studied her more closely, you would see that she was, in fact, fifteen. This was the child who had said, the night before on the boulevard: “Did I make a run for it!” She was of that sickly species that remains backward for a long time, then suddenly grows up fast. It is destitution that produces these sad human plants, creatures who don’t have a childhood or an adolescence, either. At fifteen, they look twelve, at sixteen, they look twenty. Today little girls, tomorrow mature women. It is as though they bounded through life to get it over with faster. At that moment, this being still looked like a child.

Whatever the case, nothing in the room pointed to any kind of work whatever; no tools of a trade, no loom, no spinning wheel, no implement. In one corner, there were a few dubious-looking bits of scrap iron. It was full of the forlorn indolence that follows despair and precedes the last gasp.

Marius gazed for some time at this funereal interior, more terrifying than the inside of a tomb, for you could feel the human soul stirring there and life pulsating still.

The garret, the cellar, the dungeon where certain of the destitute crawl at the bottom of the social edifice, is not yet quite the sepulchre. It is its antechamber; but, like rich people who display their greatest riches at the entrance to their palace, it seems that death, which is close at hand, puts its greatest miseries in this, its vestibule.

The man had shut up, the woman wasn’t speaking, the young girl seemed not to be breathing. You could hear the pen scratching, screeching, screaming, across the page.

The man grumbled without ceasing to write: “Mongrels! Mongrels! They’re all mongrels!” This variation on Solomon’s cry got a sigh from the woman.

“Calm down, pet,” she said. “Don’t upset yourself, dear heart. You’re too good to write to all these people, treasure.” In misery, bodies huddle together against the rest, just as they do in the cold, but hearts grow distant. This woman, as far as anyone could tell, must once have loved this man with whatever quotient of love was in her; but most likely, in the daily mutual rage provoked by the awful distress that ground the family down, that love had died. There was nothing left in her for her husband except the cold ashes of affection. But terms of endearment, as so often, had survived. She called him pet, dear heart, treasure, etc., with her lips. Her heart said nothing.

The man had returned to his writing.

STRATEGIES AND TACTICS

MARIUS, WITH HEAVY heart, was about to climb back down from this observatory he had improvised, when a noise attracted his attention and made him stay right where he was.

The garret door had just swung open violently. The elder daughter appeared on the landing. She had a man’s outsize clodhoppers on her feet and they were caked in mud, which had been spattered right up her reddened ankles, and she was cloaked in an old tattered mantle that Marius had not seen on her an hour ago, but that she had probably unloaded at his door in order to inspire more pity and then picked up again when she left. She came in, shut the door behind her, stopped to catch her breath, for she was quite winded, then shouted with an expression of triumph and joy: “He’s coming!” The father turned his eyes to her, the mother turned her head, the little sister did not stir.

“Who?” asked the father.

“The gent!”

“The philanthropist?”

“Yep.”

“From the Saint-Jacques church?”

“Yep.”

“The old geezer?”

“Yep.”

“He’s coming?”

“He’s right behind me.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Just like that, you mean, he’s coming?”

“He’s coming in a cab.”

“In a cab. Must be Rothschild!”1

The father got up.

“How can you be so sure? If he’s coming in a cab, how come you got here first? You did give him the address, at least? You did tell him the last door on the right at the end of the hall? Let’s hope he doesn’t get it wrong! So you found him at the church? Did he read my letter? What did he say?” “Tut, tut, tut!” said the girl. “God, you do go on, old man! Here’s the story: I go into the church, he’s at his usual place, I give him a curtsy and I hand him the letter, he reads it and he says: ‘Where do you live, my child?’ I say: ‘Monsieur, I’ll take you there.’ He says: ‘No, give me your address, my daughter has some shopping to do, I’ll take a carriage and I’ll get to your place the same time as you.’ I give him the address. When I told him which house, he looked surprised and he hesitated for a second, then he said: ‘It doesn’t matter, I’ll come anyway.’ When mass was over, I saw him walk out of the church with his daughter and I saw them hop in a cab. And I did tell him the last door on the right at the end of the hall.” “And what makes you think he’ll come?”

“I just saw the cab turning into the rue du Petit-Banquier. That’s why I came running.” “How do you know it’s the same cab?”

“Because I noted the number, that’s how!”

“What’s the number?”

“Four hundred and forty.”

“Good, you’re a smart girl.”

The girl gave her father a defiant look and, showing the shoes she had on her feet, she said: “A smart girl, maybe. But I’m telling you now I’m never putting these shoes on again and I won’t have anything more to do with them, for health reasons, to start with, and then for decency’s sake. I don’t know what could be more annoying than soles that ooze and go swish, swish, swish, all the way down the street. I’d rather go barefoot.” “Right you are,” replied the father in a gentle tone that contrasted with the young girl’s abrasiveness. “But then, they won’t let you set foot in a church. The poor have to have shoes. You don’t go to the house of the Lord barefoot,” he added bitterly. Then he returned to the subject on his mind: “But you’re sure, then, you’re sure he’s coming?” “He’s hot on my heels,” she said.

The man straightened up. His face lit up with a strange inner glow.

“Woman!” he cried. “You hear that. The philanthropist’s coming. Put the fire out.”

The stupefied mother didn’t budge. The father, with the agility of an acrobat, grabbed a jug with a broken neck that was sitting on the hearth and threw water on the embers. Then he turned to his elder daughter: “You! Strip the straw off the chair!” His daughter didn’t know what he meant. He took hold of the chair and with a swift thrust of his heel, kicked the straw out. His leg went right through it. As he pulled his leg out, he asked his daughter: “Is it cold out?” “Bitterly cold. It’s snowing.”

The father turned to the younger daughter who was on the pallet by the window and bellowed at her in a thundering voice: “Quick! Off the bed, you good-for-nothing lump! Can’t you do something for a change! Smash a bloody windowpane!” The little girl hopped off the bed, shivering.

“Smash a windowpane!” he repeated.

The child was speechless.

“You heard me!” the father yelled. “I told you to smash a windowpane!”

In a sort of terrified act of obedience, the child stood on tiptoe and punched her fist into a windowpane. The glass shattered and fell with a crash.

“Good,” said the father.

He was grave and abrupt. He ran his eyes rapidly over all the nooks and crannies of the garret, like a general making his final preparations as the battle was about to begin.

The mother, who had not yet uttered a word, got to her feet and asked in a slow, thick voice, in words that seemed to come out congealed: “Darling, what do you want to do?” “You hop into bed,” replied the man.

His tone did not admit of any deliberation. The mother obeyed and threw herself heavily onto one of the pallets. Meanwhile a sob was heard in a corner.

“What’s that?” shouted the father.

The younger daughter, without coming out of the shadows she had sought refuge in, showed her bleeding fist. She had hurt herself breaking the glass and now she was at her mother’s bed, quietly crying.

It was the mother’s turn to stand up and yell: “Now look what you’ve done! God, you think up some stupid things! She’s cut herself, breaking your stupid window for you!” “Well and good!” said the man. “That was the idea.”

“What do you mean, well and good?” the mother shot back.

“Quiet!” replied the father. “I suppress the freedom of the press!”2

Then, ripping the woman’s chemise he was wearing, he tore off a strip and promptly wrapped the little girl’s bleeding hand tightly with it. That done, he glanced down at his torn chemise with satisfaction.

“The chemise, while we’re at it,” he said. “It all looks pretty good.”

An icy wind whistled at the window and swept into the room. The fog outside rolled in and spread out like whitish cotton wool vaguely pulled apart by invisible fingers. Through the broken window, you could see snow falling. The cold promised the day before by the Candlemas sun had arrived with a vengeance.

The father ran his eye one last time around him as though to reassure himself that he had not forgotten anything. He took an old shovel and spread the ash over the wet embers so as to hide them completely.

Then he stood up again and leaned back against the fireplace: “Now,” he said, “we’re ready to receive the philanthropist.” A RAY OF LIGHT IN THE RATHOLE

THE BIG GIRL went over and put her hand on her father’s hand.

“Feel how cold I am,” she said.

“Bah!” the father responded. “I’m a lot colder than that.”

The mother cried impetuously: “You always have to go one better than everyone else, don’t you! Even when it comes to pain.” “Down!” said the man.

At a certain look from the man, the mother shut up. There was a moment of silence in the rathole. The elder daughter was scraping the mud off the hem of her mantle, the younger sister went on sobbing; the mother had taken the girl’s head in both hands and was covering it with kisses, whispering to her: “Now, now, my treasure, it’s nothing, don’t cry, you’ll make your father angry.” “No!” cried the father. “On the contrary! Bawl your eyes out! Sob! That’s just the ticket.” Then, turning back to the elder girl: “Well, then! He’s not coming! What if he’s not coming! I will have put out my fire, kicked in my chair, ripped my chemise, and broken my window all for nothing!” “And hurt the little one,” the mother murmured.

“Do you know,” the father went on, “it’s as cold as a nun’s nasty in this dump of a place! If this bastard doesn’t show up! He’s said to himself: ‘Well, then, let them wait! That’s what they’re there for!’ Oh, how I hate them, how I would love to strangle every one of them, gleefully, joyfully, enthusiastically, happily, the bleeding rich! Every last one of them! These so-called charitable types, who make chutney, go to mass, go in for the priesthood, preach this, preach that, churchy types who think they’re above us, and come to humiliate us and bring us their castoffs! That’s what they call them! Togs not worth four sous, and bread! That’s not what I want, you pile of steaming turds! I want money! Ah, money! Never! Because they say we’ll just go and drink it all, we’re nothing but drunks and layabouts! What about them! What are they, then, and what were they in their day? Thieves! They wouldn’t have got rich otherwise! Oh, we ought to take society by the four corners of the tablecloth and toss the whole lot in the air! Everything would smash to smithereens, most likely, but at least then no one’d have anything, and that’d be something! But what can he be doing, then, your boor of a benevolent gent? Is he going to come? The stupid bastard’s probably forgotten the address! I bet that old idiot …” At that moment there was a gentle rap at the door, the man lunged toward it and opened it, offering smiles of adoration, as he scraped and bowed: “Come in, Monsieur! Deign to come in, my respectable benefactor, along with your charming young lady.” A man of mature age and a young girl appeared in the doorway of the garret. Marius had not left his place. What he felt at that moment is beyond the power of human language to tell.

Her.

Anyone who has ever loved knows all the radiant meaning packed into the three letters of that word: Her.

It really was her. Marius could barely make her out through the luminous haze that suddenly spread over his eyes. It was that sweet absent being, that star that had shone for six months, those eyes, that forehead, that mouth, that beautiful vanished face that had brought down the night in vanishing. The vision had been eclipsed, she reappeared!

She reappeared in this darkness, in this garret, in this diseased dump of a place, in this horror!

Marius shuddered uncontrollably. What? Her! His heart was beating so hard, he could hardly see. He felt he was about to burst into tears. What? He was finally seeing her again after searching for her for so long! It felt as if he’d lost his soul and had now suddenly found it again.

She was the same as ever, a bit paler only; her delicate face was framed by a hat of violet velvet. Her figure was hidden under a pelisse of black satin. Under her long frock, you could see her tiny feet, shod in silk brodequins.

She was still accompanied by Monsieur Leblanc. She had taken a few steps into the room and had placed a fairly large parcel on the table.

The elder Jondrette girl had retreated behind the door and eyed the velvet hat darkly, along with the silk mantle and the lovely, happy face.

JONDRETTE VERY NEARLY WEEPS

THE RATHOLE WAS so dark that anyone coming in from outside felt like they were entering a cellar. The two new arrivals accordingly advanced somewhat tentatively, barely making out the dim shapes around them, while being seen and examined perfectly well by the garret residents, whose eyes were accustomed to this eternal twilight.

Monsieur Leblanc approached with his kind sad eyes, and said to father Jondrette: “Monsieur, you will find new clothes, woolen stockings, and blankets in this parcel.” “Our angelic benefactor overwhelms us,” said Jondrette, bowing to the floor.

Then, bending down to whisper in his elder daughter’s ear while the two visitors were examining the lamentable interior, he added swiftly: “See? What did I tell you? Rags! No money. They’re all the same! Speaking of which, how was the letter to this old codger signed?” “Fabantou,” she replied.

“The dramatic artiste, right!”

Lucky Jondrette had asked, for at that very moment Monsieur Leblanc turned to him and said, as though searching for his name: “I see that you really are to be pitied, Monsieur—” “Fabantou,” Jondrette quickly cut in.

“Monsieur Fabantou, yes, that’s right, I remember.”

“Dramatic artiste, Monsieur, one who has had his successes.”

Here Jondrette evidently felt the moment had come to close in on “the philanthropist.” He shouted in a voice combining the vainglory of the fairground tumbler with the humility of the high street beggar, all in one: “Student of Talma,1 Monsieur! I am a student of Talma. Fortune once smiled on me. Alas! Now it’s Misfortune’s turn. You see, my benefactor, no bread, no fire. My poor kiddies have no fire! My only chair has the bottom out of it! A broken windowpane! In this weather! My missus in bed! Sick!” “Poor woman!” said Monsieur Leblanc.

“My child hurt!” Jondrette added.

The child, distracted by the arrival of the strangers, was busy staring at “the young lady” and had stopped her sobbing.

“Go on, cry! Bawl!” Jondrette hissed at her.

At the same time, he pinched her sore hand. All with the skill of a conjurer. The little girl let out a few loud shrieks.

The adorable young girl whom Marius in his heart called “his Ursula” ran over: “You poor dear child,” she said.

“You see, my beautiful young lady,” Jondrette went on, “her bleeding wrist! It was an accident that happened while she was working away on a machine—just to make six sous a day. They may be forced to cut her arm off!” “Really?” said the old gentleman, alarmed.

The little girl, taking this remark seriously, began to wail again, louder than ever, quite beautifully.

“Alas, yes, my benefactor!” the father replied.

For some moments, Jondrette had been studying “the philanthropist” in a bizarre way. Even as he spoke, he was scrutinizing the man with intense attention, as though he were trying to gather his memories together. All of a sudden, taking advantage of a moment when the newcomers were keenly questioning the little girl about her injured hand, he went over to the bed where his wife was, looking dopey and out of her depth, and he quickly whispered to her: “Take a good look at that man, will you!”

Then he turned back to Monsieur Leblanc and continued his lament: “You see, Monsieur! All I have, myself, for clothes is one of my wife’s chemises! And it’s all torn! In the middle of winter! I can’t go out without a coat. If I had a coat of some sort, I’d go and see Mademoiselle Mars,2 who knows me and who is really fond of me. Doesn’t she still live in the rue de la Tour-des-Dames? Do you know, Monsieur? We used to tour together in the country. I shared her laurels. Célimène would come to my aid, Monsieur! Elmira would give alms to Belisarius!3 But no, nothing! And not a sou in the house! My wife sick and not a sou! My daughter dangerously injured and not a sou! The missus has coughing fits. It’s her age and, then again, the nervous system’s got something to do with it. She needs help, and my daughter, too! But we can’t afford doctors! Or chemists! How can we pay? Not a centime! I’d go down on my knees for a ten-centime piece, Monsieur! You see what the arts have been reduced to! And do you know, my charming young lady, and you, Monsieur, generous patron of mine, do you know, you who breathe virtue and goodness, and who perfume the church where my poor daughter goes to say her prayers and sees you every day? … For I bring my daughters up in the church, Monsieur. I didn’t want them to take to the theatre. Ah, the little scamps! If I see them batting an eyelid! I’m not kidding, no sir! I hit ‘em with a bit of sound and fury about honour, and morality, and virtue! Ask them. They have to stick to the straight and narrow. They’ve got a father. They’re not like those poor unfortunate girls who start off not having a family and end up taking on all comers. When you’re Mamselle Nobody, you become Madame Everybody. Jumping Jehovah! None of that in the Fabantou family! I mean to educate them virtuously, and for ‘em to be honest, and for ‘em to be nice, and for ‘em to believe in God! Good God! … Well, then, Monsieur, my worthy Monsieur, do you know what is going to happen tomorrow? Tomorrow is the fourth of February, that fatal day, the last day my landlord has given me; if I haven’t paid by this evening, tomorrow my eldest daughter, me, my missus with her fever, my little girl with her injury, we will all four be evicted, kicked out, thrown on the street, on the boulevard, without shelter, in the rain, in the snow. There you have it, Monsieur. I owe four quarters, a whole year! That is, sixty francs.” Jondrette was lying. Four quarters would have meant only forty francs, and he could not owe four quarters since only six months ago Marius had paid two.

Monsieur Leblanc pulled five francs out of his pocket and put them on the table.

Jondrette had time to mumble into his big girl’s ear: “Bastard! What does he want me to do with his five francs? That won’t pay for my chair and my window! All that for nothing!” But Monsieur Leblanc had taken off the big brown greatcoat he had been wearing over his blue redingote and thrown it over the back of the chair.

“Monsieur Fabantou,” he said, “I have only those five francs on me, but I’m going to take my daughter home and I’ll return this evening; it’s this evening, isn’t it, that you have to pay?” Jondrette’s face lit up with a strange expression. He quickly answered: “Yes, my estimable gentleman. At eight o’clock I have to be at my landlord’s door.” “I’ll be here at six o’clock, and I’ll bring you the sixty francs.”

“My benefactor!” cried Jondrette, overcome.

And he added in a whisper: “Take a good look at him, woman!”

Monsieur Leblanc had taken the arm of the beautiful young girl again and turned toward the door: “Till this evening, my friends,” he said.

“Six o’clock?” said Jondrette.

“Six on the dot.”

At that moment the greatcoat left on the chair caught the eye of the elder Jondrette girl.

“Monsieur,” she said, “you’ve forgotten your overcoat.”

Jondrette looked daggers at his daughter and gave a fearful shrug of the shoulders. Monsieur Leblanc turned round and answered with a smile: “I haven’t forgotten it, I’m leaving it.” “O, my patron,” said Jondrette. “My august benefactor. I am dissolving into tears! Please allow me to take you back to your cab.” “If you go out,” rejoined Monsieur Leblanc, “put this overcoat on. It is very cold.”

Jondrette did not need to be told twice. He swiftly threw the brown greatcoat on. And the three of them went out, Jondrette ahead of the two strangers.

RATES FOR CABS: TWO FRANCS AN HOUR

MARIUS HAD MISSED nothing of this whole scene and yet in reality he had seen nothing. His eyes had remained glued to the young girl, his heart had, so to speak, seized her and enveloped her from head to toe the moment she stepped into the garret. The whole time she was there, he had lived that life of ecstasy that suspends material perceptions and causes the whole soul to rush to one point. He contemplated, not the girl, but the light, which wore a satin pelisse and a velvet hat. If Sirius, the star, had entered the room, he could not have been more dazzled.

While the young girl was opening the parcel and unfolding the clothes and the blankets, or questioning the sick mother so kindheartedly and the little injured girl so tenderheartedly, he was watching her every move very closely, and straining to hear what she said. He knew her eyes, her forehead, her beauty, her figure, her gait, but he did not know the sound of her voice. He thought he’d caught a few words once at the Luxembourg, but he was not absolutely sure. He’d have given ten years of his life to hear it, to be able to carry a bit of that music in his soul. But it was lost in all these lamentable performances and Jondrette’s trumpeting. This added rage to Marius’s rapture. He gazed longingly at her. He could not quite believe that it really was this divine creature that he was seeing amid these depraved beings in this monstrous hole. It was like seeing a hummingbird among toads.

When she left, he had only one thought, to follow her, to hug her tracks, not to let her go until he’d found out where she lived, not lose her again, at least, after having so miraculously found her again! He jumped down from the chest of drawers and grabbed his hat. Just as he placed his hand on the doorknob and was about to go out, a thought made him stop short. The hall was long, the staircase narrow, Jondrette was a talker, Monsieur Leblanc had no doubt not yet stepped back up into his carriage; if he turned round in the hall, or on the stairs, or at the doorstop, and saw Marius in this house, obviously he would be alarmed and would find a way of escaping yet again and it would all be finished yet again. What could he do? Wait a while? But while he was waiting, the cab might take off. Marius didn’t know what to do. Finally he took the risk and left his room.

There was nobody in the hall now. He ran to the stairs. There was nobody on the stairs, either. He rushed downstairs and reached the boulevard just in time to see a fiacre turning the corner of the rue du Petit-Banquier to go back to Paris.

Marius hurried in that direction. When he reached the corner of the boulevard, he saw the same cab going at quite a clip down the rue Mouffetard; the cab was already a long way off, there was no way he could catch up with it; what did he imagine? That he’d run after it? Hardly. Besides, inside the cab they would surely notice this individual running for all his might in hot pursuit of them and the father would recognize him. Just then, an unbelievable and marvellous stroke of luck, Marius saw a cab for hire going past on the boulevard, empty. There was only one thing to do and that was to hop in this cab and follow the other one. This was safe, effective, and free of danger.

Marius signalled the driver to stop and shouted at him: “By the hour!”

Marius didn’t have a cravat on, he was in his shabby old work coat which had buttons missing, and his shirt was torn along one of the folds at the front.

The driver pulled up, winked, and held out his left hand to Marius, gently rubbing his index finger with his thumb.

“What?” said Marius.

“Pay up front,” said the driver.

Marius remembered he had only sixteen sous on him.

“How much?” he asked.

“Forty sous.”

“I’ll pay you when I get back.”

The driver, by way of response, simply whistled the tune of “La Palisse” and whipped his horse into action.

Marius watched the cabriolet driving away, distraught. For want of twenty-four sous, his joy, his happiness, his love, was slipping through his fingers! He was sliding back into the gloom! He had seen and now he would be blind again! He thought bitterly and, it must be said, with deep regret of the five francs he had given that pig of a girl that very morning. If he had had those five francs, he would be saved, he would be born again, he would emerge from limbo and darkness, he would shed his loneliness, and his spleen, and his mourning for his lost love; he would have tied the knot once more between the black thread of his destiny and this beautiful gold thread that had just floated before his very eyes only to snap once more. He went back into the crumbling slum in despair.

He could have told himself that Monsieur Leblanc had promised to return that evening and that he only needed to be better prepared this time to follow him; but in his gloomy contemplation he had hardly registered this.

Just as he was going upstairs, he saw on the other side of the boulevard, walking along by the deserted wall of the rue de la Barrière-des-Gobelins, Jondrette wrapped up in the coat of “the philanthropist,” talking to one of those disturbing-looking men who are appropriately known as “prowlers of the barrières”; rough men with ambiguous faces, given to dubious monologues and evil schemes, who routinely sleep during the day, from which you have to assume they work at night.

The two men, chatting away standing-stock still in the snow that was swirling down, formed an association that a police sergeant would definitely have kept his eye on but that Marius barely noticed.

Yet, whatever his painful preoccupation, he could not help remarking to himself that the barrière prowler Jondrette was talking to looked very like a certain Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, whom Courfeyrac had once pointed out to him and who passed in the quartier for a pretty dangerous night rambler. We saw this man’s name in the preceding book. This Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, later featured in several criminal proceedings and has since become a celebrity crook. At the time he was still only a notorious crook. Today he is a part of the tradition among gangsters and murderers. He had a real following toward the close of the last reign. And in the evening, at nightfall, at the hour when groups huddle together and speak in hushed voices, they used to talk about him in the exercise yard called the Lions’ Den at La Force.1 At that fabled prison, at the exact spot under the covered way where the sewer runs that was used in the incredible breakout in broad daylight of thirty detainees in 1843, you could even read, above the flagstones over the toilets, his name, PANCHAUD, boldly carved by the man himself on the parapet wall in one of his attempts at escape. In 1832, the police already had him under surveillance, but he had not yet seriously made his début.

MISERY OFFERS PAIN ITS SERVICES

MARIUS CLIMBED UPSTAIRS slowly; the moment he was about to go back to his cell, he saw in the hallway behind him the elder Jondrette girl following him. This girl was odious in his sight; she was the one who had his five francs and it was too late to ask her to give them back, the cabriolet was no longer there, the fiacre was far away. She wouldn’t give them back to him, anyway. As for quizzing her about where the people who had come a moment ago lived, that was pointless, it was obvious she didn’t know, since the letter signed Fabantou was addressed to the benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.

Marius stepped into his room and slammed the door shut behind him. It did not close; he turned round and saw that a hand was keeping it open.

“What is it?” he asked. “Who’s there?”

It was the Jondrette girl.

“It’s you?” said Marius, almost harshly. “You again! What do you want this time?” She seemed pensive and did not answer. She had lost the morning’s confidence. She did not come in but stood in the shadows in the hall, where Marius saw her through the half-open door.

“Come on, spit it out!” said Marius. “What do you want?” She lifted her forlorn eyes to him, a spark of life seeming to ignite in them, and said: “Monsieur Marius, you look sad. What’s wrong?” “Me!” said Marius.

“Yes, you.”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Yes, it is!”

“No, it’s not.”

“I’m telling you it is!”

“Leave me alone!”

Marius tried to shut the door again, but she continued to hold it open.

“Listen,” she said, “you’re wrong. Even though you’re not rich, you were kind this morning. Be kind again now. You gave me something to eat with, tell me now what’s the matter. You’re upset, anyone can see that. What can be done to help? Can I do something? Put me to use. I’m not asking you for your secrets, you don’t need to tell me, but, well, I can be useful. I can help you, I help my father. When someone has to carry letters, go into houses, go from door to door, find an address, follow someone, well, I’m the one that does it. So then, you can tell me what’s wrong. I’ll go and talk to certain persons. Sometimes a body just has to speak to certain persons and that’s enough to find out things, and everything’s set right. Use me.” An idea came to Marius. Is there a straw we won’t clutch at when we feel ourselves drowning? He went over to the Jondrette girl.

“Listen,” he said.

She promptly cut in, with a flash of joy in her eyes.

“Oh, yes! Tell me. That’s better!”

“Well, then,” he went on, “you know that old gentleman that you brought here with his daughter—” “Yes.”

“Do you know their address?”

“No.”

“Find out for me.”

The Jondrette girl’s eyes had gone from forlorn to joyful and from joyful to grim.

“So that’s what you’re after?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know them?”

“No.”

“So what you’re saying is,” she went on sharply, “you don’t know her, but you’d like to know her.” That shift from them to her was dripping with innuendo and bile.

“Well, can you do it?” said Marius.

“Get you the address of the lovely young lady?”

There was again in those words “the lovely young lady” a tone that irritated Marius. He went on: “Does it matter! The address of the father and the daughter. Their address, no?!” She glared at him.

“What’ll you give me?”

“Whatever you like!”

“Whatever I like?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll get the address.”

She looked down, then promptly pulled the door shut.

Marius found himself alone again.

He dropped onto a chair and leaned forward with both elbows on the bed and his head in both hands, sunk in thoughts he could not grasp as though he were having a dizzy spell. Everything that had happened since that morning, the appearance of the angel, her disappearance, what this creature had just said to him, which was like a ray of hope bobbing on an ocean of despair—his brain was filled with this giddy jumble.

Suddenly he was jolted violently out of his reverie. He heard the high, hard voice of Jondrette utter these words full of strangely intense interest for him: “I tell you I’m sure of it. I recognized him.” Who was Jondrette talking about? He recognized who? Monsieur Leblanc? The father of “his Ursula”? What! Did Jondrette know him? Was Marius about to have all the information, without which his life was meaningless to him, through this sudden and unexpected channel? Was he about to find out at last who it was he loved? Who this young girl was? Who her father was? Was that incredibly dense shadow that cloaked them about to be dispersed by light? Was the veil about to be lifted? Ah, heavens above!

He sprang rather than climbed up on the chest of drawers and resumed his place by the hole in the wall.

Once more the interior of the Jondrette rathole came into view.

USE OF MONSIEUR LEBLANC’S FIVE-FRANC PIECE

NOTHING HAD CHANGED in the family’s appearance except that the woman and the girls had thrown themselves on the parcel and pulled on stockings and woolen camisoles. Two brand-new blankets had been thrown over the two beds.

Old man Jondrette had evidently just got back. He was still winded by his trip outside. His daughters were by the fireside, sitting on the ground, the elder bandaging the younger’s hand. His wife was slumped on the pallet next to the fireplace with amazement written all over her face. Jondrette paced up and down the garret, taking great strides. His eyes were crazed.

The woman, who seemed timid and dumbstruck in front of her husband, risked a question: “Is that right? Are you sure?” “Sure! It was eight years ago! But I recognize him! Ah, I recognize him, all right! I recognized him right off! What, didn’t it hit you in the face?” “No.”

“Yet I told you to pay attention! But it’s the height, the face, he hasn’t aged a bit, there are people who don’t age, I don’t know how they do it, it’s the sound of his voice. He’s better turned out, that’s all! Ah, you old devil of a mystery man, I’ve got you now, all right!” He stopped and said to his daughters: “Get lost, you two! … It’s funny it didn’t hit you right in the face.” The girls got up to do as they were told. The mother stammered: “With her sore hand?” “The air’ll do her good,” said Jondrette. “Go on.”

It was clear that this man was one of those you do not answer back. The two girls left. Just as they were going out the door, the father grabbed hold of the elder’s arm and said in a very peculiar tone: “You be back here at five o’clock sharp. Both of you. I’ll be needing you.” Marius’s attention intensified.

Now that he was alone with his wife, Jondrette resumed pacing the room and he circled it two or three times in silence. Then he spent a few moments tucking the woman’s chemise he was wearing into his trousers and doing them up tighter.

All of a sudden he spun around to mother Jondrette, folded his arms and yelled: “And another thing! That young lady—” “What about her?” the woman shot back, “what about the young lady?” Marius could be in no doubt, they were clearly talking about Her. He listened with ardent anxiety. His whole life was throbbing in his ears.

But Jondrette had bent down and practically whispered to his wife. Then he straightened up and said very loudly: “It’s her!” “That?” said the wife.

“That!” said the husband.

Words could not express all that was packed into the mother’s that. There was surprise, rage, hate, anger, mixed and blended in a monstrous intonation. All that it took was a few words uttered by her husband, the name no doubt that her husband had whispered in her ear, for this big sleepy woman to wake up and shift from repulsive to appalling.

“Can’t be!” she cried. “When I think that my girls go barefoot and don’t have a dress between them! You’ve got to be kidding—a satin pelisse, a velvet hat, silk brodequins, the works! More than two hundred francs’ worth! Like she was a blasted princess! No, you’ve got it mixed up! To start with, that other thing was a fright, this one isn’t too bad! Not too bad at all! It can’t be her!” “I tell you it is her. You’ll see.”

In the face of such absolute assertion, mother Jondrette lifted her big ruddy blond head and looked up at the ceiling with a twisted expression. At that moment, she struck Marius as even more frightening than her husband. She was a sow with the eyes of a tigress.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” she went on. “That horrible beautiful young lady who looked at my girls with pity in her eyes, you reckon she’s that little frump! Oh, I’d like to kick her guts in with hobnailed boots!” She leaped out of bed and stood there for a moment, hair in a tangle, nostrils flaring, mouth gaping, fists clenched and drawn up. Then she dropped back onto the pallet. The man paced up and down without paying the slightest attention to his female. After a few seconds’ silence, he went over to mother Jondrette and stood facing her with his arms folded, as he had done a moment before.

“And you know what else?”

“What?” she asked.

He answered in a short, low voice: “My fortune’s made.” Mother Jondrette studied him with a look that said: Has this man talking to me gone stark raving mad?

He continued: “Holy hell! I’ve been a member of the down-and-out club a bit too long now! I’ve had a gut full of misery! I’ve had my share—more than my share! I’m not joking around anymore, I don’t find it funny anymore, enough wordplay, for Christ’s sake! No more farces, Heavenly Father! I want to eat my fill, I want to drink my fill! Wolf it down! Sleep! Laze around doing nothing! I want my turn, do you get it! Before I croak, I’d like to be a bit of a millionaire, too!” He circled the rathole before adding: “Like other people.” “What do you mean?” the woman asked.

He shook his head, winked, and raised his voice in the manner of a roving medicine man about to give a demonstration in the street: “What do I mean? I’ll tell you what I mean!” “Shoosh!” growled mother Jondrette. “Not so loud! This isn’t something anyone else should hear about.” “Bah! Who? The neighbour? I saw him go out a while ago. Besides, do you think he listens in, that great booby? And anyway, I told you, I saw him go out.” Yet out of a sort of instinct, Jondrette lowered his voice, though not enough for his words to escape Marius. A favourable circumstance that allowed Marius not to lose any of this conversation was that the fallen snow muffled the noise of carriages on the boulevard.

Here is what Marius heard: “Listen carefully. We’ve got him, this Croesus!1 As good as. It’s in the bag. It’s all arranged. I saw some people. He’s coming here at six o’clock tonight. Bringing his sixty francs, the mongrel! Did you see how I pulled that out of the bag for you, my sixty francs, my landlord, my fourth of February! It’s not even a quarter yet!2 Talk about stupid! So he’ll be here at six o’clock! That’s when the neighbour goes out to dinner. Mother Bougon goes and does the dishes in town. There’s no one in the house. The neighbour never gets back before eleven. The girls can keep a lookout. You’ll help us. He’ll go along—and hang himself.” “And what if he doesn’t go along?” asked the woman.

Jondrette made a sinister gesture and said: “We’ll do it for him.” With that, he burst out laughing.

It was the first time Marius had seen him laughing. His laugh was faint and chilling and gave Marius goosebumps.

Jondrette opened a cupboard next to the fireplace and pulled out an old cap, which he slapped on his head after whacking it on his sleeve to dust it.

“Now,” he said, “I’m off. I’ve still got people to see. Good people. You’ll see how it all works out. I won’t stay out any longer than I have to. It’s quite a hand to play. Look after the house for us.” And, with his fists thrust in the pockets of his trousers, he stood there thinking for a moment, then cried: “You know it’s pretty damned lucky that he didn’t recognize me, though! If he’d recognized me on his side, he wouldn’t be back. He’d escape our clutches. It’s my beard that saved me! My romantic little goatee! My sweet romantic little goatee!” And he started to laugh again. He went to the window. The snow was still falling, streaking the grey of the sky.

“Lousy weather!” he said.

Then he crossed the overcoat over in front: “The coat’s too big, of course … Never mind,” he added. “Just as well he left it for me, though, the old bastard! If he hadn’t, I would never have been able to go out in this and the whole thing would’ve come to naught! Such a near thing, but look how it’s worked out!” On that note, he jammed his cap down over his eyes and turned on his heel.

He had hardly had time to take a few steps outside when the door opened again and his cunning feral profile reappeared.

“I forgot,” he said. “You’re to get a charcoal fire going in the stove.” And he threw into his wife’s apron the five-franc piece that “the philanthropist” had left him.

“A charcoal fire?” the woman asked.

“Yes.”

“How many bushels of charcoal?”

“Two good ones.”

“That’ll come to thirty sous. With the rest, I’ll buy something for dinner.” “Like hell you will!”

“Why not?”

“Don’t you go spending that hundred-sou piece.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve got something else to buy with it instead.” “What?”

“Something.”

“How much will you need?”

“Where’s there an ironmonger’s around here?”

“Rue Mouffetard.”

“Ah, yes, on the corner of whatsit street, I can see the shop.” “But how much is this thing going to cost, then?”

“Three francs fifty sous.”

“There won’t be much left for dinner.”

“Today’s one day we won’t be eating. We’ve got better things to do.” “Whatever you say, treasure.”

At this word from his wife, Jondrette closed the door again, and this time Marius heard his footsteps receding down the tenement hallway and quickly down the stairs.

At that moment the bells of Saint-Médard struck one.

SOLUS CUM SOLO, IN LOCO REMOTO, NON COGITABANTUR ORARE PATER NOSTER1 HOWEVER MUCH OF a dreamer, Marius was, as we know, a strong and active person. The habits of solitary living, by developing sympathy and compassion in him, had perhaps diminished his capacity for irritation, but left intact his capacity for outrage; he had the benevolence of a Brahmin2 and the severity of a judge; he might feel sorry for a toad, but he could easily crush a viper underfoot. Now, he had just looked down into a vipers’ hole; it was a nest of monsters and it was right under his nose.

“I’ll have to stamp on these miserable bastards,” he said.

None of the puzzles he’d hoped would be cleared up had been illuminated; on the contrary, they had all, perhaps, become even more opaque; he knew nothing more about the beautiful girl from the Luxembourg gardens or about the man he called Monsieur Leblanc, except that Jondrette knew who they were. Through the black words delivered, he glimpsed only one thing at all clearly and that was that an ambush was being set up, an obscure but terrible ambush; that they were both in serious danger, she probably, her father for sure; that they had to be saved, that the hideous schemes of the Jondrettes had to be undone and the web of these spiders torn down. He observed mother Jondrette for a moment. She’d pulled an old cast-iron stove from out of a corner and was rummaging round in the scrap.

He got down from the chest of drawers as quietly as he could, being careful not to make a sound.

In his dread of what was being set up and in the horror into which the Jondrettes had plunged him, he felt a kind of joy that it might perhaps be given to him to do a great service to the one he loved.

But what could he do? Warn the people under threat? Where would he find them? He didn’t have an inkling of their address. One minute they were there, before his very eyes, the next minute they were gone again, driven back into the unfathomable depths of Paris. Wait for Monsieur Leblanc at the door at six o’clock, when he was supposed to turn up, and warn him about the trap? But Jondrette and his cronies would see him keeping watch, the place was deserted, they would be stronger than he was, they would find a way of nabbing him and carting him off, and the man Marius wanted to save would be sunk. One o’clock had just sounded, the ambush was to take place at six. Marius had five hours ahead of him.

There was only one thing for it.

He put on his presentable coat, tied a scarf around his neck, grabbed his hat and went out, without making any more noise than if he had been walking barefoot on moss.

In any case, mother Jondrette was still rattling around in her iron scrap.

Once he was out of the house, he headed for the rue du Petit-Banquier.

He was about halfway down the street, level with a very low wall that you could step over in certain places and that bordered a patch of wasteland, and he was walking along slowly, preoccupied as he was, the snow muffling his footfalls, when, all of a sudden, he heard voices talking quite close by. He turned his head, the street was deserted, there was nobody, it was broad daylight, and yet he could distinctly hear voices.

It occurred to him to look over the wall. There were in fact two men there leaning against the wall, squatting in the snow and talking in whispers to each other. These two figures were not known to him. One was a bearded man in a smock and the other was a long-haired man in rags. The bearded one had a Greek skullcap, the other was bareheaded and there was snow in his hair.

By leaning over them, Marius could hear what they said. The long-haired one dug the other one in the ribs and said: “With Patron-Minette, you can’t go wrong.” “You think so?” said the bearded one, and the long-haired one replied: “It’ll mean five hundred big ones each, and the worst that can happen? Five years, six years, ten at the most!” The other man replied with some hesitation, scratching his head under his Greek cap: “That sounds pretty solid. A person can’t turn down a job like that.” “I tell you, the deal can’t fail,” the long-haired one resumed. “Old man What’s-his-name. He’ll make sure the chaff-cutter’s hitched and hot to trot.” Then they started talking about a melodrama they’d seen the night before at the Gaîté. Marius continued on his way.

It seemed to him that the obscure words of these men, so strangely hidden behind the wall, crouching in the snow, were perhaps not unrelated to the abominable plans of Jondrette. That must be “the deal” they were referring to.

He headed for the faubourg Saint-Marceau and asked at the first shop he came to where he could find the prefect of police. He was directed to the rue de Pontoise, no. 14. Marius went straight there.

As he passed a baker’s, he bought a bread roll for two sous and ate it, foreseeing that he would not eat dinner.

On the way, he gave Providence its due. He thought how, if he had not handed over his five francs that morning to the Jondrette girl, he would have followed Monsieur Leblanc’s cab and as a result been completely in the dark. Then nothing would have stood in the way of the Jondrettes’ ambush and this Monsieur Leblanc would have been lost and, doubtless, his daughter with him.

WHERE A POLICE OFFICER GIVES A LAWYER A COUPLE OF PUNCHES WHEN HE GOT to no. 14, rue de Pontoise, he went up to the first floor and asked for the prefect of police. “The police chief isn’t in,” said an office boy. “But there’s an inspector standing in for him. Would you like to speak to him? Is it urgent?” “Yes,” said Marius.

The office boy took him to the commissioner’s room. A tall man was standing there behind a metal gate, leaning toward a stove and holding up with both hands the tails of a vast coachman’s overcoat with a triple cape. He had a square face, with a thin mouth and strong, wild, bushy greying sideburns and a gaze that could turn your pockets inside out. You would have described this gaze as not so much penetrating as boring right through you.

The man did not look all that much less ferocious or frightening than Jondrette; a mastiff is occasionally no less alarming to run into than a wolf.

“What do you want?” he barked at Marius, without adding monsieur.

“Monsieur, the prefect of police?”

“He’s not here. I’m standing in for him.”

“It concerns a very confidential matter.”

“Go on, then, speak.”

“And it’s extremely urgent.”

“Then speak fast.”

The man was calm and brusque, both frightening and reassuring at once. He inspired awe and confidence. Marius told him the story—that a person he only knew by sight was to be led that very evening into an ambush; that, living in the room next door to the lair in question, he, Marius Pontmercy, lawyer, had heard the whole plot through the wall; that the rogue who had thought up the trap was one Jondrette by name; that he would have accomplices, probably the barrière prowlers, among others a certain Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille; that Jondrette’s daughters would be on the lookout; that there was no way to warn the man threatened, given that no one even knew his name; and that, finally, all this was to be carried out at six o’clock that very evening at the most deserted point on the boulevard de l’Hôpital, in the house at no. 50–52.

At that number, the inspector raised his head and said coldly: “So it’s the room at the end of the hall?” “Exactly,” said Marius, adding, “Do you know the house?” The inspector remained silent for a moment, then he answered, warming the heel of his boot in the mouth of the stove: “Apparently.” He went on through his teeth, speaking less to Marius than to his cravat.

“Sounds like Patron-Minette’s mixed up in this somewhere.” The name struck Marius.

“Patron-Minette,” he said. “I did in fact hear that name mentioned.” And he told the inspector of the conversation between the long-haired man and the bearded man in the snow behind the wall of the rue du Petit-Banquier.

The inspector muttered: “The long-haired bloke would have to be Brujon, and the bearded bloke would have to be Demi-liard, alias Deux-milliards.” He dropped his eyes again and mused.

“As for father What’s-his-name, I have an inkling who that is. There, I’ve singed my coat. They always make these stoves too hot. Number 50–52. The old Gorbeau building.” Then he looked at Marius: “You saw only this bearded bloke and the long-haired one?” “And Panchaud.”

“You didn’t see a sort of godforsaken rodentlike little muscadin1 of a fop getting about over that way by any chance, did you?” “No.”

“Or a great big lump that looks like the elephant at the Jardin des Plantes?” “No.”

“Or a sewer rat that looks like an old red-tail of an ex-convict?” “No.”

“As for the fourth, no one sees him, not even his adjutants, clerks, and employees, so it’s not surprising you didn’t see him.” “No. What is all this?” asked Marius. “Who are all these people?” The inspector answered: “Anyway, it’s not the time they come out.” He lapsed into silence, then went on: “Number 50–52. I know the building. Impossible for us to hide inside without the artists cottoning on. Then all they’d have to do is cancel the show. They’re so modest! An audience embarrasses them. Can’t have that, can’t have that. I’d like to hear them sing and make them dance.” This monologue over, he turned toward Marius and asked him, pinning him with a stare: “Would you be frightened?” “What of?” said Marius.

“Of these men?”

“No more than of you!” Marius replied rudely, now that he’d begun to notice that this police spy had still not had the courtesy to refer to him as monsieur.

The inspector stared even harder at Marius and then went on with a sort of sententious solemnity: “Spoken like a brave man and an honest man. Courage does not fear crime, and honesty does not fear authority.” Marius broke in: “That’s all very well, but what are you going to do?” The inspector merely answered:

“The tenants of that house have latchkeys to get in with at night. Have you got one?” “Yes,” said Marius.

“Have you got it on you?”

“Yes.”

“Give it to me,” said the inspector.

Marius took the key from his waistcoat and handed it to the inspector, adding: “If you take my advice, you’ll come in force.” The inspector threw Marius the look Voltaire would have given a provincial academic who had suggested a rhyme to him; with a single movement, he plunged both hands, which were enormous, into the two vast pockets of his coachman’s coat and pulled out two little steel pistols, the sort of pistols known as coups de poing, “punches.” He presented them to Marius, with these sharp and short instructions: “Take these. Go back home. Hide yourself in your room. Let them think you’ve gone out. They’re loaded. Each one has two bullets. Keep watch. There’s a hole in the wall, you tell me. The men will come. Let them carry on for a while. When you think things are getting nice and hot and it’s time to stop them, you fire a pistol shot. Not too early. The rest’s my business. One shot in the air, at the ceiling, it doesn’t matter where. Above all, not too early. Wait till there’s some action. You’re a lawyer, you know what that means.” Marius took the pistols and put them in the side pocket of his coat.

“They stick out like that, you can see the bulge,” said the inspector. “Better put them in your trouser pockets.” Marius hid the pistols in his other pockets.

“Now,” the inspector went on, “there is not a minute to lose on anyone’s part. What time is it?’ Two-thirty. It’s for seven o’clock?” “Six o’clock,” said Marius.

“I have time,” the inspector went on, “but only just. Don’t forget any of what I’ve told you. Bam! One pistol shot.” “Don’t worry,” answered Marius.

And as Marius was putting his hand on the door handle to go out, the inspector called: “By the way, if you need me between now and then, come round here or send someone. Ask for Inspector Javert.” JONDRETTE DOES HIS SHOPPING

A FEW MOMENTS later, at around three o’clock, Courfeyrac happened to be walking down the rue Mouffetard in Bossuet’s company. The snow was falling twice as heavily and filled the air. Bossuet was just saying to Courfeyrac: “Seeing all these snowflakes falling you’d think there was a plague of white butterflies in the sky.” All at once, Bossuet spotted Marius coming up the street toward the barrière and looking a little strange.

“Look!” Bossuet exclaimed. “Marius!”

“I saw him,” said Courfeyrac. “Let’s not speak to him.” “Why not?”

“He’s busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Can’t you see how he looks?”

“How does he look?”

“He looks like he’s following someone.”

“That’s true,” said Bossuet.

“Look at his eyes, will you!” Courfeyrac went on.

“But who the hell is he following?”

“Some cutie-pie-floral-bonnet-hussy! He’s in love.”

“But,” Bossuet observed, “it’s just that I can’t see any cutie, or any hussy, or any floral bonnet in the street. There isn’t a single woman.” Courfeyrac looked around and cried: “He’s following a man!” A man, with a cap on his head and a grey beard that could just be made out even though he had his back to them, was indeed walking twenty feet ahead of Marius.

This man was dressed in a brand-new overcoat that was far too big for him and a dreadful pair of trousers in tatters, black with mud.

Bossuet burst out laughing.

“Who on earth can that man be?”

“That,” Courfeyrac said, “is a poet. Poets love getting around in the trousers of rabbit-skin peddlers and the overcoats of the peers of France.” “Let’s see where Marius is going,” said Bossuet. “Let’s see where the man’s going, let’s follow them, eh?” “Bossuet!” cried Courfeyrac. “L’Aigle de Meaux! You are an extravagant eagle! Fancy following a man who’s following a man!” They turned back.

Marius had in fact spotted Jondrette in the rue Mouffetard and was keeping an eye on him.

Jondrette forged straight ahead without suspecting that he was already being watched. He turned off the rue Mouffetard and Marius saw him go into one of the most grisly dives in the rue Gracieuse, where he stayed for a quarter of an hour before heading back to the rue Mouffetard. He stopped at an ironmonger’s that, in those days, was at the corner of the rue Pierre-Lombard, and a few moments later, Marius saw him come out of the shop holding a huge cold chisel with a beechwood handle, which he slipped under his overcoat. When he reached the rue du Petit-Gentilly, he turned left and headed swiftly for the rue du Petit-Banquier. Night was falling; the snow, which had stopped for a moment, was starting to fall thick and fast again. Marius stopped and hid at the corner of the rue du Petit-Banquier, which was deserted as always, and didn’t follow Jondrette farther. This was lucky for him because, just as Jondrette reached the low wall where Marius had overheard the bearded man and the long-haired man talking, he turned round to make sure no one was following him or could see him, then hopped over the wall and vanished.

The wasteland the wall bordered was connected to the backyard of a carriage-hire business run by a man of ill repute who had gone bust but who still had a few old berlingots sitting around in sheds.

Marius thought it wise to take advantage of Jondrette’s absence to go back home; besides, time was ticking away; every evening Ma Bougon was in the habit of locking the front door on her way out as she left to go and wash dishes in town, so the front door was always locked shut at dusk; Marius had given his only key to the police inspector, so it was vital that he hurry.

Evening had come; night had almost closed in; there was now only one small spot lit by the dying sun in all the endless sky, and that was the moon. It was rising, red, behind the low dome of La Salpêtrière.

Marius bounded back to no. 50–52. The door was still open when he got there. He tiptoed upstairs and slid along the wall of the hallway to his room. This hall, as you will recall, had garrets running off it on either side that were currently all empty and to let. Ma Bougon usually left their doors open. As he passed one of these doors, Marius thought he saw in one of the unoccupied cells the motionless heads of four men, which a faint glimmer of dying light, falling through a dormer window, lit up. Marius did not try to see, not wanting to be seen. He managed to make it back to his room without being spotted and without any noise. Just in the nick of time. A second later, he heard Ma Bougon going out and locking the front door of the house behind her.

WHERE YOU WILL FIND THE WORDS OF AN ENGLISH TUNE FASHIONABLE IN 1832

MARIUS SAT ON his bed. It might have been half past five. A mere half an hour separated him from what was to come. He could hear his arteries thumping the way you can hear the ticking of a clock in the dark. He thought of the double march that was going on at that moment in the shadows, crime advancing on one side, justice coming from the other. He wasn’t frightened, but he could not think without a certain shudder of the things that were going to happen, like all who suddenly embark on an amazing adventure out of the blue. This whole day had the effect on him of a dream, and in order not to feel he was in the throes of a nightmare, he needed to feel the coldness of the two steel pistols in his pockets.

It had stopped snowing; the moon grew brighter and brighter, emerging from the mists, and its light mingled with the white reflection of the fallen snow, giving the room a twilight feel.

There was light in the Jondrette dungheap. Marius saw a red gleam shining through the hole in the wall, which looked like it was bleeding.

He was sure that this gleam could scarcely be produced by a candle. Otherwise, there was no movement at the Jondrettes’, no one was stirring there, or talking, not a breath; the silence was glacial and profound, and without the red light you would have thought you were next to a tomb.

Marius quietly took off his boots and pushed them under the bed.

A few minutes went by. Marius heard the door below turn on its hinges, a heavy quick tread mounted the stairs and came along the hallway, the latch of the rathole clicked open; Jondrette was back.

Immediately, several voices rose. The whole family was in the garret. They simply kept quiet in the absence of the master the way wolf cubs do in the absence of the wolf.

“’Tis I,” he said.

“Good evening, Pappy,” yelped the daughters.

“Well?” said their mother.

“It’s all coming along nicely,” replied Jondrette, “but my feet are frozen. Ah, good, that’s it, I see you’re all dolled up. You have to be able to inspire trust.” “All ready to go.”

“You won’t forget anything I told you? You’ll do everything right?”

“Don’t you worry about that.”

“It’s just that—” Jondrette started to say. But he didn’t finish his sentence.

Marius heard him put something heavy on the table, probably the chisel he’d bought.

“Ah, right!” Jondrette said. “Have you had something to eat?”

“Yes,” said the mother, “I had three big potatoes with salt. I made use of the fire to cook ‘em.” “Good,” said Jondrette, “Tomorrow I’ll take you out to dinner. We’ll have duck with all the trimmings. You’ll dine like Charles X. Things are going well.” Then he added in a lowered voice: “The mousetrap’s set. The cats are ready to pounce.” He lowered his voice further still: “Put this on the fire.”

Marius heard the clatter of charcoal being knocked by tongs or some other iron instrument and Jondrette continued: “Did you oil the door hinges so they won’t make a noise?”

“Yes,” said the mother.

“What time is it?”

“Getting on for six. It’s just struck the half hour at Saint-Médard.”

“Jesus!” said Jondrette. “It’s time for the girls to get going if they’re going to keep watch. Over here, you two, listen carefully.” There was a bout of whispering, then Jondrette spoke up again: “Has mother Bougon gone?” “Yes,” said the woman.

“Are you sure there’s no one home next door?”

“He hasn’t come back all day, and you know this is the time he has his dinner.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“All the same,” said Jondrette, “no harm going round to check. Girlie, take the candle and pop next door.” Marius dropped to his hands and knees and crawled silently under the bed. He had only just curled up under it when he saw a light through the cracks in his door.

“Pa,” a voice cried, “he’s out.”

He recognized the voice of the elder daughter.

“Did you go in?” asked the father.

“No,” answered the girl, “but his key’s in the door, so he’s out.”

The father yelled: “Go in just the same.”

The door opened and Marius saw the big Jondrette girl come in, candle in hand. She was the same as she had been that morning, but even more frightening by candlelight.

She went straight to the bed. Marius had a moment of horrible panic, but by the bed there was a mirror nailed to the wall and that was where she was headed. She stretched up on tiptoes and looked at herself. You could hear the noise of scrap iron being moved around in the room next door as she smoothed her hair with the palm of her hand and smiled in the mirror, softly crooning in her deathly broken voice: Our love lasted one whole week of heaven,

But how short such moments of bliss!

It was well worth it, joy times seven!

Love should last forever, like this!

Should last forever! should last forever!1

Marius was shaking all the while. He could not believe that she could not hear him breathing.

She went to the window and looked out, talking to herself out loud with that half-mad look of hers: “God, Paris is ugly when it puts on its white chemise!” she said.

She returned to the mirror and made faces once more, studying herself first face-on, then in profile.

“Hey!” yelled the father. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m looking under the bed and behind the furniture,” she answered, continuing to arrange her hair. “There’s nobody here.” “Half-wit!” shrieked the father. “Get in here this minute! We’ve got no time to waste.” “I’m coming! I’m coming!” she said. “A girl doesn’t have time to scratch herself in this dump!” She hummed:

You leave me to find fame one day,

My sad heart will follow you all the way.2

She cast a last glance in the mirror and left, shutting the door behind her.

A moment later, Marius heard the noise of the two girls padding down the hallway in their bare feet and Jondrette’s voice shouting after them: “Be very careful! One over at the barrière, the other at the corner of the rue du Petit-Banquier. Don’t lose sight of the front door for a second, and if you see anything at all, I want you back here on the double! Hop to it! You’ve got a key to get back in.” The elder daughter grumbled: “Fancy keeping watch barefoot in the snow!”

“Tomorrow you’ll have little scarab-coloured silk ankle boots!” yelled the father.

They went downstairs, and a few seconds later the front door banged shut, announcing that they were now outside.

There was no one left in the house except Marius and the Jondrette couple and probably also the mysterious beings glimpsed by Marius in the gloom behind the door of the vacant garret.

MARIUS’S FIVE-FRANC PIECE PUT TO USE

MARIUS JUDGED THAT the moment had come to resume his place at his observation post. In the blink of an eye and with all the suppleness of a young man, he was back at the hole in the wall.

He peered in.

The interior of the Jondrette dwelling looked weirdly different. Marius could now see what was causing the strange light he had noticed. A candle was burning in a candlestick green with verdigris, but that was not what was really lighting the room. The whole rathole was lit up by the glare from a big cast-iron stove parked in the fireplace and filled with burning charcoal—the stove that mother Jondrette had worked on that morning. The charcoal was burning and the stove was red hot, with a blue flame dancing inside. By its light, you could pick out the shape of the chisel Jondrette had bought in the rue Pierre-Lombard, thrust into the burning coals and now glowing red. In a corner near the door, arranged as for some anticipated use, there were two mounds, one a heap of old scrap iron, the other a heap of ropes. Anyone who didn’t know what was in the works would have been in two minds at seeing all this, and would have wavered between a very sinister interpretation and a perfectly straightforward one. Lit up the way it was, the dump looked more a forge than the mouth of hell. But in this light, Jondrette looked more like a demon than a blacksmith.

The heat of the burning coals was so great that the candle on the table was melting fast and had burned right down on the side nearest the stove. An old Chinese lantern made of copper, worthy of a Diogenes turned housebreaker like Cartouche,1 had been placed on the mantelpiece.

The stove had been placed on the hearth itself, next to the mostly extinguished embers, and it was sending its steam straight up through the chimney flue without spreading any odour.

The moon came in through the four panes of the window, throwing its whiteness into the flaming crimson garret, and to the poetic mind of Marius, dreamer that he was even at the moment of action, it was like a beam from heaven spilling into the grotesque fantasies of earth.

A gust of air whooshed in through the broken pane and helped disperse the smell of burning coal and hide the stove.

The Jondrette lair was, if you recall what we said earlier about the old Gorbeau building, admirably well chosen to serve as the theatre of a very dark and dirty deed, and for staging a crime. It was the most remote room in the house, the one farthest away from the most deserted boulevard in Paris. If this ambush had not already been planned, someone would have invented it there.

The whole thickness of a house and a host of vacant rooms separated this rathole from the boulevard, and its only window looked out on vast wastelands blocked off behind walls and paling fences.

Jondrette had lit his pipe and was sitting on the chair with the straw seat kicked out, smoking. His wife was talking to him in a voice just above a whisper.

If Marius had been Courfeyrac, that is, one of those people who laugh at every occasion life throws up, he’d have burst out laughing when his eye lit on mother Jondrette. She was wearing a black hat with feathers not unlike one of the hats of the heralds-at-arms at Charles X’s consecration,2 an immense tartan shawl over her woolknit skirt, and the man’s shoes her daughter had turned her nose up at that morning. It was this getup that had caused Jondrette to let out his exclamation: “Good, that’s it, I see you’re all dolled up. You have to be able to inspire trust.” As for Jondrette, he had not quit the overcoat, new and far too big for him, that Monsieur Leblanc had given him, and his outfit continued to offer that contrast between overcoat and trousers that constituted the ideal of the poet in Courfeyrac’s view.

All of a sudden, Jondrette raised his voice: “Hang on! I’ve just thought of something. In this lousy weather, he’ll come in a cab. Light the lantern, and go down with it. Stay there behind the front door. The moment you hear the cab stop, open up straightaway, he’ll come up, you’ll light the stairs and the hall, and when he comes in here, go straight back down again and pay the driver and send the cab on its way.” “What about the money?” asked the woman.

Jondrette fumbled in his trousers and handed her five francs.

“What’s that?” she cried.

Jondrette replied with dignity: “It’s the monarch the neighbour gave us this morning.” And he added: “Know what? We need two chairs in here.” “What for?”

“To sit on.”

Marius felt a shiver run down his spine when he heard mother Jondrette answer calmly: “Christ! I’ll go and get the neighbour’s for you.”

And she swiftly opened the door of the rathole and went out into the hall.

Marius did not physically have the time to get down off the chest of drawers, run to the bed, and hide.

“Take the candle!” yelled Jondrette.

“No,” she said, “I’ve only got two hands and I’ve got two chairs to carry. The moon’s out.” Marius heard mother Jondrette’s heavy hand groping for his key in the dark. The door opened. He remained rooted to the spot in shock and astonishment.

Mother Jondrette came in.

The dormer window let in a ray of moonlight between two great blocks of shadow. One of the blocks of shadow covered the whole wall that Marius was leaning against in such a way that he disappeared.

Mother Jondrette looked up, did not see Marius, took the two chairs, the only ones Marius owned, and went out again, letting the door shut with a bang behind her.

She resurfaced in the rathole: “Here’re the two chairs.”

“And here’s the lantern,” said the husband. “Go down, quick.”

She rushed to obey and Jondrette was left on his own.

He arranged the two chairs on either side of the table, turned the chisel in the fire, put an old screen in front of the fireplace to hide the stove, then went over to the corner where the pile of ropes was and bent down as though to examine something there. Marius then saw that what he had taken for a shapeless heap was a rope ladder, very well made, with wooden rungs and two large hooks for hanging.

This ladder and a few large tools, veritable iron clubs, which were jumbled in with the scrap iron heaped behind the door, had not been in the Jondrette hole that morning and had evidently been brought in during the afternoon, while Marius was out.

“Those are edge-tool maker’s tools,” thought Marius.

If Marius had been a bit better informed in this line, he would have recognized that what he took for the stock-in-trade of the edge-tool maker was actually either instruments able to force a door or pick a lock or ones able to cut and slice—the two families of sinister implements that thieves know as juniors and reapers.

The fireplace and the table with the two chairs sat exactly facing Marius. With the stove hidden, the room was now illuminated by the candle alone and the tiniest object on the table or mantelpiece cast a huge shadow. A water jug with a broken neck covered half a wall. There was a heavy menacing calm in the room. You could feel that something appalling beyond words was building.

Jondrette had let his pipe go out, a serious sign of intense preoccupation, and had come and sat back down again. The candle brought out the sharp angles of his face in all their savageness. He kept frowning furiously and abruptly opening his right hand as though responding to the final counsel of some sombre inner monologue. In one of these obscure replies he was giving himself, he swiftly pulled out the table drawer, took out a long kitchen knife that was hidden there, and tested the blade on a fingernail. That done, he put the knife back in the drawer and pushed it shut.

Marius himself took hold of the pistol that was in his right fob pocket, pulled it out and cocked it. As he cocked it, the pistol made a small, clear, sharp sound. Jondrette jumped and half rose from his chair: “Who’s there?” he shouted.

Marius held his breath, Jondrette listened for a second, then started to laugh: “What an idiot I am! It’s only the wall creaking.” Marius kept the pistol in his hand.

THE FACE-OFF OF MARIUS’S TWO CHAIRS

ALL OF A sudden, the distant and melancholy ringing of a bell rattled the windows. Six o’clock rang out at Saint-Médard.

Jondrette marked each stroke with a nod of the head. At the sixth stroke, he snuffed out the candle with his fingers. Then he began to circle the room, listened in the hall, walked a bit, listened again: “He’d better turn up!” he growled, before returning to his chair.

He had only just sat down again when the door opened. Mother Jondrette had opened it but remained in the hall, her face frozen in a hideous grimace of hospitality that one of the slits in the Chinese lantern lit from below.

“Come in, Monsieur,” she said.

“Come in, my benefactor,” Jondrette repeated, shooting to his feet.

Monsieur Leblanc appeared. He had an air of serenity that made him strangely venerable. He laid four louis on the table.

“Monsieur Fabantou,” he said, “that is for your rent and your immediate needs. We’ll see to the rest later.” “May God reward you, my generous benefactor!” said Jondrette; before rushing to his wife and whispering in her ear: “Send the cab away!” She slipped away while her husband was bowing extravagantly and offering Monsieur Leblanc a chair. A moment later, she returned and whispered in his ear: “Done.” The snow that had not stopped falling all day was now so thick that none of them had heard the fiacre arrive, and they did not hear it leave.

Meanwhile, Monsieur Leblanc had taken a seat. Jondrette had taken possession of the other chair opposite Monsieur Leblanc.

Now, to truly grasp the scene that is about to unfold, the reader needs to get a clear picture of the freezing cold night, the vast expanses of La Salpêtrière covered in snow and looking as white, in the moonlight, as immense winding-sheets, the dim light of the streetlamps creating fuzzy reddish pools of light here and there along the mournful boulevards, and the long rows of black elms, not a living being out perhaps for a mile around, the old Gorbeau slum at its most intense pitch of silence, horror, and blackness, and inside this slum, in the middle of those expanses, in the middle of that darkness, the cavernous Jondrette garret lit by a single candle, and inside this dump, two men seated at a table, Monsieur Leblanc calm and tranquil, Jondrette smiling and terrifying, mother Jondrette, the she-wolf, in a corner, and on the other side of the dividing wall, Marius, on his feet, invisible, not missing a word, not missing a movement, his eye at the peephole, his pistol firmly in his grip.

Marius, in fact, felt only the emotion of horror, not fear. He held the butt of the pistol tightly and felt reassured. “I’ll stop this miserable bastard when I’m good and ready,” he thought.

He could sense that the police were there somewhere, lying in ambush, waiting for the agreed signal and ready to leap into action.

He hoped, too, that from this violent encounter between Jondrette and Monsieur Leblanc some light would be shed on all it was in his interests to find out.

DEALING WITH THE DARKEST DEPTHS

NO SOONER HAD Monsieur Leblanc sat down than he turned his eyes toward the pallets, which were empty.

“How is the poor little injured girl faring?” he asked.

“Badly,” answered Jondrette, with a terribly distressed and grateful smile, “very badly, my worthy monsieur. Her older sister has taken her to the hospital in the rue Bourbe to be bandaged. You will see them, they will be back shortly.” “Madame Fabantou looks to me to be much better?” Monsieur Leblanc pursued, casting his eyes over the bizarre getup of mother Jondrette, who was standing between him and the door as though already guarding the exit, and studying him in a threatening, almost a fighting, stance.

“She is dying,” said Jondrette. “But what can you do, Monsieur? She has so much courage, that woman! She’s not a woman, she’s an ox.” Mother Jondrette, touched by the compliment, protested with the affected simpering of a flattered monster: “You are too kind, Monsieur Jondrette!” “Jondrette?” said Monsieur Leblanc. “I thought your name was Fabantou.”

“Fabantou alias Jondrette!” the husband hastened to reply. “My stage name!”

And, giving his wife a shrug that Monsieur Leblanc did not see, he continued in a histrionic yet oily voice: “Ah, it’s just that we have always got on so well together, that poor old darling and yours truly! What would we have left, if it weren’t for that? Ours is a sorry lot, my estimable sir! We’ve got the hands, but no labour! We’ve got the heart, but no work! I don’t know how the government does it, but, on my word of honour, Monsieur, I’m no Jacobin, Monsieur, I’m no troublemaker, I don’t wish them any harm, but if I were the ministers, on my most sacred word, it’d be a very different story. Listen, here’s an example: I wanted my girls to learn packing as a trade. You’ll say to me: ‘What! A trade?’ Yes! A trade, a simple trade! A living! What a fall, my benefactor! What degradation, when you’ve been what we were! Alas, nothing’s left of our days of prosperity! Nothing but one thing, a painting I’m very fond of, which I’d part with if I had to, though, for a person’s got to live! I say again, a person’s got to live!” While Jondrette was rabbiting on incoherently in a way that sat oddly with the cool, calm, and collected expression on his face, Marius looked up and saw someone he had not yet seen at the back of the room. A man had come in, so quietly no one had heard the door turning on its hinges. This man had on a violet knitted waistcoat that was old, worn through, stained, cut off at the bottom, and gaping at the seams, baggy corduroy trousers and, on his feet, soft-soled slippers; he had no shirt, his neck was bare, his arms were bare except for tattoos, and his face was daubed in black. He had sat down in silence with his arms folded on the nearest bed, and as he was sitting behind mother Jondrette, you could only dimly make him out.

The kind of magnetic instinct that alerts the eye made Monsieur Leblanc turn round almost at the same time as Marius. He could not help but give a start of surprise that did not escape Jondrette.

“Ah, I see!” cried Jondrette, buttoning himself up with an air of complacency. “You’ve noticed your overcoat? It suits me! My faith, it suits me down to the ground!” “Who is that man?” said Monsieur Leblanc.

“That?” said Jondrette. “He’s one of the neighbours. Don’t take any notice.”

The neighbour had a most peculiar appearance. But factories producing chemicals abound in the faubourg Saint-Marceau and a lot of factory workers get their faces blackened. Monsieur Leblanc’s whole person, moreover, gave off a frank and fearless confidence. He went on: “Pardon me, what were you saying, Monsieur Fabantou?” “I was saying, Monsieur, dear patron,” Jondrette resumed, leaning on the table and contemplating Monsieur Leblanc with steady and tender eyes not unlike the eyes of a boa constrictor, “I was saying that I had a painting for sale.” A slight noise sounded at the door. A second man came in and sat on the bed, behind mother Jondrette; he, like the first, had bare arms and a mask of ink or soot. Although the man had, literally, slipped into the room, he could not prevent Monsieur Leblanc from spotting him.

“Don’t mind them,” said Jondrette. “They live in the place. So, as I was saying, I still have a painting, one precious painting, left … Look, Monsieur, see.” He got up, went to the wall where the panel we mentioned before was leaning, and turned it round the right way, though leaving it standing against the wall. The thing did actually resemble a painting, which the candle vaguely revealed. Marius couldn’t see much, Jondrette having come between him and it; all he could make out was a splotchy background and a sort of central character coloured in with the garish crudeness of fairground banners and screen paintings.

“What on earth is that?” asked Monsieur Leblanc.

Jondrette exclaimed: “An old master, a very valuable picture, my benefactor! I’m as fond of it as I am of my two daughters, it brings back such memories! But, I said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m down on my luck at present, so I’m willing to part with it …” Either by chance or because he was beginning to smell a rat, Monsieur Leblanc’s gaze went to the back of the room while he examined the painting. There were now four men there, three sitting on the bed, one standing by the door, all four bare-armed, motionless, their faces painted black. One of the three on the bed was leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, and you would have sworn he was asleep. This particular man was old, the sight of his white hair on top of his black face was shocking. The other two seemed young. One of them had a beard, the other, long hair. None had shoes; those who didn’t have socks were barefoot.

Jondrette noticed that Monsieur Leblanc was staring at the men.

“They’re friends. They live around here,” he said. “They’re all black because they work in coal. They’re chimney specialists. Don’t you worry about them, my benefactor, but do buy my painting. Take pity on me in my misery. I’ll give you a good price. What do you reckon it’s worth?” “But,” said Monsieur Leblanc, staring hard at Jondrette now, as though he was beginning to be on his guard, “it’s just some cabaret sign. It’s worth all of three francs.” Jondrette replied sweetly: “Do you have your wallet with you? I’ll be happy with a thousand écus.” Monsieur Leblanc got to his feet, put his back to the wall, and swiftly ran his eye around the room. He had Jondrette on his left on the window side and mother Jondrette and the four men on his right on the door side. The four men did not move a muscle and looked as though they hadn’t even seen him; Jondrette had begun talking in a whining tone again, with such a clouded look in his eyes and in such a woeful manner that Monsieur Leblanc could believe that the man he had before him had, quite simply, gone mad with misery.

“If you don’t buy my painting, dear benefactor,” Jondrette wailed, “I’ll be without resources, there’ll be nothing left for me to do but throw myself in the river. When I think I wanted my two girls to go into the packing industry, making cardboard gift boxes for New Year’s Day. All very well! But you have to have a table with a special panel at the bottom so the glass jars don’t fall on the floor, you have to have a specially built stove, a pot with three compartments for heating the glue to the different degrees of strength it has to be depending on whether it’s used for wood, paper, or fabric, you have to have cutters to cut the cardboard, moulds to shape it, hammers to nail in the bits of steel, chisels, and pincers, heaven knows what else! And all that just to earn four sous a day! For fourteen hours’ work! And every box passes through the worker’s hands thirteen times! And you’ve got to keep the paper wet! And you can’t get anything dirty! And you’ve got to keep the glue hot! It’s hell, I tell you! All for a lousy four sous a day! How do you expect them to live?” While he spoke, Jondrette was looking away from Monsieur Leblanc, who was watching him closely. Monsieur Leblanc’s eyes were riveted on Jondrette and Jondrette’s eyes were riveted on the door. Marius’s breathless attention swung from one to the other. Monsieur Leblanc appeared to be wondering if the man was a cretin. Jondrette repeated two or three times, using all sorts of tonal variations within the same imploring, drawling style: “There’s nothing left for me to do but throw myself in the river! The other day I went down three steps over by the pont d’Austerlitz with that in mind!” Suddenly his dull eyes blazed with a hideous fire, the little man straightened up and became terrifying; he took a step toward Monsieur Leblanc and bellowed at him in a thundering voice: “But never mind all that! Don’t you recognize me?” THE AMBUSH

THE DOOR OF the garret had just swung open abruptly and revealed three men in blue canvas smocks wearing masks of black paper. The first was skinny and had a long cudgel with an iron tip, the second was a sort of colossus, carrying a pole-axe for slaughtering cattle, holding it by the middle of the handle with the hatchet part pointing downward. The third, a man with big broad shoulders, was bigger than the first but not as massive as the second, and he was holding an enormous key stolen from some prison or other in his clenched fist.

It looked as if it was the arrival of these men that Jondrette had been waiting for. A rapid dialogue broke out between him and the man with the cudgel, the skinny one.

“Everything ready?” asked Jondrette.

“Yes,” answered the thin man.

“Where’s Montparnasse, then?”

“The juvenile lead stopped for a bit of a chin-wag with your daughter.”

“Which one?”

“The big one.”

“Is there a cab down below?”

“Yes.”

“The old rattletrap’s hitched?”

“It’s hitched.”

“Two good horses?”

“The best.”

“Waiting where I said to wait?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” said Jondrette.

Monsieur Leblanc was very pale. He looked everything over in the dump around him like a man who has finally realized where he has landed, and as he slowly turned his head to study the faces of all the men surrounding him, his movement showed alert amazement, but there was nothing in his manner that remotely resembled fear. Using the table as a makeshift entrenchment, this man who, only a moment before, looked like nothing more than a nice old gent, suddenly became a sort of athlete as he gripped the back of his chair with his powerful fist in a surprising and frightening gesture.

This old man, so strong and so brave in the face of such danger, looked to be one of those people who are as courageous as they are good—easily and simply. The father of a woman that we love is never a stranger for us. Marius felt proud of this man he didn’t know.

Three of the bare-armed men Jondrette had described as “chimney specialists” had delved into the pile of scrap iron, one extracting some very large shears, another a pair of weighing tongs, the third a hammer, and they had then ranged themselves across the doorway without a word. The old one stayed where he was on the bed and merely opened his eyes. Mother Jondrette was sitting next to him.

Marius knew that the moment to intervene would arrive in a matter of seconds and he raised his right hand toward the ceiling, in the direction of the hall, ready to let fly with a pistol shot.

Jondrette had finished his confabulation with the man with the cudgel, and he now turned once more to Monsieur Leblanc and repeated his question, this time to the accompaniment of that awful low choking laugh of his: “So you really don’t recognize me, then?” Monsieur Leblanc looked him in the face and answered: “No.”

Jondrette then bounded over to the table, leaned over the candle, folded his arms, and thrust his fierce angular jaw at the calm face of Monsieur Leblanc as closely as he could without Monsieur Leblanc’s stepping back, and in this posture of a feral animal about to bite, he shouted: “My name is not Fabantou, my name is not Jondrette. My name is Thénardier! I’m the innkeeper of Montfermeil! Do you hear me? Thénardier! Now do you recognize me?” An imperceptible flush passed over Monsieur Leblanc’s face but he answered with his usual placidity, in his usual soft, steady voice: “No more than before.” Marius did not hear this reply. Anyone seeing him at that moment, in the dark, would have seen how wild-eyed, staggered, and stunned he had become. The moment Jondrette said: “My name is Thénardier,” Marius’s whole body had started shaking and he had fallen back against the wall as though he’d felt the cold blade of a sword run through his heart. Then his right arm, raised ready to release the signal shot, slowly dropped, and the moment Jondrette shouted, “Do you hear me? Thénardier!” Marius’s failing fingers had nearly let go of the pistol. Jondrette, by revealing who he was, had not shaken Monsieur Leblanc, but he had shattered Marius. The name Thénardier, which Monsieur Leblanc did not seem to know, was known to Marius. Remember what the name meant to him! He had worn it over his heart, written as it was in his father’s will! He wore it at the back of his mind, in the depths of his memory, in the form of this sacred command: “A man named Thénardier saved my life. If my son should meet him, he will do all he can for him.” This name, as you will recall, had become an article of faith for him, engraved in his soul; he associated it with his father’s name in religious worship. And now! Here he was! Here was this Thénardier, here was this innkeeper from Montfermeil he had searched for, high and low, in vain, for so long! He had at last found him—and how? This, his father’s saviour, was a crook! This man, to whom he, Marius, burned to dedicate himself, was a monster! This, Colonel Pontmercy’s liberator, was in the process of committing some crime whose actual form Marius could not yet make out clearly but which looked like murder! And murder of whom? Good God! What a cursed fate! What a bitter mockery of fate! His father commanded him from beyond the grave to do everything he could for Thénardier. For four years, Marius had thought of nothing but how to acquit himself of his father’s debt. And now, at the very moment he was about to deliver a brigand, in the middle of perpetrating a crime, to the legal authorities, destiny screamed at him: But it’s Thénardier! When, at last, he could pay back the man who had saved his father’s life, on the heroic field of Waterloo, in a storm of grapeshot, he was going to pay him back by delivering him to the scaffold! He had promised himself that, if ever he were to find this Thénardier, he would simply throw himself at his feet. And now, he had actually found him, but only to hand him over to the executioner! His father said to him: Help Thénardier! And he was to answer this adored and saintly voice by destroying Thénardier! His father would turn in his grave at the spectacle of the man who had snatched him from the jaws of death, at his own peril, executed in the place Saint-Jacques through the intervention of the son to whom he had bequeathed the man! What a mockery, to have so long worn over his breast his father’s last wishes, written in his own hand, just to do the complete opposite so vilely! But, on the other hand, how could he witness this ambush and not stop it? Hell! How could he condemn the victim and spare the assassin? Could you be bound in any shape or form of gratitude to such a miserable bastard?

All the ideas Marius had entertained for the last four years were smashed to smithereens by this unexpected blow. He shuddered. It all depended on him. He held all these people in the palm of his hand, unbeknownst to them, as they jerked about, under his nose. If he fired a shot, Monsieur Leblanc would be saved and Thénardier sunk; if he didn’t shoot, Monsieur Leblanc would be sacrificed and, who knows? Thénardier might get away. To send one down, or drop the other? Remorse either way. What was he to do? Which should he choose? To fail his most imperious memories, all those deep commitments he had made to himself, the most sacred duty, the most venerated text! To fail his father’s will … Or let a crime go ahead! It seemed to him that, on one side, he could hear “his Ursula” imploring him to save her father and, on the other, the colonel commending Thénadier to his care. He felt as if he were going mad. His knees were buckling under him. And there was no time to decide, anyway, for the drama was racing ahead furiously, even as he looked on. It was like a whirlwind, which he thought he controlled but which was suddenly sweeping him away. He was on the point of passing out.

Meanwhile Thénardier—we will call him that and nothing else from now on—was pacing up and down in front of the table in a sort of panicky triumphant frenzy.

He wrapped his fist round the candle and plunked it down on the mantelpiece with such a violent thud that the wick nearly went out and hot wax flew over the wall.

Then he wheeled round on Monsieur Leblanc, frightening, and spat out these words: “The jig’s up! Your goose is cooked! I’ll have you for dinner!” With that, he started pacing again, erupting like a volcano as he did so: “Ah!” he cried. “At last I’ve caught up with you again, Monsieur, the philanthropist! Monsieur, the threadbare millionaire! Monsieur, the giver of dolls! Old num skull! Ah, so you don’t recognize me! No, I suppose you’re not the one who came to Montfermeil, to my inn, eight years ago, the night before Christmas, 1823! You’re not the one who took Fantine’s kid, the Lark, from us! You’re not the one who used to go around in a yellow coachman’s greatcoat! Oh, no, not you! You even had a parcel of clothes in your hand just like here, this morning! Tell me, now, woman! It’s a mania with him, it looks like, to carry parcels stuffed with blasted woolen stockings to other people’s houses! Charitable old bastard, aren’t you? Are you in the hosiery business, by any chance, Monsieur millionaire? You palm off the stuff you can’t sell on the poor, saintly man! What a charlatan! Ah, you don’t recognize me? Well, I recognize you! I recognized you right off, as soon as you stuck your nose in the door. Ah, at last you’re about to see that it’s not all roses, poking around other people’s places like that, just because they happen to be inns, decked out in lousy old clothes, looking like such a pauper that you’d have given him a coin, pulling the wool over a person’s eyes, acting the generous one, and then taking their livelihoods away, and making threats out in the woods. You’ll see it’s not enough that you come back later, when the people are ruined, bringing a dirty great overcoat that’s too big for a person and a couple of flea-bitten hospital blankets, you old rogue, you old child-snatcher!” He stopped and appeared to be talking to himself for a moment. You would have said his fury was subsiding, like the Rhône, rushing down some hole; then, as he finished off out loud the things he had been muttering to himself under his breath, he brought his fist down on the table and shouted: “And he looks so easygoing, too!” And he yelled at Monsieur Leblanc: “Jesus wept! You had a good laugh at me back then, eh! You’re the cause of all my woes! For fifteen hundred francs, you got hold of a girl I had who certainly had wealthy connections—she’d already brought me in a lot of cash. And when I was supposed to make enough out of her to live on all my life! A girl who would have paid me back for all I lost in that dirty fleapit of a pothouse where they made such a royal racket and where I ate up all my assets like a fool! Oh, I wish all the wine they drank in that dive was poison to the swine who drank it! But never mind! So tell me! You must have thought I was a real idiot when you went off with the Lark! You had your cudgel tucked away in the forest! You were the strongest, then. Well, it’s time for revenge. I hold the winning cards today! You’re done for, my good man! Oh, but I have to laugh. I do have to laugh. Look how he fell into the trap! I told him I was a performer, that my name was Fabantou, that I’d been onstage with Mamselle Mars, and Mamselle Muche, that my landlord wanted to be paid tomorrow, the fourth of February, and he didn’t even twig that it’s the eighth of January and not the fourth of February that’s the last day of the quarter! Brainless goose! And what about the four bloody philippes he brings me! Louse! He wasn’t even big enough to go up to a hundred francs! And the way he went along with my platitudes! I enjoyed that bit. I said to myself: Silly old goat! Go on, I’ve got you by the short and curlies now. I was licking your arse this morning! But I’m going to be chomping on your heart tonight!” Thénardier stopped. He was out of breath. His narrow little chest was heaving like a smithy’s bellows. His eyes were full of the ignoble jubilation of a weak, cruel, and cowardly creature, when it finally manages to bring to ground what it has feared, and insult what it has flattered—the joy of a dwarf stamping on Goliath’s head, the joy of a jackal as it tucks into a sick bull, dead enough not to defend itself, alive enough to suffer still.

Monsieur Leblanc did not cut him off, but when he cut himself off, he said: “I don’t know what you are talking about. You are mistaken. I am a very poor man, anything but a millionaire. I don’t know you. You have me mixed up with someone else.” “Ah!” groaned Thénardier. “What rubbish! You’re sticking to your little story, are you! You’re talking hogwash, old man! You don’t remember, eh? You don’t see who I am!” “Pardon me, Monsieur,” answered Monsieur Leblanc in a polite tone that, at such a moment, had a strange and powerful effect, “I see that you are a crook.” As we have all noticed, even the vilest beings have their susceptibilities; monsters are touchy. At the word crook, mother Thénardier shot up from the bed, Thénardier grabbed his chair as though he was about to break it in two with his bare hands. “Don’t you move!” he yelled at his wife; then he turned to Monsieur Leblanc: “A crook! Yes, I know that’s what you call us, you rich folk! Listen! It’s true, I went bust, I’m now in hiding, I don’t have a crust of bread, I don’t have a sou, I’m a crook, all right! It’s three days since I’ve eaten, I’m a crook! Ha! You keep your feet warm, you lot, you’ve got your fancy Sakoski loafers,1 you’ve got your padded overcoats, like archbishops, you live on the first floor of houses that have porters, you eat truffles, you eat whole bunches of asparagus at forty francs a bunch in the month of January, green peas, you stuff your faces, and, when you want to know if it’s cold out, you look in the newspaper to see what it says on the thermometer of Chevalier the engineer. Us lot, we’re our own thermometers! We don’t need to go and stand on the quai at the corner of the Tour de l’Horloge to see how many degrees below zero it is, we feel our blood freeze in our veins and ice bite into our hearts, and we say: There is no God! And you come creeping into our sties, yes, our sties, and call us crooks! But we will eat you! You poor little things, we will devour you! Monsieur millionaire! Let me tell you this: I was once set up in business, I was licensed, I was a voter, I’m a respectable citizen! I am! You, perhaps, are not!” Here Thénardier took a step toward the men near the door and added, shaking: “When I think he’s got the nerve to come here and speak to me as if I was a cobbler!” Then he rounded on Monsieur Leblanc in a fresh burst of frenzy: “And let me tell you this, too, Monsieur philanthropist! I’m no sleazy sluggard, that I am not! I’m not some nonentity without a name who slinks into other people’s houses and kidnaps children! I was once a French soldier, I’m a blasted veteran, I ought to be decorated! I was at Waterloo, you hear! And in that battle I saved a general called Count Someone-or-other! He told me his name; but his bloody voice was so weak I didn’t catch it. All I heard was mercy—merci! I’d have preferred his name to this merci caper. Thanks, but no thanks. His name would have helped me find him again. This painting you see here, which was painted by David at Bruqueselles,2 do you know who it’s a painting of? Yours truly. David wanted to immortalize that feat of arms. I’ve got the general on my back and I’m carrying him through the grapeshot. That’s the story. He never even did anything for me, that particular general, never; he was no better than the rest of you! It didn’t stop me from saving his life, but, at the risk of losing my own, and I’ve got documents to prove it coming out my pockets! I am a soldier of Waterloo, for crying out loud! And now that I’ve had the goodness to tell you all that, let’s get it over with: I need money, I need a lot of money, I need an enormous amount of money, or I’ll exterminate you, come hell or high water!” Marius had managed to subdue his anguish and was listening hard. The last shred of doubt had now evaporated. This was indeed the Thénardier of the will. Marius winced at the man’s attack on his father for ingratitude—which he had come fatally close to denying out loud. His confusion spiralled. Besides, in all Thénardier’s words, in his tone, in his gestures, in his crazily flashing eyes, flaring at every word, in the whole explosion, an evil nature was on show, parading openly in a mix of bravado and abjectness, pride and pettiness, rage and silliness, in this whole chaotic jumble of real grievances and sham emotions, in the shamelessness of a vicious criminal savouring the voluptuous pleasure of violence, in this brazen nakedness of an ugly soul exposed to view, this conflagration of extreme suffering combined with extreme hate—in all of this, there was something hideous like evil yet poignant like truth.

The masterwork, this painting by David that he had proposed Monsieur Leblanc buy, was nothing other, as the reader will have guessed, than the sign from his old pothouse, painted, as you will recall, by the man himself, the sole bit of flotsam that he had saved from his shipwreck in Montfermeil.

As he had stopped blocking Marius’s line of sight, Marius could now study the thing and in this mess of paint, he actually could make out a battle, a background of smoke and a man carrying another man. It was the group formed by Thénardier and Pontmercy—the saviour-sergeant and the colonel he had saved. Marius more or less went into a delirium. The painting somehow restored his father to life and it suddenly stopped being the sign from the Montfermeil tavern to become a resurrection; in it a grave cracked open, a phantom rose to its feet, Marius could hear his blood thumping at his temples, he had the cannon of Waterloo in his ears, his bleeding father dimly painted on that sinister panel terrified him, he felt as though that amorphous blob was staring straight at him.

When Thénardier had got his breath back, he trained his bloodshot eyes on Monsieur Leblanc and said to him in a tight, low voice: “What have you got to say before we get to work on you?” Monsieur Leblanc said nothing. In the middle of this silence, a hoarse voice threw in a grimly sarcastic remark from the hallway: “If you need any wood chopped, don’t forget I’m here!” It was the man with the pole-axe, having fun.

At the same time, an enormous dirty bristly face bobbed up at the door with a hideous grin that showed, not teeth, but fangs. It was the face of the man with the pole-axe.

“Why’d you take your mask off?” Thénardier barked at him in fury.

“So’s I could laugh,” the man replied.

For some moments, Monsieur Leblanc had apparently been closely following every move Thénardier made, while the latter, blinded and dazed as he was by his own rage, confidently stomped up and down the lair, knowing that the door was guarded and that nine armed men held one unarmed man captive, assuming mother Thénardier counted as only one man herself. As he shouted at the man with the pole-axe, he turned his back on Monsieur Leblanc.

Monsieur Leblanc seized the moment. He kicked the chair away with his foot, pushed the table away with his fist and, in a single bound, with wonderful agility, before Thénardier had time to turn round, he was at the window. It took him only a second to open it, hop onto the sill and step over. He was halfway out when six powerful fists grabbed him and yanked him violently back into the hole. The three “chimney specialists” had hurled themselves at him. At the same time, mother Thénardier had grabbed hold of his hair.

At the sound of a scuffle, the other thugs came running from the hallway. The old man on the bed, apparently half-drunk, got off the pallet and staggered over with a road-mender’s hammer in his hand.

One of the “chimney specialists” whose candle lit up his smeared face and in whom Marius, despite the smear of paint, recognized Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, raised over Monsieur Leblanc’s head a sort of club consisting of an iron bar with a knob of lead at each end.

Marius could hold out no longer. “Father,” he silently prayed, “forgive me!” And his finger sought the trigger of the pistol. He was just about to fire a shot when Thénardier’s voice rang out: “Don’t hurt him!” The victim’s desperate bid to escape, far from exasperating Thénardier, had calmed him down. There were two men in Thénardier, the vicious thug and the crafty intriguer. Till that moment, in the first flush of triumph, with the prey brought down and no longer moving, the vicious thug had dominated; when the victim resisted and seemed to want to fight back, the crafty intriguer reappeared and took over.

“Don’t hurt him!” he repeated. He didn’t know it, of course, but the first positive result for him of this shift was to stop the cocked pistol from going off and to paralyze Marius, for whom the urgency disappeared. Faced with this new development, Marius could not see what was wrong with waiting a bit longer. Who was to say that some stroke of luck would not intervene and save him from the ghastly alternatives of letting Ursula’s father perish or sinking the saviour of his own father, the colonel?

A herculean struggle had begun. With a direct punch in the guts, Monsieur Leblanc had sent the old man flying to the middle of the room, then with two backhanders he knocked two other assailants to the ground and pinned them, one under each of his knees; the poor scoundrels groaned under the pressure as though they were being squashed by a granite millstone; but the four others had seized the formidable old man by both arms and by the neck and were holding him hunched over the two flattened “chimney specialists.” And so, mastering some and mastered by others, crushing those below and suffocating under those above, vainly endeavouring to shake off the blows raining down on him, Monsieur Leblanc disappeared beneath this horrible pile of thugs like a wild boar under a howling pack of mastiffs and bloodhounds.

They managed to throw him onto the bed next to the window and hold him at bay there. Mother Thénardier had not let go of his hair.

“You,” Thénardier said to her, “stay out of it. You’ll rip your shawl.”

Mother Thénardier obeyed as the she-wolf obeys the wolf, with a growl.

“The rest of you,” said Thénardier, “search him.”

Monsieur Leblanc seemed to have abandoned the idea of resistance. They searched him. He had nothing on him except a leather purse that contained six francs and his handerkerchief. Thénardier shoved the hankie in his pocket.

“Jesus! No wallet?” he asked.

“No watch, either,” answered one of the “chimney specialists.”

“Just what you’d expect,” murmured the masked man who held the big key, in the voice of a ventriloquist. “This one’s an old bruiser from way back!” Thénardier went over to the corner by the door, grabbed a bundle of ropes from the floor, and threw it to them.

“Tie him to the foot of the bed,” he said. Then, seeing the old man was still sprawled across the floor from the punch Monsieur Leblanc had given him and was not moving, he said: “Boulatruelle’s not dead, is he?” “No,” answered Bigrenaille, “he’s drunk.”

“Sweep him into a corner,” said Thénardier.

Two of the “chimney specialists” pushed the drunk with their feet over to the heap of old scrap iron.

“Babet, what did you bring so many men for?” Thénardier said in a low voice to the man with the cudgel. “There’s no point.” “What’s a man to do?” replied the man with the cudgel. “They all wanted to be in on it. The season’s slow. Business is bad.” The pallet Monsieur Leblanc had been thrown onto was a kind of hospital bed supported by four big, rough, uneven posts. Monsieur Leblanc did not struggle. The brigands tied him up good and tight, standing upright with his feet on the floor, to the bedpost farthest from the window and closest to the fireplace.

When the last knot had been tied, Thénardier pulled up a chair and sat almost facing Monsieur Leblanc. Thénardier was a different man now. Within a few seconds, his expression had shifted from unbridled violence to a calm and relaxed cunning. Marius hardly recognized, in this polite office clerk’s smile, the almost bestial maw foaming away in a frenzy only a moment before. He studied this fantastic and alarming metamorphosis in amazement, feeling what any man would feel on seeing a tiger change into an attorney.

“Monsieur—” Thénardier began.

Waving away the brigands who still had their hands on Monsieur Leblanc, he said: “Back off a bit and let me have a chat with the gentleman.” They all stepped back toward the door.

“Monsieur, you were wrong to try and jump out the window. You could have broken a leg. Now, if you don’t mind, we’re going to have a quiet little chat. To start with, I must tell you something I’ve noticed and that is that you haven’t yet let out the slightest protest.” Thénardier was right, this detail was accurate, though it had escaped Marius in his distress. Monsieur Leblanc had hardly uttered more than a few words, and that without raising his voice; even in his struggle with the six brigands by the window, he had kept profoundly, and strangely, silent. Thénardier went on: “My God! If you’d cried ‘thief’ for a bit, I wouldn’t have found it out of place. ‘Murder!’ The word is used on occasion, and, for my part, I wouldn’t have taken it amiss. It’s only natural that a man make a bit of a racket when he finds himself with individuals who don’t exactly inspire sufficient confidence. If you’d done that, we wouldn’t have touched you. We wouldn’t even have muzzled you. And I’ll tell you why. It’s because this room here is soundproof. That’s all it’s got going for it, but at least it has that. It’s like a cellar. You could let a bomb off in here and all they’d hear at the nearest guardhouse would be a sound like a drunk snoring. In here a cannon would just go fizz and a roll of thunder would go puff. It’s a handy little dive. But you didn’t cry out, which was nice of you, my compliments; and I’ll tell you what I conclude from that fact: My dear monsieur, when a man cries out, who comes? The police. And after the police? The law. So, as I say, you didn’t let out a peep; and that’s because you don’t want to see the police and the law turn up here any more than we do. And that is because—I suspected as much a long time ago—you’re hiding something and you want to keep it hidden. It looks like we’ve got a common interest. So surely we can come to some sort of an understanding.” While he spoke, Thénardier kept his eyes fixed on Monsieur Leblanc, looking daggers at him, for all the world as though he was trying to bore into his prisoner’s very conscience. Moreover his language, though coloured with a sort of mild, sly insolence, was reserved and very nearly refined and, in this miserable wretch who had been nothing but a thug a moment before, you now sensed the man who “once studied to be a priest.” The silence that the prisoner had maintained, the wariness he had shown that went as far as completely disregarding his own safety, the way he had resisted the natural impulse of anyone whose life is in danger, which is to cry for help—all this, we have to say, since it had now been called to his attention, posed a real problem for Marius and came as a painful shock.

Thénardier’s observation, well founded as it was, further deepened for Marius the dense mystery in which this grave and strange figure to whom Courfeyrac had given the nickname of Monsieur Leblanc, concealed himself. But whatever he was, now when he was tied up with ropes, surrounded by homicidal maniacs and half-buried, so to speak, in a grave that was getting deeper under him at every instant, faced with both the fury and the calm of Thénardier, the man remained imperturbable; and Marius could not help but admire, at such a moment, that superbly melancholy face.

The man was evidently beyond the reach of horror or desperation. He was one of those men who can master shock in desperate situations. No matter how extreme the crisis, no matter how inevitable the disastrous outcome, there was no sense here of a drowning man opening startled eyes underwater as he went down for the last time.

Thénardier stood up quietly, went to the fireplace, removed the screen and stood it against the nearby pallet, thereby revealing the stove full of burning charcoal, in which the prisoner could see perfectly clearly the white-hot chisel, dotted here and there with little bright red stars.

Then Thénardier went back and sat very close to Monsieur Leblanc.

“To continue,” he said, “we can come to an understanding. Sort things out amicably. I was wrong to fly off the handle a while ago, I don’t know what I was thinking, I got carried away, I said things I should not have said. For instance, since you’re a millionaire, I told you I demanded money, a lot of money, enormous amounts of money. But that would not be reasonable. My God, you could be as rich as you like, but you’ve still got your expenses, as who has not? I don’t want to ruin you, after all I’m no bloodsucker. I’m not one of those people who make ridiculous demands, just because they have the advantage of the situation. Listen, I’ll meet you halfway, I’ll make a sacrifice on my side. All I need is two hundred thousand francs.” Monsieur Leblanc did not say a word. Thénardier went on: “You see I’m prepared to mix quite a bit of water with my wine. I don’t know the state of your fortune, but I do know that you don’t care too much for money, and an openhanded almsgiving man such as yourself can easily spare two hundred thousand francs for a family man who’s not so lucky. Certainly you are reasonable, too, and you don’t imagine that I’d go to all the trouble I’ve gone to today to organize this evening’s little event, which is nice work in the opinion of all these gentlemen, just to wind up asking you for what it takes to go and get plastered on red wine at fifteen sous a glass and eat veal at Desnoyers.3 Two hundred thousand francs, that’s what this is worth. Once that trifle has been removed from your pocket, I assure you that’ll be the end of it, we won’t harm a hair on your head. You’ll tell me: But I don’t have two hundred thousand francs on me. Oh, I’m not excessive. I don’t demand that. I ask you for one thing only. To be so good as to write what I will now dictate to you.” Here Thénardier broke off, then he added, emphasizing every word and throwing a smile in the direction of the stove: “I warn you that I won’t accept that you don’t know how to write.” A grand inquisitor would have envied that smile.

Thénardier pushed the table in toward Monsieur Leblanc, took the inkwell, a pen, and a sheet of paper from the drawer, which he left slightly open, and where the long blade of a knife gleamed. He placed the sheet of paper in front of Monsieur Leblanc.

“Write,” he said.

The prisoner spoke at last: “How do you expect me to write? My hands are tied.”

“That’s true, sorry!” said Thénardier. “You’re right there.”

He turned to Bigrenaille: “Untie Monsieur’s right hand.”

Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille carried out Thénardier’s order. When the prisoner’s right hand was free, Thénardier dipped the pen in the ink and handed it to him.

“Don’t forget, Monsieur, that you are in our power, at our discretion, that no human authority can get you out of here, and that we would be really sorry to be forced to resort to unpleasant extremes. I know neither your name nor your address, but I warn you that you will remain tied up until the person charged with delivering the letter you are about to write has returned. Now have the kindness to write.” “What?” asked the prisoner.

“I’ll dictate.”

Monsieur Leblanc took up the pen. Thénardier began to dictate: “My daught—”

The prisoner started and looked up at Thénardier.

“Put ‘my dear daughter,’” said Thénardier. Monsieur Leblanc did as he was told. Thénardier continued: “Come right away—” He broke off:

“You’re on close terms, aren’t you? You use tu?”

“Who with?” asked Monsieur Leblanc.

“For Christ’s sake! The little one, the Lark.”

Monsieur Leblanc answered without showing the slightest emotion: “I don’t know who you mean.” “Go on, anyway,” said Thénardier, and he resumed the dictation: “Come right away. I need you urgently. The person who hands you this note is charged with bringing you to me. I’ll be waiting for you. Come in all confidence.” Monsieur Leblanc wrote it all down. Thénardier went on: “No! Scratch out ‘come in all confidence’; that might make her suspect that things are not so simple and might not inspire confidence.” Monsieur Leblanc crossed out the four words.

“Now,” Thénardier pursued, “sign. What is your name?”

The prisoner put down the pen and asked: “Who is this letter for?”

“You know very well,” answered Thénardier. “For the little one. I just told you.”

It was obvious that Thénardier was avoiding naming the young girl in question. He said “the Lark,” he said “the little one,” but he did not say her name. This was the precaution a cunning man takes to keep his secret to himself in front of his accomplices. To say the name would be to hand “the whole affair” over to them and tell them more than they needed to know.

He resumed: “Sign. What is your name?”

“Urbain Fabre,” said the prisoner.

Thénardier, catlike, thrust his hand into his pocket and whipped out the handkerchief taken from Monsieur Leblanc. He held it up to the candle, looking for the initials.

“U.F. Right you are. Urbain Fabre. So then, sign U.F.”

The prisoner signed.

“Since you need two hands to fold the letter, give it to me, I’ll fold it.”

That done, Thénardier went on: “Put the address: Mademoiselle Fabre, at your place. I know you don’t live all that far from here, somewhere near Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, since that’s where you go to mass every day, but I don’t know which street. I see you appreciate your situation. As you didn’t lie about your name, you won’t lie about your address. You write it yourself.” The prisoner remained thoughtful for a moment, then he took up the pen and wrote: “Mademoiselle Fabre, care of Monsieur Urbain Fabre, rue Saint-Dominique d’Enfer, no. 17.” Thénardier seized the letter in a sort of feverish convulsion.

“Woman!” he cried.

Mother Thénardier came running.

“Here’s the letter. You know what you have to do. There’s a fiacre down below. Get going pronto and come back ditto.” And addressing the man with the pole-axe: “You, since you took your face mask off, you can go with the good woman. You can hop up the back of the fiacre. You know where you left the old rattletrap?” “Yes,” said the man.

And he dropped his pole-axe in a corner and followed mother Thénardier out.

As they were leaving, Thénardier stuck his head out the half-open door and shouted into the hall: “Whatever you do, don’t lose that letter! Just remember, you’ve got two hundred thousand francs on you.” Mother Thénardier’s raucous voice came back: “Don’t worry. I stuck it between my boosies.” A minute had not elapsed when the crack of a whip was heard, growing fainter and then quickly dying away altogether.

“Good!” growled Thénardier. “They’re off at a clip. If they keep trotting along like that, the good woman will be back in three quarters of an hour.” He brought his chair closer to the fireplace and sat down, folding his arms and holding his muddy boots up to the stove.

“My feet are cold,” he said.

There were now only five thugs left in the rathole besides Thénardier and the prisoner. These men, with their masks or with the black slime covering their faces and turning them into colliers, negroes, or fiends, whatever you feared most, looked numb and forlorn, and you could feel that they were carrying out a crime as they would a household chore, quietly, without anger and without pity, with a sort of weariness. They were huddled together in a corner like brutes and they did not make a sound. Thénardier was warming his feet. The prisoner had relapsed into his taciturn state. A sombre calm had succeeded the wild tumult that had filled the garret a few minutes before.

The candle, spreading out like a giant mushroom, barely lit the cavernous vastness, the fire had died down, and all these monstrous heads made deformed shadows on the walls and ceiling. The only noise that could be heard was the peaceful breathing of the old drunk who was now fast asleep.

Marius waited in a state of anxiety that grew more intense by the second. The enigma was more impenetrable than ever. Who was this “little one” that Thénardier had called the Lark? Was it “his Ursula”? The prisoner had not seemed to be moved by the name Lark and had answered as naturally as could be: “I don’t know who you mean.” On the other hand, the two letters U.F. were explained, they stood for Urbain Fabre, and Ursula’s name was no longer Ursula. That was the thing Marius saw most clearly. A sort of ghastly fascination nailed him to the spot from which he looked down on the whole scene. He stood there, almost incapable of thinking or moving, as though annihilated by the sight of such abominable things up close. He waited, hoping for some incident, no matter what, unable to gather his wits and not knowing whose side to take.

“In any case,” he said to himself, “if she is the Lark, I’ll soon see, since mother Thénardier is bringing her here. Then it will all come out, I’ll lay down my life and spill every drop of my blood if I have to, but I will save her! Nothing will stop me.” Nearly half an hour passed. Thénardier looked to be absorbed in some murky meditation; the prisoner did not stir. Yet Marius thought he could hear, intermittently and only for the last few moments, a faint dull noise coming from where the prisoner was.

All of a sudden, Thénardier addressed the prisoner: “Monsieur Fabre, listen, I may as well tell you right now.” Those few words seemed to prelude clarification. Marius cocked his ear. Thénardier went on: “The missus will come back, don’t you worry. I believe the Lark truly is your daughter, and it seems only natural that you should hold on to her. Only, bear with me. With your letter, the wife is going to find her. I told the wife to get dolled up, as you saw, so the young lady will follow her without giving it a moment’s thought. They’ll hop in a cab together with my friend up behind. Somewhere beyond the barrière there is an old rattletrap hitched up to two very good horses. They’ll take the young lady there. She’ll get out of the fiacre. My friend will hop up in the rattletrap with her, and the wife will come back here and tell us: It’s done. As for the young lady, they won’t hurt her, the boneshaker will take her to a place where she’ll be nice and cosy and, as soon as you’ve given me the paltry sum of two hundred thousand francs, she’ll be handed back to you. If you have me arrested, my friend will finish off the Lark. There you have it.” The prisoner did not utter a word. After a pause, Thénardier went on: “It’s simple, as you see. There’ll be no harm done, if you don’t want there to be any harm done. I’m just telling you how things stand. I’m warning you just so you know.” He stopped; the prisoner did not break the silence. Thénardier went on: “As soon as my missus comes back and tells me the Lark’s on her way, we’ll let you go and you’ll be free to go home to bed. You see that we have no bad intentions.” Appalling images rolled across Marius’s mind. Christ! So they weren’t going to bring this girl they were kidnapping back here, then, after all? One of these monsters was going to cart her off into the darkness? Where?—And what if it was her! And it was clear that it was her! Marius felt his heart stop beating. What to do? Fire the pistol shot? Put all these miserable bastards into the hands of the law? But the hideous thug with the pole-axe would still be completely out of reach somewhere with the girl, and Marius thought about those words of Thénardier’s whose murderous significance he had an inkling of: “If you have me arrested, my friend will finish off the Lark.” Now he felt himself held back not only by his father’s will, but by his very love, by the danger she was in. This awful situation, which had already gone on for more than an hour, was changing every second. Marius had the strength to pass in review, one after the other, all the most distressing conjectures, searching for some hope and finding none. The tumult of his thoughts contrasted with the funereal silence of the lair.

In the middle of this silence, the sound of the stair door could be heard, opening, then shutting.

The prisoner jerked in his bonds.

“Here’s the good woman now,” said Thénardier.

He had barely finished when mother Thénardier, indeed, rushed into the room, flushed, winded, panting, her eyes ablaze, and shouted, whacking both her thighs at once with her huge hands: “False address!” The thug that she had taken with her appeared behind her and came in to retrieve his pole-axe.

“False address?” repeated Thénardier.

She went on: “No one! Rue Saint-Dominique. No number seventeen, no Monsieur Urbain Fabre! No one’s ever heard of him!” She stopped, choking, then continued: “Monsieur Thénardier! This old geezer’s put one over on you! You’re too good, you see! Me, I’d have rearranged his mug for him, for starters! And if he turned nasty, I’d have roasted him alive! He would’ve had to talk then, and say where his daughter is, and say where the loot is! That’s how I’d have gone about it, myself! No wonder they say men aren’t as smart as women! No one there! No number seventeen! There’s nothing but a great big porte cochère! No Monsieur Fabre, rue Saint-Dominique! And going flat out, and a tip for the driver, and everything! I spoke to the porter and his missus, who’s a lovely stout woman, they don’t know anything about him!” Marius breathed again. She, Ursula, or the Lark, the one he no longer knew what to call, was safe.

While his exasperated wife stormed, Thénardier took a seat at the table; he stayed for a few moments without uttering a word, swinging his right leg which was dangling, and studying the stove with a look of savage concentration. Finally he said to the prisoner in a slow and oddly ferocious tone: “A false address? What were you hoping to gain?” “Time!” cried the prisoner in an explosive voice.

And at the same time he shook off his bonds; they had been cut. The prisoner was no longer tied to the bed except by a leg.

Before the seven men had time to recover their wits and lunge at him, he ducked down under the mantel to the fireplace, extended his hand toward the stove, then straightened up, and now Thénardier, mother Thénardier, and the thugs, driven by the shock to the back of the rathole, watched in stupefaction as he raised the red-hot chisel, throbbing with a sinister glow, above his head, almost free and most menacing.

The judicial inquiry, to which the ambush in the old Gorbeau building eventually gave rise, revealed that a retooled one-sou coin, cut and worked in a particular way, was found in the garret when the police descended on it. This retooled sou was one of those marvels of patient industry that the galleys foster in the dark and for the dark, marvels that are nothing less than the instruments of escape. These dreadful yet delicate products of a prodigious art are to jewellery what the metaphors of slang are to poetry. There are Benvenuto Cellinis behind bars, just as there are Villons4 in the local patois. The poor unfortunate wretch who aspires to deliverance finds the means, sometimes without any tools beyond a pocketknife or an old razor blade, to saw a sou into two thin sections, two discs, to then hollow out these two sections without touching the imprint of the mint, and to cut a screw thread along the edge of the sou in such a way that the sections screw back together again. This device can be screwed and unscrewed at will; it is a box. In this box, you can hide a watch spring, and this watch spring, properly handled, can cut through standard-size shackles and iron bars. You think this poor unfortunate convict has only a sou to his name; not so, he has liberty. It was a retooled sou of the kind that, in later police searches, was found lying open in two pieces in the rathole under the pallet next to the window. They also found a little blue steel saw that could be hidden in the retooled sou. It is likely that when the bandits were rifling through the prisoner’s pockets, he had this retooled sou on him and managed to hide it in his hand, and that afterwards, with his right hand free, he managed to unscrew it and used the saw to cut through the ropes tying him. This would explain the faint noise and barely perceptible movements Marius had picked up.

Not being able to bend down for fear of giving himself away, he had not cut the rope around his left leg.

The bandits had recovered from their initial surprise.

“Don’t worry,” said Bigrenaille to Thénardier. “We’ve still got him by a leg, he won’t be going anywhere. Take my word for it. I’m the one who trussed up his paw for him.” But the prisoner spoke up: “You are poor worthless wretches, but my own life is not worth being so heavily guarded. As for imagining that you’ll make me talk, that you’ll make me write anything I don’t want to write, that you’ll make me say anything I don’t want to say—” He rolled up the sleeve of his left arm and added: “Watch this.”

He instantly held out his arm and, holding the chisel by the wooden handle in his right hand, placed the burning chisel on his naked flesh.

You could hear the hiss of burning flesh; the smell peculiar to torture chambers spread through the sty. Marius tottered, faint with horror, the thugs themselves shuddered, the face of the strange old man barely contracted, and, while the red-hot iron dug deeper into the smoking wound, imperturbable and almost regal, he fixed his beautiful eyes on Thénardier. There was no hate there and pain had melted into a serene majesty.

In great and exalted natures, physical pain brings out the soul, through the revolt of the flesh and the senses against it. The soul appears on the face, just as mutinies of the soldiery force the captain to show himself in his true colours.

“Poor devils,” he said. “Don’t be any more afraid of me than I am of you.”

And lifting the chisel off his wound, he hurled it out the open window; the horrible glowing tool disappeared, spiraling off into the night to fall in the distance and be extinguished by the snow.

The captive went on: “Do what you like with me.”

He was unarmed.

“Grab him!” said Thénardier.

Two of the brigands clapped their hands on his shoulders and the masked man with the ventriloquist’s voice stood facing him, ready, at the slightest movement, to smash his skull in with a blow of the giant key.

At the same time, Marius heard below him, at the foot of the dividing wall, but so close that he couldn’t see them talking, this hushed exchange: “There’s only one thing to do.” “Slit his throat!”

“That’s it.”

It was the husband and wife holding counsel. Thénardier walked slowly round the table, opened the drawer, and took out the knife.

Marius was tormenting the butt of the pistol. Unbearable dilemma. For an hour now, there had been two voices in his conscience, one telling him to respect his father’s will, the other screaming at him to come to the prisoner’s rescue. Those two voices continued to tear at him without letup, and he was in agony. He had vaguely hoped up to that point to find a way of reconciling the two duties, but nothing had occurred. Meanwhile, the danger was urgent, the point of no return had been reached while he dithered only feet away from the captive. Thénardier, knife in hand, was working out what to do.

Marius cast his eyes wildly around him; the last, automatic resort of despair. Suddenly he jumped.

At his feet, on the table, the full moon directed a bright beam right onto a piece of paper, as though pointing it out to him. On this sheet of paper he read this line written in capital letters that very morning by the elder of the Thénardier girls: “THE COPS ARE HERE.” An idea flashed through Marius’s mind; this was the opportunity he had been waiting for, the solution to the ghastly dilemma torturing him: how to spare the assassin and save the victim. He knelt down on the chest of drawers, reached out and grabbed the note, quietly tore a bit of plaster from the dividing wall and threw the lot through the crevice into the middle of the rathole.

It was high time. Thénardier had overcome his last fears, or scruples, and was about to lunge at the prisoner.

“Something fell!” cried mother Thénardier.

“What is it?” asked Thénardier.

The woman had lurched forward and picked up the chunk of plaster wrapped in the note.

She handed it to her husband.

“Where’d this come from?” asked Thénardier.

“Lord spare us!” said the woman. “Where do you think it came from? It came through the window.” “I saw it go past,” said Bigrenaille.

Thénardier rapidly unfolded the note and brought it over to the candle.

“It’s Éponine’s writing. Jesus!”

He signalled to his wife, who came running, and after he showed her the line written on the piece of paper, he added in a muffled voice: “Quick, the ladder! We’ll leave the cheese in the mousetrap and clear out!” “Without cutting that bastard’s throat for him?” gasped mother Thénardier.

“We don’t have time.”

“Which way?” added Bigrenaille.

“Through the window,” answered Thénardier. “Since Ponine threw the stone through the window, that means the house isn’t covered on that side.” The mask with the ventriloquist’s voice threw his giant key to the ground and lifted both arms in the air without a word. This was like the signal for the crew to clear the decks. The brigands holding the prisoner let go of him; in the blinking of an eye, the rope ladder was unfurled out the window and solidly attached to the sill by means of the two iron hooks.

The prisoner paid no attention to what was happening around him. He seemed to be either dreaming or praying. As soon as the ladder was in place, Thénardier yelled: “Come on, missus!” And he rushed to the casement window. But just as he was about to climb over it, Bigrenaille grabbed him roughly by the collar.

“Oh, no you don’t, you old joker! Us first!”

“Us first!” shouted the thugs.

“Now, now, children,” said Thénardier, “we’re losing time. The flatfeet are at our heels.” “Well, then,” said one of the thugs, “let’s draw lots to see who goes first.”

Thénardier exploded:

“You’re mad! You’re insane! What a pack of mugs! You want to lose time? Why don’t we draw lots while we’re at it? Shall we use a wet finger! Or the short straw! Write our names down! Put ‘em in a hat!—” “Would you like my hat?” cried a voice from the door.

Everyone wheeled round. It was Javert.

He had his hat in his hand and held it out, smiling.

YOU SHOULD ALWAYS ARREST THE VICTIMS FIRST

AS NIGHT CAME down, Javert had posted himself and his men behind the trees on the rue de la Barrière-des-Gobelins, where they were hidden opposite the old Gorbeau slum on the other side of the boulevard. He had begun by opening his “bag,” hoping to drop in the two young girls who were supposed to be on surveillance outside the rat’s nest of a building. But he only managed to bag Azelma. As for Éponine, she was not at her post, she had vanished, and so he was not able to nab her. Javert then went into pointer mode and stood listening for the agreed signal. The comings and goings of the fiacre had really stirred him up. Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer, and “since there was bound to be a nest there,” since he was “bound to be in luck,” having recognized several of the bandits who had gone in, he had finally decided to go up without waiting for the pistol shot.

You will recall that he had Marius’s skeleton key.

He had come just in the nick of time.

The frightened bandits hurled themselves on the weapons they had dropped willy-nilly as they were about to make good their escape. In less than a second, these seven men, so dreadful to look at, had formed into a defensive position, one with his pole-axe, another with his key, another with his club, the others with chisels, pincers, and hammers, Thénardier with his knife in his hand. Mother Thénardier picked up an enormous cobblestone that was in a corner by the window and that served her daughters as a stool.

Javert clapped his hat back on his head and took two steps into the room, arms folded, cane under his arm, sword sheathed in its scabbard.

“Stop right there!” he cried. “You will not leave by the window, you will leave by the door. It’s less dangerous to life and limb. There are seven of you, there are fifteen of us. Let’s not get into a brawl like a lot of hayseeds from Auvergne. Let’s be nice.” Bigrenaille grabbed a pistol that he kept hidden in his smock and put it in Thénardier’s hand, whispering in his ear: “It’s Javert. I don’t dare shoot at that man. Do you?” “For Christ’s sake!” replied Thénardier.

“Well, then, shoot.”

Thénardier took hold of the pistol and aimed at Javert. Javert, who was only three feet away, looked him steadily in the eye and merely said: “Don’t shoot, please! You’ll miss.” Thénardier pulled the trigger. He missed.

“What did I tell you!” said Javert.

Bigrenaille threw his club at Javert’s feet.

“You’re the devil’s emperor! I surrender.”

“And you?” Javert asked the other bandits. They answered: “We do, too.”

Javert calmly went on: “That’s it, that’s good, as I was saying, we can be nice.”

“There’s just one thing I’d like to ask for,” Bigrenaille went on, “and that is that I’m allowed tobacco when I’m inside in solitary.” “Granted,” said Javert.

Then he turned round and called out behind him: “You can come in now!”

A squad of police constables with swords drawn and officers armed with clubs and cudgels rushed in at Javert’s summons. They tied the bandits up. This horde of men, dimly lit by a single candle, filled the lair with shadows.

“Cuff all of them!” shouted Javert.

“Just you try it!” shouted a voice that was not the voice of a man but that no one could say was a woman’s voice.

Mother Thénardier had taken refuge in a corner of the window and it was she who had let out this roar. The constables and officers shrank back. She had thrown off her shawl but kept her hat on; her husband, crouching behind her, almost vanished under the discarded shawl and she covered him with her body, holding the cobblestone with both hands above her head with the poise of a giant about to launch a rock.

“Stand back!” she roared.

They all backed off toward the hall. A large gap was left in the middle of the garret. Mother Thénardier threw a look at the bandits who had got themselves tied up and growled in a raucous gutteral voice: “Cowards!” Javert smiled and stepped forward into the empty space that mother Thénardier had covered.

“Get back,” she yelled, “or I’ll knock your block off.”

“What a trooper!” said Javert. “Listen, old duck! You may have a beard like a man but I’ve got claws like a woman.” And he continued to advance toward her.

Mother Thénardier, frantic and terrible, spread her legs, bent backward, and furiously hurled the cobblestone at Javert’s head. Javert ducked, the cobblestone flew over him, hit the back wall, taking out a huge chunk of plaster, and then bounced back, ricocheting from corner to corner across the room, which was happily almost empty, to come to rest just behind Javert.

At the same moment, Javert made it to the Thénardier couple. One of his huge hairy hands came down on the wife’s shoulder, the other on the husband’s head.

“Cuffs!” he shouted.

The police officers returned in block formation and within a few seconds Javert’s order had been executed. Mother Thénardier, broken, gazed at her bound hands and those of her husband, then dropped to the ground and howled through tears: “My daughters!” “They’re out of harm’s way.”

Meanwhile the officers had spotted the drunk asleep behind the door and were shaking him. He woke up, stammering: “Is it over, Jondrette?” “All over,” answered Javert.

The six manacled bandits were on their feet; but they still had their ghost faces on; three smeared with black, three masked.

“Leave your masks on,” said Javert.

And, passing them in review with the eye of Frederick II on parade at Potsdam,1 he said to the three “chimney specialists”: “Hello, Bigrenaille. Hello, Brujon. Hello, Deux-milliards.” Then he turned to the three masks and said to the man with the pole-axe: “Hello, Gueulemer.” And to the man with the cudgel: “Hello, Babet.”

And to the ventriloquist: “Hello, there, Claquesous.”

It was only then that he noticed the bandits’ prisoner who, since the police arrived on the scene, had just stood with his head down, not uttering a word.

“Untie monsieur!” said Javert. “And don’t anyone leave!”

That said, he sat with sovereign authority at the table, where the candle and the writing set still stood, pulled out a stamped sheet of official letterhead from his pocket, and started on his report. When he had written the first few lines, standard formulae that never vary, he looked up: “Bring this gentleman they tied up over here.” The officers looked around.

“Well,” said Javert. “Where’s he got to?”

The bandits’ prisoner, Monsieur Leblanc, Monsieur Urbain Fabre, the father of Ursula or the Lark, had vanished.

The door was guarded but the window was not. The very instant he found himself untied, while Javert was busy making out his report, he had taken advantage of the confusion, the clamour, the crowd, the darkness, and of a moment when attention was not fixed on him, to leap out the window. One of the officers ran over and looked. Not a soul could be seen outside. The rope ladder was still swinging.

“Christ!” Javert hissed between his teeth. “He must have been the best of the lot!” THE LITTLE BOY1 WHO CRIED OUT IN PART THREE

THE DAY AFTER these events took place in the house on the boulevard de l’Hôpital, a child, who seemed to come from the pont d’Austerlitz, walked up the side path on the right heading for the barrière de Fontainebleau. Night had closed in. This child was pale, thin, dressed in rags, with only cotton trousers in the middle of February, and he was singing at the top of his lungs.

At the corner of the rue du Petit-Banquier, an old crone was foraging around in a pile of rubbish by the light of a streetlamp; as he passed, the child bumped into her and leaped back saying: “Hey! And here’s me thinking it was an enormous, ENORMOUS dog!” He uttered the word enormous for the second time with an exaggerated snicker that only capital letters could do justice to.

The old woman straightened up, furious.

“Rotter of a kid!” she growled. “If I hadn’t been bending over, I know where I’d’ve planted my foot!” The child was already well out of reach.

“Kiss, kiss!” he said. “Anyway, I wasn’t far off the mark!”

The old woman stood straighter, choking with indignation, and the red glare of the lantern brightly lit her livid face, bringing out all the hollows and sharp angles and lines and crow’s-feet that ran all the way down to the corners of her mouth. Her body disappeared in the shadows and all that could be seen of her was her head. You would have said she was the very mask of Decrepitude, picked out by a glimmer of light in the night. The child studied her.

“Madame,” he said, “is really not my type, as far as beauty goes.”

He turned and went on his way again, singing this song:

King Get-the-boot-in

Went a’ huntin’,

A’ huntin’ crows …2

At the end of those three lines, he broke off. He had arrived at no. 50–52, and finding the door closed, had started battering it with kicks, kicks resounding and heroic, which owed rather more to the men’s shoes he was wearing than the child’s feet he was endowed with.

Meanwhile, the same old crone he had encountered at the corner of the rue du Petit-Banquier was running after him, shouting her head off and flailing her arms about frantically.

“What’s going on? What’s going on? Good Lord! Someone’s breaking the door down! They’re knocking the house down!” The kicking continued. The old woman was yelling at the top of her voice.

“Look how they treat buildings nowadays!”

Suddenly she stopped short. She had recognized the gamin.

“So it’s you, you little devil!”

“Well, well, if it isn’t the old girl,” said the child. “Hello, mother Burgonsky. I’ve come to see my ancestors.” The old woman responded with a complex grimace, an admirable improvisation of hatred that made the most of ugliness and decay, which was unfortunately lost in the dark: “There’s no one there, you little lout.” “Bah!” the child replied. “So where’s my father, then?”

“In the clink—at La Force.”

“Well, well! And my mother?”

“At Saint-Lazare.”3

“You don’t say! And my sisters?”

“In Les Madelonnettes.”

The child scratched the back of his ear, looked at Ma Bougon, and said: “Ah!”

Then he spun on his heel, and a moment later the old woman, still standing on the doorstep, heard him singing in his clear young voice again as he dived under the elm trees swaying in the winter wind: King Get-the-boot-in

Went a’ huntin’,

A’ huntin’ crows,

Mounted on stilts.

You ducked under ‘im,

An’ you paid ‘im two sous.