I. THE CLOACA AND ITS SURPRISES
IT WAS in the sewer of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.
Further resemblance of Paris with the sea. As in the ocean, the diver
can disappear.
The transition was marvellous. From the very centre of the city, Jean
Valjean had gone out of the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye, the
time of lifting a cover and closing it again, he had passed from broad day
to complete obscurity, from noon to midnight, from uproar to silence, from
the whirl of the thunder to the stagnation of the tomb, and, by a mutation
much more prodigious still than that of the Rue Polonceau, from the most
extreme peril to the most absolute security.
Sudden fall into a cave; disappearance in the dungeon of Paris; to leave
that street in which death was everywhere for this kind of sepulchre in
which there was life was an astounding crisis. He remained for some seconds
as if stunned; listening, stupefied. The spring trap of safety had
suddenly opened beneath him. Celestial goodness had in some sort taken
him by treachery. Adorable ambuscades of Providence!
Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know
whether what he was carrying away in this grave were alive or dead.
His first sensation was blindness. Suddenly he saw nothing more. It
seemed to him also that in one minute he had become deaf. He heard nothing
more. The frenzied storm of murder which was raging a few feet above
him only reached him, as we have said, thanks to the thickness of the earth
which separated him from it, stifled and indistinct, and like a rumbling at a
great depth. He felt that it was solid under his feet; that was all; but that
was enough. He reached out one hand, then the other, and touched the
wall on both sides, and realised that the passage was narrow; he slipped,
and realised that the pavement was wet. He advanced one foot with
precaution, fearing a hole, a pit, some gulf; he made sure that the flagging
continued. A whiff of fetidness informed him where he was.
After a few moments, he ceased to be blind. A little light fell from the
air-hole through which he had slipped in, and his eye became accustomed
to this cave. He began to distinguish something. The passage in which he
was earthed, no other word better expresses the condition, was walled up
behind him. It was one of those cul-de-sacs technically called branchments.
Before him, there was another wall, a wall of night. The light from the
airhole died out ten or twelve paces from the point at which Jean Valjean
stood, and scarcely produced a pallid whiteness over a few yards of the
damp wall of the sewer. Beyond, the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate
it appeared horrible, and to enter it seemed like being engulfed. He could,
however, force his way into that wall of mist, and he must do it. He must
even hasten. Jean Valjean thought that that grating, noticed by him under
the paving-stones, might also be noticed by the soldiers, and that all
depended upon that chance. They also could descend into the well and
explore it. There was not a minute to be lost. He had laid Marius upon the
ground, he gathered him up, this is again the right word, replaced him upon
his shoulders, and began his journey. He resolutely entered that obscurity.
The truth is, that they were not so safe as Jean Valjean supposed. Perils
of another kind, and not less great, awaited them perhaps. After the
flashing whirl of the combat, the cavern of miasmas and pitfalls; after chaos,
the cloaca. Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle of Hell to another.
At the end of fifty paces he was obliged to stop. A question presented
itself. The passage terminated in another which it met transversely. These
two roads were offered. Which should he take? should he turn to the left or
to the right? How guide himself in this black labyrinth? This labyrinth, as
we have remarked, has a clue: its descent. To follow the descent is to go to
the river.
Jean Valjean understood this at once.
He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer of the markets;
that, if he should choose the left and follow the descent, he would come in
less than a quarter of an hour to some mouth upon the Seine between the
Pont au Change and the Pont Neuf, that is to say, he would reappear in
broad day in the most populous portion of Paris. He might come out in
some gathering of corner idlers. Amazement of the passers-by at seeing two
bloody men come out of the ground under their feet. Arrival of sergent de
ville, call to arms in the next guard-house. He would be seized before getting
out. It was better to plunge into the labyrinth, to trust to this darkness,
and to rely on Providence for the issue.
He chose the right, and went up the ascent.
When he had turned the corner of the gallery, the distant gleam of the
air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell back over him, and he
again became blind. He went forward none the less, and as rapidly as he
could. Marius' arms were passed about his neck, and his feet hung behind
him. He held both arms with one hand, and groped for the wall with the
other. Marius' cheek touched his and stuck to it, being bloody. He felt
a warm stream, which came from Marius, flow over him and penetrate his
clothing Still, a moist warmth at his ear, which touched the wounded man's
mouth, indicated respiration, and consequently life. The passage through
which Jean Valjean was now moving was not so small as the first. Jean
Valjean walked in it with difficulty. The rains of the previous day had not
yet run off, and made a little stream in the centre of the floor, and he
was
compelled to hug the wall, to keep his feet out of the water. Thus he went
on in midnight. He resembled the creatures of night groping in the invisible,
and lost underground in the veins of the darkness.
However, little by little, whether that some distant air-holes sent a little
floating light into this opaque mist, or that his eyes became accustomed
to the obscurity, some dim vision came back to him, and he again began to
receive a confused perception, now of the wall which he was touching, and
now of the arch under which he was passing. The pupil dilates in the night,
and at last finds day in it, even as the soul dilates in misfortune, and at
last finds God in it.
To find his way was difficult.
The track of the sewers echoes, so to speak, the track of the streets
which overlie them. There were in the Paris of that day two thousand two
hundred streets. Picture to yourselves below then that forest of dark
branches which is called the sewer. The sewers existing at that epoch,
placed end to end, would have given a length of thirty miles. We have
already said that the present network, thanks to the extraordinary act-
ivity of the last thirty years, is not less than a hundred and forty
miles.
Jean Valjean began with a mistake. He thought that he was under the
Rue Saint Denis, and it was unfortunate that he was not there. There is
beneath the Rue Saint Denis an old stone sewer, which dates from Louis
XIII., and which goes straight to the collecting sewer, called the Grand
Sewer, with a single elbow, on the right, at the height of the ancient Cour
des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint Martin sewer, the four arms of
which cut each other in a cross. But the gallery of the Petite Truanderie,
the entrance to which was near the wine-shop of Corinth, never communi-
cated with the underground passage in the Rue Saint Denis; it runs into
the Montmartre sewer, and it was in that that Jean Valjean was entangled.
There, opportunities of losing one's self abound. The Montmartre sewer is
one of the most labyrinthian of the ancient network. Luckily Jean Valjean
had left behind him the sewer of the markets, the geometrical plan of which
represents a multitude of interlocked top-gallant-masts; but he had before
him more than one embarrassing encounter and more than one street corner--
for these are streets--presenting itself in the obscurity like a point of
interrogation; first, at his left, the vast Platriere sewer, a kind of Chi-
nese puzzle pushing and jumbling its chaos of T's and Z's beneath the Hotel
des Postes and the rotunda of the grain-market to the Seine, where it term-
inates in a Y; secondly, at his right, the crooked corridor of the Rue du
Cadran, with its three teeth, which are so many blind ditches; thirdly, at
his left, the branch of the Mail, complicated, almost at its entrance, by a
kind of fork, and, after zigzag upon zigzag, terminating in the great voiding
crypt of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in all directions; finally, at
the right, the cul-de-sac passage of the Rue des Jeuneurs, with countless
little reducts here and there, before arriving at the central sewer, which
alone could lead him to some outlet distant enough to be secure.
If Jean Valjean had had any notion of what we have here pointed out, he
would have quickly perceived, merely from 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 haughty and royal even in
the sewer, with floor and running courses of granite, and mortar of thick
lime, which cost seventy-five dollars a yard, he would have felt beneath
his hand the contemporary cheapness, the economical expedient, the mill-
stone grit laid in hydraulic cement upon a bed of concrete, which cost
thirty-five dollars a yard, the bourgeois masonry known as small materi-
als; but he knew nothing of all this.
He went forward, with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing, know-
ing nothing, plunged into chance, that is to say, swallowed up in Prov-
idence.
By degrees, we must say, some horror penetrated him. The shadow which
enveloped him entered his mind. He was walking in an enigma. This ac-
queduct of the cloaca is formidable; it is dizzily intertangled. It is
a dreary thing to be caught in this Paris of darkness. Jean Valjean was
obliged to find and almost to invent his route without seeing it. In
that unknown region, each step which he ventured might be the last. How
should he get out? Should he find an outlet? Should he find it in time?
Would this colossal subterranean sponge with cells of stone admit of
being penetrated and pierced? Would he meet with some unlooked-for knot
of obscurity? Would he encounter the inextricable and the insurmountable?
Would Marius die of hamorrhage, and he of hunger? Would they both
perish there at last, and make two skeletons in some niche of that night?
He did not know. He asked himself all this, and he could not answer. The
intestine of Paris is an abyss. Like the prophet, he was in the belly of
the monster.
Suddenly he was surprised. At the most unexpected moment, and without
having diverged from a straight line, he discovered that he was no long-
er rising; the water of the brook struck coming against his heels instead
of upon the top of his feet. The sewer now descended. What? would he
then soon reach the Seine? This danger was great, but the peril of retreat
was still greater. He continued to advance.
It was not towards the Seine that he was going. The saddleback which the
topography of Paris forms upon the right bank, empties one of its slopes
into the Seine and the other into the Grand Sewer. The crest of this sad-
dleback which determines the division of the waters follows a very cap-
ricious line. The culminating point, which is the point of separation of
the flow, is in the Saint Avoye sewer beyond the Rue Michel de Comte, in
the sewer of the Louvre, near the boulevards, and in the Montmartre sewer,
near the markets. It was at this culminating point that Jean Valjean had
arrived. He was making his way towards the belt sewer; he was on the right
road. But he knew nothing of it.
Whenever he came to a branch, he felt its angles, and if he found the open-
ing not as wide as the corridor in which he was, he did not enter, and con-
tinued his route, deeming rightly that every narrower way must terminate
in a cul-de-sac, and could only lead him away from his object, the outlet.
He thus evaded the quadruple snare which was spread for him in the obscur-
ity, by the four labyrinths which we have just enumerated. At a certain
moment he felt that he was getting away from under the Paris which was
petrified by the emeute, in which the barricades had suppressed the cir-
culation, and that he was coming beneath the Paris which was alive and
normal. He heard suddenly above his head a sound like thunder, distant,
but continuous. It was the rumbling of the vehicles. He had been walking
for about half an hour, at least by his own calculation, and had not yet
thought of resting; only he had changed the hand which supported Marius.
The darkness was deeper than ever, but this depth reassured him.
All at once he saw his shadow before him. It was marked out on a feeble
ruddiness almost indistinct, which vaguely empurpled the floor at his
feet, and the arch over his head, and which glided along at his right and
his left on the two slimy walls of the corridor. In amazement he turned
round. Behind him, in the portion of the passage through which he had
passed, at a distance which appeared to him immense, flamed, throwing its
rays into the dense obscurity, a sort of horrible star which appeared to
be looking at him.
It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the sewer.
Behind this star were moving without order eight or ten black forms,
straight, indistinct, terrible.
II. EXPLANATION
DURING the day of the 6th of June, a battue of the sewers had been ordered.
It was feared that they would be taken as a refuge by the vanquished, and
prefect Gisquet was to ransack the occult Paris, while General Bugeaud was
sweeping the public Paris; a connected double operation which demanded
a double strategy of the public power, represented above by the army and
below by the police. Three platoons of officers and sewermen explored the
subterranean streets of Paris, the first, the right bank, the second, the
left bank, the third, in the City.
The officers were armed with carbines, clubs, swords, and daggers.
That which was at this moment directed upon Jean Valjean, was the
lantern of the patrol of the right bank.
This patrol had just visited the crooked gallery and the three blind
alleys which are beneath the Rue du Cadran. While they were taking their
candle to the bottom of these blind alleys, Jean Valjean had come to the
entrance of the gallery upon his way, had found it narrower than the prin-
cipal passage, and had not entered it. He had passed beyond. The policemen,
on coming out from the Cadran gallery, had thought they heard the sound of
steps in the direction of the belt sewer. It was in fact Jean Valjean's
steps. The sergeant in command of the patrol lifted his lantern, and
the squad began to look into the mist in the direction whence the sound
came.
This was to Jean Valjean an indescribable moment.
Luckily, if he saw the lantern well, the lantern saw him badly. It was
light and he was shadow. He was far off, and merged in the blackness of
the place. He drew close to the side of the wall, and stopped.
Still, he formed no idea of what was moving there behind him. Lack of
sleep, want of food, emotions, had thrown him also into the visionary state.
He saw a flaring flame, and about that flame, goblins. What was it? He did
not understand.
Jean Valjean having stopped, the noise ceased.
The men of the patrol listened and heard nothing, they looked and saw
nothing. They consulted.
There was at that period a sort of square at this point of the Montmartre
sewer, called de service, which has since been suppressed on account
of the little interior lake which formed in it, by the damming up in heavy
storms of the torrents of rain water. The patrol could gather in a group in
this square.
Jean Valjean saw these goblins form a kind of circle. These mastiffs'
heads drew near each other and whispered.
The result of this council held by the watch-dogs was that they had
been mistaken, that there had been no noise, that there was nobody there,
that it was needless to trouble themselves with the belt sewer, that that
would be time lost, but that they must hasten towards Saint Merry, that if
there were anything to do and any "bonsingot" to track out, it was in that
quarter.
From time to time parties put new soles to their old terms of insult.
In 1832, the word bousingot filled the interim between the word jacobin,
which was worn out, and the word demagogue, then almost unused, but
which has since done such excellent service.
The sergeant gave the order to file left towards the descent to the
Seine. If they had conceived the idea of dividing into two squads and going
in both directions, Jean Valjean would have been caught. That hung by this
thread. It is probable that the instructions from the prefecture, foreseeing
the possibility of a combat and that the insurgents might be numerous, fo-
rbade the patrol to separate. The patrol resumed its march, leaving Jean
Valjean behind. Of all these movements, Jean Valjean perceived nothing
except the eclipse of the lantern, which suddenly turned back.
Before going away, the sergeant, to ease the police conscience, discharged
his carbine in the direction they were abandoning, towards Jean Valjean.
The detonation rolled from echo to echo in the vault like the rumbling
of this titanic bowel. Some plastering which fell into the stream and
spattered the water a few steps from Jean Valjean made him aware that
the ball had struck the arch above his head.
Slow and measured steps resounded upon the floor for some time, more
and more deadened by the progressive increase of the distance, the group
of black forms sank away, a glimmer oscillated and floated, making a
ruddy circle in the vault, which decreased, then disappeared, the silence
became deep again, the obscurity became again complete, blindness and deaf-
ness resumed possession of the darkness; and Jean Valjean, not yet daring
to stir, stood for a long time with his back to the wall, his ear intent
and eye dilated, watching the vanishing of that phantom patrol.
III. THE MAN SPUN
WE MUST do the police of that period this justice that, even in the gravest
public conjunctures, it imperturbably performed its duties watchful and
sanitary. An emeute was not in its eyes a pretext for giving malefactors a
loose rein, and for neglecting society because the government was in peril.
The ordinary duty was performed correctly in addition to the extraordinary
duty, and was not disturbed by it. In the midst of the beginning of an inc-
alculable political event, under the pressure of a possible revolution,
without allowing himself to be diverted by the insurrection and the barri-
cade, an officer would "spin" a thief.
Something precisely like this occurred in the afternoon of the 6th of
June at the brink of the Seine, on the beach of the right bank, a little
beyond the Pont des Invalides.
There is no beach there now. The appearance of the place has changed.
On this beach, two men some distance apart, seemed to be observing each
other, one avoiding the other. The one who was going before was endeav-
ouring to increase the distance, the one who came behind to lessen it.
It was like a game of chess played from a distance and silently. Neither
seemed to hurry, and both walked slowly, as if either feared that by
too much haste he would double the pace of his partner.
One would have said it was an appetite following a prey, without appear-
ing to do it on purpose. The prey was crafty, and kept on its guard.
The requisite proportions between the tracked marten and the tracking
hound were observed. He who was trying to escape had a feeble frame and
a sorry mien; he who was trying to seize, a fellow of tall stature, was
rough in aspect, and promised to be rough in encounter.
The first, feeling himself the weaker, was avoiding the second; he a-
voided him in a very furious way; he who could have observed him would
have seen in his eyes the gloomy hostility of flight, and all the menace
which there is in fear.
The beach was solitary; there were no passers; not even a boatman nor
a lighterman on the barges moored here and there.
These two men could not have been easily seen, except from the quai
in front, and to him who might have examined them from that distance,
the man who was going forward would have appeared like a bristly creature,
tattered and skulking, restless and shivering under a ragged blouse, and
the other, like a classic and official person, wearing the overcoat of
authority buttoned to the chin.
The reader would perhaps recognise these two men, if he saw them nearer.
What was the object of the last?
Probably to put the first in a warmer dress.
When a man clad by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order to
make of him also a man clad by the state. Only the colour is the whole
question. To be clad in blue is glorious; to be clad in red is disagree-
able.
There is a purple of the depths.
It was probably some inconvenience and some purple of this kind that
the first desired to escape.
If the other was allowing him to go on and did not yet seize him, it was,
according to all appearance, in the hope of seeing him bring up at some
significant rendezvous, some group of good prizes. This delicate operation
is called "spinning."
What renders this conjecture the more probable is, that the closely but-
toned man, perceiving from the shore a fiacre which was passing on the
quai empty, beckoned to the driver; the driver understood, evidently rec-
ognised with whom he had to do, turned his horse, and began to follow the
two men on the upper part of the quai at a walk. This was not noticed by
the equivocal and ragged personage who was in front.
The fiacre rolled along the trees of the Champs-Elysees. There could
be seen moving above the parapet, the bust of the driver, whip in hand.
One of the secret instructions of the police to officers contains this
article: "Always have a vehicle within call, in case of need."
While manoeuvring, each on his side, with an irreproachable strategy,
these two men approached a slope of the quai descending to the beach,
which, at that time, allowed the coach-drivers coming from Passy to go
to the river to water their horses. This slope has since been removed, for
the sake of symmetry; the horses perish with thirst, but the eye is satis-
fied.
It seemed probable that the man in the blouse would go up by this slope
in order to attempt escape into the Champs-Elysees, a place ornamented
with trees, but on the other hand thickly dotted with officers, and
where his pursuer would have easily seized him with a strong hand.
This point of the quai is very near the house brought from Moret to Paris
in 1824, by Colonel Brack, and called the house of Francis I. A guardhouse
is quite near by.
To the great surprise of his observer, the man pursued did not take the
slope of the watering-place. He continued to advance on the beach along
the quai.
His position was visibly becoming critical.
If not to throw himself into the Seine, what was he going to do?
No means henceforth of getting up to the quai; no other slope, and no
staircase; and they were very near the spot, marked by the turn of the Seine
towards the Pont d'Iena, where the beach, narrowing more and more, terminates
in a slender tongue, and is lost under the water. There he would inevitably
find himself blockaded between the steep wall on his right, the river on the
left and in front, and authority upon his heels.
It is true that this end of the beach was masked from sight by a mound of
rubbish from six to seven feet high, the product of some demolition. But
did this man hope to hide with any effect behind this heap of fragments,
which the other had only to turn. The expedient would have been puerile.
He certainly did not dream of it. The innocence of robbers does not reach
this extent.
The heap of rubbish made a sort of eminence at the edge of the water,
which prolonged like a promontory, as far as the wall of the quai.
The man pursued reached this little hill and doubled it, so that he
ceased to be seen by the other.
The latter, not seeing, was not seen; he took advantage of this to abandon
all dissimulation, and to walk very rapidly. In a few seconds he came to
the mound of rubbish, and turned it. There, he stopped in amazement.
The man whom he was hunting was gone.
Total eclipse of the man in the blouse.
The beach beyond the mound of rubbish had scarcely a length of thirty
yards, then it plunged beneath the water which beat against the wall
of the quai.
The fugitive could not have thrown himself into the Seine nor scaled
the quai without being seen by him who was following him. What had
become of him?
The man in the closely buttoned coat walked to the end of the beach, and
stopped there a moment thoughtful, his fists convulsive, his eyes ferret-
ing. Suddenly he slapped his forehead. He had noticed, at the point
where the land and the water began, an iron grating broad and low, arched,
with a heavy lock and three massive hinges. This grating, a sort of door
cut into the bottom of the quai, opened upon the river as much as upon the
beach. A blackish stream flowed from beneath it. This stream emptied into
the Seine.
Beyond its heavy rusty bars could be distinguished a sort of corridor
arched and obscure.
The man folded his arms and looked at the grating reproachfully.
This look not sufficing, he tried to push it; he shook it, it resisted
firmly. It was probable that it had just been opened, although no sound had
been heard, a singular circumstance with a grating so rusty; but it was cer-
tain that it had been closed again. That indicated that he before whom this
door had just turned, had not a hook but a key.
This evident fact burst immediately upon the mind of the man who was exert-
ing himself to shake the grating, and forced from him this indignant epiph-
onema:
"This is fine! a government key!"
Then, calming himself immediately, he expressed a whole world of int-
erior ideas by this whiff of monosyllables accented almost ironically:
"Well! well! well! well!"
This said, hoping nobody knows what, either to see the man come out, or
to see others go in, he posted himself on the watch behind the heap of
rubbish, with the patient rage of a pointer.
For its part, the fiacre, which followed all his movements, had halted
above him near the parapet. The driver, foreseeing a long stay, fitted the
muzzles of his horses into the bag of wet oats, so well known to Parisians,
to whom the governments, be it said in parenthesis, sometimes apply it. The
few passers over the Pont d'Iena, before going away, turned their heads to
look for a moment at these two motionless features of the landscape, the
man on the beach, the fiacre on the quai.
IV. HE ALSO BEARS HIS CROSS
JEAN VALJEAN had resumed his advance, and had not stopped again.
This advance became more and more laborious. The level of these arches
varies; the medium height is about five feet six inches, and was calcula-
ted for the stature of a man; Jean Valjean was compelled to bend so, as
not to hit Marius against the arch; he had to stoop every second, then rise
up, to grope incessantly for the wall. The moisture of the stones and the
sliminess of the floor made them bad points of support, whether for the
hand or the foot. He was wading in the hideous muck of the city. The occa-
sional gleams from the air-holes appeared only at long intervals, and so
ghastly were they that the noonday seemed but moonlight; all the rest was
mist, miasma, opacity, blackness. Jean Valjean was hungry and thirsty;
thirsty especially; and this place, like the sea, is one full of water where
you cannot drink. His strength, which was prodigious, and very little dim-
inished by age, thanks to his chaste and sober life, began to give way
notwithstanding. Fatigue grew upon him, and as his strength diminished
the weight of his load increased. Marius, dead perhaps, weighed heavily
upon him as inert bodies do. Jean Valjean supported him in such a way that
his breast was not compressed and his breathing could always be as free as
possible. He felt the rapid gliding of the rats between his legs. One of
them was so frightened as to bite him. There came to him from time to time
through the aprons of the mouths of the sewer a breath of fresh air which
revived him.
It might have been three o'clock in the afternoon when he arrived at
the belt sewer.
He was first astonished at this sudden enlargement. He abruptly found
himself in the gallery where his outstretched hands did not reach the two
walls, and under an arch which his head did not touch. The Grand Sewer
indeed is eight feet wide and seven high.
At the point where the Montmartre sewer joins the Grand Sewer, two other
subterranean galleries, that of the Rue de Provence and that of the Abat-
toir, coming in, make a square. Between these four ways a less sagacious
man would have been undecided. Jean Valjean took the widest, that is to
say, the belt sewer. But there the question returned: to descend, or to
ascend? He thought that the condition of affairs was urgent, and that he
must, at whatever risk, now reach the Seine. In other words, descend. He
turned to the left.
Well for him that he did so. For it would be an error to suppose that
the belt sewer has two outlets, the one towards Bercy, the other towards
Passy, and that it is, as its name indicates, the subterranean belt of the
Paris of the right bank. The Grand Sewer, which is, it must be remembered,
nothing more nor less than the ancient brook of Menilmontant, terminates,
if we ascend it, in a cul-de-sac, that is to say, its ancient starting point,
which was its spring, at the foot of the hill of Menilmontant. It has no
direct communication with the branch which gathers up the waters of Paris
below the Popincourt quartier, and which empties into the Seine by the
Amelot sewer above the ancient Ile Louviers. This branch, which completes
the collecting sewer, is separated from it, under the Rue Menilmontant
even, by a solid wall which marks the point of separation of the waters
up and down. Had Jean Valjean gone up the gallery, he would have come,
after manifold efforts, exhausted by fatigue, expiring, in the darkness,
to a wall. He would have been lost.
Strictly speaking, by going back a little, entering the passage of the
Filles du Calvaire, if he did not hesitate at the subterranean goose-track
of the Boucherat crossing, by taking the Saint Louis corridor, then, on the
left, the Saint Gilles passage, then by turning to the right and avoiding
the Saint Sebastien gallery, he might have come to the Amelot sewer, and
thence, provided he had not gone astray in the sort of F which is beneath
the Bastille, reached the outlet on the Seine near the Arsenal. But, for
that, he must have been perfectly familiar in all its ramifications and in
all its tubes with the huge madrepore of the sewer. Now, we must repeat,
he knew nothing of this frightful system of paths along which he was mak-
ing his way; and, had anybody asked him where he was, he would have
answered: In the night.
His instinct served him well. To descend was, in fact, possible safety.
He left on his right the two passages which ramify in the form of a claw
under the Rue Lafitte and the Rue Saint Georges, and the long forked cor-
ridor of the Chaussee d'Antin.
A little beyond an affluent which was probably the branching of the Mad-
eleine, he stopped. He was very tired. A large air-hole, probably the
vista on the Rue d'Anjou, produced an almost vivid light. Jean Valjean,
with the gentleness of movement of a brother for his wounded brother,
laid Marius upon the side bank of the sewer. Marius' bloody face appeared,
under the white gleam from the air-hole, as if at the bottom of a tomb. His
eyes were closed, his hair adhered to his temples like brushes dried in red
paint, his hands dropped down lifeless, his limbs were cold, there was co-
agulated blood at the corners of his mouth. A clot of blood had gathered in
the tie of his cravat; his shirt was bedded in the wounds, the cloth of his
coat chafed the gaping gashes in the living flesh. Jean Valjean, removing the
garments with the ends of his fingers, laid his hand upon his breast; the
heart still beat. Jean Valjean tore up his shirt, bandaged the wounds as well
as he could, and staunched the flowing blood; then, bending in the twilight
over Marius, who was still unconscious and almost lifeless, he looked at him
with an inexpressible hatred.
In opening Marius' clothes, he had found two things in his pockets, the
bread which had been forgotten there since the day previous, and Marius'
pocket-book. He ate the bread and opened the pocket-book. On the first
page he found the four lines written by Marius. They will be remembered.
"My name is Marius Pontmercy. Carry my corpse to my grandfather's,
M. Gillenormand, Rue des Filles du Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais."
By the light of the air-hole, Jean Valjean read these four lines, and
stopped a moment as if absorbed in himself, repeating in an undertone:
"Rue des Filles du Calvaire, Number Six, Monsieur Gillenormand." He
replaced the pocket-book in Marius' pocket. He had eaten, strength had
returned to him: he took Marius on his back again, laid his head care-
fully upon his right shoulder, and began to descend the sewer.
The Grand Sewer, following the course of the valley of Menilmontant,
is almost two leagues in length. It is paved for a considerable part of
its course.
This torch of the name of the streets of Paris with which we are illu-
minating Jean Valjean's subterranean advance for the reader, Jean Val-
jean did not have. Nothing told him what zone of the city he was passing
through, nor what route he had followed. Only the growing pallor of the
gleams of light which he saw from time to time, indicated that the sun
was withdrawing from the pavement and that the day would soon be gone;
and the rumblings of the waggons above his head, from continuous having
become intermittent, then having almost ceased, he concluded that he was
under central Paris no longer, and that he was approaching some solitary
region, in the vicinity of the outer boulevards or the furthest quais.
Where there are fewer houses and fewer streets, the sewer has fewer air-
holes. The darkness thickened about Jean Valjean, He none the less con-
tinued to advance, groping in the obscurity.
This obscurity suddenly became terrible.
V. FOR SAND AS WELL AS WOMAN THERE IS A FINESSE WHICH IS PERFIDY
HE FELT that he was entering the water, and that he had under his feet,
pavement no longer, but mud.
It sometimes happens, on certain coasts of Brittany or Scotland, that a
man, traveller or fisherman, walking on the beach at low tide far from the
bank, suddenly notices that for several minutes he has been walking with
some difficulty. The strand beneath his feet is like pitch; his soles stick
to it; it is sand no longer, it is glue. The beach is perfectly dry, but at
every step he takes, as soon as he lifts his foot, the print which it leaves
fills with water. The eye, however, has noticed no change; the immense strand
is smooth and tranquil, all the sand has the same appearance, nothing distin-
guishes the surface which is solid from the surface which is no longer so; the
joyous little cloud of sand-fleas continues to leap tumultuously over the way-
farer's feet. The man pursues his way, goes forward, inclines towards the
land, endeavours to get nearer the upland. He is not anxious. Anxious about
what? Only, he feels somehow as if the weight of his feet increased with
every step which he takes. Suddenly he sinks in. He sinks in two or three
inches. Decidedly he is not on the right road; he stops to take his bearings.
All at once, he looks at his feet. His feet have disappeared. The sand cov-
ers them. He draws his feet out of the sand, he will retrace his steps, he
turns back, he sinks in deeper. The sand comes up to his ankles, he pulls
himself out and throws himself to the left, the sand is half leg deep, he
throws himself to the right, the sand comes up to his shins. Then he recog-
nises with unspeakable terror that he is caught in the quicksand, and that
he has beneath him the fearful medium in which man can no more walk than
the fish can swim. He throws off 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, he waves his hat or his handkerchief, the sand gains on him more
and more; if the beach is deserted, if the land is too far off, if the sand-
bank is of too ill-repute, if there is no hero in sight, it is all over,
he is condemned to enlizement. He is condemned to that appalling interment,
long, infallible, implacable, impossible to slacken or to hasten, which
endures for hours, which will not end, which seizes you erect, free and in
full health, which draws you by the feet, which, at every effort that you
attempt, at every shout that you utter, drags you a little deeper, which
appears to punish you for your resistance by a redoubling of its grasp,
which sinks the man slowly into the earth while it leaves him all the time
to look at the horizon, the trees, the green fields, the smoke of the vill-
ages in the plain, the sails of the ships upon the sea, the birds flying and
singing, the sunshine, the sky. Enlizement is the grave become a tide and
rising from the depths of the earth towards a living man. Each minute is an
inexorable enshroudress. The victim attempts to sit down, to lie down, to
creep; every movement he makes, inters him; he straightens up, he sinks in;
he feels that he is being swallowed up; he howls, implores, cries to the
clouds, wrings his hands, despairs. Behold him waist deep in the sand; the
sand reaches his breast, he is now only a bust. He raises his arms, utters
furious groans, clutches the beach with his nails, would hold by that straw,
leans upon his elbows to pull himself out of this soft sheath, sobs frenziedly;
the sand rises. The sand reaches his shoulders, the sand reaches his neck; the
face alone is visible now. The mouth cries, the sand fills it; silence. The
eyes still gaze, the sand shuts them; night. Then the forehead decreases, a
little hair flutters above the sand; a hand protrudes, comes through the sur-
face of the beach, moves and shakes, and disappears. Sinister effacement of
a man.
Sometimes the horseman is enlized with his horse; sometimes the cartman
is enlized with his cart; all horrible beneath the beach. It is a shipwreck
elsewhere than in the water. It is the earth drowning man. The earth, filled
with the ocean, becomes a trap. It presents itself as a plain and opens like
a wave. Such treacheries has the abyss.
This fatal mishap, always possible upon one or another coast of the sea,
was also possible, thirty years ago, in the sewer of Paris.
Before the important works commenced in 1833, the subterranean system
of Paris was subject to sudden sinkings of the bottom.
The water filtered into certain underlying, particularly friable soils;
the floor, which was of paving-stones, as in the old sewers, or of hydraulic
cement upon concrete, as in the new galleries, having lost its support, bent.
A bend in a floor of that kind is a crack, is a crumbling. The floor gave way
over a certain space. This crevasse, a hiatus in a gulf of mud, was called
technically fontis. What is a fontis? It is the quicksand of the sea-shore
suddenly encountered under ground; it is the beach of Mont Saint Michel in
a sewer. The diluted soil is as it were in fusion; all its molecules are
in suspension in a soft medium; it is not land, and it is not water. Depth
sometimes very great. Nothing more fearful than such a mischance. If the
water predominates, death is prompt, there is swallowing up; if the earth
predominates, death is slow, there is enlizement.
Can you picture to yourself such a death? If enlizement is terrible on the
shore of the sea, what is it in the cloaca? Instead of the open air, the
full light, the broad day, that clear horizon, those vast sounds, those
free clouds whence rains life, those barks seen in the distance, that hope
under every form, probable passers, succour possible until the last moment;
instead of all that, deafness, blindness, a black arch, an interior of a tomb
already prepared, death in the mire under a cover! the slow stifling by the
filth, a stone box in which asphyxia opens its claw in the slime and takes
you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death-rattle; mire instead of
sand, sulphuretted hydrogen instead of the hurricane, ordure instead of the
ocean? and to call, and to gnash your teeth, and writhe, and struggle, and
agonise, with that huge city above your head knowing nothing of it all.
Inexpressible horror of dying thus! Death sometimes redeems its atrocity
by a certain terrible dignity. At the stake, in the shipwreck, man may be
great in the flame as in the foam, a superb attitude is possible, you are
transfigured while falling into that abyss. But not here. Death is unclean.
It is humiliating to expire. The last flitting visions are abject. Mire
is synonymous with shame. It is mean, ugly, infamous. To die in a butt of
Malmsey, like Clarence, so be it; in the scavenger's pit, like d'Escoubleau,
that is horrible. To struggle within it is hideous; at the very time that
you are agonising, you are splashing. There is darkness enough for it to be
Hell, and slime enough for it to be only a slough, and the dying man knows
not whether he will become a spectre or a toad.
Everywhere else the grave is gloomy; here it is misshapen.
The depth of the fontis varied, as well as its length, and its density by
reason of the more or less yielding character of the subsoil. Sometimes a
fontis was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or ten; sometimes no
bottom could be found. The mire was here almost solid, there almost liquid.
In the Luniere fontis, it would have taken a man a day to disappear, while
he would have been devoured in five minutes by the Phelippeaux slough. The
mire bears more or less according to its greater or lesser density. A child
escapes where a man is lost. The first law of safety is to divest yourself
of every kind of burden. To throw away his bag of tools, or his basket,
or his hod, is the first thing that every sewerman does when he feels the
soil giving way beneath him.
The fontis had various causes: friability of the soil; some crevasse at a
depth beyond the reach of man; the violent showers of summer; the incessant
storms of winter; the long misty rains. Sometimes the weight of the neigh-
bouring houses upon a marly or sandy soil pressed out the arches of the
subterranean galleries and made them yield, or it would happen that the
floor gave way and cracked under this crushing pressure. The settling of
the Pantheon obliterated in this manner, a century ago, a part of the
excavations on Mount Saint Genevieve. When a sewer sank beneath the pres-
sure of the houses, the difficulty, on certain occasions, disclosed it-
self above in the street by a kind of saw-tooth separation in the pavement;
this rent was developed in a serpentine line for the whole length of the
cracked arch, and then, the evil being visible, the remedy could be prompt.
It often happened also that the interior damage was not revealed by any
exterior scar. And, in that case, woe to the sewermen. Entering without
precaution into the sunken sewer, they might perish. The old registers
make mention of some working-men who were buried in this way in the
fontis. They give several names; among others that of the sewerman who
was engulfed in a sunken slough under the kennel on the Rue Careme
Prenant, whose name was Blaise Poutrain; this Blaise Poutrain was brother
of Nicholas Poutrain, who was the last gravedigger of the cemetery called
Charnier des Innocents in 1785, the date at which that cemetery died.
There was also that young and charming Vicomte d'Escoubleau of whom we
have spoken, one of the heroes of the siege of Lerida, where they gave
the assault in silk stockings, headed by violins. D'Escoubleau, surprised
one night with his cousin, the Duchess de Sourdis, was drowned in a quag-
mire of the Beautreillis sewer, in which he had taken refuge to escape
from the duke. Madame de Sourdis, when this death was described to her,
called for her smelling-bottle, and forgot to weep through much inhalation
of salts. In such a case, there is no love which persists; the cloaca
extinguishes it. Hero refuses to wash Leander's corpse. Thisbe stops her
nose at sight of Pyramus, and says: "Peugh!"
VI. THE FONTIS
JEAN VALJEAN found himself in presence of a fontis.
This kind of settling was then frequent in the subsoil of the Champs-
Elysees, very unfavourable for hydraulic works, and giving poor support
to underground constructions, from its excessive fluidity. This fluidity
surpasses even that of the sands of the Saint Georges quartier, which
could only be overcome by stonework upon concrete, and the clayey beds
infected with gas in the quartier of the Martyrs, so liquid that the passage
could be effected under the gallery of the martyrs only by means of a metal
lic tube. When, in 1836, they demolished, for the purpose of rebuilding,
the old stone sewer under the Faubourg Saint Honore, in which we find
Jean Valjean now entangled, the quicksand, which is the subsoil from the
Champs-Elysees to the Seine, was such an obstacle that the work lasted
nearly six months, to the great outcry of the bordering proprietors, es-
pecially the proprietors of hotels and coaches. The work was more than
difficult; it was dangerous. It is true that there were four months and
a half of rain, and three risings of the Seine.
The fontis which Jean Valjean fell upon was caused by the showers of
the previous day. A yielding of the pavement, imperfectly upheld by the
underlying sand, had occasioned a damming of the rain-water. Infiltration
having taken place, sinking had followed. The floor, broken up, had disap-
peared in the mire. For what distance? Impossible to say. The obscurity
was deeper than anywhere else. It was a mudhole in the cavern of night.
Jean Valjean felt the pavement slipping away under him. He entered into
this slime. It was water on the surface, mire at the bottom. He must
surely pass through. To retrace his steps was impossible. Marius was ex-
piring, and Jean Valjean exhausted. Where else could he go? Jean Valjean
advanced. Moreover, the quagmire appeared not very deep for a few steps.
But in proportion as he advanced, his feet sank in. He very soon had the
mire half-knee deep and water above his knees. He walked on, holding
Marius with both arms as high above the water as he could. The mud now
came up to his knees, and the water to his waist. He could no longer
turn back. He sank in deeper and deeper. This mire, dense enough for
one man's weight, evidently could not bear two. Marius and Jean Valjean
would have had a chance of escape separately. Jean Valjean continued to
advance, supporting this dying man, who was perhaps a corpse.
The water came up to his armpits; he felt that he was foundering; it was
with difficulty that he could move in the depth of mire in which he was.
The density, which was the support, was also the obstacle. He still held
Marius up, and, with an unparalleled outlay of strength, he advanced; but
he sank deeper. He now had only his head out of the water, and his arms
supporting Marius. There is in the old pictures of the deluge, a mother
doing thus with her child.
He sank still deeper, he threw his face back to escape the water, and to
be able to breathe; he who should have seen him in this obscurity would
have thought he saw a mask floating upon the darkness; he dimly perceived
Marius' drooping head and livid face above him; he made a desperate effort,
and thrust his foot forward; his foot struck something solid; a support.
It was time.
He rose and writhed and rooted himself upon this support with a sort of
fury. It produced the effect upon him of the first step of a staircase
reascending towards life.
This support, discovered in the mire at the last moment, was the begin-
ning of the other slope of the floor, which had bent without breaking,
and had curved beneath the water like a board, and in a single piece. A
well-constructed paving forms an arch, and has this firmness. This frag-
ment of the floor, partly submerged, but solid, was a real slope, and,
once upon this slope, they were saved. Jean Valjean ascended this in-
clined plane, and reached the other side of the quagmire.
On coming out of the water, he struck against a stone, and fell upon his
knees. This seemed to him fitting, and he remained thus for some time,
his soul lost in unspoken prayer to God.
He rose, shivering, chilled, infected, bending beneath this dying man,
whom he was dragging on, all dripping with slime, his soul filled with a
strange light.
VII. SOMETIMES WE GET AGROUND WHEN WE EXPECT TO GET ASHORE
HE RESUMED his route once more.
However, if he had not left his life in the fontis, he seemed to have left
his strength. This supreme effort had exhausted him. His exhaustion was so
great, that every three or four steps he was obliged to take breath, and
leaned against the wall. Once he had to sit down upon the curb to change
Marius' position and he thought he should stay there. But if his vigour
were dead his energy was not. He rose again. He walked with desperation,
almost with rapidity, for a hundred paces, without raising his head, almost
without breathing, and suddenly struck against the wall. He had reached an
angle of the sewer, and, arriving at the turn with his head down, he had
encountered the wall. He raised his eyes, and at the extremity of the pas-
sage, down there before him, far, very far away, he perceived a light. This
time, it was not the terrible light; it was the good and white light. It was
the light of day.
Jean Valjean saw the outlet.
A condemned soul who, from the midst of the furnace, should suddenly per-
ceive an exit from Gehenna, would feel what Jean Valjean felt. It would
fly frantically with the stumps of its burned wings towards the radiant
door. Jean Valjean felt exhaustion no more, he felt Marius' weight no
longer, he found again his knees of steel, he ran rather than walked. As
he approached, the outlet assumed more and more distinct outline. It was a
circular arch, not so high as the vault which sank down by degrees, and not
so wide as the gallery which narrowed as the top grew lower. The tunnel
ended on the inside in the form of a funnel; a vicious contraction, copied
from the wickets of houses of detention, logical in a prison, illogical in
a sewer, and which has since been corrected.
Jean Valjean reached the outlet.
There he stopped.
It was indeed the outlet, but it did not let him out.
The arch was closed by a strong grating, and the grating which, accord-
ing to all appearance, rarely turned upon its rusty hinges, was held in
its stone frame by a stout lock which, red with rust, seemed an enormous
brick. He could see the keyhole, and the strong bolt deeply plunged into
the iron staple. The lock was plainly a double-lock. It was one of those
Bastille locks of which the old Paris was so lavish.
Beyond the grating, the open air, the river, the daylight, the beach, very
narrow, but sufficient to get away. The distant quais, Paris, that gulf in
which one is so easily lost, the wide horizon, liberty. He distinguished at
his right, below him, the Pont d'Iena, and at his left, above, the Pont des
Invalides; the spot would have been propitious for awaiting night and
escaping. It was one of the most solitary points in Paris; the beach which
fronts on the Gros Caillou. The flies came in and went out through the
bars of the grating.
It might have been half-past eight o'clock in the evening. The day was
declining.
Jean Valjean laid Marius along the wall on the dry part of the floor, then
walked to the grating and clenched the bars with both hands; the shaking
was frenzied, the shock nothing. The grating did not stir. Jean Valjean
seized the bars one after another, hoping to be able to tear out the least
solid one, and to make a lever of it to lift the door or break the lock.
Not a bar yielded. A tiger's teeth are not more solid in their sockets. No
lever; no possible purchase. The obstacle was invincible. No means of open-
ing the door.
Must he then perish there? What should he do? what would become of them?
go back; recommence the terrible road which he had already traversed;
he had not the strength. Besides, how cross that quagmire again, from
which he had escaped only by a miracle? And after the quagmire, was
there not that police patrol from which, certainly, one would not escape
twice? And then where should he go? what direction take? to follow the
descent was not to reach the goal. Should he come to another outlet, he
would find it obstructed by a door or a grating. All the outlets were
undoubtedly closed in this way. Chance had unsealed the grating by which
they had entered, but evidendy all the other mouths of the sewer were
fastened. He had only succeeded in escaping into a prison.
It was over. All that Jean Valjean had done was useless. Exhaustion
ended in abortion.
They were both caught in the gloomy and immense web of death, and Jean
Valjean felt running over those black threads trembling in the darkness,
the appalling spider.
He turned his back to the grating, and dropped upon the pavement, rather
prostrate than sitting, beside the yet motionless Marius, and his head
sank between his knees. No exit. This was the last drop of anguish.
Of whom did he think in this overwhelming dejection? Neither of
himself nor of Marius. He thought of Cosette.
VIII. THE TORN COAT-TAIL
IN THE MIDST of this annihilation, a hand was laid upon his shoulder,
and a voice which spoke low, said to him:
"Go halves."
Somebody in that darkness? Nothing is so like a dream as despair, Jean
Valjean thought he was dreaming. He had heard no steps. Was it possible?
he raised his eyes.
A man was before him.
This man was dressed in a blouse; he was barefooted; he held his shoes
in his left hand; he had evidently taken them off to be able to reach
Jean Valjean without being heard.
Jean Valjean had not a moment's hesitation. Unforeseen as was the
encounter, this man was known to him. This man was Thenardier.
Although wakened, so to speak, with a start, Jean Valjean, accustomed
to be on the alert and on the watch for unexpected blows which he must
quickly parry, instantly regained possession of all his presence of mind.
Besides, the condition of affairs could not be worse, a certain degree
of distress is no longer capable of crescendo, and Thenardier himself
could not add to the blackness of this night.
There was a moment of delay.
Thenardier, lifting his right hand to the height of his forehead, shaded
his eyes with it, then brought his brows together while he winked his eyes,
which, with a slight pursing of the mouth, characterises the sagacious
attention of a man who is seeking to recognise another. He did not suc-
ceed. Jean Valjean, we have just said, turned his back to the light, and
was moreover so disfigured, so muddy and so blood-stained, that in full
noon he would have been unrecognisable. On the other hand, with the light
from the grating shining in his face, a cellar light, it is true, livid,
but precise in its lividness, Thenardier, as the energetic, trite metaphor
expresses it, struck Jean Valjean at once. This inequality of conditions
was enough to insure Jean Valjean some advantage in this mysterious duel
which was about to open between the two conditions and the two men. The
encounter took place between Jean Valjean veiled and Thenardier unmasked.
Jean Valjean perceived immediately that Thenardier did not recognise
him.
They gazed at each other for a moment in this penumbra, as if they
were taking each other's measure. Thenardier was first to break the
silence.
"How are you going to manage to get out?"
Jean Valjean did not answer.
Thenardier continued:
"Impossible to pick the lock. Still you must get away from here."
"That is true," said Jean Valjean.
"Well, go halves."
"What do you mean?"
"You have killed the man; very well. For my part, I have the key."
Thenardier pointed to Marius. He went on:
"I don't know you, but I would like to help you. You must be a friend."
Jean Valjean began to understand. Thenardier took him for an assassin.
Thenardier resumed:
"Listen, comrade. You haven't killed that man without looking to what
he had in his pockets. Give me my half. I will open the door for you."
And, drawing a big key half out from under his blouse, which was full
of holes, he added:
"Would you like to see how the key of the fields is made? There it is."
Jean Valjean "remained stupid," the expression is the elder Corneille's,
so far as to doubt whether what he saw was real. It was Providence ap-
pearing in a guise of horror, and the good angel springing out of the
ground under the form of Thenardier.
Thenardier plunged his fist into a huge pocket hidden under his
blouse, pulled out a rope, and handed it to Jean Valjean.
"Here," said he, "I'll give you the rope to boot."
"A rope, what for?"
"You want a stone too, but you'll find one outside. There is a heap of
rubbish there."
"A stone, what for?"
"Fool, as you are going to throw the pantre into the river, you want a
stone and a rope; without them it would float on the water."
Jean Valjean took the rope. Everybody has accepted things thus
mechanically.
Thenardier snapped his fingers as over the arrival of a sudden idea:
"Ah now, comrade, how did you manage to get out of the quagmire yonder?
I haven't dared to risk myself there. Peugh! you don't smell good."
After a pause, he added:
"I ask you questions, but you are right in not answering them. That is
an apprenticeship for the examining judge's cursed quarter of an hour. And
then by not speaking at all, you run no risk of speaking too loud. It is
all the same, because I don't see your face, and because I don't know your
name, you would do wrong to suppose that I don't know who you are and
what you want. Understood. You have smashed this gentleman a little; now
you want to squeeze him somewhere. You need the river, the great hidefolly.
I am going to get you out of the scrape. To help a good fellow in
trouble that puts my boots on."
While approving Jean Valjean for keeping silence, he was evidently seeking
to make him speak. He pushed his shoulders, so as to endeavour to see his
side-face, and exclaimed, without however rising above the moderate tone
in which he kept his voice:
"Speaking of the quagmire, you are a proud animal. Why didn't you
throw the man in there?"
Jean Valjean preserved silence.
Thenardier resumed, raising the rag which served him as a cravat up to his
Adam's apple, a gesture which completes the air of sagacity of a serious
man:
"Indeed, perhaps you have acted prudently. The workmen when they come to-
morrow to stop the hole, would certainly have found the pantinois forgot-
ten there, and they would have been able, thread by thread, straw by straw,
to pincer the trace, and to reach you. Something has passed through the
sewer? Who? Where did he come out? Did anybody see him come out? The
police has plenty of brains. The sewer is treacherous and informs against
you. Such a discovery is a rarity, it attracts attention, few people use
the
sewer in their business while the river is at everybody's service. The
river is the true grave. At the month's end, they fish you up the man at
the nets of Saint Cloud. Well, what does that amount to? It is a carcass,
indeed! Who killed this man? Paris. And justice don't even inquire into
it. You have done right."
The more loquacious Thenardier was, the more dumb was Jean Valjean.
Thenardier pushed his shoulder anew.
"Now, let us finish the business. Let us divide. You have seen my key,
show me your money."
Thenardier was haggard, tawny, equivocal, a little threatening, neverthe-
less friendly.
There was one strange circumstance; Thenardier's manner was not natural;
he did not appear entirely at his ease; while he did not affect an air
of mystery, he talked low; from time to time he laid his finger on his
mouth, and muttered: "Hush!" It was difficult to guess why. There was
nobody there but them. Jean Valjean thought that perhaps some other ban-
dits were hidden in some recess not far off, and that Thenardier did not
care to share with them.
Thenardier resumed:
"Let us finish. How much did the pantre have in his deeps?"
Jean Valjean felt in his pockets.
It was, as will be remembered, his custom always to have money about
him. The gloomy life of expedients to which he was condemned, made this
a law to him. This time, however, he was caught unprovided. On putting
on his National Guard's uniform, the evening before, he had forgotten,
gloomily absorbed as he was, to take his pocket-book with him. He had
only some coins in his waistcoat pocket. He turned out his pocket, all
soaked with filth, and displayed upon the curb of the sewer a louis d'or,
two five-franc pieces, and five or six big sous.
Thenardier thrust out his under lip with a significant twist of the neck.
"You didn't kill him very dear," said he.
He began to handle, in all familiarity, the pockets of Jean Valjean and
Marius. Jean Valjean, principally concerned in keeping his back to the light,
did not interfere with him. While he was feeling of Marius's coat, Thenar-
dier, with the dexterity of a juggler, found means, without attracting
Jean Valjean's attention, to tear off a strip, which he hid under his blouse,
probably thinking that this scrap of cloth might assist him afterwards to
identify the assassinated man and the assassin. He found, however, nothing
more than the thirty francs.
"It is true," said he, "both together, you have no more than that."
And, forgetting his words, go halves, he took the whole.
He hesitated a little before the big sous. Upon reflection, he took them
also, mumbling:
"No matter! this is to suriner people too cheap."
This said, he took the key from under his blouse anew.
"Now, friend, you must go out. This is like the fair, you pay on going
out. You have paid, go out."
And he began to laugh.
That he had, in extending to an unknown man the help of this key, and
in causing another man than himself to go out by this door, the pure and
disinterested intention of saving an assassin, is something which it is
permissible to doubt.
Thenardier helped Jean Valjean to replace Marius upon his shoulders; then
he went towards the grating upon the points of his bare feet, beckoning
to Jean Valjean to follow him, he looked outside, laid his finger on his
mouth, and stood a few seconds as if in suspense; the inspection over, he
put the key into the lock. The bolt slid and the door turned. There was
neither snapping nor grinding. It was done very quietly. It was plain that
this grating and its hinges, oiled with care, were opened oftener than would
have been guessed. This quiet was ominous; you felt in it the furtive goings
and comings, the silent entrances and exits of the men of the night, and the
wolf-like tread of crime. The sewer was evidently in complicity with some
mysterious band. This taciturn grating was a receiver.
Thenardier half opened the door, left just a passage for Jean Valjean,
closed the grating again, turned the key twice in the lock, and plunged back
into the obscurity, without making more noise than a breath. He seemed to
walk with the velvet paws of a tiger. A moment afterwards, this hideous
providence had entered again into the invisible.
Jean Valjean found himself outside.
IX. MARIUS SEEMS TO BE DEAD TO ONE WHO IS A GOOD JUDGE
HE LET Marius slide down upon the beach.
They were outside!
The miasmas, the obscurity, the horror, were behind him. The balmy air, pure,
living, joyful, freely respirable, flowed around him. Everywhere about him
silence, but the charming silence of a sunset in a clear sky. Twilight had
fallen; night was coming, the great liberatress, the friend of all those who
need a mantle of darkness to escape from an anguish. The sky extended on
every side like an enormous calm. The river came to his feet with the sound
of a kiss. He heard the airy dialogues of the nests bidding each other good
night in the elms of the Champs-Elysees. A few stars, faintly piercing the
pale blue of the zenith, and visible to reverie alone, produced their imper-
ceptible little resplendencies in the immensity. Evening was unfolding over
Jean Valjean's head all the caresses of the infinite.
It was the undecided and exquisite hour which says neither yes nor no. There
was already night enough for one to be lost in it at a little distance, and
still day enough for one to be recognised near at hand.
Jean Valjean was for a few seconds irresistibly overcome by all this august
and caressing serenity; there are such moments of forgetfulness; suffering
refuses to harass the wretched; all is eclipsed in thought; peace covers the
dreamer like a night; and, under the twilight which is flinging forth its
rays, and in imitation of the sky which is illuminating, the soul becomes
starry. Jean Valjean could not but gaze at that vast clear shadow which was
above him; pensive, he took in the majestic silence of the eternal heavens,
a bath of ecstasy and prayer. Then, hastily, as if a feeling of duty came
back to him, he bent over Marius, and, dipping up some water in the hollow
of his hand, he threw a few drops gently into his face. Marius' eyelids did
not part; but his half-open mouth breathed.
Jean Valjean was plunging his hand into the river again, when suddenly
he felt an indescribable uneasiness, such as we feel when we have somebody
behind us, without seeing him.
We have already referred elsewhere to this impression, with which
everybody is acquainted.
He turned round.
As just before, somebody was indeed behind him.
A man of tall stature, wrapped in a long overcoat, with folded arms,
and holding in his right hand a club, the leaden knob of which could be
seen, stood erect a few steps in the rear of Jean Valjean, who was stooping
over Marius.
It was, with the aid of the shadow, a sort of apparition. A simple man
would have been afraid on account of the twilight, and a reflective man on
account of the club.
Jean Valjean recognised Javert.
The reader has doubtless guessed that Thenardier's pursuer was none
other than Javert. Javert, after his unhoped-for departure from the barricade,
had gone to the prefecture of police, had given an account verbally
to the prefect in person in a short audience, had then immediately returned
to his duty, which implied--the note found upon him will be remembered
--a certain surveillance of the shore on the right bank of the Champs-
Elysees, which for some time had excited the attention of the police. There
he had seen Thenardier, and had followed him. The rest is known.
It is understood also that the opening of that grating so obligingly
before Jean Valjean was a piece of shrewdness on the part of Thenardier.
Thenardier felt that Javert was still there; the man who is watched has a
scent which does not deceive him; a bone must be thrown to this hound. An
assassin, what a godsend! It was the scapegoat, which must never be
refused. Thenardier, by putting Jean Valjean out in his place, gave a victim
to the police, threw them off his own track, caused himself to be
forgotten in a larger matter, rewarded Javert for his delay, which always
flatters a spy, gained thirty francs, and counted surely, as for himself, upon
escaping by the aid of this diversion.
Jean Valjean had passed from one shoal to another.
These two encounters, blow on blow, to fall from Thenardier upon
Javert, it was hard.
Javert did not recognise Jean Valjean, who, as we have said, no longer
resembled himself. He did not unfold his arms, he secured his club in his
grasp by an imperceptible movement, and said in a quick and calm voice:
"Who are you?"
"I."
"What you?"
"Jean Valjean."
Javert put the club between his teeth, bent his knees, inclined his body,
laid his two powerful hands upon Jean Valjean's shoulders, which they
clamped like two vices, examined him, and recognised him. Their faces
almost touched. Javert's look was terrible.
Jean Valjean stood inert under the grasp of Javert like a lion who
should submit to the claw of a lynx.
"Inspector Javert," said he, "you have got me. Besides, since this morning,
I have considered myself your prisoner. I did not give you my address
to try to escape you. Take me. Only grant me one thing."
Javert seemed not to hear. He rested his fixed eye upon Jean Valjean.
His rising chin pushed his lips towards his nose, a sign of savage reverie.
At last, he let go of Jean Valjean, rose up as straight as a stick, took his club
firmly in his grasp, and, as if in a dream, murmured rather than pronounced
this question:
"What are you doing here? and who is this man?"
Jean Valjean answered, and the sound of his voice appeared to awaken
Javert:
"It is precisely of him that I wished to speak. Dispose of me as you
please; but help me first to carry him home. I only ask that of you."
Javert's face contracted, as it happened to him whenever anybody
seemed to consider him capable of a concession. Still he did not say no.
He stooped down again, took a handkerchief from his pocket, which
he dipped in the water, and wiped Marius' blood-stained forehead.
"This man was in the barricade," said he in an undertone, and as if
speaking to himself. "This is he whom they called Marius."
A spy of the first quality, who had observed everything, listened to
everything, heard everything, and recollected everything, believing he was
about to die; who spied even in his death-agony, and who, leaning upon
the first step of the grave, had taken notes.
He seized Marius' hand, seeking for his pulse.
"He is wounded," said Jean Valjean.
"He is dead," said Javert.
Jean Valjean answered:
"No. Not yet."
"You have brought him, then, from the barricade here?" observed
Javert.
His preoccupation must have been deep, as he did not dwell longer
upon this perplexing escape through the sewer, and did not even notice
Jean Valjean's silence after his question.
Jean Valjean, for his part, seemed to have but one idea. He resumed:
"He lives in the Marais, Rue des Filles du Calvaire, at his grandfather's--
I forget the name."
Jean Valjean felt in Marius' coat, took out the pocket-book, opened it
at the page pencilled by Marius, and handed it to Javert.
There was still enough light floating in the air to enable one to read.
Javert, moreover, had in his eye the feline phosphorescence of the birds of
the night. He deciphered the few lines written by Marius, and muttered:
"Gillenormand, Rue des Filles du Calvaire, No. 6."
Then he cried: "Driver?"
The reader will remember the fiacre which was waiting, in case of
need.
Javert kept Marius' pocket-book.
A moment later, the carriage, descending by the slope of the watering-
place, was on the beach. Marius was laid upon the back seat, and Javert
sat down by the side of Jean Valjean on the front seat.
When the door was shut, the fiacre moved rapidly off, going up the
quais in the direction of the Bastille.
They left the quais and entered the streets. The driver, a black silhouette
upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach.
Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head
dropping down upon his breast, his arms hanging, his legs rigid, appeared
to await nothing now but a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of shadow,
and Javert of stone; and in that carriage full of night, the interior of which,
whenever it passed before a lamp, appeared to turn lividly pale, as if from an
intermittent flash, chance grouped together, and seemed dismally to confront
the three tragic immobilities, the corpse, the spectre, and the statue.
X. RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL SON--OF HIS LIFE
AT EVERY JOLT over the pavement, a drop of blood fell from Marius' hair.
It was after nightfall when the fiacre arrived at No. 6, in the Rue des
Filles du Calvaire.
Javert first set foot on the ground, verified by a glance the number
above the porte-cochere, and, lifting the heavy wrought-iron knocker,
embellished in the old fashion, with a goat and a satyr defying each other,
struck a violent blow. The fold of the door partly opened, and Javert
pushed it. The porter showed himself, gaping and half-awake, a candle in
his hand.
Everybody in the house was asleep. People go to bed early in the
Marais, especially on days of emeute. That good old quartier, startled by
the Revolution, takes refuge in slumber, as children, when they hear Bugaboo
coming, hide their heads very quickly under their coverlets.
Meanwhile Jean Valjean and the driver lifted Marius out of the coach,
Jean Valjean supporting him by the armpits, and the coachman by the knees.
While he was carrying Marius in this way, Jean Valjean slipped his
hand under his clothes, which were much torn, felt his breast, and assured
himself that the heart still beat. It beat even a little less feebly, as if the
motion of the carriage had determined a certain renewal of life.
Javert called out to the porter in the tone which befits the government,
in presence of the porter of a factious man.
"Somebody whose name is Gillenormand?"
"It is here. What do you want with him?"
"His son is brought home."
"His son?" said the porter with amazement.
"He is dead."
Jean Valjean, who came ragged and dirty, behind Javert, and whom the
porter beheld with some horror, motioned to him with his head that he was
not.
The porter did not appear to understand either Javert's words, or Jean
Valjean's signs.
Javert continued:
"He has been to the barricade, and here he is."
"To the barricade!" exclaimed the porter.
"He has got himself killed. Go and wake his father."
The porter did not stir.
"Why don't you go?" resumed Javert.
And he added:
"There will be a funeral here to-morrow."
With Javert the common incidents of the highways were classed categor-
ically, which is the foundation of prudence and vigilance, and each
contingency had its compartment; the possible facts were in some sort in
the drawers, whence they came out, on occasion, in variable quantities;
there were, in the street, riot, emeute, carnival, funeral.
The porter merely woke Basque. Basque woke Nicolette; Nicolette woke
Aunt Gillenormand. As to the grandfather, they let him sleep, thinking
that he would know it soon enough at all events.
They carried Marius up to the first story, without anybody, moreover,
perceiving it in the other portions of the house, and they laid him on an
old couch in M. Gillenormand's ante-chamber; and, while Basque went for
a doctor and Nicolette was opening the linen closets, Jean Valjean felt
Javert touch him on the shoulder. He understood, and went down stairs,
having behind him Javert's following steps.
The porter saw them depart as he had seen them arrive, with drowsy
dismay.
They got into the fiacre again, and the driver mounted upon his box.
"Inspector Javert," said Jean Valjean, "grant me one thing more."
"What?" asked Javert roughly.
"Let me go home a moment. Then you shall do with me what you will."
Javert remained silent for a few seconds, his chin drawn back into the
collar of his overcoat, then he let down the window in front.
"Driver," said he, "Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7."
XI. COMMOTION IN THE ABSOLUTE
THEY DID NOT open their mouths again for the whole distance.
What did Jean Valjean desire? To finish what he had begun; to inform
Cosette, to tell her where Marius was, to give her perhaps some other useful
information, to make, if he could, certain final dispositions. As to
himself, as to what concerned him personally, it was all over; he had been
seized by Javert and did not resist; another than he, in such a condition,
would perhaps have thought vaguely of that rope which Thenardier had
given him and of the bars of the first cell which he should enter; but, since
the bishop, there had been in Jean Valjean, in view of any violent attempt,
were it even upon his own life, let us repeat, a deep religious hesitation.
Suicide, that mysterious assault upon the unknown, which may contain, in
a certain measure, the death of the soul, was impossible to Jean Valjean.
At the entrance of the Rue de l'Homme Arme, the fiacre stopped, this
street being too narrow for carriages to enter. Javert and Jean Valjean got
out.
The driver humbly represented to monsieur the inspector that the Utrecht
velvet of his carriage was all stained with the blood of the assassinat-
ed man and with the mud of the assassin. That was what he had understood.
He added that an indemnity was due him. At the same time, taking his lit-
tle book from his pocket, he begged monsieur the inspector to have the
goodness to write him "a little scrap of certificate as to what."
Javert pushed back the little book which the driver handed him, and
said:
"How much must you have, including your stop and your trip?"
"It is seven hours and a quarter," answered the driver, "and my velvet
was brand new. Eighty francs, monsieur the inspector."
Javert took four napoleons from his pocket and dismissed the fiacre.
Jean Valjean thought that Javert's intention was to take him on foot
to the post of the Blancs-Manteaux or to the post of the Archives which
are quite near by.
They entered the street. It was, as usual, empty. Javert followed Jean
Valjean. They reached No. 7. Jean Valjean rapped. The door opened.
"Very well," said Javert. "Go up."
He added with a strange expression and as if he were making an effort
in speaking in such a way:
"I will wait here for you."
Jean Valjean looked at Javert. This manner of proceeding was little in
accordance with Javert's habits. Still, that Javert should now have a sort
of haughty confidence in him, the confidence of the cat which grants the
mouse the liberty of the length of her claw, resolved as Jean Valjean was
to deliver himself up and make an end of it, could not surprise him very
much. He opened the door, went into the house, cried to the porter who
was in bed and who had drawn the cord without getting up: "It is I!" and
mounted the stairs.
On reaching the first story, he paused. All painful paths have their halt-
ing-places. The window on the landing, which was a sliding window, was
open. As in many old houses, the stairway admitted the light, and had a
view upon the street. The street lamp, which stood exactly opposite, threw
some rays upon the stairs, which produced an economy in light.
Jean Valjean, either to take breath or mechanically, looked out of this
window. He leaned over the street. It is short, and the lamp lighted it from
one end to the other. Jean Valjean was bewildered with amazement; there
was nobody there.
Javert was gone.
XII. THE GRANDFATHER
BASQUE and the porter had carried Marius into the parlour, still stretched
motionless upon the couch on which he had been first laid. The doctor,
who had been sent for, had arrived. Aunt Gillenormand had got up.
Aunt Gillenormand went to and fro, in terror, clasping her hands, and
incapable of doing anything but to say: "My God, is it possible?" She added
at intervals: "Everything will be covered with blood!" When the first horror
was over, a certain philosophy of the situation dawned upon her mind,
and expressed itself by this exclamation: "it must have turned out this way!"
She did not attain to: "I always said just so!" which is customary on occasions
of this kind.
On the doctor's order, a cot-bed had been set up near the couch. The
doctor examined Marius, and, after having determined that the pulse still
beat, that the sufferer had no wound penetrating his breast, and that the
blood at the corners of his mouth came from the nasal cavities, he had him
laid flat upon the bed, without a pillow, his head on a level with his body,
and even a little lower with his chest bare, in order to facilitate respir-
ation. Mademoiselle Gillenormand, seeing that they were taking off Marius'
clothes, withdrew. She began to tell her beads in her room.
The body had not received any interior lesion; a ball, deadened by the
pocket-book, had turned aside, and made the tour of the ribs with a hideous
gash, but not deep, and consequently not dangerous. The long walk under-
ground had completed the dislocation of the broken shoulder-blade, and
there were serious difficulties there. There were sword cuts on the arms.
No scar disfigured his face; the head, however, was as it were covered with
hacks; what would be the result of these wounds on the head? did they stop
at the scalp? did they affect the skull? That could not yet be told. A ser-
ious symptom was, that they had caused the fainting, and men do not always
wake from such faintings. The hamorrhage, moreover, had exhausted the
wounded man. From the waist, the lower part of the body had been protected
by the barricade.
Basque and Nicolette tore up linen and made bandages; Nicolette
sewed them, Basque folded them. There being no lint, the doctor stopped
the flow of blood from the wounds temporarily with rolls of wadding. By
the side of the bed, three candles were burning on a table upon which the
surgical instruments were spread out. The doctor washed Marius' face and
hair with cold water. A bucketful was red in a moment. The porter, candle
in hand, stood by.
The physician seemed reflecting sadly. From time to time he shook his
head, as if he were answering some question which he had put to himself
internally. A bad sign for the patient, these mysterious dialogues of the
physician with himself.
At the moment the doctor was wiping the face and touching the still
closed eyelids lightly with his finger, a door opened at the rear end
of the parlour, and a long, pale figure approached.
It was the grandfather.
The emeute, for two days, had very much agitated, exasperated, and
absorbed M. Gillenormand. He had not slept during the preceding night,
and he had had a fever all day. At night, he had gone to bed very early,
recommending that everything in the house be bolted; and, from fatigue,
he had fallen asleep.
The slumbers of old men are easily broken; M. Gillenormand's room
was next the parlour, and, in spite of the precautions they had taken, the
noise had awakened him. Surprised by the light which he saw at the crack
of his door, he had got out of bed, and groped his way along.
He was on the threshold, one hand on the knob of the half-opened
door, his head bent a little forward and shaking, his body wrapped in
a white nightgown, straight and without folds like a shroud; he was
astounded; and he had the appearance of a phantom who is looking into
a tomb.
He perceived the bed, and on the mattress that bleeding young man, white
with a waxy whiteness, his eyes closed, his mouth open, his lips pallid,
naked to the waist, gashed everywhere with red wounds, motionless,
brightly lighted.
The grandfather had, from head to foot, as much of a shiver as ossified
limbs can have; his eyes, the cornea of which had become yellow from
his great age, were veiled with a sort of glassy haze; his whole face assumed
in an instant the cadaverous angles of a skeleton head, his arms fell pendent
as if a spring were broken in them, and his stupefied astonishment was
expressed by the separation of the fingers of his aged, tremulous hands; his
knees bent forward, showing through the opening of his nightgown his
poor naked legs bristling with white hairs, and he murmured:
"Marius!"
"Monsieur," said Basque, "monsieur has just been brought home. He
has been to the barricade, and----"
"He is dead!" cried the old man in a terrible voice. "Oh! the brigand."
Then a sort of sepulchral transfiguration made this centenarian as
straight as a young man.
"Monsieur," said he, "you are the doctor. Come, tell me one thing. He
is dead, isn't he?"
The physician, in the height of anxiety, kept silence.
M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with a terrific burst of laughter.
"He is dead! he is dead! He has got killed at the barricade! in hatred
of me! It is against me that he did this! Ah, the blood-drinker! This is
the way he comes back to me! Misery of my life, he is dead!"
He went to a window, opened it wide as if he were stifling, and, standing
before the shadow, he began to talk into the street to the night:
"Pierced, sabred, slaughtered, exterminated, slashed, cut in pieces! do
you see that, the vagabond! He knew very well that I was waiting for him
and that I had had his room arranged for him, and that I had had his por-
trait of the time when he was a little boy hung at the head of my bed! He
knew very well that he had only to come back, and that for years I had been
calling him, and that I sat at night in my chimney corner, with my hands on
my knees, not knowing what to do, and that I was a fool for his sake! You
knew it very well, that you had only to come in and say: eIt is I,' and that
you would be the master of the house, and that I would obey you, and that
you would do whatever you liked with your old booby of a grandfather.
You knew it very well, and you said: eNo, he is a royalist; I won't go!' And
you went to the barricades, and you got yourself killed, out of spite! to
revenge yourself for what I said to you about Monsieur the Duke de Berry!
That is infamous! Go to bed, then, and sleep quietly! He is dead! That is
my waking."
The physician, who began to be anxious on two accounts, left Marius a
moment, and went to M. Gillenormand and took his arm. The grandfather
turned round, looked at him with eyes which seemed swollen and
bloody, and said quietly:
"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 which
is terrible, to think that it is your newspapers that do all the harm. You will
have scribblers, talkers, lawyers, orators, tribunes, discussions, progress,
lights, rights of man, freedom of the press, and this is the way they bring
home your children for you. Oh! Marius! it is abominable! Killed! dead
before me! A barricade! Oh! the bandit! Doctor, you live in the quartier, I
believe? Oh! I know you well. I see your carriage pass from my window. I
am going to tell you. You would be wrong to think I am angry. We don't
get angry with a dead man; that would be stupid. That is a child I brought
up. I was an old man when he was yet quite small. He played at the Tui11-
leries with his little spade and his little chair, and, so that the keeper should
not scold, with my cane I filled up the holes in the ground that he made
with his spade. One day he cried: eDown with Louis XVIII.!' and went
away. It is not my fault. He was all rosy and fair. His mother is dead. Have
you noticed that all little children are fair? What is the reason of it? 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 as high as this. He
could not pronounce the d's. His talk was so soft and so obscure that you
would have thought it was a bird. I recollect that once, before the Farnese
Hercules, they made a circle to admire and wonder at him, that child was so
beautiful! It was such a head as you see in pictures. I spoke to him in my
gruff voice, I frightened him with my cane, but he knew very well it was
for fun. In the morning, when he came into my room, I scolded, but it
seemed like sunshine to me. You can't defend yourself against these brats.
They take you, they hold on to you, they never let go of you. The truth is,
that there was never any amour like that child. Now, what do you say of
your Lafayette, your Benjamin Constant, and of your Tirecuir de Corcelles,
who kill him for me! It can't go on like this."
He approached Marius, who was still livid and motionless, and to
whom the physician had returned, and he began to wring his hands. The
old man's white lips moved as if mechanically, and made way for almost
indistinct words, like whispers in a death-rattle, which could scarcely be
heard: "Oh! heartless! Oh! clubbist! Oh! scoundrel! Oh! Septembrist!"
Reproaches whispered by a dying man to a corpse.
Little by little, as internal eruptions must always make their way out,
the connection of his words returned, but the grandfather appeared to have
lost the strength to utter them, his voice was so dull and faint that it
seemed to come from the other side of an abyss:
"It is all the same to me, I am going to die too, myself. And to say that
there is no little creature in Paris who would have been glad to make the
wretch happy! A rascal who, instead of amusing himself and enjoying life,
went to fight and got himself riddled like a brute! And for whom? for what?
For the republic! Instead of going to dance at the Chaumiere, as young
people should! It is well worth being twenty years old. The republic, a
deuced fine folly. Poor mothers, raise your pretty boys then. Come, he is
dead. That will make two funerals under the porte-cochere. Then you fixed
yourself out like that for the fine eyes of General Lamarque! What had he
done for you, this General Lamarque? A sabrer! a babbler! To get killed for
a dead man! If it isn't enough to make a man crazy! Think of it! At twenty!
And without turning his head to see if he was not leaving somebody behind
him! Here now are the poor old goodmen who must die alone. Perish in
your corner, owl! Well, indeed, so much the better, it is what I was hoping,
it is going to kill me dead. I am too old, I am a hundred, I am a
hundred thousand; it is a long time since I have had a right to be dead.
With this blow, it is done. It is all over then, how lucky! What is the use of
making him breathe hartshorn and all this heap of drugs? You are losing
your pains, dolt of a doctor! Go along, he is dead, stone dead. I understand
it, I, who am dead also. He hasn't done the thing halfway. Yes, these times
are infamous, infamous, infamous, and that is what I think of you, of your
ideas, of your systems, of your masters, of your oracles, of your doctors, of
your scamps of writers, of your beggars of philosophers, and of all the
rev-
olutions which for sixty years have frightened the flocks of crows in the
Tuileries! And as you had no pity in getting yourself killed like that, I shall
not have even any grief for your death, do you understand, assassin?"
At this moment, Marius slowly raised his lids, and his gaze, still veiled
in the astonishment of lethargy, rested upon M. Gillenormand.
"Marius!" cried the old man. "Marius! my darling Marius! my child!
my dear son! You are opening your eyes, you are looking at me, you are
alive, thanks!"
And he fell fainting.
@@@BOOK FOURTH
JAVERT OFF THE TRACK
I. JAVERT OFF THE TRACK
JAVERT made his way with slow steps from the Rue de l'Homme Arme.
He walked with his head down, for the first time in his life, and, for
the first time in his life as well, with his hands behind his back.
Until that day, Javert had taken, of the two attitudes of Napoleon, only
that which expresses resolution, the arms folded upon the breast; that
which expresses uncertainty, the hands behind the back, was unknown to
him. Now, a change had taken place; his whole person, slow and gloomy,
bore the impress of anxiety.
He plunged into the silent streets.
Still he followed one direction.
He took the shortest route towards the Seine, reached the Quai des
Ormes, went along the quai, passed the Greve, and stopped, at a little
distance from the post of the Place du Chatelet, at the corner of the
Pont Notre Dame. The Seine there forms between the Pont Notre Dame and
the Pont au Change in one direction, and in the other between the Quai de
la Megisserie and the Quai aux Fleurs, a sort of square lake crossed by a
rapid.
This point of the Seine is dreaded by mariners. Nothing is more danger-
ous than this rapid, narrowed at that period and vexed by the piles of
the mill of the bridge, since removed. The two bridges, so near each other,
increase the danger, the water hurrying fearfully under the arches. It rolls
on with broad, terrible folds; it gathers and heaps up; the flood strains at
the piles of the bridge as if to tear them out with huge liquid ropes. Men
who fall in there, one never sees again; the best swimmers are drowned.
Javert leaned both elbows on the parapet, with his chin in his hands,
and while his fingers were clenched mechanically in the thickest of his
whiskers, he reflected.
There had been a new thing, a revolution, a catastrophe in the depths
of his being; and there was matter for self-examination.
Javert was suffering frightfully.
For some hours Javert had ceased to be natural. He was troubled; this brain,
so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; there was a cloud
in this crystal. Javert felt that duty was growing weaker in his conscience,
and he could not hide it from himself. When he had so unexpectedly met
Jean Valjean upon the beach of the Seine, there had been in him something
of the wolf, which seizes his prey again, and of the dog, which again finds
his master.
He saw before him two roads, both equally straight; but he saw two;
and that terrified him--him, who had never in his life known but one
straight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory. One
of these two straight lines excluded the other. Which of the two was the
true one?
His condition was inexpressible.
To owe life to a malefactor, to accept that debt and to pay it, to be, in
spite of himself, on a level with a fugitive from justice, and to pay him for
one service with another service; to allow him to say: "Go away," and to
say to him in turn: "Be free ;" to sacrifice duty, that general obligation,
to personal motives, and to feel in these personal motives something general
also, and perhaps superior; to betray society in order to be true to his own
conscience; that all these absurdities should be realised and that they should
be accumulated upon himself, this it was by which he was prostrated.
One thing had astonished him, that Jean Valjean had spared him, and
one thing had petrified him, that he, Javert, had spared Jean Valjean.
Where was he? He sought himself and found himself no longer.
What should he do now? Give up Jean Valjean, that was wrong; leave
Jean Valjean free, that was wrong. In the first case, the man of authority
would fall lower than the man of the galley; in the second, a convict rose
higher than the law and set his foot upon it. In both cases, dishonour to
him, Javert. In every course which was open to him, there was a fall. Destiny
has certain extremities precipitous upon the impossible, and beyond which
life is no more than an abyss. Javert was at one of these extremities.
One of his causes of anxiety was, that he was compelled to think. The
very violence of all these contradictory emotions forced him to it. Thought,
an unaccustomed thing to him, and singularly painful.
There is always a certain amount of internal rebellion in thought; and
he was irritated at having it within him.
Thought, upon any subject, no matter what, outside of the narrow circle
of his functions, had been to him, in all cases, a folly and a fatigue; but
thought upon the day which had just gone by, was torture. He must absolutely,
however, look into his conscience after such shocks, and render an account
of himself to himself.
What he had just done made him shudder. He had, he, Javert, thought good
to decide, against all the regulations of the police, against the whole
social and judicial organisation, against the entire code, in favour of a
release; that had pleased him; he had substituted his own affairs for the pub
lic affairs; could this be characterised? Every time that he set himself face to
face with this nameless act which he had committed, he trembled from
head to foot. Upon what should he resolve? A single resource remained: to
return immediately to the Rue de l'Homme Arme, and have Jean Valjean
arrested. It was clear that that was what he must do. He could not.
Something barred the way to him on that side.
Something? What? Is there anything else in the world besides tribunals,
sentences, police, and authority? Javert's ideas were overturned.
A galley-slave sacred! a convict not to be taken by justice! and that by
the act of Javert!
That Javert and Jean Valjean, the man made to be severe, the man
made to be submissive, that these two men, who were each the thing of the
law, should have come to this point of setting themselves both above the
law, was not this terrible?
What then! such enormities should happen and nobody should be
punished? Jean Valjean, stronger than the entire social order, should be
free and he, Javert, continue to eat the bread of the government!
His reflections gradually became terrible.
He might also through these reflections have reproached himself a little
in regard to the insurgent carried to the Rue des Filles du Calvaire, but
he did not think of it. The lesser fault was lost in the greater. Besides, that
insurgent was clearly a dead man, and legally, death extinguishes pursuit.
Jean Valjean then was the weight he had on his mind.
Jean Valjean confounded him. All the axioms which had been the supports
of his whole life crumbled away before this man. Jean Valjean's
generosity towards him, Javert, overwhelmed him. Other acts, which he
remembered and which he had hitherto treated as lies and follies, returned
to him now as realities. M. Madeleine reappeared behind Jean Valjean, and
the two figures overlaid each other so as to make but one, which was ven-
erable. Javert felt that something horrible was penetrating his soul,
admiration for a convict. Respect for a galley-slave, can that be possible?
He shuddered at it, yet could not shake it off. It was useless to struggle, he
was reduced to confess before his own inner tribunal the sublimity of this
wretch. That was hateful.
A beneficent malefactor, a compassionate convict, kind, helpful,
clement, returning good for evil, returning pardon for hatred, loving pity
rather than vengeance, preferring to destroy himself rather than to destroy
his enemy, saving him who had stricken him, kneeling upon the height of
virtue, nearer the angels than men. Javert was compelled to acknowledge
that this monster existed.
This could not last.
Certainly, and we repeat it, he had not given himself up without resistance
to this monster, this infamous angel, this hideous hero, at whom he
was almost as indignant as he was astounded. Twenty times, while he was in
that carriage face to face with Jean Valjean, the legal tiger had roared
within him. Twenty times he had been tempted to throw himself upon Jean
Valjean, to seize him and to devour him, that is to say, to arrest him. What
more simple, indeed? To cry at the first post in front of which they passed:
"Here is a fugitive from justice in breach of his ban!" to call the gendarmes
and say to them: "This man is yours!" then to go away, to leave this condemned
man there, to ignore the rest, and to have nothing more to do with
it. This man is for ever the prisoner of the law, the law will do what it will
with him. What more just? Javert had said all this to himself; he had desired
to go further, to act, to apprehend the man, and, then as now, he had not
been able; and every time that his hand had been raised convulsively
towards Jean Valjean's collar, his hand, as if under an enormous weight,
had fallen back, and in the depths of his mind he had heard a voice, a
strange voice crying to him: "Very well. Give up your saviour. Then have
Pontius Pilate's basin brought, and wash your claws."
Then his reflections fell back upon himself, and by the side of Jean
Valjean, exalted, he beheld himself, him, Javert, degraded.
A convict was his benefactor!
But also why had he permitted this man to let him live? He had, in that
barricade, the right to be killed. He should have availed himself of that
right. To have called the other insurgents to his aid against Jean Valjean,
to have secured a shot by force, that would have been better.
His supreme anguish was the loss of all certainty. He felt that he was
uprooted. The code was now but a stump in his hand. He had to do with
scruples of an unknown species. There was in him a revelation of feeling
entirely distinct from the declarations of the law, his only standard hith-
erto. To retain his old virtue, that no longer sufficed. An entire order of
unexpected facts arose and subjugated him. An entire new world appeared to
his soul; favour accepted and returned, devotion, compassion, indulgence,
acts of violence committed by pity upon austerity, respect of persons, no
more final condemnation, no more damnation, the possibility of a tear in
the eye of the law, a mysterious justice according to God going counter to
justice according to men. He perceived in the darkness the fearful rising of
an unknown moral sun; he was horrified and blinded by it. An owl compelled
to an eagle's gaze.
He said to himself that it was true then, that there were exceptions,
that authority might be put out of countenance, that rule might stop short
before a fact, that everything was not framed in the text of the code, that
the unforeseen would be obeyed, that the virtue of a convict might spread a
snare for the virtue of a functionary, that the monstrous might be divine,
that destiny had such ambuscades as these, and he thought with despair that
even he had not been proof against a surprise.
He was compelled to recognise the existence of kindness. This convict
had been kind. And he himself, wonderful to tell, he had just been kind.
Therefore he had become depraved.
He thought himself base. He was a horror to himself.
Javert's ideal was not to be humane, not to be great, not to be sublime;
it was to be irreproachable. Now he had just failed.
How had he reached that point? How had all this happened? He could not
have told himself. He took his head in his hands, but it was in vain; he
could not explain it to himself.
He had certainly always had the intention of returning Jean Valjean to
the law, of which Jean Valjean was the captive, and of which he, Javert,
was the slave. He had not confessed to himself for a single moment while
he held him, that he had a thought of letting him go. It was in some sort
without his knowledge that his hand had opened and released him.
All manner of interrogation points flashed before his eyes. He put
questions to himself, and he made answers, and his answers frightened him.
He asked himself: "This convict, this desperate man, whom I have pursued
even to persecution, and who has had me beneath his feet, and could have
avenged himself, and who ought to have done so as well for his revenge as
for his security, in granting me life, in sparing me, what has he done? His
duty? No. Something more. And I, in sparing him in my turn, what have I
done? My duty? No. Something more. There is then something more than duty."
Here he was startled; his balances were disturbed; one of the scales fell
into the abyss, the other flew into the sky, and Javert felt no less dismay
from the one which was above than from the one which was below.
Without being the least in the world what is called a Voltairian, or a
philosopher, or a sceptic, respectful on the contrary, by instinct, towards
the established church, he knew it only as an august fragment of the social
whole; order was his dogma and was enough for him; since he had been of
the age of a man, and an official, he had put almost all his religion in the
police. Being, and we employ the words here without the slightest irony
and in their most serious acceptation, being, we have said, a spy as men are
priests. He had a superior, M. Gisquet; he had scarcely thought, until today,
of that other superior, God.
This new chief, God, he felt unawares, and was perplexed thereat.
He had lost his bearings in this unexpected presence; he did not know
what to do with this superior; he who was not ignorant that the subordinate
is bound always to yield, that he ought neither to disobey, nor to blame,
nor to discuss, and that, in presence of a superior who astonishes him too
much, the inferior has no resource but resignation.
But how manage to send in his resignation to God?
However this might be, and it was always to this that he returned, one
thing overruled all else for him, that was, that he had just committed
an appalling infraction. He had closed his eyes upon a convicted second
offender in breach of his ban. He had set a galley-slave at large. He
had robbed the laws of a man who belonged to them. He had done that. He
could not understand himself. He was not sure of being himself. The very
reasons of his action escaped him; he caught only the whirl of them. He
had lived up to this moment by that blind faith which a dark probity en-
genders. This faith was leaving him, this probity was failing him. All
that he had believed was dissipated. Truths which he had no wish for in-
exorably besieged him. He must henceforth be another man. He suffered the
strange pangs of a conscience suddenly operated upon for the cataract. He
saw what he revolted at seeing. He felt that he was emptied, useless, bro-
ken off from his past life, destitute, dissolved. Authority was dead in
him. He had no further reason for existence.
Terrible situation! to be moved.
To be granite, and to doubt! to be the statue of penalty cast in a single
piece in the mould of the law, and to suddenly perceive that you have under
your breast of bronze something preposterous and disobedient which
almost resembles a heart! To be led by it to render good for good, although
you may have said until to-day that this good was evil! to be the watch-dog,
and to fawn! to be ice, and to melt! to be a vice, and to become a hand! to
feel your fingers suddenly open! to lose your hold, appalling thing!
The projectile man no longer knowing his road, and recoiling!
To be obliged to acknowledge this: infallibility is not infallibile, there
may be an error in the dogma, all is not said when a code has spoken, society
is not perfect, authority is complicate with vacillation, a cracking is pos-
sible in the immutable, judges are men, the law may be deceived, the tribunals
may be mistaken! to see a flaw in the immense blue crystal of the firmament!
What was passing in Javert was the Fampoux of a rectilinear conscience, the
throwing of a soul out of its path, the crushing of a probity irresistibly
hurled in a straight line and breaking itself against God. Certainly, it was
strange, that the fireman of order, the engineer of authority, mounted upon
the blind iron-horse of the rigid path, could be thrown off by a ray of
light! that the incommutable, the direct, the correct, the geometrical,
the passive, the perfect, could bend! that there should be a road to
Damascus for the locomotive!
God, always interior to man, and unyielding, he the true conscience, to the
false; a prohibition to the spark to extinguish itself; an order to the ray
to remember the sun; an injunction to the soul to recognise the real absolute
when it is confronted with the fictitious absolute; humanity imperishable;
the human heart inadmissible; that splendid phenomenon, the most beautiful
perhaps of our interior wonders, did Javert comprehend it? did Javert
penetrate it? did Javert form any idea of it? Evidently not. But under the
pressure of this incontestable incomprehensible, he felt that his head was
bursting.
He was less the transfigured than the victim of this miracle. He bore it,
exasperated. He saw in it only an immense difficulty of existence. It seemed
to him that henceforth his breathing would be oppressed for ever.
To have the unknown over his head, he was not accustomed to that.
Until now all that he had above him had been in his sight a smooth, simple,
limpid surface; nothing there unknown, nothing obscure; nothing which was
not definite, co-ordinated, concatenated, precise, exact, circumscribed,
limited, shut in, all foreseen; authority was a plane; no fall in it, no
dizziness before it. Javert had never seen the unknown except below. The
irregular, the unexpected, the disorderly opening of chaos, the possible
slipping into an abyss; that belonged to inferior regions, to the rebell-
ious, the wicked, the miserable. Now Javert was thrown over backward, and
he was abruptly startled by this monstrous apparition: a gulf on high.
What then! he was dismantled completely! he was disconcerted, absolutely!
In what should he trust? That of which he had been convinced gave way!
What! the flaw in the cuirass of society could be found by a magnanimous
wretch! what! an honest servant of the law could find himself suddenly
caught between two crimes, the crime of letting a man escape, and the
crime of arresting him! all was not certain in the order given by the
state to the official! There might be blind alleys in duty! What then!
was all that real! was it true that an old bandit, weighed down by con-
demnations, could rise up and be right at last? was this credible? were
there cases then when the law ought, before a transfigured crime, to
retire, stammering excuses?
Yes, there were! and Javert saw it! and Javert touched it! and not only
could he not deny it, but he took part in it. They were realities. It
was abominable that real facts could reach such deformity.
If facts did their duty, they would be contented with being the proofs
of the law; facts, it is God who sends them. Was anarchy then about to
descend from on high?
So,--and beneath the magnifying power of anguish, and in the optical il-
lusion of consternation, all that might have restrained and corrected his
impression vanished, and society, and the human race, and the universe,
were summed up henceforth in his eyes in one simple and terrible feature--
so punishment, the thing judged, the force due to legislation, the decrees
of the sovereign courts, the magistracy, the government, prevention and re-
pression, official wisdom, legal infallibility, the principle of authority,
all the dogmas upon which repose political and civil security, sovereignty,
justice, the logic flowing from the code, the social absolute, the public
truth, all that, confusion, jumble, chaos; himself, Javert, the spy of order,
incorruptibility in the service of the police, the mastiff-providence of
society vanquished and prostrated; and upon all this ruin a man standing,
with a green cap on his head and a halo about his brow; such was the over-
turn to which he had come; such was the frightful vision which he had in
his soul.
Could that be endurable? No.
Unnatural state, if ever there was one. There were only two ways to get
out of it. One, to go resolutely to Jean Valjean, and to return the man of
the galleys to the dungeon. The other----
Javert left the parapet, and, his head erect this time, made his way with
a firm step towards the post indicated by a lamp at one of the corners of
the Place du Chatelet.
On reaching it, he saw a sergent de ville through the window, and he
entered. Merely from the manner in which they push open the door of a
guard-house, policemen recognise each other. Javert gave his name, show-
ed his card to the sergent, and sat down at the table of the post, on
which a candle was burning. There was a pen on the table, a leaden ink-
stand, and some paper in readiness for chance reports and the orders of
the night patrol.
This table, always accompanied by its straw chair, is an institution; it
exists in all the police posts; it is invariably adorned with a boxwood saucer,
full of saw-dust, and a pasteboard box full of red wafers, and it is the
lower stage of the official style. On it the literature of the state begins.
Javert took the pen and a sheet of paper, and began to write. This is
what he wrote:
SOME OBSERVATIONS FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE SERVICE
"First: I beg monsieur the prefect to glance at this.
"Secondly: the prisoners, on their return from examination, take off
their shoes and remain barefooted upon the pavement while they are
searched. Many cough on returning to the prison. This involves hospital
expenses.
"Thirdly: spinning is good, with relays of officers at intervals; but there
should be, on important occasions, two officers at least who do not lose
sight of each other, so that, if, for any cause whatever, one officer becomes
weak in the service, the other is watching him, and supplies his place.
"Fourthly: it is difficult to explain why the special regulation of the pri-
son of the Madelonnettes forbids a prisoner having a chair, even on paying
for it.
"Fifthly: at the Madelonnettes, there are only two bars to the sutler's
window, which enables the sutler to let the prisoners touch her hand.
"Sixthly: the prisoners, called barkers, who call the other prisoners to the
parlour, make the prisoner pay them two sous for calling his name distinctly.
This is a theft.
"Seventhly: for a dropped thread, they retain ten sous from the prisoner
in the weaving shop; this is an abuse on the part of the contractor,
since the cloth is just as good.
"Eighthly: it is annoying that the visitors of La Force have to cross
the Cour des Momes to reach the parlour of Sainte Marie l'Egyptienne.
"Ninthly: it is certain that gendarmes are every day heard relating, in
the yard of the prefecture, the examinations of those brought before the
magistrates. For a gendarme, who should hold such things sacred, to repeat
what he has heard in the examining chamber, is a serious disorder.
"Tenthly: Mme. Henry is an honest woman; her sutler's window is very neat;
but it is wrong for a woman to keep the wicket of the trap-door of the secret
cells. It is not worthy the Conciergerie of a great civilisation."
Javert wrote these lines in his calmest and most correct handwriting,
not omitting a dot, and making the paper squeak resolutely under his pen.
Beneath the last line he signed:
"At the Post of the Place du Chatelet.
"June 7, 1832, about one o'clock in the morning."
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