بخش 5 کتاب 3

BOOK THREE

IT MAY BE MUCK, BUT IT IS STILL THE SOUL

THE CLOACA AND ITS SURPRISES

IT WAS IN the Paris sewer that Jean Valjean found himself.

A further resemblance between Paris and the sea. As in the ocean, the diver can disappear there.

The transition was startling. Smack bang in the middle of the city, Jean Valjean had left the city behind; and, in the twinkling of an eye, the time it took to lift up a lid and put it back down again, he had gone from broad daylight to utter darkness, from midday to midnight, from hubbub to silence, from the whirlwind of thunder and lightning to the stagnation of the tomb, and, through even more amazing twists and turns than those of the rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most absolute safety.

It meant tumbling abruptly into a vault; disappearing into the oubliette of Paris; quitting the streets where death lurked everywhere for a sort of sepulchre where there was life—a strange moment. He remained apparently dazed for a few seconds, listening, stunned. The trapdoor of salvation had suddenly opened under him. A heavenly goodness had in a way taken him by stealth in one of those fabulous ambushes of Providence.

Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean had no idea whether the man he was carrying into this pit was alive or dead.

His first sensation was of blindness. Suddenly, he could not see a thing. It also felt as though he’d gone deaf in one minute flat. He could not hear a thing. The frenetic storm of murder that was raging a few feet above him did not reach him, as we said, thanks to the thick chunk of earth that separated him from it, except in a muted indistinct way, like rumbling at a great depth. He felt that the ground was solid beneath his feet; that was all, but it was enough. He stretched out one arm, then the other, touching the wall on either side, and realized the corridor was narrow; he slipped, and realized the flagstones were wet. He advanced a foot cautiously, fearing a hole, a well, some kind of gulf; he found that the flagging continued. A terrible stink alerted him to where he was.

After a few moments, he was no longer blind. A trickle of light fell from the air vent through which he had slipped and his eyes adjusted to the vault. He began to make something out. The tunnel where he was holed up—no other words could express the situation better—was walled in behind him. It was one of those dead ends that the technical language terms a branch pipe. In front of him stood another wall, a wall of darkness. The light from the air vent died out ten or twelve feet in front of Jean Valjean and barely cast a wan whiteness over a few metres of the damp sewer wall. Beyond that, the opacity was massive; to penetrate further into it seemed horrible, to step into it felt like being swallowed up. But you could sink into this wall of mist and it had to be done. It had to be done very quickly, even. Jean Valjean thought that the grate he had spotted under the paving stones could also be spotted by the soldiers and that there was every chance it would be. They could hop down into the well, too, and search it. There was not a minute to lose. He had deposited Marius on the ground and now he gathered him up again—this being the right phrase—and threw him over his shoulders once more and set out, stepping resolutely into the darkness.

The reality was that they were not as safe as Jean Valjean had thought. Perils of another kind, no less great, were perhaps awaiting them. After the blazing whirlwind of combat came the cavern of miasmas and traps; after chaos, the cesspit. Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle of hell into another.

When he had gone fifty paces, he had to stop. A question presented itself. The corridor ended in another narrow tunnel which it met side-on. Which way should he go? Left or right? How could a man get his bearings in this black labyrinth? The labyrinth, as we noted earlier, has a thread, which is its downward slope. Following the downward slope means reaching the river. Jean Valjean caught on instantly.

He told himself that he was probably in the sewer at Les Halles; that if he chose the left fork and followed the slope he would, in about fifteen minutes, reach some outlet opening on to the Seine between the Pont-au-Change and the Pont-Neuf—meaning, he would pop up in broad daylight at the most crowded spot in Paris. Maybe he would come out in some sunny stretch of a public square. Imagine the stupor of the bystanders seeing two men covered in blood emerging from out of the ground beneath their feet. The cops would arrive, there’d be a call to arms at the nearest guardhouse. They’d be nabbed before they fully surfaced. Better to sink into the maze, trust to that blackness, and rely on Providence for an exit. He went back up the slope and took the right.

When he had turned the corner of the gallery, the distant gleam from the air vent disappeared, the curtain of darkness fell back over him and he went blind again. But he forged ahead regardless and as fast as his legs would carry him. Marius’s arms were hanging around his neck and his feet dangling behind him. He had hold of both arms with one hand and groped along the wall with the other. Marius’s cheek touched his own and stuck to it like glue, being covered in blood. He felt a warm stream that came from Marius flow over him and seep into his clothes. Yet a damp warmth in the ear pressed against the wounded man’s mouth indicated there was still breath and consequently, life. The corridor through which Jean Valjean was now wending his way was not as narrow as the first. Jean Valjean walked along it, though pretty painfully. The rains of the night before had not yet run off and they formed a small torrent in the middle of the channel floor, and he was forced to hug the wall to keep his feet out of the water. And so, on he staggered in the dark. He was like one of those nocturnal creatures groping through the invisible, lost underground in the veins of shadow.

And yet, little by little, either because distant air vents were sending a bit of flickering light into this opaque mist, or because his eyes were getting used to the dark, some feeble sight returned and he began to be vaguely aware again, here of the wall he was touching, there of the vault he was passing under. The pupil dilates in the night and ends up finding a kind of daylight there, just as the soul dilates in misery and ends up finding God.

Finding his way was hard. The layout of the sewers reflects, so to speak, the layout of the streets lying on top. In the Paris of the day there were two thousand two hundred streets. Try to imagine this forest of dark branches known as the sewer underneath that. Placed end to end, the sewer system existing at the time would have measured eleven leagues in length. As we said earlier, the current network is no less than sixty leagues long.

Jean Valjean had gone wrong from the start. He thought he was under the rue Saint-Denis and it is a shame he wasn’t. Under the rue Saint-Denis, there is an old stone sewer dating from Louis XIII’s day that runs straight into the main sewer, known as the Grand Égout, the Grand Sewer, with only a single sharp turn, on the right-hand side, under the old Cour des Miracles, and a single connecting drain, the Saint-Martin sewer, whose four intersecting arms form a cross. But the Petite-Truanderie gallery, whose inlet was near the Corinthe tavern, has never been connected to the underground passage under the rue Saint-Denis; it ends in the Montmartre sewer and that was where Jean Valjean was tangled up. There, opportunities to get lost abounded. The Montmartre sewer is one of the most labyrinthine in the old network. Luckily Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer of Les Halles, whose geometric layout shows like a whole bevy of interlocking topgallant masts; but he had ahead of him more than one tricky encounter and more than one street corner—for these are streets—popping up in the dark like a question mark: first, on his left, the vast Plâtrière sewer, a sort of Chinese puzzle, shoving and scrambling its chaotic jumble of T-intersections and Z-bends under the Hôtel des Postes and under the rotunda at the wheat market and as far as the Seine, where it ends in a Y; second, on his right, the curved tunnel of the rue du Cadran with its three teeth, which are so many dead ends; third, on his left, the Mail branch line, complicated very near the entrance by a sort of fork and zigzagging along to end in the great outfall basin of the Louvre, where it breaks up into sections and branches out in all directions; last, on his right, the dead-end tunnel of the rue de Jeûneurs. This was without counting the tiny offshoots here and there before you get to the ring sewer, which alone could lead him to some exit far enough away to be safe.

If Jean Valjean had had any idea of the above, he would quickly have realized just by feeling the wall that he was not in the underground gallery of the rue Saint-Denis. Instead of the old hewn stone, instead of the ancient architecture, which was noble and regal even in the sewer, with channel floor and water courses of granite and rich lime mortar, the latter costing over four hundred livres per metre, he would have felt beneath his hand the then-contemporary crumminess, the economic expedient, the millstone rock of a hydraulic mortar bed over a layer of concrete that costs a mere two hundred francs a metre, bourgeois masonry known as small materials. But he knew nothing about any of that.

He forged ahead, anxious but calm, seeing nothing, knowing nothing, absorbed in random chance, that is, engulfed by Providence.

By degrees, we have to say, horror crept over him. The shadows that enveloped him entered his mind. He was walking through a puzzle. The cloaca aqueduct is glumly forbidding; it weaves around, dizzyingly intertwining. It is pretty grim being caught up in this Paris of darkness. Jean Valjean was obliged to find, almost to invent, his route without seeing it. Within this unknown, every step he risked could be his last. How would he ever get out of there? Would he find a way out? Would he find it in time? Would this colossal subterranean sponge with alveoli of stone let itself be penetrated and pierced through? Would he stumble across some unexpected knot of obscurity in there? Would they come to a part where they would get stuck and stay there, stranded? Would Marius die there of a hemorrhage and himself of starvation? Would they wind up getting lost in there, the two of them, and end up as two skeletons in some pocket of that black night? He did not know. He asked himself all this but could not give himself any answers. The bowels of Paris are bottomless. He was, like the prophet, in the belly of the monster whale.

Suddenly he had a jolt. At the most unpredictable moment and without his having stopped walking in a straight line, he noticed he was no longer going uphill; the water of the stream churned at his heels instead of coming at his toes. The sewer was now running downward. How come? Was he about to suddenly hit the Seine? The danger of that was great, but the peril of going back was even greater. He forged ahead.

It was not toward the Seine that he was heading. The hump formed by the soil of Paris on the right bank empties one of its sides into the Seine and the other into the Grand Sewer. The ridge of the hump that determines which way the water flows follows an extremely capricious line. The culmination point, which is the point at which the runoff divide occurs, is above the rue Michelle-Comte in the Sainte-Avoye sewer, close to the boulevards in the Louvre sewer, and close to Les Halles in the Montmartre sewer. It was this culmination point that Jean Valjean had reached. He was heading for the ring sewer. He was on the right track. But he didn’t know it.

Whenever he came to a side drain, he groped around the opening and if he found it was not as wide as the tunnel he was in, he did not go into it but continued on his way, judging, rightly, that a narrower passage would end in a dead end and could only take him away from the goal, that is, the way out. And so he avoided the fourfold trap laid out for him in the darkness by the four mazes mentioned above.

At a certain moment he realized that he had moved away from under the Paris petrified by the riot, where the barricades had brought traffic to a standstill, and back under the normal Paris, alive and bustling. He suddenly heard a noise like thunder overhead—distant, but continuous. It was the rumbling of carriages.

He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according to his inner reckoning, and had not yet thought about resting. The only thing he’d done was change the hand supporting Marius. The darkness was deeper than ever, but this deep darkness reassured him.

All of a sudden he saw his shadow in front of him. It stood out against a feeble, almost indistinct red patch that vaguely turned the channel floor at his feet and the vault over his head crimson, as it slid to left and right over the two slimy walls of the tunnel. Stunned, he wheeled round.

Behind him, in the section of tunnel he had just traversed, at a distance that seemed to him immense, a sort of horrible star was flaring, lighting up the dense darkness, and it looked to be watching him.

It was the dark star of the police rising in the sewer. Behind this star, moving around confusedly, were eight or ten black shapes, erect, indistinct, terrifying.

EXPLANATION

DURING THE DAY of June 6, a battue of the sewers had been ordered. It was feared that they might be used as a refuge by the vanquished, and the prefect, Gisquet, was supposed to scour the hidden Paris while General Bugeaud swept the public Paris; a twin operation that demanded a twin strategy from the public force represented by the army up above and the police down below. Three platoons of officers and sewer workers explored the subterranean streets of Paris, the first, the right bank, the second, the left bank, the third, the Île de la Cité. The officers were armed with carbines, clubs, swords, and daggers.

What was at that moment directed at Jean Valjean was the lantern of the right bank patrol.

This patrol had just been through the curved gallery and the three dead ends lying under the rue du Cadran. While they were waving their lantern around at the back of those dead ends, Jean Valjean had stumbled on the entrance to the gallery in his path, had found it narrower than the main tunnel, and had not gone in. He had disregarded it. The police officers, reemerging from the Cadran gallery, had thought they heard the noise of footfalls coming from the direction of the ring sewer. They were right, these were Jean Valjean’s footsteps. The sergeant in command of the patrol had held up his lantern and the squad had started peering into the mist over where the noise had come from.

This was a moment beyond words for Jean Valjean.

Luckily, if he could see the lantern clearly, the lantern could not clearly see him. It was light and he was shadow. He was a very long way off and merged into the black darkness of the place. He flattened himself against the wall and stopped, dead-still.

In any case, he had no idea what it was that was moving around behind him. Lack of sleep, lack of food, emotional turmoil had thrown him, too, into a hallucinatory state. He saw a flaring light and around that flaring light, spectres. What were they? He didn’t have a clue.

Jean Valjean having stopped, the noise also stopped. The men on patrol listened and heard nothing, they looked and saw nothing. They conferred.

In those days, at that point in the Montmartre sewer, there was a sort of square known as the service junction, since done away with because of the small inland lake formed by the torrential runoff that collected there in violent storms. The platoon was able to huddle together in this space. Jean Valjean saw the spectres form a sort of circle. They brought their mastiff heads together and whispered.

The outcome of this confabulation of guard dogs was that they had been mistaken, that there had been no noise, that no one was there, that there was no point trying to tackle the ring sewer, that it would be a waste of time, but that they needed to get cracking toward Saint-Merry, that if there was anything to be done and any loudmouth troublemakers, or bousingots, to track down, it was in that quarter.

From time to time the different parties slap new soles on their old insults. In 1832, the word bousingot filled the interim between the word Jacobin, which was old hat, and the word démagogue, or rabble-rouser, which was then almost unused but which has since done such an excellent job.

The sergeant gave the order to veer off to the left toward the downhill slope to the Seine. If it had occurred to them to split into two squads and cover both directions at once, Jean Valjean would have been caught. His fate was hanging by a thread. It is likely that instructions from the prefecture, anticipating that there could be a fight, one involving a fair number of insurgents, had ruled out the patrol’s splintering. The patrol set off again, leaving Jean Valjean behind them. Of all this movement, Jean Valjean saw nothing except the eclipse of the lantern which suddenly swung round the other way.

Before going off, the sergeant, to ease the conscience of the police officers, fired his carbine in the direction they were abandoning—at Jean Valjean. The explosion rolled through the basin, echoing along the way, as though the titanic tunnel’s gut were rumbling. A chunk of plaster fell into the stream and made the water splash a few feet from where he stood, alerting Jean Valjean to the fact that the musket ball had struck the vault above his head.

Slow and measured footsteps reverberated along the channel for a while, but they were more and more dampened the farther away they got; the pack of black shapes slunk into the gloom, a glimmer of light wavered and fluttered, turning the curved arch of the vault a kind of red, before dwindling and disappearing; silence once more fell, profound, blindness and deafness again took hold of the darkness, and Jean Valjean, not yet daring to move again, stayed for a long time with his back to the wall, ears pricked, eyes wide open, watching the vanishing phantom patrol.

THE MAN TAILED

WE MUST DO the police of the day justice and acknowledge that, even in the gravest political situations, they carried out their duty imperturbably as far as maintenance of roads and waterways and surveillance went. A riot was not in their eyes a reason for giving malefactors free rein and neglecting society just because the government was in peril. Ordinary duty was performed correctly through extraordinary duty and was in no way disturbed by it. In the middle of a totally unpredictable political event that had taken off, under pressure of a possible revolution, without letting himself be distracted by mere insurrections and barricades, a policeman would “tail” a thief.

It was precisely something of the kind that happened on the afternoon of June 6 down by the Seine, on the embankment of the right bank, a bit beyond the pont des Invalides.

There is no embankment there today. The whole look of the place has changed.

On this embankment, two men a certain distance apart looked to be eyeing each other, with one avoiding the other. The one up ahead was trying to get away, the one bringing up the rear was trying to close the gap.

It was like a game of chess being played at a distance, silently. Neither man seemed in a hurry; they both walked slowly as though each of them feared to cause his partner to step up the pace if he showed too much haste. It made you think of a hungry predator following its prey, but trying to look as though it wasn’t. The prey was cunning and kept on his guard.

The requisite distance between a hounded weasel and the mastiff hounding it was observed. The man trying to escape was a scrawny skinny-necked weed, the man going after him was a tall strapping man who looked hard as nails, and would no doubt be hard as nails if you went up against him.

The first, feeling himself to be the weaker, avoided the second, but he avoided him in a profoundly furious fashion; anyone observing him closely would have seen his eyes shining with the glum hostility of a man in flight and with all the menace there is in fear.

The embankment was deserted and cut-off, there was no one going by; not even a boatman or a longshoreman on the barges moored here and there.

You could not easily spot the two men except from the quai opposite, and for anyone studying them at that distance, the man in front would have looked as though his hackles were up, ragged and skulking as he was, fretful and shivering under a tattered smock, and the other man, like some classic official, wearing the overcoat of authority buttoned up to the chin. The reader would perhaps recognize the two men if they could see them a little closer.

What was the second man’s objective? Probably to dress the first man in something warmer.

When a man dressed by the state pursues a man in rags, it is to turn him, too, into a man dressed by the state. Only, the colour is the crux of the matter. To be dressed in blue is glorious; to be dressed in red1 is rather unpleasant. There is such a thing as low-life crimson. It was probably some unpleasantness and a shade of crimson of the kind that the first man hoped to elude.

If the second man let him walk ahead and had not yet seized him, it was, to all appearances, in the hopes of seeing him wind up at some important rendezvous with some gang worth nabbing with him that would amount to a good haul all around. This delicate operation is known as tailing.

What makes such a conjecture perfectly plausible is that the buttoned-up man, spotting from the embankment an empty fiacre going past, signalled to the driver, and the driver understood, evidently realized with whom he was dealing, turned around and began to follow the two men from the quai at a slow trot. This was not picked up by the shady character in rags walking ahead.

The fiacre rolled along under the trees of the Champs-Élysées. You could see the driver’s upper body above the parapet, whip in hand.

One of the secret instructions issued by the police to their officers contains this article: “Always have a hire car to hand, just in case.”

While manoeuvring, each on his side, with irreproachable strategy, the two men approached a ramp on the quai that went down to the embankment and which, in those days, allowed coach drivers coming from Passy to go down to the river to water their horses. This ramp has been removed since, in the interests of symmetry; the horses die of thirst, but the eye is flattered.

It seemed most likely that the man in the smock would run up this ramp in order to escape down the Champs-Élysées, a place adorned with trees, but also, on the other hand, heavily dotted with police officers, where the other man would have a helping hand.

This point of the quai is not very far from the house brought from Moret to Paris in 1824 by Colonel Brack, and known as the house of François I.2 A guardhouse sits right alongside it.

To the great surprise of his observer, the hounded man did not take the ramp to the watering place. He kept going along the embankment beside the quai. His position was becoming visibly critical. Apart from throwing himself in the Seine, what was he going to do?

No way back up to the quai now; no more ramp, no stairs; and they were very close to the bend in the Seine near the pont d’Iéna, where the embankment got narrower and narrower, tapering off in a skinny tongue before vanishing underwater. There he would inevitably find himself trapped between the sheer wall on his right, the river on his left and in front of him, and the powers that be at his heels.

It is true that the end of the embankment was hidden from sight by a heap of rubble six or seven feet high produced by some demolition or other. But was the man actually hoping to hide effectively behind a heap of rubble anyone could just walk around? The expedient would have been puerile. Surely he wouldn’t dream of it. The innocence of crooks has its limits.

The heap of debris made a sort of elevation at the water’s edge that extended as a promontory right up to the wall of the quai.

The man being followed reached this knoll and rounded it so that he couldn’t be seen anymore by the other man.

The latter could not see but neither could he be seen; he took advantage of that fact to abandon all dissimulation and step up the pace. In a few seconds he had reached the mound of rubble and turned it. There, he stopped in his tracks, stunned. The man he was hunting was no longer to be seen. The man in the smock had disappeared into thin air.

The embankment barely went on for another thirty paces from the heap of rubble before it dived below the water that lapped against the quai wall. The fugitive could not have thrown himself into the Seine or scaled the quai without being seen by the man following him. What had become of him?

The man with the buttoned-up coat walked to the very end of the embankment and stayed there a moment lost in thought, wildly clenching and unclenching his fists, his eyes darting about like a ferret’s. All of a sudden he slapped himself on the forehead. At the point where the ground ended and the water began, he had just clapped eyes on an iron gate, wide and low-lying, arched, fitted with a heavy lock and three massive hinges. This gate, a sort of door cut into the bottom of the quai, opened onto the river as much as onto the embankment. A blackish stream flowed at the bottom. This stream disgorged into the Seine.

On the other side of its heavy rusted iron bars you could make out a sort of tunnel, vaulted and black.

The man folded his arms and gave the gate a look of resentment.

Looking was not enough. He then tried to push it open; he rattled it, it resisted without budging. Yet it most likely had just been opened, even if he hadn’t heard a sound, which was pretty strange for such a rusty grate; but it had certainly been closed again. This showed that the man this door had just opened for had, not a hook, but a key.

This obvious fact came to the man in a flash, prompting him to shake the gate as hard as he could, and forcing out of him this roar of indignation: “The nerve of it! A government key!”

Then, instantly calming down, he gave vent to a whole inner world of ideas in a flurry of monosyllables spat out with almost ironic emphasis: “Well! Well! Well! Well!”

That said, hoping for who knows what—either to see the man emerge again or to see other men go in—he posted himself on the lookout behind the heap of rubble with the patient rage of a pointer.

For its part, the fiacre, which mirrored all his movements, had come to a halt above him alongside the parapet. The driver, foreseeing a long wait, fitted the muzzles of his horses into the nosebag of oats, wet at the bottom, which is so familiar to Parisians, being—this said in brackets—something the various governments sometimes apply to them. The rare passersby on the pont d’Iéna, before moving on, turned their heads to gaze for a moment at those two motionless features of the landscape, the man on the embankment, the fiacre on the quai.

HE, TOO, BEARS HIS CROSS

JEAN VALJEAN HAD CONTINUED on his course once more and did not stop again.

The going was more and more laborious. The level of the tunnels varies, the average height being about five feet six inches, based on a man’s height. Jean Valjean was forced to bend over so as not to bang Marius against the vaulted ceiling; he had to duck at every step, then straighten up again, groping the wall constantly. The dampness of the stones and the sliminess of the floor meant they were useless as supports, for either hands or feet. He stumbled in the city’s hideous shit heap. The intermittent reflections from the air vents appeared only at very widely spaced intervals and the light was so wan that daylight was like moonlight; all the rest was mist, miasma, opacity, blackness. Jean Valjean was hungry and thirsty; thirsty, especially; and that place, like the sea, is full of water that can’t be drunk. His strength, which, as we know, was prodigious and barely diminished a fraction with age thanks to his chaste and sober life, was beginning to give way. He was getting tired and as his strength diminished, the weight of his burden grew. Marius, who was perhaps dead, weighed heavily as inert bodies do. Jean Valjean was carrying him in such a way that his chest was not squashed and he could breathe as freely as possible. He could feel the rats darting between his legs. One of them was frightened enough to bite him. From time to time a breath of fresh air came to him through the covers of the manholes and revived him.

It might have been three in the afternoon when he reached the ring sewer. At first he was amazed at the sudden widening. He suddenly found himself in a gallery where his outstretched hands did not reach the walls on either side and beneath a vault that his head did not touch. The Grand Sewer is, indeed, eight feet wide and seven feet high.

At the point where the Montmartre sewer joins the Grand Sewer, two other underground galleries, that of the rue de Provence and that of the Abattoir, intersect and form a square. Having to choose between these four lanes anyone less wise would have been undecided. Jean Valjean took the widest, meaning the ring sewer. But this is where the question returned: uphill or downhill? He sensed the situation was urgent and that it was now vital to get to the Seine whatever the risk. In other words, to go downhill. He took the left.

And just as well for him that he did. For it would be a mistake to think that the ring sewer has two exits, one somewhere at Bercy, the other somewhere at Passy, and that it is, as its name would suggest, the underground ring around the Paris of the right bank. The Grand Sewer, you must remember, is nothing more than the old Ménilmontant stream and it ends, if you go up it, in a dead end—that is, in its old starting point, which was its spring, at the foot of the Ménilmontant knoll. It is not directly connected to the drain that collects the Paris runoff starting from the Popincourt quartier and emptying into the Seine through the Amelot sewer above the old Île Louviers. This drain, which completes the outfall sewer, is separated from it, under the rue Ménilmontant itself, by a solid wall that marks the drainage divide between the upstream and downstream runoff. If Jean Valjean had gone up the gallery, then after huge effort, shattering fatigue, gasping his last, in darkness, he would have hit a wall. He would have been sunk.

At a pinch, by retracing his steps a short distance and taking the Filles-du-Calvaire tunnel, on the condition of not hesitating at the underground bifurcation under the Boucherat junction but taking the Saint-Louis tunnel instead, then, on the left, the Saint-Gilles tunnel, then, by turning right and avoiding the Saint-Sébastien gallery, he would have been able to get to the Amelot sewer and from there, as long as he didn’t go astray in the sort of F-formation under the Bastille, he would have reached the outlet on the Seine near the Arsenal. But, to do that, he would have had to know the enormous coral reef that is the sewer inside out, along with all its ramifications and all its interconnections. Well, we said before and we’ll say it again, he knew nothing about this grisly network of tunnels in which he was wending his way; and if anyone had asked him what he was in, he would have answered: In the dark.

His instinct served him well. Going downhill did indeed mean possible salvation.

He left behind on his right the two tunnels that branch out in a claw shape under the rue Laffitte and the rue Saint-Georges and the long forked tunnel of the chaussée d’Antin.

A bit beyond a tributary that was most likely the Madeleine drain, he paused. He was very weary. A pretty big air vent, probably the manhole in the rue d’Anjou, provided an almost sharp light. With movements as gentle as those of a man handling his own wounded brother, Jean Valjean laid Marius down on the bank of the sewer. Marius’s bloody face looked to be lying at the bottom of a grave in the white light from the air vent. His eyes were closed, his matted hair stuck to his temples like dried brushes that had been dipped in the colour red, his hands hung down, lifeless, his limbs were cold, there was coagulated blood at the corners of his mouth. A clot of blood had built up in the knot of his cravat; his shirt was sinking into in his wounds, the cloth of his coat was rubbing against the gaping gashes in his living flesh. Jean Valjean pulled his clothes aside with the tips of his fingers and placed his hand on his chest; his heart was still beating. Jean Valjean ripped up his own shirt, bandaged the wounds as best he could and staunched the flowing blood; then, bending over the still-unconscious and almost unbreathing Marius in the twilit gloom, he glared at him with inexpressible hatred.

In disturbing Marius’s clothes, he had found in his pockets two things: the bread forgotten there since the day before and Marius’s wallet. He ate the bread and opened the wallet. In the first compartment he found the four lines written by Marius. You will recall them: My name is Marius Pontmercy. Take my body to my grandfather, Monsieur Gillenormand, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, no. 6, in the Marais.

Jean Valjean read these four lines in the light of the air vent and remained for a moment as though absorbed in himself, repeating to himself in a murmur: “rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, number six, Monsieur Gillenormand.” He put the wallet back in Marius’s pocket. He had eaten, his strength had returned; he put Marius on his back again, carefully rested his head on his right shoulder, and began descending the sewer again.

The Grand Sewer, aligned following the riverbed of the Ménilmontant valley, is almost two leagues long. It is paved for a considerable part of its course.

But this torch of Paris street names which we are shining for the reader’s benefit on Jean Valjean’s subterranean course, was not available to Jean Valjean. Nothing told him which part of the city he was crossing or what way he had come. Only the growing faintness of the pools and points of light he came across periodically showed him that the sun was withdrawing from the footpath above and day was gradually coming to a close; and the rumbling of the carriages overhead, having gone from endless to intermittent, then almost ceasing altogether, made him conclude that he was no longer under the centre of Paris, but was approaching some out-of-the-way area somewhere near the outer boulevards or the quais furthest away. Wherever there are fewer houses and fewer streets, the sewer has fewer air vents. The darkness was getting thicker around Jean Valjean. He continued to forge ahead, though, regardless, groping in the gloom.

This gloom promptly became terrible.

WITH SAND AS WITH WOMEN, THERE IS A KIND OF FINENESS THAT IS PERFIDIOUS

HE FELT THAT he was stepping into water and that he had beneath his feet not pavement now, but mud.

It sometimes happens, on certains stretches of Breton or Scottish coast, that a man, a traveller or a fisherman, trudging along the beach at low tide far from shore, suddenly realizes he has been struggling for some minutes. The sand is like pitch underfoot; his soles stick to it; it’s no longer sand, it’s glue. The beach is perfectly dry, but with every step a person takes, as soon as he lifts his foot, the footprint it leaves fills with water. The eye, though, has not registered any change; the vast wide beach is all of a piece and peaceful, everywhere the sand looks the same, nothing distinguishes solid ground from ground that no longer is; the little gleeful cloud of sandflies continues to hop tumultuously over the wayfarer’s feet. The man follows his route, forges straight ahead, leaning in toward the ground, tries to get closer to the hinterland. He is not worried. What’s there to worry about? Only, he feels somehow as though his feet are getting heavier with each step he takes. Suddenly, he sinks. He sinks by two or three inches. Clearly he is not on the right track; he stops to get his bearings. All of a sudden he looks at his feet. His feet have disappeared. The sand has buried them. He pulls his feet out of the sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he swivels round; he sinks deeper. The sand comes up to his ankles, he yanks himself out and throws himself to the left, the sand comes halfway up his calves, he throws himself to the right, the sand comes up to the backs of his knees. Then he recognizes with unspeakable terror that he is caught in quicksand and that that awful medium in which a man can no more walk than a fish can swim is lying under him. He chucks away his load if he has one, he lightens himself like a ship in distress. It is already too late, the sand is above his knees.

He calls out, he waves his hat or his handkerchief, the sand is gaining on him more and more; if the beach is deserted, if the land is too far away, if the sandbank is too notorious, if there is no hero about, then that’s it, he is condemned to being sucked down and buried alive. He is condemned to that appalling interment—long, inexorable, implacable, impossible to slow down or speed up, going on for hours, never-ending—that grabs you as you stand, free and in the pink of health, and pulls you by the feet and, at every effort you make, at every cry you let out, drags you under a bit farther; that seems to punish you for your resistance by redoubling its grip, that pulls a man slowly into the ground, leaving him all the time in the world to gaze at the horizon, the trees, the lush green countryside, the smoke from villages in the plain, the sails of ships out on the sea, the birds flying about and singing, the sun, the sky. Being sucked down is the sepulchre turned into the watery grave of a tide rising up from the ends of the earth to attack the living. Every minute means further entombment. The poor bastard tries to sit down, to lie down, to crawl; every move he makes buries him; he straightens up, he sinks down; he feels himself being engulfed; he screams, implores, cries out to the clouds, wrings his hands, despairs. There he is waist-deep in the sand; the sand reaches his chest; he is no more than a bust now. He raises his arms, groans furiously, clutches at the beach with his nails, tries to hold on to that ash, leans on his elbows to tear himself out of that soft sheath, sobs frantically; the sand rises. The sand reaches his shoulders, the sand reaches his neck; only his face is visible now. His mouth shouts, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still gaze, the sand shuts them; darkness. Then his forehead diminishes, a bit of hair flutters above the sand; a hand pops up, pokes a hole in the surface of the beach, flaps and shakes, then disappears. A man has been sinisterly erased.

Sometimes the rider gets sucked down with the horse; sometimes the carter gets sucked down with the cart; all sink beneath the beach. It is a shipwreck out of water. It is land drowning the man. Land, permeated by the ocean, becomes a trap. It offers itself as a plain and opens itself up like a wave. The abyss goes in for such treachery.

This fatal experience, always possible on this or that ocean beach, was also possible, thirty years ago, in the sewer of Paris. Before the major works begun in 1833 got off the ground, the underground network of Paris was subject to sudden cave-ins.

The water trickled down into certain underlying pockets of particularly friable soil; the channel floor, whether made of paving as in the old sewers, or of hydraulic cement over concrete as in the new galleries, having lost its support, buckled. A buckle in a floor of this nature means a crack; a crack means collapse. The channel floor would give way over a certain distance. This crevasse, a gap that was a gully of sludge, was known in the specialized language as subsidence. What is subsidence? It is the quicksand of the seaside suddenly encountered under the ground; it is the beach of Mont Saint-Michel1 in a sewer. The saturated soil behaves as though molten; all of its molecules are in suspension in a soft medium; it is not soil and it is not water. And this, sometimes to very great depth. There is nothing more awful than such an encounter. If water is predominant, death is swift, you are simply swallowed up; if soil is predominant, death is slow, you are sucked down inch by inch.

Can you imagine such a death? If being sucked down is appalling on a beach by the sea, what can it be like in the cloaca? Instead of the open air, bright sunlight, broad daylight, that clear horizon, those vast sounds, those free clouds raining down life, those boats just visible in the distance, hope in all its forms, people probably going by, help possible up until the last minute—instead of all that, deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a grave all ready and waiting, death in a bog under a lid, slow suffocation by feculence, a stone box where asphyxiation opens its claws in the mire and grabs you by the throat; fetid air mingling with your death rattle; slime instead of sand, sulphured hydrogen instead of a hurricane, ordure instead of the ocean! And you call out, and you grind your teeth, and you writhe, and struggle, and agonize, with this enormous city that is completely ignorant of all this, sitting there just above your head!

No words can express the horror of dying like this! Death sometimes redeems its atrociousness by a certain terrible dignity. At the stake, in a shipwreck, a person can be grand; in flames as in foam, a superb attitude is possible; you are transfigured in going down into the abyss. But not here. Death is dirty. Expiring here is humiliating. The last things you see floating by are base. Muck is synonymous with shame. It is small, ugly, vile. Die in a tun of marsala,2 like Clarence, if you have to; in the night-carter’s ditch, like d’Escoubleau, no, that is horrible. To struggle in it is ghastly; while you are fighting for your life, you squelch around paddling. It is dark enough to be hell, viscous enough to be no more than a slime pit, and the dying man can’t tell whether he will turn into a spectre or a toad. Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is grotesque.

The depth of subsidences varied, as well as their length and density, depending on how bad the quality of the subsoil was. Sometimes a subsidence was two or three feet deep, sometimes eight or ten; occasionally, the bottom could not be found. The muck would be almost solid in one place, almost liquid in another. In the Lunière subsidence,3 it would have taken a man a day to disappear, whereas he would have been devoured in five minutes flat in the Phélippeaux bog. Sludge’s load-bearing capacity varies with its density. A child can get away where a man is sunk. The first law of salvation is to shed any kind of weight. Chuck your tool bag or your sack or your hod. That was the first thing a sewer worker did when he felt the ground giving way under him.

Subsidences had different causes: the friability of the soil; a landslide at a depth below human reach; the violent showers of summer; the endless downpours of winter; long drizzle patches. Sometimes the weight of neighbouring houses on a marly or sandy ground bore down on the vaults of the underground galleries and caused them to warp, or else the sewer floor would burst and crack under the crushing pressure. The compression caused by the Panthéon obliterated in this way, a century ago, a section of the vaults of montagne Sainte-Geneviève. When a sewer slumped under pressure from houses, the chaos occasionally translated at street level as a sort of sawtoothed split between paving stones; this rent would snake all the way along the cracked vault and then, since the problem was visible, it could be promptly fixed. Just as often, the internal ravages did not reveal themselves by any external scar. In which case, woe betide the sewer workers. Stepping carelessly into the caved-in sewer, they could lose their lives there. The old records make mention of well sinkers buried alive in this way in subsidences. They list several names, among others the name of a sewerman who got bogged down when the sewer caved in under the square in the rue Carême-Prenant, a man named Blaise Poutrain. This Blaise Poutrain was the brother of Nicolas Poutrain, who was the last ditch-digger of the cemetery nicknamed the Slaughterhouse of the Innocents in 1785, the period when that particular cemetery died.

There was also the young and dashing vicomte d’Escoubleau4 we just referred to, one of the heroes of the siege of Lérida, where they mounted the attack in silk stockings, violins leading the way. D’Escoubleau, surprised one night at his cousin’s, the duchesse de Sourdis, drowned in a quagmire in the Beautrellis sewer, where he had sought refuge from the duc. Madame de Sourdis, when told of his death, asked for her smelling salts and forgot to weep, she was so busy sniffing the salts. In such cases, no love can hold up; the cloaca snuffs it out. Hero refuses to wash Leander’s dead body. Thisbe holds her nose in front of Pyramus5 and lets out a: “Pooh!” THE SUBSIDENCE

JEAN VALJEAN FOUND HIMSELF faced with a subsidence. This type of cave-in was then frequent in the subsoil of the Champs-Élysées, which did not really lend itself to hydraulic works and was not very good at preserving underground structures because of its excessive fluidity. For inconsistency this fluidity is even worse than the sands of the quartier Saint-Georges, which could only be defeated by a layer of dry stone revetment over concrete; even worse than the clay beds contaminated with gas of the quartier des Martyrs, which are so water-logged that the passage could only be dug out under the gallery des Martyrs by means of a cast-iron pipe. When, in 1836, they demolished, in order to rebuild it, the old stone sewer under the faubourg Saint-Honoré where we see Jean Valjean tangled up at this moment, the quicksand that forms the subsoil of the Champs-Élysées right down to the Seine was such an obstacle that the operation lasted close on six months, to the great hue and cry of local residents, especially those residents who owned mansions1 or coaches. The work was more than grueling; it was downright dangerous. It is true that it rained for four and a half months and that the Seine flooded three times.

The subsidence that Jean Valjean encountered was caused by the downpour the day before. The paved floor, poorly supported by the underlying sand, had buckled and blocked the flow of storm water, producing a flood. Seepage had occurred and collapse had followed. The broken-up floor had subsided into the sludge. For how long a stretch? Impossible to say. It was darker here than anywhere else. It was a mud hole in a cavern of pitch-black night.

Jean Valjean felt the pavement give way under him. He stepped into the mire. It was water on the surface, sludge at the bottom. He had to get through it. To go back the way he had come was out of the question. Marius was dying and Jean Valjean worn out. What other way was there? Jean Valjean plowed on. Besides, the bog did not seem too deep for the first few steps. But the farther he advanced, the deeper his feet sank in. He was soon knee-deep in sludge and more than knee-deep in water. He trudged on, holding Marius as high as he could with both arms above the water. The sludge now came up over his knees and the water to his waist. It was already too late to turn back. He was sinking deeper and deeper. The sludge was dense enough to hold one man’s weight but evidently could not bear two. Separately, Marius and Jean Valjean would have had a chance to get out. Jean Valjean continued to advance, holding up the dying man who was, perhaps, already a corpse.

The water came up to his armpits; he felt himself foundering; he could hardly move, the muck was so deep. Its density, which was its load-bearing support, was also the obstacle. He kept Marius aloft and, with an unbelievable show of strength, made headway; but he was sinking fast. Now only his head was out of water and the arms that held Marius aloft. In old paintings of the Flood, you’ll see a mother holding her child in the same manner.

He sank even deeper, throwing his head back to avoid swallowing water and to be able to breathe; to anyone there in the darkness he would have looked like a mask floating in the dark; he dimly caught sight of Marius’s head hanging down above him and his livid face; he made a desperate effort and thrust his foot out; his foot hit something solid. A foothold. High time.

He straightened up and twisted round and rooted himself firmly on that support in a kind of fit of fury. It was, for him, like the first step of a flight of stairs leading back up to life.

The support, encountered in the muck just in the nick of time, just as he was about to go under, was the start of the other side of the sewer floor that had folded without breaking up and buckled under the water like a board, in one piece. A well-built pavement forms an arch and is good and solid like this. This fragment of the floor, partly submerged but solid, was a veritable ramp and, once he was on the ramp, Jean Valjean climbed up the inclined plane to the other side of the bog.

Emerging from the water, he hit a rock and fell to his knees. This seemed fitting to him and he stayed there a while, his soul plunged in we know not what words to God.

He got to his feet, shivering, frozen, rank, bent under the dying man he was lugging, all streaming with muck, his soul full of a strange light.

SOMETIMES WE HAVE RUN AGROUND WHEN WE THINK WE HAVE LANDED

HE SET OUT again once more.

But if he had not left his life behind in the subsidence, he seemed to have left his strength there. That last supreme effort had polished him off. He was now so weary that every three or four steps he was forced to stop to get his breath and he would lean against the wall. Once, he had to sit down on the bank of the channel to change Marius’s position and he thought he would never get up. But if his vigour was gone, his spirit was not. He got up.

He walked on in desperation, almost fast, went about a hundred paces in this fashion without lifting his head, almost without breathing, when all of a sudden he banged into a wall. He had reached a sharp bend in the sewer and, arriving at the turn with his head down, had struck the wall. He looked up and at the end of the tunnel up ahead, in front of him, a long way down, a very long way down, he saw a light. It was not the terrible light of before; it was good, white light. It was daylight. Jean Valjean could see the way out.

A damned soul suddenly spotting the way out of Gehenna,1 from the middle of the blazing furnace of hell, would feel what Jean Valjean then felt. They would fly frantically with the stumps of their burned wings toward that radiant door. Jean Valjean no longer felt tired, he no longer felt Marius’s weight, his calves once more became calves of steel, he didn’t walk, he ran. As he approached, the exit stood out more and more distinctly. It was a circular arch, not as high as the vault, which got smaller by degrees, and not as wide as the gallery, which got narrower at the same time that the vault got lower. The tunnel ended like the inside of a funnel, tightening severely in imitation of the gates of houses of detention—logical in a jail, illogical in a sewer and since corrected.

Jean Valjean reached the exit. There, he stopped. It was indeed an outlet, but there was no way out.

The arch was sealed off by a heavy gate and this gate, which, to all appearances, rarely turned on its oxidized hinges, was held fast in its stone frame by a heavy lock, red with rust, that looked like an enormous brick. You could see the keyhole and the robust sliding bolt driven deep into the iron staple. The lock was visibly locked with a double turn. It was one of those fortress locks that were rampant in the old lock-crazy Paris.

Beyond the gate, there was the open air, the river, sunlight, the embankment, very narrow but wide enough to get away, the distant quais, Paris, that bottomless pit where a person can so easily hide, the wide horizon, freedom. To the right, downriver, you could make out the pont d’Iéna, and, on the left, up-river, the pont des Invalides; the spot would have been just right for waiting till nightfall and escaping. It was one of the most deserted places in Paris: the embankment fronting the Gros-Caillou. Flies came and went through the bars of the gate.

It might have been eight-thirty in the evening. The day was coming to a close.

Jean Valjean laid Marius down along the wall on the dry part of the floor channel, then went up to the gate and gripped the bars with both hands; the shaking was frenetic, the shock nonexistent. The gate did not budge. Jean Valjean seized each bar, one by one, hoping to be able to tear out the least sturdy and use it as a lever to lift up the gate or break the lock. Not one bar shifted. A tiger’s teeth are no firmer in their sockets. No lever; no possible purchase. The obstacle was invincible. There was no way of opening the gate.

Must he end it all there, then? What to do? What would happen to them? Should he go back, do the frightening course he had already covered all over again? He did not have the strength. Besides, how could he cross that bog once more when it was a miracle they had got through it in the first place? And after the bog, what about the police patrol? He would not escape that lot twice, that much was certain. And, anyway, where would he go? What direction would he take? Following the downhill slope did not mean reaching the goal. Should a person make it to some other exit, he would find it blocked off by some other plug or grate. All the exits were indubitably sealed off in this fashion. Chance had unsealed the grate by which they had entered, but obviously all the other sewer outlets and manholes were shut tight. They had only succeeded in escaping into a prison.

The jig was up. All that Jean Valjean had done was useless. God would not have it.

They were caught, the two of them, in the gloomy immense web of death, and Jean Valjean could feel that horrible spider running along the trembling black threads in the darkness.

He turned his back to the gate and flopped down on the stone floor, flattened rather than sitting, next to the ever-motionless Marius, and his head sank between his knees. No way out. As far as anguish went, this was the last straw.

Who did he think of in his profound devastation? Not of himself, nor of Marius. He thought of Cosette.

THE TORN BIT OF COAT

IN THE MIDDLE of his annihilation a hand clapped on his shoulder and a voice that was low said to him: “Go you halves.” Was there someone in that gloom? Nothing is more dreamlike than despair. Jean Valjean thought he was dreaming. He had not heard any footsteps. Was it possible? Could it be? He looked up. A man was planted in front of him.

This man was dressed in a smock; he was barefoot; he was holding his shoes in his left hand; he had obviously taken them off to approach Jean Valjean without being heard.

Jean Valjean was not in doubt for a moment. As unforeseen as the encounter was, the man was known to him. The man was Thénardier.

Although woken up, so to speak, with a start, Jean Valjean was used to being on the alert and on the lookout for unexpected blows that you have to swiftly parry, and he once more and without further ado regained his presence of mind. Besides, the situation could hardly get any worse; at a certain level of distress a crescendo is no longer possible and even Thénardier could not make the night any blacker.

There was a moment’s silence.

Thénardier raised his right hand to his forehead and shaded his eyes with it; then he knitted his eyebrows together as he blinked, which, along with a slight pursing of the mouth, typifies the sagacious attention of a man straining to place another man. He did not succeed. Jean Valjean, as we say, had his back to the light and was in any case so disfigured, so covered with mud and blood, that at high noon he would have been unrecognizable. On the other hand, lit up from the front by the light coming through the gate which shone full in his face, the light of a cellar, it is true, livid but sharp in its lividity, Thénardier, as the lively if trite metaphor has it, stood out plain as day to Jean Valjean. This imbalance in the situation was enough to ensure Jean Valjean had an advantage in the mysterious duel that was about to begin between the two men in their two opposing camps. In the encounter that took place, Jean Valjean was veiled and Thénardier unmasked.

Jean Valjean saw right away that Thénardier did not recognize him.

They studied each other for a moment in the half-light as though each was taking the other’s measure. Thénardier was the first to break the silence.

“How are you going to get out?”

Jean Valjean did not answer. Thénardier went on: “No way you can pick the lock. You’ve got to get out of here, though.” “That’s true,” said Jean Valjean.

“Well, then, go you halves.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve killed the man; fine. Me, I’ve got the key.”

Thénardier pointed to Marius. He continued: “I don’t know you, but I’d like to help you. Only, you’ve got to be a friend.” Jean Valjean began to understand. Thénardier took him for a murderer. Thénardier resumed: “Listen, comrade. You didn’t kill this geezer without seeing what he had in his pockets. Give me my half. And I’ll open the gate for you.” And pulling a huge key halfway out from under his badly torn smock, he added: “Would you like to see how the key to freedom’s made? Here it is.” Jean Valjean “stayed dumb”—the expression is Corneille the elder’s1—to the point of doubting that what he saw was real. It had to be Providence taking on a horrible guise, with the good angel crawling out of the ground in the form of Thénardier.

Thénardier thrust his fist into a big pocket hidden under his smock, fished around, pulled out a rope, and held it out to Jean Valjean.

“Here,” he said. “I’ll throw in the rope while I’m at it.”

“A rope, what for?”

“You’ll need a stone, too, but you’ll find plenty outside. There’s a heap of rubble out there.”

“A stone, what for?”

“Idiot. If you’re going to throw this mug in the river, you’ll need a rope and a stone; without ‘em, it’ll bob up and float on the water.” Jean Valjean took the rope. There is no one who hasn’t taken what they are offered without thinking.

Thénardier snapped his fingers as though he’d just had a brain wave:

“Ah, right, comrade, while I think of it: How the hell did you manage to get out of the bog back there? I wasn’t taking any chances myself. Pooh! You stink.” After a pause, he added: “I’m asking you questions but you’re right not to answer. It’s your bit of an apprenticeship for the cursed quarter of an hour in front of the examining magistrate. And then again, if you don’t talk at all, you don’t run the risk of talking too loud. It’s all the same to me. Just because I can’t see your face and don’t know your name, you’d be wrong to think I don’t know who you are and what you want. I know all right. You’ve knocked this gentleman around a bit and now you’d like to tuck him away somewhere safe. What you need is the river, the great cover-upper-of-stuff-ups. I’m about to get you out of your predicament. Help out a mate in trouble, that’s right up my alley.” While applauding Jean Valjean for holding his tongue, he was clearly trying to get him to speak. He gave his shoulder a shove to try and get a look at him side-on, and cried, though without raising his voice above the middle register he favoured: “Speaking of that boghole, you’re a bit finicky, aren’t you? Why didn’t you just dump the geezer in there?” Jean Valjean remained silent. Thénardier went on, hoisting the old rag that served him as a cravat up as far as his Adam’s apple, a gesture that completes the capable air of a man to be reckoned with: “Actually, you probably acted wisely. When the workers come tomorrow to patch up the hole they’d have found the poor sucker left there, for sure, and bit by bit, one way or another, they’d have been able to sniff you out and track you down. Someone’s come through the sewer? Who? How’d he get out? Where? Did anyone see him come out? The police have got eyes in the back of their heads. The sewer’s treacherous and gives you away. Such a find is a rarity, it attracts attention, not many people use the sewer to go about their business, whereas the river’s anybody’s. The river, that’s the real cemetery in this town. After a month, they fish up your man for you in the Saint-Cloud nets. So, who gives two hoots? It’s a decaying carcass, for Christ’s sake! Who killed the man? Paris. And the law doesn’t even put up a notice. You did the right thing.” The more loquacious Thénardier was, the more mute Jean Valjean. Thénardier shoved his shoulder again.

“Now, to conclude our business. We’ll divvy it up. You’ve seen my key, now show me your money.”

Thénardier was haggard, smelly, sleazy, a bit threatening, yet friendly. One thing was strange; Thénardier’s manner was not natural; he didn’t look entirely at ease; while he didn’t exactly affect an air of mystery, he kept his voice low; from time to time he placed a finger over his mouth and murmured: sshhh! It was hard to guess why. There was no one there but the two of them. Jean Valjean thought that other bandits were perhaps hidden in some recess, not far away, and that Thénardier was not too keen to share any spoils with them.

Thénardier resumed: “Let’s get it over with, then. How much did this dunce here have in his pouch?”

Jean Valjean felt around in his pockets.

It was, as you will recall, his custom to always have money on him. The grim life of expediency that he was condemned to lead made this a rule for him. This time, however, he was caught off guard. In donning his National Guard uniform the night before, gloomily absorbed as he was, he had forgotten to take his wallet with him. All he had was a few loose coins in his waistcoat pocket. It only amounted to thirty or so francs! He turned his pocket inside out, all soaked with muck, and then set out a gold louis, two five-franc pieces, and five or six gros sous on the curb of the channel floor.

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

“You didn’t kill him for much,” he said.

He started to pat, in all familiarity, Jean Valjean’s pockets, followed by Marius’s pockets. Jean Valjean, concerned above all with keeping his back to the light, let him go ahead. While he handled Marius’s coat, Thénardier, with the dexterity of a conjurer and unbeknownst to Jean Valjean, managed to tear off a strip that he hid under his smock, probably thinking that this piece of cloth could later serve him to identify the man killed and the killer. Otherwise he did not come up with a sou more than the thirty francs.

“It’s true,” he said, “the two of you together, that’s all you’re good for.”

And, forgetting his phrase “go you halves,” he took the lot.

He did hesitate a bit before the gros sous but, upon reflection, took those, too, grumbling: “Bugger it! It’s knifing people too cheap.” This done, he pulled the key out of his smock once more.

“Now, friend, you can go. It’s just like at the fair here, you pay as you go. You’ve paid, now go.”

And he started to laugh.

In offering a stranger the aid of this key and getting some man other than himself out through the gate, did he have the pure and disinterested intention of saving a murderer? That is something you may be forgiven for doubting.

Thénardier helped Jean Valjean get Marius back on his shoulders, then he headed for the gate on his bare feet, tiptoeing, beckoning to Jean Valjean to follow him; he peered outside, placed a finger to his lips and remained sort of suspended for a few seconds; the inspection done, he put the key in the lock. The bolt slid and the gate turned. There was no squeaking, no grating. It happened very smoothly. Clearly, the gate and the hinges were carefully oiled and opened more often than you would have thought. The smoothness was sinister; you could feel in it the furtive comings and goings, the silent entrances and exits of nocturnal men and the wolflike tread of crime. The sewer was evidently in cahoots with some mysterious gang. That taciturn gate was a receiver of stolen goods—a “fence.” Thénardier cracked the gate open, left just enough room for Jean Valjean to squeeze through, then shut it again, turned the key twice in the lock, and plunged back into the darkness, quiet as a breath. He seemed to walk with the velvet pads of a tiger. A moment later, that repulsive saviour had melted back into the invisible.

Jean Valjean found himself outside.

MARIUS LOOKS TO BE DEAD TO ONE WHO KNOWS

HE LET MARIUS slide down onto the embankment. They were outside!

The miasmas, the darkness, the horror, were behind him. The healthful, pure, vital, joyful, freely breathable air flooded him. All around him was silence, but the lovely silence of the sun going down in the bright blue sky. Twilight had fallen; night, that great liberator, the friend of all those who need the cover of darkness to surface from some torment, was on the way. The sky offered itself everywhere you looked as an enormous calm. The river lapped at his feet with the soft smack of a kiss. You could hear the overhead dialogue of birds in their nests bidding each other good evening in the elms of the Champs-Élysées. A few stars, feebly punctuating the pale blue of the zenith and visible only to daydreamers, made barely perceptible points of splendour in the infinite vastness.

It was that undecided and exquisite hour that says neither yes nor no. It was already dark enough for a person to be able to be lost from sight in it at some remove and still light enough for a person to be recognizable up close.

For a few seconds, Jean Valjean was irresistibly overcome by all that awesome yet soft serenity; such moments of forgetting occur; suffering stops harassing the miserable; all worry slips away; peace wraps the dreamer like night; and in the glow of twilight the soul twinkles with stars, mimicking the sky as it lights up. Jean Valjean could not help but contemplate this vast bright darkness above him; pensive, he bathed in ecstasy and prayer within the magnificent silence of the eternal heavens. Then, swiftly, as though a sense of duty was coming back to him, he bent down to Marius and, scooping up some water in the palm of his hand, gently threw a few drops over his face. Marius’s eyelids did not lift; but he breathed through his half-open mouth.

Jean Valjean was about to plunge his hand in the river again when all of a sudden he felt strangely uneasy, as you do when you know someone is behind you, even though you can’t see them. We have talked about this feeling, which everyone is familiar with, before. He wheeled round.

Someone was indeed behind him, just as there had been a moment ago.

A tall man, wrapped in a long redingote, with his arms folded, the lead knob of a club showing in his right hand, was standing a few feet behind Jean Valjean as he crouched over Marius.

There in the gloaming, it seemed to be a sort of apparition. A simple man would have been frightened of it because of the gathering dark, and a reflective man because of the club. Jean Valjean knew that it was Javert.

The reader has no doubt guessed that Thénardier’s tracker was none other than Javert. Javert, after his unhoped-for exit from the barricade, had gone to the prefecture of police, had given a verbal report to the prefect in person during a brief audience, then had immediately resumed his duties, which involved—you will remember the note seized on him earlier—a certain surveillance of the right bank embankment at the Champs-Élysées, which had excited the attention of the police for some time. There, he had spotted Thénardier and followed him. You know the rest.

You will also understand that the gate that so obligingly opened for Jean Valjean was a bit of cunning on Thénardier’s part. Thénardier could smell that Javert was still around; a watched man has a scent that does not let him down; he had to throw the bloodhound a bone. A murderer, what a godsend! It meant cutting his losses, which is an option a person must never turn down. Thénardier, in shoving Jean Valjean outside in his stead, gave the police a bit of bait, threw them off his own scent, got himself overlooked in a much bigger haul, rewarded Javert for waiting, which always placates a police spy, earned himself thirty francs, and found a means, one he was certainly counting on, of bolting with the aid of this diversion.

Jean Valjean had gone from one pitfall to another.

These two encounters, one right after the other, first Thénardier, then Javert, shook him up.

Javert did not recognize Jean Valjean, who, as we say, did not look himself at the moment. He kept his arms folded, quietly ensured his club was firmly in hand, and said in a calm, brisk voice: “Who are you?” “Me.”

“Who is me?”

“Jean Valjean.”

Javert stuck the club between his teeth, bent his knees, leaned forward, placed his two powerful hands on Jean Valjean’s shoulders, clamping them like two vices, examined him and saw that it was him. Their faces were almost touching. Javert’s gaze was terrible.

Jean Valjean remained inert under Javert’s grip like a lion submitting to the claws of a lynx.

“Inspector Javert,” he said, “you’ve got me. Besides, since this morning, I’ve considered myself your prisoner. I didn’t give you my address in order to try and get away from you. Take me. Only, grant me one thing.” Javert seemed not to hear. He bored into Jean Valjean with his hard stare. His puckered chin pushed his lips up toward his nose, a sign of fierce musing. Finally, he let go of Jean Valjean, straightened up all in one go, took his club fully in hand, and, as in a dream, murmured more than spoke these questions: “What are you doing here? And who is this man?” He continued using vous rather than tu in addressing Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean answered, and the sound of his voice seemed to wake Javert: “He is precisely what I wanted to speak to you about. Do what you like with me, but first help me get him home. That’s all I ask you.” Javert’s face tensed the way it did whenever anyone believed him capable of some concession. Yet he did not say no.

He bent down again, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped Marius’s bloody forehead.

“This man was at the barricade,” he said in a small voice, as though speaking to himself. “He’s the one they called Marius.” A first-class spy, the man had observed all, heard all, absorbed all, and retained all, believing himself about to die; he went on spying even at death’s door; even with one foot in the grave, he went on taking notes.

He seized Marius’s hand, looked for a pulse.

“He’s one of the wounded,” said Jean Valjean.

“He’s one of the dead,” said Javert.

Jean Valjean answered: “No. Not yet.”

“So, you carried him here from the barricade?” observed Javert.

He must have been very preoccupied indeed for him not to dwell on this troubling rescue via the sewer, not even to notice Jean Valjean’s silence at his question.

Jean Valjean, for his part, seemed to have only one thought. He resumed: “He lives in the Marais, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, with his grandfather—I forget the name.” Jean Valjean fumbled in Marius’s coat, pulled out the wallet, opened it at the page pencilled in by Marius, and handed it to Javert.

There was still enough light floating in the air to be able to read by. Javert, moreover, had the catlike phosphorescence of night owls in his eyes. He deciphered the few lines written by Marius and muttered: “Gillenormand, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, number six.” Then he yelled: “Driver!”

You will remember the fiacre was waiting, just in case.

Javert held onto Marius’s wallet.

A moment later, the carriage, which had come down the watering-hole ramp, was on the embankment, Marius was lifted onto the back seat, and Javert was sitting next to Jean Valjean on the front seat.

When the door was shut again, the fiacre pulled away rapidly, going back along the quais in the direction of the Bastille.

They turned off the quais and into the streets. The driver, a black silhouette on his box, whipped his bony horses. Icy silence inside the fiacre. Marius, motionless, his body propped up against the back corner, his head lolling on his chest, arms dangling, legs stiff, appeared to be waiting now only for a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed to be made of shadow, and Javert, of stone; and in this carriage full of night, whose interior turned a livid white, as though struck by intermittent lightning, every time it passed a lamp, chance seemed to have brought together in grim confrontation three tragic immobilities, the corpse, the spectre, and the statue.

RETURN OF THE SON PRODIGAL WITH HIS LIFE

AT EVERY JOLT from the pavement, a drop of blood fell from Marius’s hair. Night had closed in by the time the fiacre pulled up at no. 6, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.

Javert was first to set foot on the ground, took in at a glance the number above the porte cochère, and lifting up the heavy wrought-iron knocker, embellished in the old-fashioned way with a billy goat and a satyr clashing, gave it a violent bang. One side of the double door cracked open a little and Javert gave it a shove. The porter stuck his head out, yawning, vaguely awake, candle in hand.

Everyone in the house was asleep. They go to bed early in the Marais, especially on days when there’s a riot on. This good old quartier, scared stiff by the revolution, takes refuge in sleep, just as children, when they hear the bogeyman coming, quickly duck their heads under the covers.

Meanwhile, Jean Valjean and the driver lifted Marius out of the fiacre, Jean Valjean holding him under the armpits and the driver under the knees.

While he was carrying Marius in this fashion, Jean Valjean slipped a hand under his clothes, which were pretty much torn to shreds, and felt his chest to reassure himself that his heart was still beating. It was even beating a little less feebly as if the motion of the carriage had produced a certain return to life.

Javert called out to the porter in the tone appropriate for the government to take with the porter of a troublemaker: “Anyone here by the name of Gillenormand?” “That’s here. What do you want with him?”

“We’ve brought his son home for him.”

“His son?” said the porter in a daze.

“He’s dead.”

Jean Valjean, who came up behind Javert, ragged and dirty, and whom the porter regarded with some horror, motioned to him with his head that he was not. The porter did not seem to understand either Javert’s words or Jean Valjean’s signs.

Javert continued: “He’s been at the barricade, and now, here he is.”

“At the barricade!” cried the porter.

“He’s gone and got himself killed. Go and wake up the father.”

The porter did not budge.

“Go on, then!” Javert barked.

And he added: “There will be a funeral here tomorrow.”

For Javert, the usual incidents of the public highway were classified according to category, which is the basis of foresight and oversight, and every eventuality had its pigeonhole; the possible facts were filed away in drawers, so to speak, from where they emerged, as the occasion arose, in variable quantities; there was, in the street, a bit of a racket, a bit of a riot, a bit of a carnival, a bit of a funeral.

The porter went no further than waking up Basque. Basque woke up Nicolette, Nicolette woke up Aunt Gillenormand. As for the grandfather, they let him sleep on, telling themselves he’d find out soon enough.

They carried Marius up to the first floor, without anyone, moreover, knowing anything about it in the other parts of the house, and they laid him out on an old sofa in Monsieur Gillenormand’s antechamber; and while Basque went off to look for a doctor and Nicolette opened the linen cupboards, Jean Valjean felt Javert tap him on the shoulder. He understood and went back downstairs with Javert following hot on his heels.

The porter watched them leave just as he had watched them arrive, in drowsy horror. They climbed back up into the fiacre, and the driver onto his box.

“Inspector Javert,” said Jean Valjean, “grant me one more thing.”

“What?” asked Javert rudely.

“Let me go back to my place for a moment. After that, you can do what you like with me.”

Javert remained silent for a few moments, with his chin tucked into the collar of his coat; then he pulled down the window in front.

“Driver,” he said, “rue de l’Homme-Armé, number seven.”

THE ABSOLUTE, ROCKED

THEY DID NOT open their mouths again the entire trip.

What did Jean Valjean want? To finish what he had started; to warn Cosette, to tell her where Marius was, perhaps give her some other useful information, and make, if he could, certain final arrangements. As for himself, as for what concerned him personally, it was all over; he had been nabbed by Javert and did not resist; anyone else, in such a situation, might perhaps have thought vaguely of the rope that Thénardier had given him and of the bars of the first dungeon that he would enter; but since the bishop, Jean Valjean, when confronted by any violence, including against himself, felt a profoundly religious hesitation. We cannot stress this point enough.

Suicide, that mysterious assault and battery against the unknown, which may to a certain extent involve the death of the soul, was impossible for Jean Valjean.

At the entrance to the rue de l’Homme-Armé, the fiacre stopped. The street was too narrow for carriages to be able to go in. Javert and Jean Valjean got down.

The driver humbly pointed out to “Monsieur l’inspecteur” that the Utrecht velvet of his carriage was all stained by the blood of the murdered man and by the mud of the murderer. That was what he had understood, anyway. He added that some kind of compensation was due to him. At the same time, pulling his notebook out of his pocket, he begged Monsieur l’inspecteur to have the goodness to write down for him “a bit of a statement to that effect.” Javert pushed away the notebook the driver held out to him and said: “How much do you need, being on standby and the trip itself included?” “There’s seven and a quarter hours,” answered the driver, “and my velvet was brand-new. Eighty francs, Monsieur l’inspecteur.” Javert took four napoléons out of his pocket and sent the fiacre packing.

Jean Valjean thought Javert intended to conduct him on foot to the Blancs-Manteaux guardhouse or the Archives guardhouse, which are both close by. They stepped into the street. It was, as usual, deserted. Javert followed Jean Valjean. They reached no. 7. Jean Valjean knocked. The door opened.

“Good,” said Javert. “Go up.”

He added with a strange expression, as though it cost him quite an effort to speak in such a way: “I’ll wait for you here.” Jean Valjean looked at Javert. This way of doing things was not at all in Javert’s repertoire. Yet the fact that Javert now displayed a sort of arrogant confidence, the confidence of a cat allowing a mouse the freedom of the length of its claw, resolved as Jean Valjean was to give himself up and have done with it—this could hardly surprise him much. He pushed the door, stepped into the house, shouted to the porter, who was in bed and had pulled the cord from his bed without getting up, “It’s me!” and mounted the stairs.

When he reached the first floor, he paused. All painful paths have their stations. The window on the landing, which was a sash window, was open. As in many old houses, the stairway let in the light and looked onto the street. The streetlamp, standing exactly opposite, threw light on the stairs and that meant economizing on lighting.

Jean Valjean, either to take a breath of air, or simply without thinking, stuck his head out the window, and leaned out over the street. It is a short street and the lamp lit it from one end to the other. Jean Valjean felt suddenly dizzy with amazement; there was no one there anymore.

Javert had gone.

THE GRANDFATHER

BASQUE AND THE porter had carried Marius into the salon and he was still stretched out motionless on the sofa where they had first laid him. The doctor, who had been sent for, had come running. Aunt Gillenormand had got out of bed.

Aunt Gillenormand came and went, aghast, clutching her hands, unable to do anything but mutter: “God, is it possible?” She added an occasional: “Everything will be covered in blood!” When the initial horror had subsided, a certain philosophical attitude toward the situation came over her and was translated into this exclamation: “It was bound to end this way!” She did not go so far as the “I told you so!” that is customary on such occasions.

On the doctor’s orders, a camp bed had been set up next to the sofa. The doctor examined Marius and, after establishing that there was a persistent pulse, that the wounded man had no deep stab wounds in his chest, and that the blood at the corner of his mouth came from his nasal cavity, he had him laid out flat on the bed, without a pillow, his head level with his body, and even a bit lower, and his chest bare to facilitate breathing. At the sight of them undressing Marius, Mademoiselle Gillenormand withdrew. She began saying her rosary in her room.

Marius had no internal injuries; a bullet, absorbed by his wallet, had swerved and raked across his ribs in a hideous gash but without going deep, and so without danger. The long trip underground had completed the dislocation of his broken collarbone and there were serious complications there. His arms had sabre cuts. No scar disfigured his face; his head, on the other hand, was badly hacked about; what would become of these head wounds? Did they stop at the scalp? Did they eat into the skull? It was not yet possible to say. One grave symptom was that they had caused unconsciousness and you don’t always recover from unconsciousness of the kind. The haemorrhaging, moreover, had worn the wounded man out. But below the waist, the lower part of his body had been protected by the barricade.

Basque and Nicolette ripped up linen and prepared bandages; Nicolette sewed them, Basque rolled them up. There being no lint, the doctor had staunched the blood flowing from the wounds with wads of cotton wool for the time being. Beside the bed, three candles burned on a table where the surgical instruments were spread out. The doctor washed Marius’s face and hair with cold water. A full bucket turned red in an instant. The porter stood by, his candle in hand, providing the light.

The doctor seemed lost in sad thoughts. From time to time, he shook his head as though answering some question he had silently put to himself. They were a bad sign for the sick man, these mysterious conversations the doctor had with himself.

Just as the doctor was wiping Marius’s face and gently touching his still-closed lids, a door opened at the back of the salon and a long pale figure appeared. It was the grandfather.

For two days the riot had strongly agitated, outraged, and preoccupied Monsieur Gillenormand. He had not been able to sleep a wink the night before and had had a fever all day. That evening, he had gone to bed far earlier than usual, advising that everything in the house be locked up, and he had finally dozed off from sheer fatigue Old men’s sleep is fragile; Monsieur Gillenormand’s room was next door to the salon, and no matter what precautions they may have taken, the noise had woken him up. Surprised at the crack of light he saw under his door, he had got out of bed and groped his way along.

He was standing at the half-open door, with one hand on the doorknob, his head tipped forward a little and wobbling, his body wrapped tightly in a white dressing gown as rigid and wrinkle-free as a shroud, astonished; and he looked like a phantom peering into a tomb.

He saw the bed, and on the mattress this young man covered in blood, white with a waxy whiteness, eyes closed, mouth agape, lips pale, naked to the waist, slashed to ribbons with dark red wounds, lying there motionless under harsh light.

The grandfather shivered from head to toe, as much as ossified limbs can shiver, and his eyes, their corneas yellow due to his great age, filmed over with a sort of glassy gleam. His whole face instantly took on the ashen boniness of a skeleton’s head, his arms fell dangling as though a spring in them had broken, and his stupor expressed itself in the way he spread the fingers of his two badly shaking old hands, his knees buckled forward, showing his poor bare legs bristling with white hairs through the gap in his dressing gown, and he murmured: “Marius!” “Monsieur,” said Basque, “they have just brought Monsieur home. He was at the barricade and—”

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

Then a sort of sepulchral transfiguration made this centenarian stand as tall and erect as a young man.

“Monsieur,” he said, “you are the doctor. Begin by telling me one thing. He is dead, isn’t he?”

The doctor, in a paroxysm of anxiety, remained silent.

Monsieur Gillenormand wrung his hands with a frightening burst of laughter.

“He’s dead! He’s dead! He got himself killed at the barricades! Out of hatred for me! It’s to spite me that he did that! Ah, bloodsucker! This is the way he comes back to me! Misery of my life, he’s dead!” He went to the window, flung it open wide as though he was suffocating, and, standing facing the darkness, he started talking to the night out there in the street: “Riddled with holes, sabred, butchered, exterminated, hacked to pieces, carved up! You see that, the little rogue! He knew very well that I was waiting for him, and that I had them fix up his room and that I had them hang his portrait from when he was a little boy by my bed! He knew very well that he only had to come back and that I’d been calling him back for years and that I spent every night in my corner by the fire with my hands on my knees not knowing what to do, losing my mind worrying about him! You knew all that very well, and that you only had to come home and say, ‘It’s me’ and you’d be master of the house and that I’d do whatever you said and that you could do whatever you liked with your old codger of a grandfather! You knew that very well, and you said: ‘No, he’s a royalist, I won’t go!’ And off you went to the barricades, and you got yourself killed out of spite! To get revenge for what I said to you about Monsieur le duc de Berry! That’s what’s so despicable! Go to bed, then, and sleep soundly. He is dead. That’s what I’ve got to wake up to.” The doctor, who was beginning to worry on both scores, left Marius for a moment and went over to Monsieur Gillenormand and took his arm. The grandfather spun round, looked at him with widened bloodshot eyes, and said to him calmly: “Monsieur, I thank you. I am calm, I am a man, I saw the death of Louis XVI, I know how to bear up under events. There is one thing that is terrible, though, and that is to think that it is your newspapers that do all the damage. You can have all the scribblers, gasbags, lawyers, orators, tribunes, debates, progress, enlightenment, rights of man, freedom of the press you want, and this is how they bring your children back home for you! Ah, Marius! It’s abominable! Killed! Dead before me! A barricade! Ah, the little cur! Doctor, you live in the neighbourhood, I believe? Oh, I know you well. I see your cabriolet going by from my window. Let me tell you something. You’d be mistaken to think I’m angry. One does not get angry at a dead man. That would be stupid. I raised this child, you see. I was already old when he was still only a toddler. He used to play in the Tuileries with his little spade and his little chair, and so the keepers would not scold him, I’d get my cane and fill in the holes he made in the ground with his spade as he made them. One day he yelled, ‘Down with Louis XVIII!’ and off he went. It’s not my fault. He was all rosy and blond. His mother is dead. Have you noticed how all little children are blond? Where does that come from? He is the son of one of those brigands of the Loire. But children are innocent of the crimes of their fathers. I remember when he was just this high. He could never manage to pronounce the ds. He chattered away so sweetly and so unintelligibly you’d have thought he was a bird. I remember once, in front of the Farnese Hercules, they all stood around in a circle to marvel at him and admire him, he was so beautiful, that child! He had a head like the ones in paintings. I put on my gruff voice for him, I frightened him with my cane, but he knew very well that it was all just in fun. In the morning, when he used to come into my room, I would growl at him, but for me it was like sunshine streaming in. You can’t defend yourself against these little mites. They take hold of you, they hold on to you, they never let go of you. The truth is that there never was a little love like that child there. Now, what do you have to say for your Lafayettes, your Benjamin Constants, and your Tirecuir de Corcelles,1 that have gone and killed him for me! It can’t go on like this.” He went over to Marius, still livid and motionless, the doctor once more by his side, and he began to wring his hands again. The white lips of the old man moved as though they had a will of their own, and let slip, like the exhalations of a death rattle, almost indistinct words that could barely be heard: “Ah, heartless! Ah, clubbist!2 Ah, scoundrel! Ah, Septembrist!” Reproaches made tonelessly by a dying man to a corpse.

Little by little, as inner eruptions will always out, he strung his words together again in a sequence, but the grandfather appeared to have no strength left to utter them; his voice was so subdued and faint that it seemed to come from the other side of an abyss: “I don’t care, I’ll die, too, I will. And don’t tell me that in all Paris there wasn’t some little vixen who’d have been glad to make this miserable wretch happy! A young rascal who, instead of having fun and enjoying life, took himself off to fight and got himself shot to bits like a noodle! And who for? What for? For the republic! Instead of going dancing at the Chaumière, as young people are supposed to! What’s the good of being twenty years old, I ask you. The republic, what a load of poppycock! Poor mothers, go and make pretty boys, why don’t you! So that’s that, he’s dead. That’ll be two graves under the porte cochère. So this is how you spruce yourself up for the fine eyes of this General Lamarque! A sword-slinger! A blatherskite! Fancy getting yourself killed for a dead man! If that isn’t enough to drive a man mad! Go and figure that out! At twenty years old! And without turning a hair to see if he was leaving someone behind! So now we poor old blighters are forced to die all alone. Croak in your corner, old owl! Well, then, actually, so much the better, it’s what I was hoping for, it will kill me stone dead. I’m too old, I’m a hundred years old, I’m a hundred thousand years old, I earned the right to be dead long ago. This blow will do the trick. So, it’s over, what luck! What’s the good of making him sniff ammonia and all these other drugs? You’re wasting your time, you numskull of a quack! Get out of there, he’s dead, dead as a doornail. Take it from me—I’m one who knows, I’m dead, too. He hasn’t done it by halves. Yes, these are ghastly times, ghastly, ghastly, and here is what I think of you, of your ideas, of your systems, of your masters, of your oracles, of your doctors, of your little pipsqueaks of writers, of your weasels of philosophers, and of all the revolutions that have terrified the flocks of crows in the Tuileries for the last sixty years! And since you showed no mercy in getting yourself killed like this, I won’t even feel any grief at your death, do you hear, you assassin!” At that moment, Marius’s eyelids slowly lifted, and his eyes, still filmy with drowsy amazement, rested on Monsieur Gillenormand.

“Marius!” cried the old man. “Marius! My darling Marius! My dear boy! My beloved son! You’ve opened your eyes, you are looking at me, you are alive, thank you!” And he promptly passed out.