
The deeper one goes, the more mysterious are the toilers. 
The work is good, up to a degree which the social philosophies
are able to recognize; beyond that degree it is doubtful and mixed;
lower down, it becomes terrible.  At a certain depth, the excavations
are no longer penetrable by the spirit of civilization, the limit
breathable by man has been passed; a beginning of monsters is possible.

The descending scale is a strange one; and each one of the rungs of this
ladder corresponds to a stage where philosophy can find foothold,
and where one encounters one of these workmen, sometimes divine,
sometimes misshapen.  Below John Huss, there is Luther; below Luther,
there is Descartes; below Descartes, there is Voltaire; below Voltaire,
there is Condorcet; below Condorcet, there is Robespierre;
below Robespierre, there is Marat; below Marat there is Babeuf. 
And so it goes on.  Lower down, confusedly, at the limit which separates
the indistinct from the invisible, one perceives other gloomy men,
who perhaps do not exist as yet.  The men of yesterday are spectres;
those of to-morrow are forms.  The eye of the spirit distinguishes
them but obscurely.  The embryonic work of the future is one of the
visions of philosophy.

A world in limbo, in the state of foetus, what an unheard-of spectre!

Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, are there also, in lateral galleries.

Surely, although a divine and invisible chain unknown to themselves,
binds together all these subterranean pioneers who, almost always,
think themselves isolated, and who are not so, their works vary greatly,
and the light of some contrasts with the blaze of others.  The first
are paradisiacal, the last are tragic.  Nevertheless, whatever may be
the contrast, all these toilers, from the highest to the most nocturnal,
from the wisest to the most foolish, possess one likeness, and this
is it:  disinterestedness.  Marat forgets himself like Jesus. 
They throw themselves on one side, they omit themselves, they think
not of themselves.  They have a glance, and that glance seeks
the absolute.  The first has the whole heavens in his eyes; the last,
enigmatical though he may be, has still, beneath his eyelids,
the pale beam of the infinite.  Venerate the man, whoever he may be,
who has this sign--the starry eye.

The shadowy eye is the other sign.

With it, evil commences.  Reflect and tremble in the presence of any
one who has no glance at all.  The social order has its black miners.

There is a point where depth is tantamount to burial, and where
light becomes extinct.

Below all these mines which we have just mentioned, below all
these galleries, below this whole immense, subterranean, venous system
of progress and utopia, much further on in the earth, much lower
than Marat, lower than Babeuf, lower, much lower, and without
any connection with the upper levels, there lies the last mine. 
A formidable spot.  This is what we have designated as the le
troisieme dessous.  It is the grave of shadows.  It is the cellar
of the blind.  Inferi.

This communicates with the abyss.



CHAPTER II

THE LOWEST DEPTHS


There disinterestedness vanishes.  The demon is vaguely outlined;
each one is for himself.  The _I_ in the eyes howls, seeks, fumbles,
and gnaws.  The social Ugolino is in this gulf.

The wild spectres who roam in this grave, almost beasts,
almost phantoms, are not occupied with universal progress; they are
ignorant both of the idea and of the word; they take no thought
for anything but the satisfaction of their individual desires. 
They are almost unconscious, and there exists within them a sort
of terrible obliteration.  They have two mothers, both step-mothers,
ignorance and misery.  They have a guide, necessity; and for all
forms of satisfaction, appetite.  They are brutally voracious,
that is to say, ferocious, not after the fashion of the tyrant,
but after the fashion of the tiger.  From suffering these spectres
pass to crime; fatal affiliation, dizzy creation, logic of darkness. 
That which crawls in the social third lower level is no longer
complaint stifled by the absolute; it is the protest of matter. 
Man there becomes a dragon.  To be hungry, to be thirsty--that is
the point of departure; to be Satan--that is the point reached. 
From that vault Lacenaire emerges.

We have just seen, in Book Fourth, one of the compartments
of the upper mine, of the great political, revolutionary, and
philosophical excavation.  There, as we have just said, all is pure,
noble, dignified, honest.  There, assuredly, one might be misled;
but error is worthy of veneration there, so thoroughly does it imply
heroism.  The work there effected, taken as a whole has a name:  Progress.

The moment has now come when we must take a look at other depths,
hideous depths.  There exists beneath society, we insist upon
this point, and there will exist, until that day when ignorance
shall be dissipated, the great cavern of evil.

This cavern is below all, and is the foe of all.  It is hatred,
without exception.  This cavern knows no philosophers; its dagger has
never cut a pen.  Its blackness has no connection with the sublime
blackness of the inkstand.  Never have the fingers of night which
contract beneath this stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book
nor unfolded a newspaper.  Babeuf is a speculator to Cartouche;
Marat is an aristocrat to Schinderhannes.  This cavern has for its
object the destruction of everything.

Of everything.  Including the upper superior mines, which it execrates. 
It not only undermines, in its hideous swarming, the actual social order;
it undermines philosophy, it undermines human thought, it undermines
civilization, it undermines revolution, it undermines progress. 
Its name is simply theft, prostitution, murder, assassination. 
It is darkness, and it desires chaos.  Its vault is formed of ignorance.

All the others, those above it, have but one object--to suppress it. 
It is to this point that philosophy and progress tend, with all
their organs simultaneously, by their amelioration of the real,
as well as by their contemplation of the absolute.  Destroy the cavern
Ignorance and you destroy the lair Crime.

Let us condense, in a few words, a part of what we have just written. 
The only social peril is darkness.

Humanity is identity.  All men are made of the same clay. 
There is no difference, here below, at least, in predestination. 
The same shadow in front, the same flesh in the present, the same
ashes afterwards.  But ignorance, mingled with the human paste,
blackens it.  This incurable blackness takes possession of the
interior of a man and is there converted into evil.



CHAPTER III

BABET, GUEULEMER, CLAQUESOUS, AND MONTPARNASSE


A quartette of ruffians, Claquesous, Gueulemer, Babet, and Montparnasse
governed the third lower floor of Paris, from 1830 to 1835.

Gueulemer was a Hercules of no defined position.  For his lair he had
the sewer of the Arche-Marion. He was six feet high, his pectoral muscles
were of marble, his biceps of brass, his breath was that of a cavern,
his torso that of a colossus, his head that of a bird.  One thought
one beheld the Farnese Hercules clad in duck trousers and a cotton
velvet waistcoat.  Gueulemer, built after this sculptural fashion,
might have subdued monsters; he had found it more expeditious to
be one.  A low brow, large temples, less than forty years of age,
but with crow's-feet, harsh, short hair, cheeks like a brush, a beard
like that of a wild boar; the reader can see the man before him. 
His muscles called for work, his stupidity would have none of it. 
He was a great, idle force.  He was an assassin through coolness. 
He was thought to be a creole.  He had, probably, somewhat to do
with Marshal Brune, having been a porter at Avignon in 1815. 
After this stage, he had turned ruffian.

The diaphaneity of Babet contrasted with the grossness of Gueulemer. 
Babet was thin and learned.  He was transparent but impenetrable. 
Daylight was visible through his bones, but nothing through his eyes. 
He declared that he was a chemist.  He had been a jack of all trades. 
He had played in vaudeville at Saint-Mihiel. He was a man of purpose,
a fine talker, who underlined his smiles and accentuated his gestures. 
His occupation consisted in selling, in the open air, plaster busts
and portraits of "the head of the State."  In addition to this,
he extracted teeth.  He had exhibited phenomena at fairs,
and he had owned a booth with a trumpet and this poster: 
"Babet, Dental Artist, Member of the Academies, makes physical
experiments on metals and metalloids, extracts teeth, undertakes
stumps abandoned by his brother practitioners.  Price:  one tooth,
one franc, fifty centimes; two teeth, two francs; three teeth,
two francs, fifty.  Take advantage of this opportunity." 
This Take advantage of this opportunity meant:  Have as many teeth
extracted as possible.  He had been married and had had children. 
He did not know what had become of his wife and children.  He had
lost them as one loses his handkerchief.  Babet read the papers,
a striking exception in the world to which he belonged.  One day,
at the period when he had his family with him in his booth on wheels,
he had read in the Messager, that a woman had just given birth to a child,
who was doing well, and had a calf's muzzle, and he exclaimed: 
"There's a fortune! my wife has not the wit to present me with a child
like that!"

Later on he had abandoned everything, in order to "undertake Paris." 
This was his expression.

Who was Claquesous?  He was night.  He waited until the sky was daubed
with black, before he showed himself.  At nightfall he emerged from
the hole whither he returned before daylight.  Where was this hole? 
No one knew.  He only addressed his accomplices in the most absolute
darkness, and with his back turned to them.  Was his name Claquesous? 
Certainly not.  If a candle was brought, he put on a mask. 
He was a ventriloquist.  Babet said:  "Claquesous is a nocturne
for two voices."  Claquesous was vague, terrible, and a roamer. 
No one was sure whether he had a name, Claquesous being a sobriquet;
none was sure that he had a voice, as his stomach spoke more
frequently than his voice; no one was sure that he had a face,
as he was never seen without his mask.  He disappeared as though he
had vanished into thin air; when he appeared, it was as though he
sprang from the earth.

A lugubrious being was Montparnasse.  Montparnasse was a child;
less than twenty years of age, with a handsome face, lips like cherries,
charming black hair, the brilliant light of springtime in his eyes;
he had all vices and aspired to all crimes.

The digestion of evil aroused in him an appetite for worse.  It was
the street boy turned pickpocket, and a pickpocket turned garroter. 
He was genteel, effeminate, graceful, robust, sluggish, ferocious. 
The rim of his hat was curled up on the left side, in order to make
room for a tuft of hair, after the style of 1829.  He lived by robbery
with violence.  His coat was of the best cut, but threadbare. 
Montparnasse was a fashion-plate in misery and given to the commission
of murders.  The cause of all this youth's crimes was the desire
to be well-dressed. The first grisette who had said to him: 
"You are handsome!" had cast the stain of darkness into his heart,
and had made a Cain of this Abel.  Finding that he was handsome,
he desired to be elegant:  now, the height of elegance is idleness;
idleness in a poor man means crime.  Few prowlers were so dreaded
as Montparnasse.  At eighteen, he had already numerous corpses
in his past.  More than one passer-by lay with outstretched arms
in the presence of this wretch, with his face in a pool of blood. 
Curled, pomaded, with laced waist, the hips of a woman, the bust
of a Prussian officer, the murmur of admiration from the boulevard
wenches surrounding him, his cravat knowingly tied, a bludgeon
in his pocket, a flower in his buttonhole; such was this dandy of
the sepulchre.



CHAPTER IV

COMPOSITION OF THE TROUPE


These four ruffians formed a sort of Proteus, winding like a serpent
among the police, and striving to escape Vidocq's indiscreet
glances "under divers forms, tree, flame, fountain," lending each
other their names and their traps, hiding in their own shadows,
boxes with secret compartments and refuges for each other,
stripping off their personalities, as one removes his false nose
at a masked ball, sometimes simplifying matters to the point of
consisting of but one individual, sometimes multiplying themselves
to such a point that Coco-Latour himself took them for a whole throng.

These four men were not four men; they were a sort of mysterious
robber with four heads, operating on a grand scale on Paris;
they were that monstrous polyp of evil, which inhabits the crypt
of society.

Thanks to their ramifications, and to the network underlying
their relations, Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous, and Montparnasse
were charged with the general enterprise of the ambushes of the
department of the Seine.  The inventors of ideas of that nature,
men with nocturnal imaginations, applied to them to have their
ideas executed.  They furnished the canvas to the four rascals,
and the latter undertook the preparation of the scenery.  They labored
at the stage setting.  They were always in a condition to lend
a force proportioned and suitable to all crimes which demanded
a lift of the shoulder, and which were sufficiently lucrative. 
When a crime was in quest of arms, they under-let their accomplices. 
They kept a troupe of actors of the shadows at the disposition
of all underground tragedies.

They were in the habit of assembling at nightfall, the hour when they
woke up, on the plains which adjoin the Salpetriere.  There they
held their conferences.  They had twelve black hours before them;
they regulated their employment accordingly.

Patron-Minette,--such was the name which was bestowed in the
subterranean circulation on the association of these four men. 
In the fantastic, ancient, popular parlance, which is vanishing day
by day, Patron-Minette signifies the morning, the same as entre chien
et loup--between dog and wolf--signifies the evening.  This appellation,
Patron-Minette, was probably derived from the hour at which their
work ended, the dawn being the vanishing moment for phantoms and for the
separation of ruffians.  These four men were known under this title. 
When the President of the Assizes visited Lacenaire in his prison,
and questioned him concerning a misdeed which Lacenaire denied,
"Who did it?" demanded the President.  Lacenaire made this response,
enigmatical so far as the magistrate was concerned, but clear
to the police:  "Perhaps it was Patron-Minette."

A piece can sometimes be divined on the enunciation of the personages;
in the same manner a band can almost be judged from the list
of ruffians composing it.  Here are the appellations to which
the principal members of Patron-Minette answered,--for the names
have survived in special memoirs.

Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille.

Brujon.  [There was a Brujon dynasty; we cannot refrain from
interpolating this word.]

Boulatruelle, the road-mender already introduced.

Laveuve.

Finistere.

Homere-Hogu, a negro.

Mardisoir.  (Tuesday evening.)

Depeche.  (Make haste.)

Fauntleroy, alias Bouquetiere (the Flower Girl).

Glorieux, a discharged convict.

Barrecarrosse (Stop-carriage), called Monsieur Dupont.

L'Esplanade-du-Sud.

Poussagrive.

Carmagnolet.

Kruideniers, called Bizarro.

Mangedentelle.  (Lace-eater.)

Les-pieds-en-l'Air. (Feet in the air.)

Demi-Liard, called Deux-Milliards.

Etc., etc.

We pass over some, and not the worst of them.  These names have
faces attached.  They do not express merely beings, but species. 
Each one of these names corresponds to a variety of those misshapen
fungi from the under side of civilization.

Those beings, who were not very lavish with their countenances,
were not among the men whom one sees passing along the streets. 
Fatigued by the wild nights which they passed, they went off by day
to sleep, sometimes in the lime-kilns, sometimes in the abandoned
quarries of Montmatre or Montrouge, sometimes in the sewers. 
They ran to earth.

What became of these men?  They still exist.  They have always existed. 
Horace speaks of them:  Ambubaiarum collegia, pharmacopolae,
mendici, mimae; and so long as society remains what it is,
they will remain what they are.  Beneath the obscure roof of
their cavern, they are continually born again from the social ooze. 
They return, spectres, but always identical; only, they no longer
bear the same names and they are no longer in the same skins. 
The individuals extirpated, the tribe subsists.

They always have the same faculties.  From the vagrant to the tramp,
the race is maintained in its purity.  They divine purses in pockets,
they scent out watches in fobs.  Gold and silver possess an odor
for them.  There exist ingenuous bourgeois, of whom it might be said,
that they have a "stealable" air.  These men patiently pursue
these bourgeois.  They experience the quivers of a spider at the
passage of a stranger or of a man from the country.

These men are terrible, when one encounters them, or catches
a glimpse of them, towards midnight, on a deserted boulevard. 
They do not seem to be men but forms composed of living mists;
one would say that they habitually constitute one mass with the shadows,
that they are in no wise distinct from them, that they possess
no other soul than the darkness, and that it is only momentarily
and for the purpose of living for a few minutes a monstrous life,
that they have separated from the night.

What is necessary to cause these spectres to vanish?  Light. 
Light in floods.  Not a single bat can resist the dawn. 
Light up society from below.



BOOK EIGHTH.--THE WICKED POOR MAN


CHAPTER I

MARIUS, WHILE SEEKING A GIRL IN A BONNET, ENCOUNTERS A MAN IN A CAP


Summer passed, then the autumn; winter came.  Neither M. Leblanc
nor the young girl had again set foot in the Luxembourg garden. 
Thenceforth, Marius had but one thought,--to gaze once more on that
sweet and adorable face.  He sought constantly, he sought everywhere;
he found nothing.  He was no longer Marius, the enthusiastic dreamer,
the firm, resolute, ardent man, the bold defier of fate, the brain
which erected future on future, the young spirit encumbered with plans,
with projects, with pride, with ideas and wishes; he was a lost dog. 
He fell into a black melancholy.  All was over.  Work disgusted him,
walking tired him.  Vast nature, formerly so filled with forms,
lights, voices, counsels, perspectives, horizons, teachings, now lay
empty before him.  It seemed to him that everything had disappeared.

He thought incessantly, for he could not do otherwise; but he
no longer took pleasure in his thoughts.  To everything that they
proposed to him in a whisper, he replied in his darkness: 
"What is the use?"

He heaped a hundred reproaches on himself.  "Why did I follow her? 
I was so happy at the mere sight of her!  She looked at me;
was not that immense?  She had the air of loving me.  Was not
that everything?  I wished to have, what?  There was nothing
after that.  I have been absurd.  It is my own fault," etc., etc. 
Courfeyrac, to whom he confided nothing,--it was his nature,--
but who made some little guess at everything,--that was his nature,--
had begun by congratulating him on being in love, though he was
amazed at it; then, seeing Marius fall into this melancholy state,
he ended by saying to him:  "I see that you have been simply
an animal.  Here, come to the Chaumiere."

Once, having confidence in a fine September sun, Marius had allowed
himself to be taken to the ball at Sceaux by Courfeyrac, Bossuet,
and Grantaire, hoping, what a dream! that he might, perhaps,
find her there.  Of course he did not see the one he sought.--"But
this is the place, all the same, where all lost women are found,"
grumbled Grantaire in an aside.  Marius left his friends at the ball
and returned home on foot, alone, through the night, weary, feverish,
with sad and troubled eyes, stunned by the noise and dust of the
merry wagons filled with singing creatures on their way home from
the feast, which passed close to him, as he, in his discouragement,
breathed in the acrid scent of the walnut-trees, along the road,
in order to refresh his head.

He took to living more and more alone, utterly overwhelmed,
wholly given up to his inward anguish, going and coming in his pain
like the wolf in the trap, seeking the absent one everywhere,
stupefied by love.

On another occasion, he had an encounter which produced on him
a singular effect.  He met, in the narrow streets in the vicinity
of the Boulevard des Invalides, a man dressed like a workingman
and wearing a cap with a long visor, which allowed a glimpse
of locks of very white hair.  Marius was struck with the beauty
of this white hair, and scrutinized the man, who was walking slowly
and as though absorbed in painful meditation.  Strange to say,
he thought that he recognized M. Leblanc.  The hair was the same,
also the profile, so far as the cap permitted a view of it, the mien
identical, only more depressed.  But why these workingman's clothes? 
What was the meaning of this?  What signified that disguise? 
Marius was greatly astonished.  When he recovered himself,
his first impulse was to follow the man; who knows whether he did
not hold at last the clue which he was seeking?  In any case,
he must see the man near at hand, and clear up the mystery. 
But the idea occurred to him too late, the man was no longer there. 
He had turned into some little side street, and Marius could not
find him.  This encounter occupied his mind for three days and then
was effaced.  "After all," he said to himself, "it was probably only
a resemblance."



CHAPTER II

TREASURE TROVE


Marius had not left the Gorbeau house.  He paid no attention
to any one there.

At that epoch, to tell the truth, there were no other inhabitants
in the house, except himself and those Jondrettes whose rent he had
once paid, without, moreover, ever having spoken to either father,
mother, or daughters.  The other lodgers had moved away or had died,
or had been turned out in default of payment.

One day during that winter, the sun had shown itself a little
in the afternoon, but it was the 2d of February, that ancient
Candlemas day whose treacherous sun, the precursor of a six weeks'
cold spell, inspired Mathieu Laensberg with these two lines,
which have with justice remained classic:--


           Qu'il luise ou qu'il luiserne,
           L'ours rentre dans en sa caverne.[26]


[26] Whether the sun shines brightly or dim, the bear returns
to his cave.


Marius had just emerged from his:  night was falling.  It was the hour
for his dinner; for he had been obliged to take to dining again,
alas! oh, infirmities of ideal passions!

He had just crossed his threshold, where Ma'am Bougon was sweeping
at the moment, as she uttered this memorable monologue:--

"What is there that is cheap now?  Everything is dear.
There is nothing in the world that is cheap except trouble;
you can get that for nothing, the trouble of the world!"

Marius slowly ascended the boulevard towards the barrier, in order
to reach the Rue Saint-Jacques. He was walking along with drooping head.

All at once, he felt some one elbow him in the dusk; he wheeled round,
and saw two young girls clad in rags, the one tall and slim, the other
a little shorter, who were passing rapidly, all out of breath,
in terror, and with the appearance of fleeing; they had been coming
to meet him, had not seen him, and had jostled him as they passed. 
Through the twilight, Marius could distinguish their livid faces,
their wild heads, their dishevelled hair, their hideous bonnets,
their ragged petticoats, and their bare feet.  They were talking as
they ran.  The taller said in a very low voice:--

"The bobbies have come.  They came near nabbing me at the half-circle."
The other answered:  "I saw them.  I bolted, bolted, bolted!"

Through this repulsive slang, Marius understood that gendarmes
or the police had come near apprehending these two children,
and that the latter had escaped.

They plunged among the trees of the boulevard behind him,
and there created, for a few minutes, in the gloom, a sort
of vague white spot, then disappeared.

Marius had halted for a moment.

He was about to pursue his way, when his eye lighted on a little
grayish package lying on the ground at his feet.  He stooped and picked
it up.  It was a sort of envelope which appeared to contain papers.

"Good," he said to himself, "those unhappy girls dropped it."

He retraced his steps, he called, he did not find them; he reflected
that they must already be far away, put the package in his pocket,
and went off to dine.

On the way, he saw in an alley of the Rue Mouffetard, a child's coffin,
covered with a black cloth resting on three chairs, and illuminated
by a candle.  The two girls of the twilight recurred to his mind.

"Poor mothers!" he thought.  "There is one thing sadder than to see
one's children die; it is to see them leading an evil life."

Then those shadows which had varied his melancholy vanished
from his thoughts, and he fell back once more into his habitual
preoccupations.  He fell to thinking once more of his six months
of love and happiness in the open air and the broad daylight,
beneath the beautiful trees of Luxembourg.

"How gloomy my life has become!" he said to himself.  "Young girls
are always appearing to me, only formerly they were angels and now
they are ghouls."



CHAPTER III

QUADRIFRONS


That evening, as he was undressing preparatory to going to bed,
his hand came in contact, in the pocket of his coat, with the packet
which he had picked up on the boulevard.  He had forgotten it. 
He thought that it would be well to open it, and that this package
might possibly contain the address of the young girls, if it really
belonged to them, and, in any case, the information necessary to a
restitution to the person who had lost it.

He opened the envelope.

It was not sealed and contained four letters, also unsealed.

They bore addresses.

All four exhaled a horrible odor of tobacco.

The first was addressed:  "To Madame, Madame la Marquise de Grucheray,
the place opposite the Chamber of Deputies, No.--"

Marius said to himself, that he should probably find in it the
information which he sought, and that, moreover, the letter being open,
it was probable that it could be read without impropriety.

It was conceived as follows:--


Madame la Marquise:  The virtue of clemency and piety is that which
most closely unites sosiety.  Turn your Christian spirit and cast
a look of compassion on this unfortunate Spanish victim of loyalty
and attachment to the sacred cause of legitimacy, who has given
with his blood, consecrated his fortune, evverything, to defend
that cause, and to-day finds himself in the greatest missery. 
He doubts not that your honorable person will grant succor to preserve
an existence exteremely painful for a military man of education
and honor full of wounds, counts in advance on the humanity which
animates you and on the interest which Madame la Marquise bears
to a nation so unfortunate.  Their prayer will not be in vain,
and their gratitude will preserve theirs charming souvenir.

My respectful sentiments, with which I have the honor to be
                            Madame,
                                 Don Alvares, Spanish Captain
                                 of Cavalry, a royalist who
                                 has take refuge in France,
                                 who finds himself on travells
                                 for his country, and the
                                 resources are lacking him to
                                 continue his travells.


No address was joined to the signature.  Marius hoped to find
the address in the second letter, whose superscription read: 
A Madame, Madame la Comtesse de Montvernet, Rue Cassette, No. 9. 
This is what Marius read in it:--


Madame la Comtesse:  It is an unhappy mother of a family of six
children the last of which is only eight months old.  I sick
since my last confinement, abandoned by my husband five months ago,
haveing no resources in the world the most frightful indigance.

In the hope of Madame la Comtesse, she has the honor to be,
Madame, with profound respect,
                                       Mistress Balizard.


Marius turned to the third letter, which was a petition like
the preceding; he read:--

        Monsieur Pabourgeot, Elector, wholesale stocking merchant,
           Rue Saint-Denis on the corner of the Rue aux Fers.

I permit myself to address you this letter to beg you to grant me
the pretious favor of your simpaties and to interest yourself in a man
of letters who has just sent a drama to the Theatre-Francais. The subject
is historical, and the action takes place in Auvergne in the time
of the Empire; the style, I think, is natural, laconic, and may have
some merit.  There are couplets to be sung in four places.  The comic,
the serious, the unexpected, are mingled in a variety of characters,
and a tinge of romanticism lightly spread through all the intrigue
which proceeds misteriously, and ends, after striking altarations,
in the midst of many beautiful strokes of brilliant scenes.

My principal object is to satisfi the desire which progressively
animates the man of our century, that is to say, the fashion,
that capritious and bizarre weathervane which changes at almost
every new wind.

In spite of these qualities I have reason to fear that jealousy,
the egotism of priviliged authors, may obtaine my exclusion from
the theatre, for I am not ignorant of the mortifications with which
new-comers are treated.

Monsiuer Pabourgeot, your just reputation as an enlightened protector
of men of litters emboldens me to send you my daughter who will
explain our indigant situation to you, lacking bread and fire
in this wynter season.  When I say to you that I beg you to accept
the dedication of my drama which I desire to make to you and of all
those that I shall make, is to prove to you how great is my ambition
to have the honor of sheltering myself under your protection,
and of adorning my writings with your name.  If you deign to honor
me with the most modest offering, I shall immediately occupy myself
in making a piesse of verse to pay you my tribute of gratitude. 
Which I shall endeavor to render this piesse as perfect as possible,
will be sent to you before it is inserted at the beginning of the
drama and delivered on the stage.
                            To Monsieur
                               and Madame Pabourgeot,
                                  My most respectful complements,
                                     Genflot, man of letters.
      P. S. Even if it is only forty sous.

Excuse me for sending my daughter and not presenting myself,
but sad motives connected with the toilet do not permit me,
alas! to go out.


Finally, Marius opened the fourth letter.  The address ran: 
To the benevolent Gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacquesdu-haut-Pas.
It contained the following lines:--


Benevolent Man:  If you deign to accompany my daughter, you will
behold a misserable calamity, and I will show you my certificates.

At the aspect of these writings your generous soul will be moved
with a sentiment of obvious benevolence, for true philosophers
always feel lively emotions.

Admit, compassionate man, that it is necessary to suffer the most
cruel need, and that it is very painful, for the sake of obtaining
a little relief, to get oneself attested by the authorities as though
one were not free to suffer and to die of inanition while waiting
to have our misery relieved.  Destinies are very fatal for several
and too prodigal or too protecting for others.

I await your presence or your offering, if you deign to make one,
and I beseech you to accept the respectful sentiments with which I
have the honor to be,
                      truly magnanimous man,
                        your very humble
                          and very obedient servant,
                                       P. Fabantou, dramatic artist.


After perusing these four letters, Marius did not find himself much
further advanced than before.

In the first place, not one of the signers gave his address.

Then, they seemed to come from four different individuals, Don Alveras,
Mistress Balizard, the poet Genflot, and dramatic artist Fabantou;
but the singular thing about these letters was, that all four were
written by the same hand.

What conclusion was to be drawn from this, except that they all
come from the same person?

Moreover, and this rendered the conjecture all the more probable,
the coarse and yellow paper was the same in all four, the odor
of tobacco was the same, and, although an attempt had been made
to vary the style, the same orthographical faults were reproduced
with the greatest tranquillity, and the man of letters Genflot was
no more exempt from them than the Spanish captain.

It was waste of trouble to try to solve this petty mystery.  Had it
not been a chance find, it would have borne the air of a mystification. 
Marius was too melancholy to take even a chance pleasantry well,
and to lend himself to a game which the pavement of the street seemed
desirous of playing with him.  It seemed to him that he was playing
the part of the blind man in blind man's buff between the four letters,
and that they were making sport of him.

Nothing, however, indicated that these letters belonged to the two
young girls whom Marius had met on the boulevard.  After all,
they were evidently papers of no value.  Marius replaced them
in their envelope, flung the whole into a corner and went to bed. 
About seven o'clock in the morning, he had just risen and breakfasted,
and was trying to settle down to work, when there came a soft knock
at his door.

As he owned nothing, he never locked his door, unless occasionally,
though very rarely, when he was engaged in some pressing work. 
Even when absent he left his key in the lock.  "You will be robbed,"
said Ma'am Bougon.  "Of what?" said Marius.  The truth is, however,
that he had, one day, been robbed of an old pair of boots, to the
great triumph of Ma'am Bougon.

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

"Come in," said Marius.

The door opened.

"What do you want, Ma'am Bougon?" asked Marius, without raising
his eyes from the books and manuscripts on his table.

A voice which did not belong to Ma'am Bougon replied:--

"Excuse me, sir--"

It was a dull, broken, hoarse, strangled voice, the voice
of an old man, roughened with brandy and liquor.

Marius turned round hastily, and beheld a young girl.



CHAPTER IV

A ROSE IN MISERY


A very young girl was standing in the half-open door.  The dormer
window of the garret, through which the light fell, was precisely
opposite the door, and illuminated the figure with a wan light. 
She was a frail, emaciated, slender creature; there was nothing but a
chemise and a petticoat upon that chilled and shivering nakedness. 
Her girdle was a string, her head ribbon a string, her pointed
shoulders emerged from her chemise, a blond and lymphatic pallor,
earth-colored collar-bones, red hands, a half-open and degraded mouth,
missing teeth, dull, bold, base eyes; she had the form of a young
girl who has missed her youth, and the look of a corrupt old woman;
fifty years mingled with fifteen; one of those beings which are both
feeble and horrible, and which cause those to shudder whom they do not
cause to weep.

Marius had risen, and was staring in a sort of stupor at this being,
who was almost like the forms of the shadows which traverse dreams.

The most heart-breaking thing of all was, that this young girl had not
come into the world to be homely.  In her early childhood she must
even have been pretty.  The grace of her age was still struggling
against the hideous, premature decrepitude of debauchery and poverty. 
The remains of beauty were dying away in that face of sixteen,
like the pale sunlight which is extinguished under hideous clouds
at dawn on a winter's day.

That face was not wholly unknown to Marius.  He thought he remembered
having seen it somewhere.

"What do you wish, Mademoiselle?" he asked.

The young girl replied in her voice of a drunken convict:--

"Here is a letter for you, Monsieur Marius."

She called Marius by his name; he could not doubt that he was the person
whom she wanted; but who was this girl?  How did she know his name?

Without waiting for him to tell her to advance, she entered. 
She entered resolutely, staring, with a sort of assurance that made
the heart bleed, at the whole room and the unmade bed.  Her feet
were bare.  Large holes in her petticoat permitted glimpses of her
long legs and her thin knees.  She was shivering.

She held a letter in her hand, which she presented to Marius.

Marius, as he opened the letter, noticed that the enormous wafer
which sealed it was still moist.  The message could not have come
from a distance.  He read:--


My amiable neighbor, young man:  I have learned of your goodness to me,
that you paid my rent six months ago.  I bless you, young man. 
My eldest daughter will tell you that we have been without a morsel
of bread for two days, four persons and my spouse ill.  If I am
not deseaved in my opinion, I think I may hope that your generous
heart will melt at this statement and the desire will subjugate you
to be propitious to me by daigning to lavish on me a slight favor.

I am with the distinguished consideration which is due to the
benefactors of humanity,--
                                                        Jondrette.

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


This letter, coming in the very midst of the mysterious adventure
which had occupied Marius' thoughts ever since the preceding evening,
was like a candle in a cellar.  All was suddenly illuminated.

This letter came from the same place as the other four. 
There was the same writing, the same style, the same orthography,
the same paper, the same odor of tobacco.

There were five missives, five histories, five signatures,
and a single signer.  The Spanish Captain Don Alvares, the unhappy
Mistress Balizard, the dramatic poet Genflot, the old comedian Fabantou,
were all four named Jondrette, if, indeed, Jondrette himself
were named Jondrette.

Marius had lived in the house for a tolerably long time,
and he had had, as we have said, but very rare occasion to see,
to even catch a glimpse of, his extremely mean neighbors.  His mind
was elsewhere, and where the mind is, there the eyes are also. 
He had been obliged more than once to pass the Jondrettes in the
corridor or on the stairs; but they were mere forms to him; he had
paid so little heed to them, that, on the preceding evening, he had
jostled the Jondrette girls on the boulevard, without recognizing them,
for it had evidently been they, and it was with great difficulty
that the one who had just entered his room had awakened in him,
in spite of disgust and pity, a vague recollection of having met
her elsewhere.

Now he saw everything clearly.  He understood that his neighbor
Jondrette, in his distress, exercised the industry of speculating
on the charity of benevolent persons, that he procured addresses,
and that he wrote under feigned names to people whom he judged to be
wealthy and compassionate, letters which his daughters delivered
at their risk and peril, for this father had come to such a pass,
that he risked his daughters; he was playing a game with fate,
and he used them as the stake.  Marius understood that probably,
judging from their flight on the evening before, from their
breathless condition, from their terror and from the words of slang
which he had overheard, these unfortunate creatures were plying
some inexplicably sad profession, and that the result of the
whole was, in the midst of human society, as it is now constituted,
two miserable beings who were neither girls nor women, a species
of impure and innocent monsters produced by misery.

Sad creatures, without name, or sex, or age, to whom neither good nor
evil were any longer possible, and who, on emerging from childhood,
have already nothing in this world, neither liberty, nor virtue,
nor responsibility.  Souls which blossomed out yesterday, and are faded
to-day, like those flowers let fall in the streets, which are soiled
with every sort of mire, while waiting for some wheel to crush them. 
Nevertheless, while Marius bent a pained and astonished gaze on her,
the young girl was wandering back and forth in the garret with the
audacity of a spectre.  She kicked about, without troubling herself
as to her nakedness.  Occasionally her chemise, which was untied
and torn, fell almost to her waist.  She moved the chairs about,
she disarranged the toilet articles which stood on the commode,
she handled Marius' clothes, she rummaged about to see what there
was in the corners.

"Hullo!" said she, "you have a mirror!"

And she hummed scraps of vaudevilles, as though she had
been alone, frolicsome refrains which her hoarse and guttural
voice rendered lugubrious.

An indescribable constraint, weariness, and humiliation were
perceptible beneath this hardihood.  Effrontery is a disgrace.

Nothing could be more melancholy than to see her sport about
the room, and, so to speak, flit with the movements of a bird
which is frightened by the daylight, or which has broken its wing. 
One felt that under other conditions of education and destiny,
the gay and over-free mien of this young girl might have turned out
sweet and charming.  Never, even among animals, does the creature
born to be a dove change into an osprey.  That is only to be seen
among men.

Marius reflected, and allowed her to have her way.

She approached the table.

"Ah!" said she, "books!"

A flash pierced her glassy eye.  She resumed, and her accent
expressed the happiness which she felt in boasting of something,
to which no human creature is insensible:--

"I know how to read, I do!"

She eagerly seized a book which lay open on the table, and read
with tolerable fluency:--

"--General Bauduin received orders to take the chateau of Hougomont
which stands in the middle of the plain of Waterloo, with five
battalions of his brigade."

She paused.

"Ah!  Waterloo!  I know about that.  It was a battle long ago. 
My father was there.  My father has served in the armies.  We are
fine Bonapartists in our house, that we are!  Waterloo was against
the English."

She laid down the book, caught up a pen, and exclaimed:--

"And I know how to write, too!"

She dipped her pen in the ink, and turning to Marius:--

"Do you want to see?  Look here, I'm going to write a word to show you."

And before he had time to answer, she wrote on a sheet of white paper,
which lay in the middle of the table:  "The bobbies are here."

Then throwing down the pen:--

"There are no faults of orthography.  You can look.  We have received
an education, my sister and I. We have not always been as we are now. 
We were not made--"

Here she paused, fixed her dull eyes on Marius, and burst
out laughing, saying, with an intonation which contained
every form of anguish, stifled by every form of cynicism:--

"Bah!"

And she began to hum these words to a gay air:--

      "J'ai faim, mon pere."      I am hungry, father.
       Pas de fricot.             I have no food.
       J'ai froid, ma mere.       I am cold, mother.
       Pas de tricot.             I have no clothes.
       Grelotte,                  Lolotte!
            Lolotte!                   Shiver,
            Sanglote,                  Sob,
            Jacquot!"                  Jacquot!"


She had hardly finished this couplet, when she exexclaimed:--

"Do you ever go to the play, Monsieur Marius?  I do.  I have a
little brother who is a friend of the artists, and who gives me
tickets sometimes.  But I don't like the benches in the galleries. 
One is cramped and uncomfortable there.  There are rough people
there sometimes; and people who smell bad."

Then she scrutinized Marius, assumed a singular air and said:--

"Do you know, Mr. Marius, that you are a very handsome fellow?"

And at the same moment the same idea occurred to them both,
and made her smile and him blush.  She stepped up to him, and laid
her hand on his shoulder:  "You pay no heed to me, but I know you,
Mr. Marius.  I meet you here on the staircase, and then I often see
you going to a person named Father Mabeuf who lives in the direction
of Austerlitz, sometimes when I have been strolling in that quarter. 
It is very becoming to you to have your hair tumbled thus."

She tried to render her voice soft, but only succeeded in making
it very deep.  A portion of her words was lost in the transit
from her larynx to her lips, as though on a piano where some notes
are missing.

Marius had retreated gently.

"Mademoiselle," said he, with his cool gravity, "I have here a package
which belongs to you, I think.  Permit me to return it to you."

And he held out the envelope containing the four letters.

She clapped her hands and exclaimed:--

"We have been looking everywhere for that!"

Then she eagerly seized the package and opened the envelope,
saying as she did so:--

"Dieu de Dieu! how my sister and I have hunted!  And it was you
who found it!  On the boulevard, was it not?  It must have been
on the boulevard?  You see, we let it fall when we were running. 
It was that brat of a sister of mine who was so stupid.  When we
got home, we could not find it anywhere.  As we did not wish
to be beaten, as that is useless, as that is entirely useless,
as that is absolutely useless, we said that we had carried the
letters to the proper persons, and that they had said to us: 
`Nix.' So here they are, those poor letters!  And how did you find
out that they belonged to me?  Ah! yes, the writing.  So it was
you that we jostled as we passed last night.  We couldn't see. 
I said to my sister:  `Is it a gentleman?'  My sister said to me: 
`I think it is a gentleman.'"

In the meanwhile she had unfolded the petition addressed to "the
benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacquesdu-Haut-Pas."

"Here!" said she, "this is for that old fellow who goes to mass. 
By the way, this is his hour.  I'll go and carry it to him. 
Perhaps he will give us something to breakfast on."

Then she began to laugh again, and added:--

"Do you know what it will mean if we get a breakfast today? 
It will mean that we shall have had our breakfast of the day
before yesterday, our breakfast of yesterday, our dinner of to-day,
and all that at once, and this morning.  Come!  Parbleu! if you
are not satisfied, dogs, burst!"

This reminded Marius of the wretched girl's errand to himself. 
He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and found nothing there.

The young girl went on, and seemed to have no consciousness
of Marius' presence.

"I often go off in the evening.  Sometimes I don't come home again. 
Last winter, before we came here, we lived under the arches
of the bridges.  We huddled together to keep from freezing. 
My little sister cried.  How melancholy the water is!  When I
thought of drowning myself, I said to myself:  `No, it's too cold.' 
I go out alone, whenever I choose, I sometimes sleep in the ditches. 
Do you know, at night, when I walk along the boulevard, I see the trees
like forks, I see houses, all black and as big as Notre Dame, I fancy
that the white walls are the river, I say to myself:  `Why, there's
water there!'  The stars are like the lamps in illuminations,
one would say that they smoked and that the wind blew them out,
I am bewildered, as though horses were breathing in my ears;
although it is night, I hear hand-organs and spinning-machines, and I
don't know what all.  I think people are flinging stones at me,
I flee without knowing whither, everything whirls and whirls. 
You feel very queer when you have had no food."

And then she stared at him with a bewildered air.

By dint of searching and ransacking his pockets, Marius had finally
collected five francs sixteen sous.  This was all he owned in the world
for the moment.  "At all events," he thought, "there is my dinner
for to-day, and to-morrow we will see."  He kept the sixteen sous,
and handed the five francs to the young girl.

She seized the coin.

"Good!" said she, "the sun is shining!"

And, as though the sun had possessed the property of melting
the avalanches of slang in her brain, she went on:--

"Five francs! the shiner! a monarch! in this hole!  Ain't this fine! 
You're a jolly thief!  I'm your humble servant!  Bravo for the
good fellows!  Two days' wine! and meat! and stew! we'll have
a royal feast! and a good fill!"

She pulled her chemise up on her shoulders, made a low bow to Marius,
then a familiar sign with her hand, and went towards the door, saying:--

"Good morning, sir.  It's all right.  I'll go and find my old man."

As she passed, she caught sight of a dry crust of bread on the commode,
which was moulding there amid the dust; she flung herself upon it
and bit into it, muttering:--

"That's good! it's hard! it breaks my teeth!"

Then she departed.



CHAPTER V

A PROVIDENTIAL PEEP-HOLE


Marius had lived for five years in poverty, in destitution,
even in distress, but he now perceived that he had not known
real misery.  True misery he had but just had a view of. 
It was its spectre which had just passed before his eyes. 
In fact, he who has only beheld the misery of man has seen nothing;
the misery of woman is what he must see; he who has seen only the
misery of woman has seen nothing; he must see the misery of the child.

When a man has reached his last extremity, he has reached his last
resources at the same time.  Woe to the defenceless beings who
surround him!  Work, wages, bread, fire, courage, good will, all fail
him simultaneously.  The light of day seems extinguished without,
the moral light within; in these shadows man encounters the feebleness
of the woman and the child, and bends them violently to ignominy.

Then all horrors become possible.  Despair is surrounded with fragile
partitions which all open on either vice or crime.

Health, youth, honor, all the shy delicacies of the young body,
the heart, virginity, modesty, that epidermis of the soul,
are manipulated in sinister wise by that fumbling which seeks resources,
which encounters opprobrium, and which accomodates itself to it. 
Fathers, mothers, children, brothers, sisters, men, women, daughters,
adhere and become incorporated, almost like a mineral formation,
in that dusky promiscuousness of sexes, relationships, ages, infamies,
and innocences.  They crouch, back to back, in a sort of hut of fate. 
They exchange woe-begone glances.  Oh, the unfortunate wretches! 
How pale they are!  How cold they are!  It seems as though they
dwelt in a planet much further from the sun than ours.

This young girl was to Marius a sort of messenger from the realm
of sad shadows.  She revealed to him a hideous side of the night.

Marius almost reproached himself for the preoccupations of revery
and passion which had prevented his bestowing a glance on his
neighbors up to that day.  The payment of their rent had been
a mechanical movement, which any one would have yielded to;
but he, Marius, should have done better than that.  What! only
a wall separated him from those abandoned beings who lived
gropingly in the dark outside the pale of the rest of the world,
he was elbow to elbow with them, he was, in some sort, the last link
of the human race which they touched, he heard them live, or rather,
rattle in the death agony beside him, and he paid no heed to them! 
Every day, every instant, he heard them walking on the other side
of the wall, he heard them go, and come, and speak, and he did
not even lend an ear!  And groans lay in those words, and he did
not even listen to them, his thoughts were elsewhere, given up
to dreams, to impossible radiances, to loves in the air, to follies;
and all the while, human creatures, his brothers in Jesus Christ,
his brothers in the people, were agonizing in vain beside him! 
He even formed a part of their misfortune, and he aggravated it. 
For if they had had another neighbor who was less chimerical and
more attentive, any ordinary and charitable man, evidently their
indigence would have been noticed, their signals of distress would have
been perceived, and they would have been taken hold of and rescued! 
They appeared very corrupt and very depraved, no doubt, very vile,
very odious even; but those who fall without becoming degraded
are rare; besides, there is a point where the unfortunate and the
infamous unite and are confounded in a single word, a fatal word,
the miserable; whose fault is this?  And then should not the charity
be all the more profound, in proportion as the fall is great?

While reading himself this moral lesson, for there were occasions
on which Marius, like all truly honest hearts, was his own pedagogue
and scolded himself more than he deserved, he stared at the wall
which separated him from the Jondrettes, as though he were able
to make his gaze, full of pity, penetrate that partition and warm
these wretched people.  The wall was a thin layer of plaster
upheld by lathes and beams, and, as the reader had just learned,
it allowed the sound of voices and words to be clearly distinguished. 
Only a man as dreamy as Marius could have failed to perceive this
long before.  There was no paper pasted on the wall, either on the
side of the Jondrettes or on that of Marius; the coarse construction
was visible in its nakedness.  Marius examined the partition,
almost unconsciously; sometimes revery examines, observes,
and scrutinizes as thought would.  All at once he sprang up;
he had just perceived, near the top, close to the ceiling,
a triangular hole, which resulted from the space between three lathes. 
The plaster which should have filled this cavity was missing, and by
mounting on the commode, a view could be had through this aperture
into the Jondrettes' attic.  Commiseration has, and should have,
its curiosity.  This aperture formed a sort of peep-hole. It is
permissible to gaze at misfortune like a traitor in order to succor it.[27]


[27] The peep-hole is a Judas in French.  Hence the half-punning allusion.


"Let us get some little idea of what these people are like,"
thought Marius, "and in what condition they are."

He climbed upon the commode, put his eye to the crevice, and looked.



CHAPTER VI

THE WILD MAN IN HIS LAIR


Cities, like forests, have their caverns in which all the most
wicked and formidable creatures which they contain conceal
themselves.  Only, in cities, that which thus conceals itself
is ferocious, unclean, and petty, that is to say, ugly; in forests,
that which conceals itself is ferocious, savage, and grand,
that is to say, beautiful.  Taking one lair with another,
the beast's is preferable to the man's. Caverns are better than hovels.

What Marius now beheld was a hovel.

Marius was poor, and his chamber was poverty-stricken, but as his
poverty was noble, his garret was neat.  The den upon which his eye now
rested was abject, dirty, fetid, pestiferous, mean, sordid.  The only
furniture consisted of a straw chair, an infirm table, some old bits
of crockery, and in two of the corners, two indescribable pallets;
all the light was furnishd by a dormer window of four panes,
draped with spiders' webs.  Through this aperture there penetrated
just enough light to make the face of a man appear like the face
of a phantom.  The walls had a leprous aspect, and were covered with
seams and scars, like a visage disfigured by some horrible malady;
a repulsive moisture exuded from them.  Obscene sketches roughly
sketched with charcoal could be distinguished upon them.

The chamber which Marius occupied had a dilapidated brick pavement;
this one was neither tiled nor planked; its inhabitants stepped
directly on the antique plaster of the hovel, which had grown black
under the long-continued pressure of feet.  Upon this uneven floor,
where the dirt seemed to be fairly incrusted, and which possessed
but one virginity, that of the broom, were capriciously grouped
constellations of old shoes, socks, and repulsive rags; however,
this room had a fireplace, so it was let for forty francs a year. 
There was every sort of thing in that fireplace, a brazier, a pot,
broken boards, rags suspended from nails, a bird-cage, ashes,
and even a little fire.  Two brands were smouldering there in a
melancholy way.

One thing which added still more to the horrors of this garret was,
that it was large.  It had projections and angles and black holes,
the lower sides of roofs, bays, and promontories.  Hence horrible,
unfathomable nooks where it seemed as though spiders as big as one's fist,
wood-lice as large as one's foot, and perhaps even--who knows?--
some monstrous human beings, must be hiding.

One of the pallets was near the door, the other near the window. 
One end of each touched the fireplace and faced Marius.  In a corner
near the aperture through which Marius was gazing, a colored
engraving in a black frame was suspended to a nail on the wall,
and at its bottom, in large letters, was the inscription:  THE DREAM. 
This represented a sleeping woman, and a child, also asleep, the child
on the woman's lap, an eagle in a cloud, with a crown in his beak,
and the woman thrusting the crown away from the child's head,
without awaking the latter; in the background, Napoleon in a glory,
leaning on a very blue column with a yellow capital ornamented with
this inscription:

                            MARINGO
                           AUSTERLITS
                              IENA
                            WAGRAMME
                              ELOT

Beneath this frame, a sort of wooden panel, which was no longer
than it was broad, stood on the ground and rested in a sloping
attitude against the wall.  It had the appearance of a picture
with its face turned to the wall, of a frame probably showing
a daub on the other side, of some pier-glass detached from a wall
and lying forgotten there while waiting to be rehung.

Near the table, upon which Marius descried a pen, ink, and paper,
sat a man about sixty years of age, small, thin, livid, haggard,
with a cunning, cruel, and uneasy air; a hideous scoundrel.

If Lavater had studied this visage, he would have found the vulture
mingled with the attorney there, the bird of prey and the pettifogger
rendering each other mutually hideous and complementing each other;
the pettifogger making the bird of prey ignoble, the bird of prey
making the pettifogger horrible.

This man had a long gray beard.  He was clad in a woman's chemise,
which allowed his hairy breast and his bare arms, bristling with
gray hair, to be seen.  Beneath this chemise, muddy trousers
and boots through which his toes projected were visible.

He had a pipe in his mouth and was smoking.  There was no bread
in the hovel, but there was still tobacco.

He was writing probably some more letters like those which Marius
had read.

On the corner of the table lay an ancient, dilapidated, reddish volume,
and the size, which was the antique 12mo of reading-rooms,
betrayed a romance.  On the cover sprawled the following title,
printed in large capitals:  GOD; THE KING; HONOR AND THE LADIES;
BY DUCRAY DUMINIL, 1814.

As the man wrote, he talked aloud, and Marius heard his words:--

"The idea that there is no equality, even when you are dead! 
Just look at Pere Lachaise!  The great, those who are rich, are up above,
in the acacia alley, which is paved.  They can reach it in a carriage. 
The little people, the poor, the unhappy, well, what of them? they
are put down below, where the mud is up to your knees, in the
damp places.  They are put there so that they will decay the sooner! 
You cannot go to see them without sinking into the earth."

He paused, smote the table with his fist, and added, as he ground
his teeth:--

"Oh!  I could eat the whole world!"

A big woman, who might be forty years of age, or a hundred,
was crouching near the fireplace on her bare heels.

She, too, was clad only in a chemise and a knitted petticoat
patched with bits of old cloth.  A coarse linen apron concealed
the half of her petticoat.  Although this woman was doubled up and
bent together, it could be seen that she was of very lofty stature. 
She was a sort of giant, beside her husband.  She had hideous hair,
of a reddish blond which was turning gray, and which she thrust
back from time to time, with her enormous shining hands, with their
flat nails.

Beside her, on the floor, wide open, lay a book of the same form
as the other, and probably a volume of the same romance.

On one of the pallets, Marius caught a glimpse of a sort of tall
pale young girl, who sat there half naked and with pendant feet,
and who did not seem to be listening or seeing or living.

No doubt the younger sister of the one who had come to his room.

She seemed to be eleven or twelve years of age.  On closer
scrutiny it was evident that she really was fourteen.  She was
the child who had said, on the boulevard the evening before: 
"I bolted, bolted, bolted!"

She was of that puny sort which remains backward for a long time,
then suddenly starts up rapidly.  It is indigence which produces
these melancholy human plants.  These creatures have neither childhood
nor youth.  At fifteen years of age they appear to be twelve,
at sixteen they seem twenty.  To-day a little girl, to-morrow a woman. 
One might say that they stride through life, in order to get through
with it the more speedily.

At this moment, this being had the air of a child.

Moreover, no trace of work was revealed in that dwelling;
no handicraft, no spinning-wheel, not a tool.  In one corner lay
some ironmongery of dubious aspect.  It was the dull listlessness
which follows despair and precedes the death agony.

Marius gazed for a while at this gloomy interior, more terrifying
than the interior of a tomb, for the human soul could be felt
fluttering there, and life was palpitating there.  The garret,
the cellar, the lowly ditch where certain indigent wretches crawl at
the very bottom of the social edifice, is not exactly the sepulchre,
but only its antechamber; but, as the wealthy display their greatest
magnificence at the entrance of their palaces, it seems that death,
which stands directly side by side with them, places its greatest
miseries in that vestibule.

The man held his peace, the woman spoke no word, the young girl did
not even seem to breathe.  The scratching of the pen on the paper
was audible.

The man grumbled, without pausing in his writing.  "Canaille! canaille!
everybody is canaille!"

This variation to Solomon's exclamation elicited a sigh from the woman.

"Calm yourself, my little friend," she said.  "Don't hurt yourself,
my dear.  You are too good to write to all those people, husband."

Bodies press close to each other in misery, as in cold, but hearts
draw apart.  This woman must have loved this man, to all appearance,
judging from the amount of love within her; but probably,
in the daily and reciprocal reproaches of the horrible distress
which weighed on the whole group, this had become extinct.  There no
longer existed in her anything more than the ashes of affection
for her husband.  Nevertheless, caressing appellations had survived,
as is often the case.  She called him:  My dear, my little friend,
my good man, etc., with her mouth while her heart was silent.

The man resumed his writing.



CHAPTER VII

STRATEGY AND TACTICS


Marius, with a load upon his breast, was on the point of descending
from the species of observatory which he had improvised, when a
sound attracted his attention and caused him to remain at his post.

The door of the attic had just burst open abruptly.  The eldest girl
made her appearance on the threshold.  On her feet, she had large,
coarse, men's shoes, bespattered with mud, which had splashed even
to her red ankles, and she was wrapped in an old mantle which hung
in tatters.  Marius had not seen it on her an hour previously,
but she had probably deposited it at his door, in order that she
might inspire the more pity, and had picked it up again on emerging. 
She entered, pushed the door to behind her, paused to take breath,
for she was completely breathless, then exclaimed with an expression
of triumph and joy:--

"He is coming!"

The father turned his eyes towards her, the woman turned her head,
the little sister did not stir.

"Who?" demanded her father.

"The gentleman!"

"The philanthropist?"

"Yes."

"From the church of Saint-Jacques?"

"Yes."

"That old fellow?"

"Yes."

"And he is coming?"

"He is following me."

"You are sure?"

"I am sure."

"There, truly, he is coming?"

"He is coming in a fiacre."

"In a fiacre.  He is Rothschild."

The father rose.

"How are you sure?  If he is coming in a fiacre, how is it that you
arrive before him?  You gave him our address at least?  Did you tell him
that it was the last door at the end of the corridor, on the right? 
If he only does not make a mistake!  So you found him at the church? 
Did he read my letter?  What did he say to you?"

"Ta, ta, ta," said the girl, "how you do gallop on, my good man! 
See here:  I entered the church, he was in his usual place, I made him
a reverence, and I handed him the letter; he read it and said to me: 
`Where do you live, my child?'  I said:  `Monsieur, I will show you.' 
He said to me:  `No, give me your address, my daughter has some purchases
to make, I will take a carriage and reach your house at the same time
that you do.'  I gave him the address.  When I mentioned the house,
he seemed surprised and hesitated for an instant, then he said: 
`Never mind, I will come.'  When the mass was finished, I watched
him leave the church with his daughter, and I saw them enter
a carriage.  I certainly did tell him the last door in the corridor,
on the right."

"And what makes you think that he will come?"

"I have just seen the fiacre turn into the Rue Petit-Banquier. That
is what made me run so."

"How do you know that it was the same fiacre?"

"Because I took notice of the number, so there!"

"What was the number?"

"440."

"Good, you are a clever girl."

The girl stared boldly at her father, and showing the shoes
which she had on her feet:--

"A clever girl, possibly; but I tell you I won't put these
shoes on again, and that I won't, for the sake of my health,
in the first place, and for the sake of cleanliness, in the next. 
I don't know anything more irritating than shoes that squelch,
and go ghi, ghi, ghi, the whole time.  I prefer to go barefoot."

"You are right," said her father, in a sweet tone which contrasted
with the young girl's rudeness, "but then, you will not be allowed
to enter churches, for poor people must have shoes to do that. 
One cannot go barefoot to the good God," he added bitterly.

Then, returning to the subject which absorbed him:--

"So you are sure that he will come?"

"He is following on my heels," said she.

The man started up.  A sort of illumination appeared on his countenance.

"Wife!" he exclaimed, "you hear.  Here is the philanthropist. 
Extinguish the fire."

The stupefied mother did not stir.

The father, with the agility of an acrobat, seized a broken-nosed
jug which stood on the chimney, and flung the water on the brands.

Then, addressing his eldest daughter:--

"Here you!  Pull the straw off that chair!"

His daughter did not understand.

He seized the chair, and with one kick he rendered it seatless. 
His leg passed through it.

As he withdrew his leg, he asked his daughter:--

"Is it cold?"

"Very cold.  It is snowing."

The father turned towards the younger girl who sat on the bed near
the window, and shouted to her in a thundering voice:--

"Quick! get off that bed, you lazy thing! will you never do anything? 
Break a pane of glass!"

The little girl jumped off the bed with a shiver.

"Break a pane!" he repeated.

The child stood still in bewilderment.

"Do you hear me?" repeated her father, "I tell you to break a pane!"

The child, with a sort of terrified obedience, rose on tiptoe,
and struck a pane with her fist.  The glass broke and fell with a
loud clatter.

"Good," said the father.

He was grave and abrupt.  His glance swept rapidly over all the crannies
of the garret.  One would have said that he was a general making the final
preparation at the moment when the battle is on the point of beginning.

The mother, who had not said a word so far, now rose and demanded
in a dull, slow, languid voice, whence her words seemed to emerge
in a congealed state:--

"What do you mean to do, my dear?"

"Get into bed," replied the man.

His intonation admitted of no deliberation.  The mother obeyed,
and threw herself heavily on one of the pallets.

In the meantime, a sob became audible in one corner.

"What's that?" cried the father.

The younger daughter exhibited her bleeding fist, without quitting
the corner in which she was cowering.  She had wounded herself
while breaking the window; she went off, near her mother's pallet
and wept silently.

It was now the mother's turn to start up and exclaim:--

"Just see there!  What follies you commit!  She has cut herself
breaking that pane for you!"

"So much the better!" said the man.  "I foresaw that."

"What?  So much the better?" retorted his wife.

"Peace!" replied the father, "I suppress the liberty of the press."

Then tearing the woman's chemise which he was wearing, he made
a strip of cloth with which he hastily swathed the little girl's
bleeding wrist.

That done, his eye fell with a satisfied expression on his torn chemise.

"And the chemise too," said he, "this has a good appearance."

An icy breeze whistled through the window and entered the room. 
The outer mist penetrated thither and diffused itself like a whitish
sheet of wadding vaguely spread by invisible fingers.  Through the
broken pane the snow could be seen falling.  The snow promised
by the Candlemas sun of the preceding day had actually come.

The father cast a glance about him as though to make sure that he
had forgotten nothing.  He seized an old shovel and spread ashes
over the wet brands in such a manner as to entirely conceal them.

Then drawing himself up and leaning against the chimney-piece:--

"Now," said he, "we can receive the philanthropist."



CHAPTER VIII

THE RAY OF LIGHT IN THE HOVEL


The big girl approached and laid her hand in her father's.

"Feel how cold I am," said she.

"Bah!" replied the father, "I am much colder than that."

The mother exclaimed impetuously:--

"You always have something better than any one else, so you do!
even bad things."

"Down with you!" said the man.

The mother, being eyed after a certain fashion, held her tongue.

Silence reigned for a moment in the hovel.  The elder girl was
removing the mud from the bottom of her mantle, with a careless air;
her younger sister continued to sob; the mother had taken the
latter's head between her hands, and was covering it with kisses,
whispering to her the while:--

"My treasure, I entreat you, it is nothing of consequence, don't cry,
you will anger your father."

"No!" exclaimed the father, "quite the contrary! sob! sob! that's right."

Then turning to the elder:--

"There now!  He is not coming!  What if he were not to come! 
I shall have extinguished my fire, wrecked my chair, torn my shirt,
and broken my pane all for nothing."

"And wounded the child!" murmured the mother.

"Do you know," went on the father, "that it's beastly cold in this
devil's garret!  What if that man should not come!  Oh!  See there,
you!  He makes us wait!  He says to himself:  `Well! they will wait
for me!  That's what they're there for.'  Oh! how I hate them,
and with what joy, jubilation, enthusiasm, and satisfaction I
could strangle all those rich folks! all those rich folks! 
These men who pretend to be charitable, who put on airs, who go
to mass, who make presents to the priesthood, preachy, preachy,
in their skullcaps, and who think themselves above us, and who come
for the purpose of humiliating us, and to bring us `clothes,'
as they say! old duds that are not worth four sous!  And bread! 
That's not what I want, pack of rascals that they are, it's money! 
Ah! money!  Never!  Because they say that we would go off and
drink it up, and that we are drunkards and idlers!  And they! 
What are they, then, and what have they been in their time!  Thieves! 
They never could have become rich otherwise!  Oh!  Society ought to
be grasped by the four corners of the cloth and tossed into the air,
all of it!  It would all be smashed, very likely, but at least,
no one would have anything, and there would be that much gained! 
But what is that blockhead of a benevolent gentleman doing? 
Will he come?  Perhaps the animal has forgotten the address! 
I'll bet that that old beast--"

At that moment there came a light tap at the door, the man rushed
to it and opened it, exclaiming, amid profound bows and smiles
of adoration:--

"Enter, sir!  Deign to enter, most respected benefactor, and your
charming young lady, also."

A man of ripe age and a young girl made their appearance
on the threshold of the attic.

Marius had not quitted his post.  His feelings for the moment
surpassed the powers of the human tongue.

It was She!

Whoever has loved knows all the radiant meanings contained
in those three letters of that word:  She.

It was certainly she.  Marius could hardly distinguish her through
the luminous vapor which had suddenly spread before his eyes. 
It was that sweet, absent being, that star which had beamed upon
him for six months; it was those eyes, that brow, that mouth,
that lovely vanished face which had created night by its departure. 
The vision had been eclipsed, now it reappeared.

It reappeared in that gloom, in that garret, in that misshapen attic,
in all that horror.

Marius shuddered in dismay.  What!  It was she!  The palpitations
of his heart troubled his sight.  He felt that he was on the brink
of bursting into tears!  What!  He beheld her again at last,
after having sought her so long!  It seemed to him that he had lost
his soul, and that he had just found it again.

She was the same as ever, only a little pale; her delicate face
was framed in a bonnet of violet velvet, her figure was concealed
beneath a pelisse of black satin.  Beneath her long dress,
a glimpse could be caught of her tiny foot shod in a silken boot.

She was still accompanied by M. Leblanc.

She had taken a few steps into the room, and had deposited
a tolerably bulky parcel on the table.

The eldest Jondrette girl had retired behind the door, and was
staring with sombre eyes at that velvet bonnet, that silk mantle,
and that charming, happy face.



CHAPTER IX

JONDRETTE COMES NEAR WEEPING


The hovel was so dark, that people coming from without felt
on entering it the effect produced on entering a cellar. 
The two new-comers advanced, therefore, with a certain hesitation,
being hardly able to distinguish the vague forms surrounding them,
while they could be clearly seen and scrutinized by the eyes of the
inhabitants of the garret, who were accustomed to this twilight.

M. Leblanc approached, with his sad but kindly look, and said
to Jondrette the father:--

"Monsieur, in this package you will find some new clothes and some
woollen stockings and blankets."

"Our angelic benefactor overwhelms us," said Jondrette, bowing to
the very earth.

Then, bending down to the ear of his eldest daughter, while the
two visitors were engaged in examining this lamentable interior,
he added in a low and rapid voice:--

"Hey?  What did I say?  Duds!  No money!  They are all alike! 
By the way, how was the letter to that old blockhead signed?"

"Fabantou," replied the girl.

"The dramatic artist, good!"

It was lucky for Jondrette, that this had occurred to him,
for at the very moment, M. Leblanc turned to him, and said to him
with the air of a person who is seeking to recall a name:--

"I see that you are greatly to be pitied, Monsieur--"

"Fabantou," replied Jondrette quickly.

"Monsieur Fabantou, yes, that is it.  I remember."

"Dramatic artist, sir, and one who has had some success."

Here Jondrette evidently judged the moment propitious for capturing
the "philanthropist."  He exclaimed with an accent which smacked
at the same time of the vainglory of the mountebank at fairs,
and the humility of the mendicant on the highway:--

"A pupil of Talma!  Sir!  I am a pupil of Talma!  Fortune formerly
smiled on me--Alas!  Now it is misfortune's turn.  You see,
my benefactor, no bread, no fire.  My poor babes have no fire! 
My only chair has no seat!  A broken pane!  And in such weather! 
My spouse in bed!  Ill!"

"Poor woman!" said M. Leblanc.

"My child wounded!" added Jondrette.

The child, diverted by the arrival of the strangers, had fallen
to contemplating "the young lady," and had ceased to sob.

"Cry! bawl!" said Jondrette to her in a low voice.

At the same time he pinched her sore hand.  All this was done
with the talent of a juggler.

The little girl gave vent to loud shrieks.

The adorable young girl, whom Marius, in his heart, called "his Ursule,"
approached her hastily.

"Poor, dear child!" said she.

"You see, my beautiful young lady," pursued Jondrette "her
bleeding wrist!  It came through an accident while working at a
machine to earn six sous a day.  It may be necessary to cut off her arm."

"Really?" said the old gentleman, in alarm.

The little girl, taking this seriously, fell to sobbing more
violently than ever.

"Alas! yes, my benefactor!" replied the father.

For several minutes, Jondrette had been scrutinizing "the benefactor"
in a singular fashion.  As he spoke, he seemed to be examining the
other attentively, as though seeking to summon up his recollections. 
All at once, profiting by a moment when the new-comers were
questioning the child with interest as to her injured hand, he passed
near his wife, who lay in her bed with a stupid and dejected air,
and said to her in a rapid but very low tone:--

"Take a look at that man!"

Then, turning to M. Leblanc, and continuing his lamentations:--

"You see, sir!  All the clothing that I have is my wife's chemise! 
And all torn at that!  In the depths of winter!  I can't go out
for lack of a coat.  If I had a coat of any sort, I would go and see
Mademoiselle Mars, who knows me and is very fond of me.  Does she
not still reside in the Rue de la Tour-des-Dames? Do you know, sir? 
We played together in the provinces.  I shared her laurels. 
Celimene would come to my succor, sir!  Elmire would bestow alms
on Belisaire!  But no, nothing!  And not a sou in the house! 
My wife ill, and not a sou!  My daughter dangerously injured,
not a sou!  My wife suffers from fits of suffocation.  It comes
from her age, and besides, her nervous system is affected. 
She ought to have assistance, and my daughter also!  But the doctor! 
But the apothecary!  How am I to pay them?  I would kneel to
a penny, sir!  Such is the condition to which the arts are reduced. 
And do you know, my charming young lady, and you, my generous protector,
do you know, you who breathe forth virtue and goodness, and who perfume
that church where my daughter sees you every day when she says
her prayers?--For I have brought up my children religiously, sir. 
I did not want them to take to the theatre.  Ah! the hussies! 
If I catch them tripping!  I do not jest, that I don't! I read them
lessons on honor, on morality, on virtue!  Ask them!  They have
got to walk straight.  They are none of your unhappy wretches
who begin by having no family, and end by espousing the public. 
One is Mamselle Nobody, and one becomes Madame Everybody. 
Deuce take it!  None of that in the Fabantou family!  I mean
to bring them up virtuously, and they shall be honest, and nice,
and believe in God, by the sacred name!  Well, sir, my worthy sir,
do you know what is going to happen to-morrow? To-morrow is the fourth
day of February, the fatal day, the last day of grace allowed me by
my landlord; if by this evening I have not paid my rent, to-morrow my
oldest daughter, my spouse with her fever, my child with her wound,--
we shall all four be turned out of here and thrown into the street,
on the boulevard, without shelter, in the rain, in the snow. 
There, sir.  I owe for four quarters--a whole year! that is to say,
sixty francs."

Jondrette lied.  Four quarters would have amounted to only forty francs,
and he could not owe four, because six months had not elapsed
since Marius had paid for two.

M. Leblanc drew five francs from his pocket and threw them on the table.

Jondrette found time to mutter in the ear of his eldest daughter:--

"The scoundrel!  What does he think I can do with his five francs? 
That won't pay me for my chair and pane of glass!  That's what comes
of incurring expenses!"

In the meanwhile, M. Leblanc had removed the large brown great-coat
which he wore over his blue coat, and had thrown it over the back
of the chair.

"Monsieur Fabantou," he said, "these five francs are all that I have
about me, but I shall now take my daughter home, and I will return
this evening,--it is this evening that you must pay, is it not?"

Jondrette's face lighted up with a strange expression. 
He replied vivaciously:--

"Yes, respected sir.  At eight o'clock, I must be at my landlord's."

"I will be here at six, and I will fetch you the sixty francs."

"My benefactor!" exclaimed Jondrette, overwhelmed.  And he added,
in a low tone:  "Take a good look at him, wife!"

M. Leblanc had taken the arm of the young girl, once more,
and had turned towards the door.

"Farewell until this evening, my friends!" said he.

"Six o'clock?" said Jondrette.

"Six o'clock precisely."

At that moment, the overcoat lying on the chair caught the eye
of the elder Jondrette girl.

"You are forgetting your coat, sir," said she.

Jondrette darted an annihilating look at his daughter,
accompanied by a formidable shrug of the shoulders.

M. Leblanc turned back and said, with a smile:--

"I have not forgotten it, I am leaving it."

"O my protector!" said Jondrette, "my august benefactor, I melt
into tears!  Permit me to accompany you to your carriage."

"If you come out," answered M. Leblanc, "put on this coat. 
It really is very cold."

Jondrette did not need to be told twice.  He hastily donned
the brown great-coat. And all three went out, Jondrette preceding
the two strangers.



CHAPTER X

TARIFF OF LICENSED CABS:  TWO FRANCS AN HOUR


Marius had lost nothing of this entire scene, and yet, in reality,
had seen nothing.  His eyes had remained fixed on the young girl,
his heart had, so to speak, seized her and wholly enveloped her from
the moment of her very first step in that garret.  During her entire
stay there, he had lived that life of ecstasy which suspends material
perceptions and precipitates the whole soul on a single point. 
He contemplated, not that girl, but that light which wore a satin
pelisse and a velvet bonnet.  The star Sirius might have entered
the room, and he would not have been any more dazzled.

While the young girl was engaged in opening the package, unfolding the
clothing and the blankets, questioning the sick mother kindly,
and the little injured girl tenderly, he watched her every movement,
he sought to catch her words.  He knew her eyes, her brow, her beauty,
her form, her walk, he did not know the sound of her voice. 
He had once fancied that he had caught a few words at the Luxembourg,
but he was not absolutely sure of the fact.  He would have given
ten years of his life to hear it, in order that he might bear away
in his soul a little of that music.  But everything was drowned
in the lamentable exclamations and trumpet bursts of Jondrette. 
This added a touch of genuine wrath to Marius' ecstasy.  He devoured
her with his eyes.  He could not believe that it really was that
divine creature whom he saw in the midst of those vile creatures in
that monstrous lair.  It seemed to him that he beheld a humming-bird
in the midst of toads.

When she took her departure, he had but one thought, to follow her,
to cling to her trace, not to quit her until he learned where she lived,
not to lose her again, at least, after having so miraculously
re-discovered her.  He leaped down from the commode and seized
his hat.  As he laid his hand on the lock of the door, and was on
the point of opening it, a sudden reflection caused him to pause. 
The corridor was long, the staircase steep, Jondrette was talkative,
M. Leblanc had, no doubt, not yet regained his carriage; if, on turning
round in the corridor, or on the staircase, he were to catch sight
of him, Marius, in that house, he would, evidently, take the alarm,
and find means to escape from him again, and this time it would
be final.  What was he to do?  Should he wait a little?  But while he
was waiting, the carriage might drive off.  Marius was perplexed. 
At last he accepted the risk and quitted his room.

There was no one in the corridor.  He hastened to the stairs. 
There was no one on the staircase.  He descended in all haste,
and reached the boulevard in time to see a fiacre turning the corner
of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, on its way back to Paris.

Marius rushed headlong in that direction.  On arriving at the angle
of the boulevard, he caught sight of the fiacre again, rapidly descending
the Rue Mouffetard; the carriage was already a long way off,
and there was no means of overtaking it; what! run after it? 
Impossible; and besides, the people in the carriage would assuredly
notice an individual running at full speed in pursuit of a fiacre,
and the father would recognize him.  At that moment, wonderful and
unprecedented good luck, Marius perceived an empty cab passing along
the boulevard.  There was but one thing to be done, to jump into this cab
and follow the fiacre.  That was sure, efficacious, and free from danger.

Marius made the driver a sign to halt, and called to him:--

"By the hour?"

Marius wore no cravat, he had on his working-coat, which was destitute
of buttons, his shirt was torn along one of the plaits on the bosom.

The driver halted, winked, and held out his left hand to Marius,
rubbing his forefinger gently with his thumb.

"What is it?" said Marius.

"Pay in advance," said the coachman.

Marius recollected that he had but sixteen sous about him.

"How much?" he demanded.

"Forty sous."

"I will pay on my return."

The driver's only reply was to whistle the air of La Palisse
and to whip up his horse.

Marius stared at the retreating cabriolet with a bewildered air. 
For the lack of four and twenty sous, he was losing his joy,
his happiness, his love!  He had seen, and he was becoming
blind again.  He reflected bitterly, and it must be confessed,
with profound regret, on the five francs which he had bestowed,
that very morning, on that miserable girl.  If he had had those
five francs, he would have been saved, he would have been born again,
he would have emerged from the limbo and darkness, he would have
made his escape from isolation and spleen, from his widowed state;
he might have re-knotted the black thread of his destiny to that
beautiful golden thread, which had just floated before his eyes
and had broken at the same instant, once more!  He returned to his
hovel in despair.

He might have told himself that M. Leblanc had promised to return
in the evening, and that all he had to do was to set about the matter
more skilfully, so that he might follow him on that occasion;
but, in his contemplation, it is doubtful whether he had heard this.

As he was on the point of mounting the staircase, he perceived, on the
other side of the boulevard, near the deserted wall skirting the Rue De
la Barriere-des-Gobelins, Jondrette, wrapped in the "philanthropist's"
great-coat, engaged in conversation with one of those men of
disquieting aspect who have been dubbed by common consent, prowlers of
the barriers; people of equivocal face, of suspicious monologues,
who present the air of having evil minds, and who generally sleep
in the daytime, which suggests the supposition that they work by night.

These two men, standing there motionless and in conversation,
in the snow which was falling in whirlwinds, formed a group that a
policeman would surely have observed, but which Marius hardly noticed.

Still, in spite of his mournful preoccupation, he could not
refrain from saying to himself that this prowler of the barriers
with whom Jondrette was talking resembled a certain Panchaud,
alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, whom Courfeyrac had once
pointed out to him as a very dangerous nocturnal roamer. 
This man's name the reader has learned in the preceding book. 
This Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, figured later
on in many criminal trials, and became a notorious rascal. 
He was at that time only a famous rascal.  To-day he exists in the
state of tradition among ruffians and assassins.  He was at the head
of a school towards the end of the last reign.  And in the evening,
at nightfall, at the hour when groups form and talk in whispers,
he was discussed at La Force in the Fosse-aux-Lions. One might even,
in that prison, precisely at the spot where the sewer which served
the unprecedented escape, in broad daylight, of thirty prisoners,
in 1843, passes under the culvert, read his name, PANCHAUD,
audaciously carved by his own hand on the wall of the sewer,
during one of his attempts at flight.  In 1832, the police already
had their eye on him, but he had not as yet made a serious beginning.



CHAPTER XI

OFFERS OF SERVICE FROM MISERY TO WRETCHEDNESS


Marius ascended the stairs of the hovel with slow steps; at the moment
when he was about to re-enter his cell, he caught sight of the elder
Jondrette girl following him through the corridor.  The very sight
of this girl was odious to him; it was she who had his five francs,
it was too late to demand them back, the cab was no longer there,
the fiacre was far away.  Moreover, she would not have given them back. 
As for questioning her about the residence of the persons who had
just been there, that was useless; it was evident that she did
not know, since the letter signed Fabantou had been addressed "to
the benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacquesdu-Haut-Pas."

Marius entered his room and pushed the door to after him.

It did not close; he turned round and beheld a hand which held
the door half open.

"What is it?" he asked, "who is there?"

It was the Jondrette girl.

"Is it you?" resumed Marius almost harshly, "still you!  What do
you want with me?"

She appeared to be thoughtful and did not look at him.  She no longer
had the air of assurance which had characterized her that morning. 
She did not enter, but held back in the darkness of the corridor,
where Marius could see her through the half-open door.

"Come now, will you answer?" cried Marius.  "What do you want
with me?"

She raised her dull eyes, in which a sort of gleam seemed
to flicker vaguely, and said:--

"Monsieur Marius, you look sad.  What is the matter with you?"

"With me!" said Marius.

"Yes, you."

"There is nothing the matter with me."

"Yes, there is!"

"No."

"I tell you there is!"

"Let me alone!"

Marius gave the door another push, but she retained her hold on it.

"Stop," said she, "you are in the wrong.  Although you are
not rich, you were kind this morning.  Be so again now. 
You gave me something to eat, now tell me what ails you. 
You are grieved, that is plain.  I do not want you to be grieved. 
What can be done for it?  Can I be of any service?  Employ me. 
I do not ask for your secrets, you need not tell them to me,
but I may be of use, nevertheless.  I may be able to help you,
since I help my father.  When it is necessary to carry letters,
to go to houses, to inquire from door to door, to find out an address,
to follow any one, I am of service.  Well, you may assuredly tell me
what is the matter with you, and I will go and speak to the persons;
sometimes it is enough if some one speaks to the persons, that suffices
to let them understand matters, and everything comes right. 
Make use of me."

An idea flashed across Marius' mind.  What branch does one disdain
when one feels that one is falling?

He drew near to the Jondrette girl.

"Listen--" he said to her.

She interrupted him with a gleam of joy in her eyes.

"Oh yes, do call me thou!  I like that better."

"Well," he resumed, "thou hast brought hither that old gentleman
and his daughter!"

"Yes."

"Dost thou know their address?"

"No."

"Find it for me."

The Jondrette's dull eyes had grown joyous, and they now became gloomy.

"Is that what you want?" she demanded.

"Yes."

"Do you know them?"

"No."

"That is to say," she resumed quickly, "you do not know her,
but you wish to know her."

This them which had turned into her had something indescribably
significant and bitter about it.

"Well, can you do it?" said Marius.

"You shall have the beautiful lady's address."

There was still a shade in the words "the beautiful lady"
which troubled Marius.  He resumed:--

"Never mind, after all, the address of the father and daughter. 
Their address, indeed!"

She gazed fixedly at him.

"What will you give me?"

"Anything you like."

"Anything I like?"

"Yes."

"You shall have the address."

She dropped her head; then, with a brusque movement, she pulled
to the door, which closed behind her.

Marius found himself alone.

He dropped into a chair, with his head and both elbows on his bed,
absorbed in thoughts which he could not grasp, and as though
a prey to vertigo.  All that had taken place since the morning,
the appearance of the angel, her disappearance, what that creature
had just said to him, a gleam of hope floating in an immense despair,--
this was what filled his brain confusedly.

All at once he was violently aroused from his revery.

He heard the shrill, hard voice of Jondrette utter these words,
which were fraught with a strange interest for him:--

"I tell you that I am sure of it, and that I recognized him."

Of whom was Jondrette speaking?  Whom had he recognized?  M. Leblanc? 
The father of "his Ursule"? What!  Did Jondrette know him? 
Was Marius about to obtain in this abrupt and unexpected fashion
all the information without which his life was so dark to him? 
Was he about to learn at last who it was that he loved, who that
young girl was?  Who her father was?  Was the dense shadow which
enwrapped them on the point of being dispelled?  Was the veil about
to be rent?  Ah!  Heavens!

He bounded rather than climbed upon his commode, and resumed his
post near the little peep-hole in the partition wall.

Again he beheld the interior of Jondrette's hovel.



CHAPTER XII

THE USE MADE OF M. LEBLANC'S FIVE-FRANC PIECE


Nothing in the aspect of the family was altered, except that the wife
and daughters had levied on the package and put on woollen stockings
and jackets.  Two new blankets were thrown across the two beds.

Jondrette had evidently just returned.  He still had the breathlessness
of out of doors.  His daughters were seated on the floor near
the fireplace, the elder engaged in dressing the younger's
wounded hand.  His wife had sunk back on the bed near the fireplace,
with a face indicative of astonishment.  Jondrette was pacing
up and down the garret with long strides.  His eyes were extraordinary.

The woman, who seemed timid and overwhelmed with stupor in the
presence of her husband, turned to say:--

"What, really?  You are sure?"

"Sure!  Eight years have passed!  But I recognize him!  Ah!  I recognize
him.  I knew him at once!  What!  Didn't it force itself on you?"

"No."

"But I told you:  `Pay attention!'  Why, it is his figure,
it is his face, only older,--there are people who do not grow old,
I don't know how they manage it,--it is the very sound of his voice. 
He is better dressed, that is all!  Ah! you mysterious old devil,
I've got you, that I have!"

He paused, and said to his daughters:--

"Get out of here, you!--It's queer that it didn't strike you!"

They arose to obey.

The mother stammered:--

"With her injured hand."

"The air will do it good," said Jondrette.  "Be off."

It was plain that this man was of the sort to whom no one offers
to reply.  The two girls departed.

At the moment when they were about to pass through the door,
the father detained the elder by the arm, and said to her with
a peculiar accent:--

"You will be here at five o'clock precisely.  Both of you. 
I shall need you."

Marius redoubled his attention.

On being left alone with his wife, Jondrette began to pace the
room again, and made the tour of it two or three times in silence. 
Then he spent several minutes in tucking the lower part of the
woman's chemise which he wore into his trousers.

All at once, he turned to the female Jondrette, folded his arms
and exclaimed:--

"And would you like to have me tell you something?  The young lady--"

"Well, what?" retorted his wife, "the young lady?"

Marius could not doubt that it was really she of whom they were speaking. 
He listened with ardent anxiety.  His whole life was in his ears.

But Jondrette had bent over and spoke to his wife in a whisper. 
Then he straightened himself up and concluded aloud:--

"It is she!"

"That one?" said his wife.

"That very one," said the husband.

No expression can reproduce the significance of the mother's words. 
Surprise, rage, hate, wrath, were mingled and combined in one
monstrous intonation.  The pronunciation of a few words, the name,
no doubt, which her husband had whispered in her ear, had sufficed
to rouse this huge, somnolent woman, and from being repulsive
she became terrible.

"It is not possible!" she cried.  "When I think that my daughters
are going barefoot, and have not a gown to their backs!  What! 
A satin pelisse, a velvet bonnet, boots, and everything; more than
two hundred francs' worth of clothes! so that one would think
she was a lady!  No, you are mistaken!  Why, in the first place,
the other was hideous, and this one is not so bad-looking!
She really is not bad-looking! It can't be she!"

"I tell you that it is she.  You will see."

At this absolute assertion, the Jondrette woman raised her large, red,
blonde face and stared at the ceiling with a horrible expression. 
At that moment, she seemed to Marius even more to be feared than
her husband.  She was a sow with the look of a tigress.

"What!" she resumed, "that horrible, beautiful young lady,
who gazed at my daughters with an air of pity,--she is that
beggar brat!  Oh!  I should like to kick her stomach in for her!"

She sprang off of the bed, and remained standing for a moment,
her hair in disorder, her nostrils dilating, her mouth half open,
her fists clenched and drawn back.  Then she fell back on the bed
once more.  The man paced to and fro and paid no attention to
his female.

After a silence lasting several minutes, he approached the
female Jondrette, and halted in front of her, with folded arms,
as he had done a moment before:--

"And shall I tell you another thing?"

"What is it?" she asked.

He answered in a low, curt voice:--

"My fortune is made."

The woman stared at him with the look that signifies:  "Is the
person who is addressing me on the point of going mad?"

He went on:--

"Thunder!  It was not so very long ago that I was a parishioner of the
parish of die-of-hunger-if-you-have-a-fire,-die-of-cold-if-you-have-bread!
I have had enough of misery! my share and other people's share! 
I am not joking any longer, I don't find it comic any more,
I've had enough of puns, good God! no more farces, Eternal Father! 
I want to eat till I am full, I want to drink my fill! to gormandize!
to sleep! to do nothing!  I want to have my turn, so I do,
come now! before I die!  I want to be a bit of a millionnaire!"

He took a turn round the hovel, and added:--

"Like other people."

"What do you mean by that?" asked the woman.

He shook his head, winked, screwed up one eye, and raised his voice
like a medical professor who is about to make a demonstration:--

"What do I mean by that?  Listen!"

"Hush!" muttered the woman, "not so loud!  These are matters
which must not be overheard."

"Bah!  Who's here?  Our neighbor?  I saw him go out a little
while ago.  Besides, he doesn't listen, the big booby. 
And I tell you that I saw him go out."

Nevertheless, by a sort of instinct, Jondrette lowered his voice,
although not sufficiently to prevent Marius hearing his words. 
One favorable circumstance, which enabled Marius not to lose a word
of this conversation was the falling snow which deadened the sound of
vehicles on the boulevard.

This is what Marius heard:--

"Listen carefully.  The Croesus is caught, or as good as caught! 
That's all settled already.  Everything is arranged.  I have seen
some people.  He will come here this evening at six o'clock. To
bring sixty francs, the rascal!  Did you notice how I played that
game on him, my sixty francs, my landlord, my fourth of February? 
I don't even owe for one quarter!  Isn't he a fool!  So he will come
at six o'clock! That's the hour when our neighbor goes to his dinner. 
Mother Bougon is off washing dishes in the city.  There's not a soul
in the house.  The neighbor never comes home until eleven o'clock.
The children shall stand on watch.  You shall help us.  He will
give in."

"And what if he does not give in?" demanded his wife.

Jondrette made a sinister gesture, and said:--

"We'll fix him."

And he burst out laughing.

This was the first time Marius had seen him laugh.  The laugh
was cold and sweet, and provoked a shudder.

Jondrette opened a cupboard near the fireplace, and drew from it an
old cap, which he placed on his head, after brushing it with his sleeve.

"Now," said he, "I'm going out.  I have some more people that I
must see.  Good ones.  You'll see how well the whole thing will work. 
I shall be away as short a time as possible, it's a fine stroke
of business, do you look after the house."

And with both fists thrust into the pockets of his trousers,
he stood for a moment in thought, then exclaimed:--

"Do you know, it's mighty lucky, by the way, that he didn't
recognize me!  If he had recognized me on his side, he would not
have come back again.  He would have slipped through our fingers! 
It was my beard that saved us! my romantic beard! my pretty little
romantic beard!"

And again he broke into a laugh.

He stepped to the window.  The snow was still falling, and streaking
the gray of the sky.

"What beastly weather!" said he.

Then lapping his overcoat across his breast:--

"This rind is too large for me.  Never mind," he added, "he did
a devilish good thing in leaving it for me, the old scoundrel! 
If it hadn't been for that, I couldn't have gone out, and everything
would have gone wrong!  What small points things hang on, anyway!"

And pulling his cap down over his eyes, he quitted the room.

He had barely had time to take half a dozen steps from the door,
when the door opened again, and his savage but intelligent face made
its appearance once more in the opening.

"I came near forgetting," said he.  "You are to have a brazier
of charcoal ready."

And he flung into his wife's apron the five-franc piece which
the "philanthropist" had left with him.

"A brazier of charcoal?" asked his wife.

"Yes."

"How many bushels?"

"Two good ones."

"That will come to thirty sous.  With the rest I will buy something
for dinner."

"The devil, no."

"Why?"

"Don't go and spend the hundred-sou piece."

"Why?"

"Because I shall have to buy something, too."

"What?"

"Something."

"How much shall you need?"

"Whereabouts in the neighborhood is there an ironmonger's shop?"

"Rue Mouffetard."

"Ah! yes, at the corner of a street; I can see the shop."

"But tell me how much you will need for what you have to purchase?"

"Fifty sous--three francs."

"There won't be much left for dinner."

"Eating is not the point to-day. There's something better to be done."

"That's enough, my jewel."

At this word from his wife, Jondrette closed the door again,
and this time, Marius heard his step die away in the corridor
of the hovel, and descend the staircase rapidly.

At that moment, one o'clock struck from the church of Saint-Medard.



CHAPTER XIII


SOLUS CUM SOLO, IN LOCO REMOTO, NON COGITABUNTUR ORARE PATER NOSTER


Marius, dreamer as he was, was, as we have said, firm and energetic
by nature.  His habits of solitary meditation, while they had developed
in him sympathy and compassion, had, perhaps, diminished the faculty
for irritation, but had left intact the power of waxing indignant;
he had the kindliness of a brahmin, and the severity of a judge;
he took pity upon a toad, but he crushed a viper.  Now, it was
into a hole of vipers that his glance had just been directed,
it was a nest of monsters that he had beneath his eyes.

"These wretches must be stamped upon," said he.

Not one of the enigmas which he had hoped to see solved had
been elucidated; on the contrary, all of them had been rendered
more dense, if anything; he knew nothing more about the beautiful
maiden of the Luxembourg and the man whom he called M. Leblanc,
except that Jondrette was acquainted with them.  Athwart the
mysterious words which had been uttered, the only thing of which he
caught a distinct glimpse was the fact that an ambush was in course
of preparation, a dark but terrible trap; that both of them
were incurring great danger, she probably, her father certainly;
that they must be saved; that the hideous plots of the Jondrettes
must be thwarted, and the web of these spiders broken.

He scanned the female Jondrette for a moment.  She had pulled
an old sheet-iron stove from a corner, and she was rummaging among
the old heap of iron.

He descended from the commode as softly as possible, taking care not
to make the least noise.  Amid his terror as to what was in preparation,
and in the horror with which the Jondrettes had inspired him,
he experienced a sort of joy at the idea that it might be granted
to him perhaps to render a service to the one whom he loved.

But how was it to be done?  How warn the persons threatened? 
He did not know their address.  They had reappeared for an instant
before his eyes, and had then plunged back again into the immense
depths of Paris.  Should he wait for M. Leblanc at the door that
evening at six o'clock, at the moment of his arrival, and warn him
of the trap?  But Jondrette and his men would see him on the watch,
the spot was lonely, they were stronger than he, they would devise
means to seize him or to get him away, and the man whom Marius
was anxious to save would be lost.  One o'clock had just struck,
the trap was to be sprung at six.  Marius had five hours before him.

There was but one thing to be done.

He put on his decent coat, knotted a silk handkerchief round his neck,
took his hat, and went out, without making any more noise than if he
had been treading on moss with bare feet.

Moreover, the Jondrette woman continued to rummage among her old iron.

Once outside of the house, he made for the Rue du Petit-Banquier.

He had almost reached the middle of this street, near a very low wall
which a man can easily step over at certain points, and which abuts
on a waste space, and was walking slowly, in consequence of his
preoccupied condition, and the snow deadened the sound of his steps;
all at once he heard voices talking very close by.  He turned
his head, the street was deserted, there was not a soul in it,
it was broad daylight, and yet he distinctly heard voices.

It occurred to him to glance over the wall which he was skirting.

There, in fact, sat two men, flat on the snow, with their backs
against the wall, talking together in subdued tones.

These two persons were strangers to him; one was a bearded man
in a blouse, and the other a long-haired individual in rags. 
The bearded man had on a fez, the other's head was bare, and the snow
had lodged in his hair.

By thrusting his head over the wall, Marius could hear their remarks.

The hairy one jogged the other man's elbow and said:--

"--With the assistance of Patron-Minette, it can't fail."

"Do you think so?" said the bearded man.

And the long-haired one began again:--

"It's as good as a warrant for each one, of five hundred balls,
and the worst that can happen is five years, six years, ten years
at the most!"

The other replied with some hesitation, and shivering beneath
his fez:--

"That's a real thing.  You can't go against such things."

"I tell you that the affair can't go wrong," resumed the long-haired man. 
"Father What's-his-name's team will be already harnessed."

Then they began to discuss a melodrama that they had seen
on the preceding evening at the Gaite Theatre.

Marius went his way.

It seemed to him that the mysterious words of these men,
so strangely hidden behind that wall, and crouching in the snow,
could not but bear some relation to Jondrette's abominable projects. 
That must be the affair.

He directed his course towards the faubourg Saint-Marceau and asked
at the first shop he came to where he could find a commissary
of police.

He was directed to Rue de Pontoise, No. 14.

Thither Marius betook himself.

As he passed a baker's shop, he bought a two-penny roll, and ate it,
foreseeing that he should not dine.

On the way, he rendered justice to Providence.  He reflected that had
he not given his five francs to the Jondrette girl in the morning,
he would have followed M. Leblanc's fiacre, and consequently have
remained ignorant of everything, and that there would have been
no obstacle to the trap of the Jondrettes and that M. Leblanc
would have been lost, and his daughter with him, no doubt.



CHAPTER XIV

IN WHICH A POLICE AGENT BESTOWS TWO FISTFULS ON A LAWYER


On arriving at No. 14, Rue de Pontoise, he ascended to the first
floor and inquired for the commissary of police.

"The commissary of police is not here," said a clerk; "but there is
an inspector who takes his place.  Would you like to speak to him? 
Are you in haste?"

"Yes," said Marius.

The clerk introduced him into the commissary's office.  There stood
a tall man behind a grating, leaning against a stove, and holding up
with both hands the tails of a vast topcoat, with three collars. 
His face was square, with a thin, firmmouth, thick, gray, and very
ferocious whiskers, and a look that was enough to turn your
pockets inside out.  Of that glance it might have been well said,
not that it penetrated, but that it searched.

This man's air was not much less ferocious nor less terrible
than Jondrette's; the dog is, at times, no less terrible to meet
than the wolf.

"What do you want?" he said to Marius, without adding "monsieur."

"Is this Monsieur le Commissaire de Police?"

"He is absent.  I am here in his stead."

"The matter is very private."

"Then speak."

"And great haste is required."

"Then speak quick."

This calm, abrupt man was both terrifying and reassuring
at one and the same time.  He inspired fear and confidence. 
Marius related the adventure to him:  That a person with whom he
was not acquainted otherwise than by sight, was to be inveigled
into a trap that very evening; that, as he occupied the room
adjoining the den, he, Marius Pontmercy, a lawyer, had heard the
whole plot through the partition; that the wretch who had planned
the trap was a certain Jondrette; that there would be accomplices,
probably some prowlers of the barriers, among others a certain
Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille; that Jondrette's
daughters were to lie in wait; that there was no way of warning
the threatened man, since he did not even know his name; and that,
finally, all this was to be carried out at six o'clock that evening, at
the most deserted point of the Boulevard de l'Hopital, in house No. 50-52.

At the sound of this number, the inspector raised his head,
and said coldly:--

"So it is in the room at the end of the corridor?"

"Precisely," answered Marius, and he added:  "Are you acquainted
with that house?"

The inspector remained silent for a moment, then replied, as he
warmed the heel of his boot at the door of the stove:--

"Apparently."

He went on, muttering between his teeth, and not addressing Marius
so much as his cravat:--

"Patron-Minette must have had a hand in this."

This word struck Marius.

"Patron-Minette," said he, "I did hear that word pronounced,
in fact."

And he repeated to the inspector the dialogue between the long-haired
man and the bearded man in the snow behind the wall of the Rue
du Petit-Banquier.

The inspector muttered:--

"The long-haired man must be Brujon, and the bearded one Demi-Liard,
alias Deux-Milliards."

He had dropped his eyelids again, and became absorbed in thought.

"As for Father What's-his-name, I think I recognize him. 
Here, I've burned my coat.  They always have too much fire
in these cursed stoves.  Number 50-52. Former property of Gorbeau."

Then he glanced at Marius.

"You saw only that bearded and that long-haired man?"

"And Panchaud."

"You didn't see a little imp of a dandy prowling about the premises?"

"No."

"Nor a big lump of matter, resembling an elephant in the Jardin
des Plantes?"

"No."

"Nor a scamp with the air of an old red tail?"

"No."

"As for the fourth, no one sees him, not even his adjutants, clerks,
and employees.  It is not surprising that you did not see him."

"No. Who are all those persons?" asked Marius.

The inspector answered:--

"Besides, this is not the time for them."

He relapsed into silence, then resumed:--

"50-52. I know that barrack.  Impossible to conceal ourselves
inside it without the artists seeing us, and then they will get
off simply by countermanding the vaudeville.  They are so modest! 
An audience embarrasses them.  None of that, none of that.  I want
to hear them sing and make them dance."

This monologue concluded, he turned to Marius, and demanded,
gazing at him intently the while:--

"Are you afraid?"

"Of what?" said Marius.

"Of these men?"

"No more than yourself!" retorted Marius rudely, who had begun
to notice that this police agent had not yet said "monsieur" to him.

The inspector stared still more intently at Marius, and continued
with sententious solemnity:--

"There, you speak like a brave man, and like an honest man. 
Courage does not fear crime, and honesty does not fear authority."

Marius interrupted him:--

"That is well, but what do you intend to do?"

The inspector contented himself with the remark:--

"The lodgers have pass-keys with which to get in at night. 
You must have one."

"Yes," said Marius.

"Have you it about you?"

"Yes."

"Give it to me," said the inspector.

Marius took his key from his waistcoat pocket, handed it to the
inspector and added:--

"If you will take my advice, you will come in force."

The inspector cast on Marius such a glance as Voltaire might have
bestowed on a provincial academician who had suggested a rhyme to him;
with one movement he plunged his hands, which were enormous,
into the two immense pockets of his top-coat, and pulled out two
small steel pistols, of the sort called "knock-me-downs." Then he
presented them to Marius, saying rapidly, in a curt tone:--

"Take these.  Go home.  Hide in your chamber, so that you may be
supposed to have gone out.  They are loaded.  Each one carries
two balls.  You will keep watch; there is a hole in the wall,
as you have informed me.  These men will come.  Leave them to
their own devices for a time.  When you think matters have reached
a crisis, and that it is time to put a stop to them, fire a shot. 
Not too soon.  The rest concerns me.  A shot into the ceiling,
the air, no matter where.  Above all things, not too soon.  Wait until
they begin to put their project into execution; you are a lawyer;
you know the proper point."  Marius took the pistols and put them
in the side pocket of his coat.

"That makes a lump that can be seen," said the inspector. 
"Put them in your trousers pocket."

Marius hid the pistols in his trousers pockets.

"Now," pursued the inspector, "there is not a minute more to be
lost by any one.  What time is it?  Half-past two.  Seven o'clock
is the hour?"

"Six o'clock," answered Marius.

"I have plenty of time," said the inspector, "but no more than enough. 
Don't forget anything that I have said to you.  Bang.  A pistol shot."

"Rest easy," said Marius.

And as Marius laid his hand on the handle of the door on his way out,
the inspector called to him:--

"By the way, if you have occasion for my services between now and then,
come or send here.  You will ask for Inspector Javert."



CHAPTER XV

JONDRETTE MAKES HIS PURCHASES


A few moments later, about three o'clock, Courfeyrac chanced
to be passing along the Rue Mouffetard in company with Bossuet. 
The snow had redoubled in violence, and filled the air.  Bossuet was
just saying to Courfeyrac:--

"One would say, to see all these snow-flakes fall, that there
was a plague of white butterflies in heaven."  All at once,
Bossuet caught sight of Marius coming up the street towards
the barrier with a peculiar air.

"Hold!" said Bossuet.  "There's Marius."

"I saw him," said Courfeyrac.  "Don't let's speak to him."

"Why?"

"He is busy."

"With what?"

"Don't you see his air?"

"What air?"

"He has the air of a man who is following some one."

"That's true," said Bossuet.

"Just see the eyes he is making!" said Courfeyrac.

"But who the deuce is he following?"

"Some fine, flowery bonneted wench!  He's in love."

"But," observed Bossuet, "I don't see any wench nor any flowery
bonnet in the street.  There's not a woman round."

Courfeyrac took a survey, and exclaimed:--

"He's following a man!"

A man, in fact, wearing a gray cap, and whose gray beard could
be distinguished, although they only saw his back, was walking
along about twenty paces in advance of Marius.

This man was dressed in a great-coat which was perfectly new and
too large for him, and in a frightful pair of trousers all hanging
in rags and black with mud.

Bossuet burst out laughing.

"Who is that man?"

"He?" retorted Courfeyrac, "he's a poet.  Poets are very fond of
wearing the trousers of dealers in rabbit skins and the overcoats
of peers of France."

"Let's see where Marius will go," said Bossuet; "let's see where
the man is going, let's follow them, hey?"

"Bossuet!" exclaimed Courfeyrac, "eagle of Meaux!  You are
a prodigious brute.  Follow a man who is following another man, indeed!"

They retraced their steps.

Marius had, in fact, seen Jondrette passing along the Rue Mouffetard,
and was spying on his proceedings.

Jondrette walked straight ahead, without a suspicion that he was
already held by a glance.

He quitted the Rue Mouffetard, and Marius saw him enter one of
the most terrible hovels in the Rue Gracieuse; he remained there
about a quarter of an hour, then returned to the Rue Mouffetard. 
He halted at an ironmonger's shop, which then stood at the corner
of the Rue Pierre-Lombard, and a few minutes later Marius saw him
emerge from the shop, holding in his hand a huge cold chisel with
a white wood handle, which he concealed beneath his great-coat. At
the top of the Rue Petit-Gentilly he turned to the left and proceeded
rapidly to the Rue du Petit-Banquier. The day was declining;
the snow, which had ceased for a moment, had just begun again. 
Marius posted himself on the watch at the very corner of the Rue du
Petit-Banquier, which was deserted, as usual, and did not follow
Jondrette into it.  It was lucky that he did so, for, on arriving
in the vicinity of the wall where Marius had heard the long-haired
man and the bearded man conversing, Jondrette turned round, made sure
that no one was following him, did not see him, then sprang across
the wall and disappeared.

The waste land bordered by this wall communicated with the back
yard of an ex-livery stable-keeper of bad repute, who had failed
and who still kept a few old single-seated berlins under his sheds.

Marius thought that it would be wise to profit by Jondrette's absence
to return home; moreover, it was growing late; every evening,
Ma'am Bougon when she set out for her dish-washing in town,
had a habit of locking the door, which was always closed at dusk. 
Marius had given his key to the inspector of police; it was important,
therefore, that he should make haste.

Evening had arrived, night had almost closed in; on the horizon and
in the immensity of space, there remained but one spot illuminated
by the sun, and that was the moon.

It was rising in a ruddy glow behind the low dome of Salpetriere.

Marius returned to No. 50-52 with great strides.  The door was still
open when he arrived.  He mounted the stairs on tip-toe and glided
along the wall of the corridor to his chamber.  This corridor,
as the reader will remember, was bordered on both sides by attics,
all of which were, for the moment, empty and to let.  Ma'am Bougon
was in the habit of leaving all the doors open.  As he passed one
of these attics, Marius thought he perceived in the uninhabited cell
the motionless heads of four men, vaguely lighted up by a remnant
of daylight, falling through a dormer window,

Marius made no attempt to see, not wishing to be seen himself. 
He succeeded in reaching his chamber without being seen and without
making any noise.  It was high time.  A moment later he heard
Ma'am Bougon take her departure, locking the door of the house
behind her.



CHAPTER XVI

IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE WORDS TO AN ENGLISH AIR WHICH WAS IN
FASHION IN 1832


Marius seated himself on his bed.  It might have been half-past five
o'clock. Only half an hour separated him from what was about to happen. 
He heard the beating of his arteries as one hears the ticking
of a watch in the dark.  He thought of the double march which was
going on at that moment in the dark,--crime advancing on one side,
justice coming up on the other.  He was not afraid, but he could
not think without a shudder of what was about to take place. 
As is the case with all those who are suddenly assailed by an
unforeseen adventure, the entire day produced upon him the effect
of a dream, and in order to persuade himself that he was not the
prey of a nightmare, he had to feel the cold barrels of the steel
pistols in his trousers pockets.

It was no longer snowing; the moon disengaged itself
more and more clearly from the mist, and its light,
mingled with the white reflection of the snow
which had fallen, communicated to the chamber a sort of twilight aspect.

There was a light in the Jondrette den.  Marius saw the hole
in the wall shining with a reddish glow which seemed bloody to him.

It was true that the light could not be produced by a candle. 
However, there was not a sound in the Jondrette quarters, not a soul
was moving there, not a soul speaking, not a breath; the silence
was glacial and profound, and had it not been for that light,
he might have thought himself next door to a sepulchre.

Marius softly removed his boots and pushed them under his bed.

Several minutes elapsed.  Marius heard the lower door turn on its hinges;
a heavy step mounted the staircase, and hastened along the corridor;
the latch of the hovel was noisily lifted; it was Jondrette returning.

Instantly, several voices arose.  The whole family was in
the garret.  Only, it had been silent in the master's absence,
like wolf whelps in the absence of the wolf.

"It's I," said he.

"Good evening, daddy," yelped the girls.

"Well?" said the mother.

"All's going first-rate," responded Jondrette, "but my feet are
beastly cold.  Good!  You have dressed up.  You have done well! 
You must inspire confidence."

"All ready to go out."

"Don't forget what I told you.  You will do everything sure?"

"Rest easy."

"Because--" said Jondrette.  And he left the phrase unfinished.

Marius heard him lay something heavy on the table, probably the
chisel which he had purchased.

"By the way," said Jondrette, "have you been eating here?"

"Yes," said the mother.  "I got three large potatoes and some salt. 
I took advantage of the fire to cook them."

"Good," returned Jondrette.  "To-morrow I will take you out
to dine with me.  We will have a duck and fixings.  You shall
dine like Charles the Tenth; all is going well!"

Then he added:--

"The mouse-trap is open.  The cats are there."

He lowered his voice still further, and said:--

"Put this in the fire."

Marius heard a sound of charcoal being knocked with the tongs
or some iron utensil, and Jondrette continued:--

"Have you greased the hinges of the door so that they will not squeak?"

"Yes," replied the mother.

"What time is it?"

"Nearly six.  The half-hour struck from Saint-Medard a while ago."

"The devil!" ejaculated Jondrette; "the children must go and watch. 
Come you, do you listen here."

A whispering ensued.

Jondrette's voice became audible again:--

"Has old Bougon left?"

"Yes," said the mother.

"Are you sure that there is no one in our neighbor's room?"

"He has not been in all day, and you know very well that this
is his dinner hour."

"You are sure?"

"Sure."

"All the same," said Jondrette, "there's no harm in going to see
whether he is there.  Here, my girl, take the candle and go there."

Marius fell on his hands and knees and crawled silently under his bed.

Hardly had he concealed himself, when he perceived a light through
the crack of his door.

"P'pa," cried a voice, "he is not in here."

He recognized the voice of the eldest daughter.

"Did you go in?" demanded her father.

"No," replied the girl, "but as his key is in the door, he must
be out."

The father exclaimed:--

"Go in, nevertheless."

The door opened, and Marius saw the tall Jondrette come in with
a candle in her hand.  She was as she had been in the morning,
only still more repulsive in this light.

She walked straight up to the bed.  Marius endured an indescribable
moment of anxiety; but near the bed there was a mirror nailed
to the wall, and it was thither that she was directing her steps. 
She raised herself on tiptoe and looked at herself in it. 
In the neighboring room, the sound of iron articles being moved
was audible.

She smoothed her hair with the palm of her hand, and smiled into
the mirror, humming with her cracked and sepulchral voice:--

          Nos amours ont dure toute une semaine,[28]
          Mais que du bonheur les instants sont courts!
          S'adorer huit jours, c' etait bien la peine!
          Le temps des amours devait durer toujours!
          Devrait durer toujours! devrait durer toujours!


[28] Our love has lasted a whole week, but how short are the instants
of happiness!  To adore each other for eight days was hardly worth
the while!  The time of love should last forever.


In the meantime, Marius trembled.  It seemed impossible to him
that she should not hear his breathing.

She stepped to the window and looked out with the half-foolish way
she had.

"How ugly Paris is when it has put on a white chemise!" said she.

She returned to the mirror and began again to put on airs before it,
scrutinizing herself full-face and three-quarters face in turn.

"Well!" cried her father, "what are you about there?"

"I am looking under the bed and the furniture," she replied,
continuing to arrange her hair; "there's no one here."

"Booby!" yelled her father.  "Come here this minute!  And don't
waste any time about it!"

"Coming!  Coming!" said she.  "One has no time for anything
in this hovel!"

She hummed:--

          Vous me quittez pour aller a la gloire;[29]
          Mon triste coeur suivra partout.


[29] You leave me to go to glory; my sad heart will follow
you everywhere.


She cast a parting glance in the mirror and went out, shutting the
door behind her.

A moment more, and Marius heard the sound of the two young girls'
bare feet in the corridor, and Jondrette's voice shouting to them:--

"Pay strict heed!  One on the side of the barrier, the other at
the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier. Don't lose sight for a
moment of the door of this house, and the moment you see anything,
rush here on the instant! as hard as you can go!  You have a key
to get in."

The eldest girl grumbled:--

"The idea of standing watch in the snow barefoot!"

"To-morrow you shall have some dainty little green silk boots!"
said the father.

They ran down stairs, and a few seconds later the shock of the outer
door as it banged to announced that they were outside.

There now remained in the house only Marius, the Jondrettes
and probably, also, the mysterious persons of whom Marius had caught
a glimpse in the twilight, behind the door of the unused attic.



CHAPTER XVII

THE USE MADE OF MARIUS' FIVE-FRANC PIECE


Marius decided that the moment had now arrived when he must resume
his post at his observatory.  In a twinkling, and with the agility
of his age, he had reached the hole in the partition.

He looked.

The interior of the Jondrette apartment presented a curious aspect,
and Marius found an explanation of the singular light which he
had noticed.  A candle was burning in a candlestick covered
with verdigris, but that was not what really lighted the chamber. 
The hovel was completely illuminated, as it were, by the reflection
from a rather large sheet-iron brazier standing in the fireplace,
and filled with burning charcoal, the brazier prepared by the Jondrette
woman that morning.  The charcoal was glowing hot and the brazier was red;
a blue flame flickered over it, and helped him to make out the form
of the chisel purchased by Jondrette in the Rue Pierre-Lombard,
where it had been thrust into the brazier to heat.  In one corner,
near the door, and as though prepared for some definite use,
two heaps were visible, which appeared to be, the one a heap of
old iron, the other a heap of ropes.  All this would have caused
the mind of a person who knew nothing of what was in preparation,
to waver between a very sinister and a very simple idea.  The lair
thus lighted up more resembled a forge than a mouth of hell,
but Jondrette, in this light, had rather the air of a demon than
of a smith.

The heat of the brazier was so great, that the candle on the table
was melting on the side next the chafing-dish, and was drooping over. 
An old dark-lantern of copper, worthy of Diogenes turned Cartouche,
stood on the chimney-piece.

The brazier, placed in the fireplace itself, beside the nearly
extinct brands, sent its vapors up the chimney, and gave out no odor.

The moon, entering through the four panes of the window, cast its
whiteness into the crimson and flaming garret; and to the poetic
spirit of Marius, who was dreamy even in the moment of action,
it was like a thought of heaven mingled with the misshapen reveries
of earth.

A breath of air which made its way in through the open pane,
helped to dissipate the smell of the charcoal and to conceal
the presence of the brazier.

The Jondrette lair was, if the reader recalls what we have said
of the Gorbeau building, admirably chosen to serve as the theatre
of a violent and sombre deed, and as the envelope for a crime. 
It was the most retired chamber in the most isolated house on the
most deserted boulevard in Paris.  If the system of ambush and traps
had not already existed, they would have been invented there.

The whole thickness of a house and a multitude of uninhabited
rooms separated this den from the boulevard, and the only window
that existed opened on waste lands enclosed with walls and palisades.

Jondrette had lighted his pipe, seated himself on the seatless chair,
and was engaged in smoking.  His wife was talking to him in a low tone.

If Marius had been Courfeyrac, that is to say, one of those men who
laugh on every occasion in life, he would have burst with laughter
when his gaze fell on the Jondrette woman.  She had on a black
bonnet with plumes not unlike the hats of the heralds-at-arms
at the coronation of Charles X., an immense tartan shawl over her
knitted petticoat, and the man's shoes which her daughter had
scorned in the morning.  It was this toilette which had extracted
from Jondrette the exclamation:  "Good!  You have dressed up. 
You have done well.  You must inspire confidence!"

As for Jondrette, he had not taken off the new surtout, which was
too large for him, and which M. Leblanc had given him, and his
costume continued to present that contrast of coat and trousers
which constituted the ideal of a poet in Courfeyrac's eyes.

All at once, Jondrette lifted up his voice:--

"By the way!  Now that I think of it.  In this weather, he will come
in a carriage.  Light the lantern, take it and go down stairs. 
You will stand behind the lower door.  The very moment that you hear
the carriage stop, you will open the door, instantly, he will come up,
you will light the staircase and the corridor, and when he enters here,
you will go down stairs again as speedily as possible, you will pay
the coachman, and dismiss the fiacre."

"And the money?" inquired the woman.

Jondrette fumbled in his trousers pocket and handed her five francs.

"What's this?" she exclaimed.

Jondrette replied with dignity:--

"That is the monarch which our neighbor gave us this morning."

And he added:--

"Do you know what?  Two chairs will be needed here."

"What for?"

"To sit on."

Marius felt a cold chill pass through his limbs at hearing this
mild answer from Jondrette.

"Pardieu!  I'll go and get one of our neighbor's."

And with a rapid movement, she opened the door of the den, and went
out into the corridor.

Marius absolutely had not the time to descend from the commode,
reach his bed, and conceal himself beneath it.

"Take the candle," cried Jondrette.

"No," said she, "it would embarrass me, I have the two chairs to carry. 
There is moonlight."

Marius heard Mother Jondrette's heavy hand fumbling at his lock
in the dark.  The door opened.  He remained nailed to the spot
with the shock and with horror.

The Jondrette entered.

The dormer window permitted the entrance of a ray of moonlight
between two blocks of shadow.  One of these blocks of shadow
entirely covered the wall against which Marius was leaning,
so that he disappeared within it.

Mother Jondrette raised her eyes, did not see Marius, took the
two chairs, the only ones which Marius possessed, and went away,
letting the door fall heavily to behind her.

She re-entered the lair.

"Here are the two chairs."

"And here is the lantern.  Go down as quick as you can."

She hastily obeyed, and Jondrette was left alone.

He placed the two chairs on opposite sides of the table, turned the
chisel in the brazier, set in front of the fireplace an old screen
which masked the chafing-dish, then went to the corner where lay
the pile of rope, and bent down as though to examine something. 
Marius then recognized the fact, that what he had taken for a
shapeless mass was a very well-made rope-ladder, with wooden rungs
and two hooks with which to attach it.

This ladder, and some large tools, veritable masses of iron,
which were mingled with the old iron piled up behind the door,
had not been in the Jondrette hovel in the morning, and had evidently
been brought thither in the afternoon, during Marius' absence.

"Those are the utensils of an edge-tool maker," thought Marius.

Had Marius been a little more learned in this line, he would have
recognized in what he took for the engines of an edge-tool maker,
certain instruments which will force a lock or pick a lock,
and others which will cut or slice, the two families of tools
which burglars call cadets and fauchants.

The fireplace and the two chairs were exactly opposite Marius. 
The brazier being concealed, the only light in the room was now
furnished by the candle; the smallest bit of crockery on the table
or on the chimney-piece cast a large shadow.  There was something
indescribably calm, threatening, and hideous about this chamber. 
One felt that there existed in it the anticipation of something terrible.

Jondrette had allowed his pipe to go out, a serious sign of preoccupation,
and had again seated himself.  The candle brought out the fierce
and the fine angles of his countenance.  He indulged in scowls and
in abrupt unfoldings of the right hand, as though he were responding
to the last counsels of a sombre inward monologue.  In the course
of one of these dark replies which he was making to himself,
he pulled the table drawer rapidly towards him, took out a long kitchen
knife which was concealed there, and tried the edge of its blade
on his nail.  That done, he put the knife back in the drawer and shut it.

Marius, on his side, grasped the pistol in his right pocket,
drew it out and cocked it.

The pistol emitted a sharp, clear click, as he cocked it.

Jondrette started, half rose, listened a moment, then began to laugh
and said:--

"What a fool I am!  It's the partition cracking!"

Marius kept the pistol in his hand.



CHAPTER XVIII

MARIUS' TWO CHAIRS FORM A VIS-A-VIS


Suddenly, the distant and melancholy vibration of a clock shook
the panes.  Six o'clock was striking from Saint-Medard.

Jondrette marked off each stroke with a toss of his head. 
When the sixth had struck, he snuffed the candle with his fingers.

Then he began to pace up and down the room, listened at the corridor,
walked on again, then listened once more.

"Provided only that he comes!" he muttered, then he returned
to his chair.

He had hardly reseated himself when the door opened.

Mother Jondrette had opened it, and now remained in the corridor
making a horrible, amiable grimace, which one of the holes
of the dark-lantern illuminated from below.

"Enter, sir," she said.

"Enter, my benefactor," repeated Jondrette, rising hastily.

M. Leblanc made his appearance.

He wore an air of serenity which rendered him singularly venerable.

He laid four louis on the table.

"Monsieur Fabantou," said he, "this is for your rent and your most
pressing necessities.  We will attend to the rest hereafter."

"May God requite it to you, my generous benefactor!" said Jondrette.

And rapidly approaching his wife:--

"Dismiss the carriage!"

She slipped out while her husband was lavishing salutes and offering
M. Leblanc a chair.  An instant later she returned and whispered
in his ear:--

"'Tis done."

The snow, which had not ceased falling since the morning,
was so deep that the arrival of the fiacre had not been audible,
and they did not now hear its departure.

Meanwhile, M. Leblanc had seated himself.

Jondrette had taken possession of the other chair, facing M. Leblanc.

Now, in order to form an idea of the scene which is to follow,
let the reader picture to himself in his own mind, a cold night,
the solitudes of the Salpetriere covered with snow and white as
winding-sheets in the moonlight, the taper-like lights of the street
lanterns which shone redly here and there along those tragic boulevards,
and the long rows of black elms, not a passer-by for perhaps
a quarter of a league around, the Gorbeau hovel, at its highest
pitch of silence, of horror, and of darkness; in that building,
in the midst of those solitudes, in the midst of that darkness,
the vast Jondrette garret lighted by a single candle, and in that den
two men seated at a table, M. Leblanc tranquil, Jondrette smiling
and alarming, the Jondrette woman, the female wolf, in one corner,
and, behind the partition, Marius, invisible, erect, not losing
a word, not missing a single movement, his eye on the watch,
and pistol in hand.

However, Marius experienced only an emotion of horror, but no fear. 
He clasped the stock of the pistol firmly and felt reassured. 
"I shall be able to stop that wretch whenever I please,"
he thought.

He felt that the police were there somewhere in ambuscade,
waiting for the signal agreed upon and ready to stretch out their arm.

Moreover, he was in hopes, that this violent encounter between
Jondrette and M. Leblanc would cast some light on all the things
which he was interested in learning.



CHAPTER XIX

OCCUPYING ONE'S SELF WITH OBSCURE DEPTHS


Hardly was M. Leblanc seated, when he turned his eyes towards
the pallets, which were empty.

"How is the poor little wounded girl?" he inquired.

"Bad," replied Jondrette with a heart-broken and grateful smile,
"very bad, my worthy sir.  Her elder sister has taken her to the
Bourbe to have her hurt dressed.  You will see them presently;
they will be back immediately."

"Madame Fabantou seems to me to be better," went on M. Leblanc,
casting his eyes on the eccentric costume of the Jondrette woman,
as she stood between him and the door, as though already guarding
the exit, and gazed at him in an attitude of menace and almost
of combat.

"She is dying," said Jondrette.  "But what do you expect, sir! 
She has so much courage, that woman has!  She's not a woman,
she's an ox."

The Jondrette, touched by his compliment, deprecated it with the
affected airs of a flattered monster.

"You are always too good to me, Monsieur Jondrette!"

"Jondrette!" said M. Leblanc, "I thought your name was Fabantou?"

"Fabantou, alias Jondrette!" replied the husband hurriedly. 
"An artistic sobriquet!"

And launching at his wife a shrug of the shoulders which M. Leblanc
did not catch, he continued with an emphatic and caressing inflection
of voice:--

"Ah! we have had a happy life together, this poor darling and I! 
What would there be left for us if we had not that?  We are so wretched,
my respectable sir!  We have arms, but there is no work!  We have
the will, no work!  I don't know how the government arranges that,
but, on my word of honor, sir, I am not Jacobin, sir, I am not a
bousingot.[30] I don't wish them any evil, but if I were the ministers,
on my most sacred word, things would be different.  Here, for instance,
I wanted to have my girls taught the trade of paper-box makers. 
You will say to me:  `What! a trade?'  Yes!  A trade!  A simple trade! 
A bread-winner! What a fall, my benefactor!  What a degradation,
when one has been what we have been!  Alas!  There is nothing
left to us of our days of prosperity!  One thing only, a picture,
of which I think a great deal, but which I am willing to part with,
for I must live!  Item, one must live!"


[30] A democrat.


While Jondrette thus talked, with an apparent incoherence which
detracted nothing from the thoughtful and sagacious expression
of his physiognomy, Marius raised his eyes, and perceived at
the other end of the room a person whom he had not seen before. 
A man had just entered, so softly that the door had not been heard
to turn on its hinges.  This man wore a violet knitted vest,
which was old, worn, spotted, cut and gaping at every fold,
wide trousers of cotton velvet, wooden shoes on his feet, no shirt,
had his neck bare, his bare arms tattooed, and his face smeared
with black.  He had seated himself in silence on the nearest bed,
and, as he was behind Jondrette, he could only be indistinctly seen.

That sort of magnetic instinct which turns aside the gaze,
caused M. Leblanc to turn round almost at the same moment as Marius. 
He could not refrain from a gesture of surprise which did not
escape Jondrette.

"Ah!  I see!" exclaimed Jondrette, buttoning up his coat with an air
of complaisance, "you are looking at your overcoat?  It fits me! 
My faith, but it fits me!"

"Who is that man?" said M. Leblanc.

"Him?" ejaculated Jondrette, "he's a neighbor of mine.  Don't pay
any attention to him."

The neighbor was a singular-looking individual.  However, manufactories
of chemical products abound in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Many
of the workmen might have black faces.  Besides this, M. Leblanc's
whole person was expressive of candid and intrepid confidence.

He went on:--

"Excuse me; what were you saying, M. Fabantou?"

"I was telling you, sir, and dear protector," replied Jondrette
placing his elbows on the table and contemplating M. Leblanc with
steady and tender eyes, not unlike the eyes of the boa-constrictor,
"I was telling you, that I have a picture to sell."

A slight sound came from the door.  A second man had just entered
and seated himself on the bed, behind Jondrette.

Like the first, his arms were bare, and he had a mask of ink
or lampblack.

Although this man had, literally, glided into the room, he had
not been able to prevent M. Leblanc catching sight of him.

"Don't mind them," said Jondrette, "they are people who belong
in the house.  So I was saying, that there remains in my possession
a valuable picture.  But stop, sir, take a look at it."

He rose, went to the wall at the foot of which stood the panel which we
have already mentioned, and turned it round, still leaving it supported
against the wall.  It really was something which resembled a picture,
and which the candle illuminated, somewhat.  Marius could make
nothing out of it, as Jondrette stood between the picture and him;
he only saw a coarse daub, and a sort of principal personage colored
with the harsh crudity of foreign canvasses and screen paintings.

"What is that?" asked M. Leblanc.

Jondrette exclaimed:--

"A painting by a master, a picture of great value, my benefactor! 
I am as much attached to it as I am to my two daughters; it recalls
souvenirs to me!  But I have told you, and I will not take it back,
that I am so wretched that I will part with it."

Either by chance, or because he had begun to feel a dawning uneasiness,
M. Leblanc's glance returned to the bottom of the room as he
examined the picture.

There were now four men, three seated on the bed, one standing near
the door-post, all four with bare arms and motionless, with faces smeared
with black.  One of those on the bed was leaning against the wall,
with closed eyes, and it might have been supposed that he was asleep. 
He was old; his white hair contrasting with his blackened face
produced a horrible effect.  The other two seemed to be young;
one wore a beard, the other wore his hair long.  None of them had
on shoes; those who did not wear socks were barefooted.

Jondrette noticed that M. Leblanc's eye was fixed on these men.

"They are friends.  They are neighbors," said he.  "Their faces
are black because they work in charcoal.  They are chimney-builders.
Don't trouble yourself about them, my benefactor, but buy my picture. 
Have pity on my misery.  I will not ask you much for it.  How much
do you think it is worth?"

"Well," said M. Leblanc, looking Jondrette full in the eye,
and with the manner of a man who is on his guard, "it is some
signboard for a tavern, and is worth about three francs."

Jondrette replied sweetly:--

"Have you your pocket-book with you?  I should be satisfied
with a thousand crowns."

M. Leblanc sprang up, placed his back against the wall, and cast
a rapid glance around the room.  He had Jondrette on his left,
on the side next the window, and the Jondrette woman and the four men
on his right, on the side next the door.  The four men did not stir,
and did not even seem to be looking on.

Jondrette had again begun to speak in a plaintive tone, with so vague an
eye, and so lamentable an intonation, that M. Leblanc might have supposed
that what he had before him was a man who had simply gone mad with misery.

"If you do not buy my picture, my dear benefactor," said Jondrette,
"I shall be left without resources; there will be nothing left
for me but to throw myself into the river.  When I think that I
wanted to have my two girls taught the middle-class paper-box trade,
the making of boxes for New Year's gifts!  Well!  A table with a
board at the end to keep the glasses from falling off is required,
then a special stove is needed, a pot with three compartments
for the different degrees of strength of the paste, according as it
is to be used for wood, paper, or stuff, a paring-knife to cut
the cardboard, a mould to adjust it, a hammer to nail the steels,
pincers, how the devil do I know what all?  And all that in order
to earn four sous a day!  And you have to work fourteen hours a day! 
And each box passes through the workwoman's hands thirteen times! 
And you can't wet the paper!  And you mustn't spot anything!  And you
must keep the paste hot.  The devil, I tell you!  Four sous a day! 
How do you suppose a man is to live?"

As he spoke, Jondrette did not look at M. Leblanc, who was observing him. 
M. Leblanc's eye was fixed on Jondrette, and Jondrette's eye was fixed on
the door.  Marius' eager attention was transferred from one to the other. 
M. Leblanc seemed to be asking himself:  "Is this man an idiot?" 
Jondrette repeated two or three distinct times, with all manner
of varying inflections of the whining and supplicating order: 
"There is nothing left for me but to throw myself into the river! 
I went down three steps at the side of the bridge of Austerlitz
the other day for that purpose."

All at once his dull eyes lighted up with a hideous flash;
the little man drew himself up and became terrible, took a step
toward M. Leblanc and cried in a voice of thunder:  "That has
nothing to do with the question!  Do you know me?"



CHAPTER XX

THE TRAP


The door of the garret had just opened abruptly, and allowed a view
of three men clad in blue linen blouses, and masked with masks
of black paper.  The first was thin, and had a long, iron-tipped cudgel;
the second, who was a sort of colossus, carried, by the middle
of the handle, with the blade downward, a butcher's pole-axe for
slaughtering cattle.  The third, a man with thick-set shoulders,
not so slender as the first, held in his hand an enormous key
stolen from the door of some prison.

It appeared that the arrival of these men was what Jondrette had
been waiting for.  A rapid dialogue ensued between him and the man
with the cudgel, the thin one.

"Is everything ready?" said Jondrette.

"Yes," replied the thin man.

"Where is Montparnasse?"

"The young principal actor stopped to chat with your girl."

"Which?"

"The eldest."

"Is there a carriage at the door?"

"Yes."

"Is the team harnessed?"

"Yes."

"With two good horses?"

"Excellent."

"Is it waiting where I ordered?"

"Yes."

"Good," said Jondrette.

M. Leblanc was very pale.  He was scrutinizing everything around
him in the den, like a man who understands what he has fallen into,
and his head, directed in turn toward all the heads which surrounded him,
moved on his neck with an astonished and attentive slowness,
but there was nothing in his air which resembled fear.  He had
improvised an intrenchment out of the table; and the man, who but
an instant previously, had borne merely the appearance of a kindly
old man, had suddenly become a sort of athlete, and placed his robust
fist on the back of his chair, with a formidable and surprising gesture.

This old man, who was so firm and so brave in the presence
of such a danger, seemed to possess one of those natures which
are as courageous as they are kind, both easily and simply. 
The father of a woman whom we love is never a stranger to us. 
Marius felt proud of that unknown man.

Three of the men, of whom Jondrette had said:  "They are
chimney-builders," had armed themselves from the pile of old iron,
one with a heavy pair of shears, the second with weighing-tongs, the third
with a hammer, and had placed themselves across the entrance without
uttering a syllable.  The old man had remained on the bed, and had merely
opened his eyes.  The Jondrette woman had seated herself beside him.

Marius decided that in a few seconds more the moment for intervention
would arrive, and he raised his right hand towards the ceiling,
in the direction of the corridor, in readiness to discharge his pistol.

Jondrette having terminated his colloquy with the man with the cudgel,
turned once more to M. Leblanc, and repeated his question,
accompanying it with that low, repressed, and terrible laugh
which was peculiar to him:--

"So you do not recognize me?"

M. Leblanc looked him full in the face, and replied:--

"No."

Then Jondrette advanced to the table.  He leaned across the candle,
crossing his arms, putting his angular and ferocious jaw close
to M. Leblanc's calm face, and advancing as far as possible without
forcing M. Leblanc to retreat, and, in this posture of a wild beast
who is about to bite, he exclaimed:--

"My name is not Fabantou, my name is not Jondrette,
my name is Thenardier.  I am the inn-keeper of Montfermeil! 
Do you understand?  Thenardier!  Now do you know me?"

An almost imperceptible flush crossed M. Leblanc's brow, and he
replied with a voice which neither trembled nor rose above its
ordinary level, with his accustomed placidity:--

"No more than before."

Marius did not hear this reply.  Any one who had seen him at
that moment through the darkness would have perceived that he
was haggard, stupid, thunder-struck. At the moment when Jondrette said: 
"My name is Thenardier," Marius had trembled in every limb,
and had leaned against the wall, as though he felt the cold of
a steel blade through his heart.  Then his right arm, all ready
to discharge the signal shot, dropped slowly, and at the moment
when Jondrette repeated, "Thenardier, do you understand?" 
Marius's faltering fingers had come near letting the pistol fall. 
Jondrette, by revealing his identity, had not moved M. Leblanc,
but he had quite upset Marius.  That name of Thenardier, with which
M. Leblanc did not seem to be acquainted, Marius knew well. 
Let the reader recall what that name meant to him!  That name
he had worn on his heart, inscribed in his father's testament! 
He bore it at the bottom of his mind, in the depths of his memory,
in that sacred injunction:  "A certain Thenardier saved my life. 
If my son encounters him, he will do him all the good that lies
in his power."  That name, it will be remembered, was one of the
pieties of his soul; he mingled it with the name of his father in
his worship.  What!  This man was that Thenardier, that inn-keeper
of Montfermeil whom he had so long and so vainly sought!  He had
found him at last, and how?  His father's saviour was a ruffian! 
That man, to whose service Marius was burning to devote himself,
was a monster!  That liberator of Colonel Pontmercy was on the
point of committing a crime whose scope Marius did not, as yet,
clearly comprehend, but which resembled an assassination! 
And against whom, great God! what a fatality!  What a bitter mockery
of fate!  His father had commanded him from the depths of his coffin
to do all the good in his power to this Thenardier, and for four
years Marius had cherished no other thought than to acquit this
debt of his father's, and at the moment when he was on the eve
of having a brigand seized in the very act of crime by justice,
destiny cried to him:  "This is Thenardier!"  He could at last repay
this man for his father's life, saved amid a hail-storm of grape-shot
on the heroic field of Waterloo, and repay it with the scaffold! 
He had sworn to himself that if ever he found that Thenardier,
he would address him only by throwing himself at his feet; and now
he actually had found him, but it was only to deliver him over to
the executioner!  His father said to him:  "Succor Thenardier!" 
And he replied to that adored and sainted voice by crushing Thenardier! 
He was about to offer to his father in his grave the spectacle of
that man who had torn him from death at the peril of his own life,
executed on the Place Saint-Jacques through the means of his son,
of that Marius to whom he had entrusted that man by his will! 
And what a mockery to have so long worn on his breast his father's
last commands, written in his own hand, only to act in so horribly
contrary a sense!  But, on the other hand, now look on that trap
and not prevent it!  Condemn the victim and to spare the assassin! 
Could one be held to any gratitude towards so miserable a wretch? 
All the ideas which Marius had cherished for the last four years
were pierced through and through, as it were, by this unforeseen
blow.

He shuddered.  Everything depended on him.  Unknown to themselves,
he held in his hand all those beings who were moving about there
before his eyes.  If he fired his pistol, M. Leblanc was saved,
and Thenardier lost; if he did not fire, M. Leblanc would be sacrificed,
and, who knows?  Thenardier would escape.  Should he dash down the
one or allow the other to fall?  Remorse awaited him in either case.

What was he to do?  What should he choose?  Be false to the most
imperious souvenirs, to all those solemn vows to himself, to the
most sacred duty, to the most venerated text!  Should he ignore
his father's testament, or allow the perpetration of a crime! 
On the one hand, it seemed to him that he heard "his Ursule"
supplicating for her father and on the other, the colonel commending
Thenardier to his care.  He felt that he was going mad.  His knees
gave way beneath him.  And he had not even the time for deliberation,
so great was the fury with which the scene before his eyes was
hastening to its catastrophe.  It was like a whirlwind of which he
had thought himself the master, and which was now sweeping him away. 
He was on the verge of swooning.

In the meantime, Thenardier, whom we shall henceforth call by no
other name, was pacing up and down in front of the table in a sort
of frenzy and wild triumph.

He seized the candle in his fist, and set it on the chimney-piece
with so violent a bang that the wick came near being extinguished,
and the tallow bespattered the wall.

Then he turned to M. Leblanc with a horrible look, and spit out
these words:--

"Done for!  Smoked brown!  Cooked!  Spitchcocked!"

And again he began to march back and forth, in full eruption.

"Ah!" he cried, "so I've found you again at last, Mister philanthropist! 
Mister threadbare millionnaire!  Mister giver of dolls! you old ninny! 
Ah! so you don't recognize me!  No, it wasn't you who came
to Montfermeil, to my inn, eight years ago, on Christmas eve, 1823! 
It wasn't you who carried off that Fantine's child from me! 
The Lark!  It wasn't you who had a yellow great-coat! No! 
Nor a package of duds in your hand, as you had this morning here! 
Say, wife, it seems to be his mania to carry packets of woollen
stockings into houses!  Old charity monger, get out with you! 
Are you a hosier, Mister millionnaire?  You give away your stock
in trade to the poor, holy man!  What bosh! merry Andrew! 
Ah! and you don't recognize me?  Well, I recognize you, that I do! 
I recognized you the very moment you poked your snout in here. 
Ah! you'll find out presently, that it isn't all roses to thrust
yourself in that fashion into people's houses, under the pretext
that they are taverns, in wretched clothes, with the air of a
poor man, to whom one would give a sou, to deceive persons,
to play the generous, to take away their means of livelihood,
and to make threats in the woods, and you can't call things quits
because afterwards, when people are ruined, you bring a coat that is
too large, and two miserable hospital blankets, you old blackguard,
you child-stealer!"

He paused, and seemed to be talking to himself for a moment. 
One would have said that his wrath had fallen into some hole,
like the Rhone; then, as though he were concluding aloud the things
which he had been saying to himself in a whisper, he smote the table
with his fist, and shouted:--

"And with his goody-goody air!"

And, apostrophizing M. Leblanc:--

"Parbleu!  You made game of me in the past!  You are the cause
of all my misfortunes!  For fifteen hundred francs you got
a girl whom I had, and who certainly belonged to rich people,
and who had already brought in a great deal of money, and from whom
I might have extracted enough to live on all my life!  A girl who
would have made up to me for everything that I lost in that vile
cook-shop, where there was nothing but one continual row, and where,
like a fool, I ate up my last farthing!  Oh!  I wish all the wine
folks drank in my house had been poison to those who drank it! 
Well, never mind!  Say, now!  You must have thought me ridiculous
when you went off with the Lark!  You had your cudgel in the forest. 
You were the stronger.  Revenge.  I'm the one to hold the trumps
to-day! You're in a sorry case, my good fellow!  Oh, but I
can laugh!  Really, I laugh!  Didn't he fall into the trap! 
I told him that I was an actor, that my name was Fabantou,
that I had played comedy with Mamselle Mars, with Mamselle Muche,
that my landlord insisted on being paid tomorrow, the 4th of February,
and he didn't even notice that the 8th of January, and not the 4th
of February is the time when the quarter runs out!  Absurd idiot! 
And the four miserable Philippes which he has brought me!  Scoundrel! 
He hadn't the heart even to go as high as a hundred francs!  And how
he swallowed my platitudes!  That did amuse me.  I said to myself: 
`Blockhead! Come, I've got you!  I lick your paws this morning,
but I'll gnaw your heart this evening!'"

Thenardier paused.  He was out of breath.  His little, narrow chest
panted like a forge bellows.  His eyes were full of the ignoble
happiness of a feeble, cruel, and cowardly creature, which finds
that it can, at last, harass what it has feared, and insult what it
has flattered, the joy of a dwarf who should be able to set his heel
on the head of Goliath, the joy of a jackal which is beginning to rend
a sick bull, so nearly dead that he can no longer defend himself,
but sufficiently alive to suffer still.

M. Leblanc did not interrupt him, but said to him when he paused:--

"I do not know what you mean to say.  You are mistaken in me.  I am
a very poor man, and anything but a millionnaire.  I do not know you. 
You are mistaking me for some other person."

"Ah!" roared Thenardier hoarsely, "a pretty lie!  You stick
to that pleasantry, do you!  You're floundering, my old buck! 
Ah!  You don't remember!  You don't see who I am?"

"Excuse me, sir," said M. Leblanc with a politeness of accent,
which at that moment seemed peculiarly strange and powerful, "I see
that you are a villain!"

Who has not remarked the fact that odious creatures possess a
susceptibility of their own, that monsters are ticklish!  At this
word "villain," the female Thenardier sprang from the bed, Thenardier
grasped his chair as though he were about to crush it in his hands. 
"Don't you stir!" he shouted to his wife; and, turning to M. Leblanc:--

"Villain!  Yes, I know that you call us that, you rich gentlemen! 
Stop! it's true that I became bankrupt, that I am in hiding, that I
have no bread, that I have not a single sou, that I am a villain! 
It's three days since I have had anything to eat, so I'm a villain! 
Ah! you folks warm your feet, you have Sakoski boots, you have
wadded great-coats, like archbishops, you lodge on the first floor
in houses that have porters, you eat truffles, you eat asparagus
at forty francs the bunch in the month of January, and green peas,
you gorge yourselves, and when you want to know whether it is cold,
you look in the papers to see what the engineer Chevalier's
thermometer says about it.  We, it is we who are thermometers. 
We don't need to go out and look on the quay at the corner of the
Tour de l'Horologe, to find out the number of degrees of cold;
we feel our blood congealing in our veins, and the ice forming
round our hearts, and we say:  `There is no God!'  And you come to
our caverns, yes our caverns, for the purpose of calling us villains! 
But we'll devour you!  But we'll devour you, poor little things! 
Just see here, Mister millionnaire:  I have been a solid man,
I have held a license, I have been an elector, I am a bourgeois,
that I am!  And it's quite possible that you are not!"

Here Thenardier took a step towards the men who stood near the door,
and added with a shudder:--

"When I think that he has dared to come here and talk to me
like a cobbler!"

Then addressing M. Leblanc with a fresh outburst of frenzy:--

"And listen to this also, Mister philanthropist!  I'm not a
suspicious character, not a bit of it!  I'm not a man whose name
nobody knows, and who comes and abducts children from houses! 
I'm an old French soldier, I ought to have been decorated! 
I was at Waterloo, so I was!  And in the battle I saved a general
called the Comte of I don't know what.  He told me his name,
but his beastly voice was so weak that I didn't hear.  All I caught
was Merci [thanks]. I'd rather have had his name than his thanks. 
That would have helped me to find him again.  The picture that you
see here, and which was painted by David at Bruqueselles,--do you know
what it represents?  It represents me.  David wished to immortalize
that feat of prowess.  I have that general on my back, and I am
carrying him through the grape-shot. There's the history of it! 
That general never did a single thing for me; he was no better
than the rest!  But none the less, I saved his life at the risk
of my own, and I have the certificate of the fact in my pocket! 
I am a soldier of Waterloo, by all the furies!  And now that I have
had the goodness to tell you all this, let's have an end of it. 
I want money, I want a deal of money, I must have an enormous
lot of money, or I'll exterminate you, by the thunder of the
good God!"

Marius had regained some measure of control over his anguish,
and was listening.  The last possibility of doubt had just vanished. 
It certainly was the Thenardier of the will.  Marius shuddered
at that reproach of ingratitude directed against his father,
and which he was on the point of so fatally justifying.  His perplexity
was redoubled.

Moreover, there was in all these words of Thenardier, in his accent,
in his gesture, in his glance which darted flames at every word,
there was, in this explosion of an evil nature disclosing everything,
in that mixture of braggadocio and abjectness, of pride and pettiness,
of rage and folly, in that chaos of real griefs and false sentiments,
in that immodesty of a malicious man tasting the voluptuous
delights of violence, in that shameless nudity of a repulsive soul,
in that conflagration of all sufferings combined with all hatreds,
something which was as hideous as evil, and as heart-rending as
the truth.

The picture of the master, the painting by David which he had
proposed that M. Leblanc should purchase, was nothing else,
as the reader has divined, than the sign of his tavern painted,
as it will be remembered, by himself, the only relic which he
had preserved from his shipwreck at Montfermeil.

As he had ceased to intercept Marius' visual ray, Marius could
examine this thing, and in the daub, he actually did recognize
a battle, a background of smoke, and a man carrying another man. 
It was the group composed of Pontmercy and Thenardier; the sergeant
the rescuer, the colonel rescued.  Marius was like a drunken man;
this picture restored his father to life in some sort; it was no longer
the signboard of the wine-shop at Montfermeil, it was a resurrection;
a tomb had yawned, a phantom had risen there.  Marius heard his heart
beating in his temples, he had the cannon of Waterloo in his ears,
his bleeding father, vaguely depicted on that sinister panel
terrified him, and it seemed to him that the misshapen spectre was
gazing intently at him.

When Thenardier had recovered his breath, he turned his bloodshot
eyes on M. Leblanc, and said to him in a low, curt voice:--

"What have you to say before we put the handcuffs on you?"

M. Leblanc held his peace.

In the midst of this silence, a cracked voice launched this
lugubrious sarcasm from the corridor:--

"If there's any wood to be split, I'm there!"

It was the man with the axe, who was growing merry.

At the same moment, an enormous, bristling, and clayey face made
its appearance at the door, with a hideous laugh which exhibited
not teeth, but fangs.

It was the face of the man with the butcher's axe.

"Why have you taken off your mask?" cried Thenardier in a rage.

"For fun," retorted the man.

For the last few minutes M. Leblanc had appeared to be watching and
following all the movements of Thenardier, who, blinded and dazzled
by his own rage, was stalking to and fro in the den with full
confidence that the door was guarded, and of holding an unarmed
man fast, he being armed himself, of being nine against one,
supposing that the female Thenardier counted for but one man.

During his address to the man with the pole-axe, he had turned
his back to M. Leblanc.

M. Leblanc seized this moment, overturned the chair with his foot and
the table with his fist, and with one bound, with prodigious agility,
before Thenardier had time to turn round, he had reached the window. 
To open it, to scale the frame, to bestride it, was the work
of a second only.  He was half out when six robust fists seized
him and dragged him back energetically into the hovel.  These were
the three "chimney-builders," who had flung themselves upon him. 
At the same time the Thenardier woman had wound her hands in his hair.

At the trampling which ensued, the other ruffians rushed up
from the corridor.  The old man on the bed, who seemed under the
influence of wine, descended from the pallet and came reeling up,
with a stone-breaker's hammer in his hand.

One of the "chimney-builders," whose smirched face was lighted up by the
candle, and in whom Marius recognized, in spite of his daubing, Panchaud,
alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, lifted above M. Leblanc's head a sort
of bludgeon made of two balls of lead, at the two ends of a bar of iron.

Marius could not resist this sight.  "My father," he thought,
"forgive me!"

And his finger sought the trigger of his pistol.

The shot was on the point of being discharged when Thenardier's
voice shouted:--

"Don't harm him!"

This desperate attempt of the victim, far from exasperating Thenardier,
had calmed him.  There existed in him two men, the ferocious man
and the adroit man.  Up to that moment, in the excess of his triumph
in the presence of the prey which had been brought down, and which did
not stir, the ferocious man had prevailed; when the victim struggled
and tried to resist, the adroit man reappeared and took the upper hand.

"Don't hurt him!" he repeated, and without suspecting it, his first
success was to arrest the pistol in the act of being discharged,
and to paralyze Marius, in whose opinion the urgency of the
case disappeared, and who, in the face of this new phase,
saw no inconvenience in waiting a while longer.

Who knows whether some chance would not arise which would deliver him
from the horrible alternative of allowing Ursule's father to perish,
or of destroying the colonel's saviour?

A herculean struggle had begun.  With one blow full in the chest,
M. Leblanc had sent the old man tumbling, rolling in the middle of
the room, then with two backward sweeps of his hand he had overthrown
two more assailants, and he held one under each of his knees;
the wretches were rattling in the throat beneath this pressure
as under a granite millstone; but the other four had seized the
formidable old man by both arms and the back of his neck, and were
holding him doubled up over the two "chimney-builders" on the floor.

Thus, the master of some and mastered by the rest, crushing those
beneath him and stifling under those on top of him, endeavoring in
vain to shake off all the efforts which were heaped upon him,
M. Leblanc disappeared under the horrible group of ruffians
like the wild boar beneath a howling pile of dogs and hounds.

They succeeded in overthrowing him upon the bed nearest the window,
and there they held him in awe.  The Thenardier woman had not released
her clutch on his hair.

"Don't you mix yourself up in this affair," said Thenardier. 
"You'll tear your shawl."

The Thenardier obeyed, as the female wolf obeys the male wolf,
with a growl.

"Now," said Thenardier, "search him, you other fellows!"

M. Leblanc seemed to have renounced the idea of resistance.

They searched him.

He had nothing on his person except a leather purse containing
six francs, and his handkerchief.

Thenardier put the handkerchief into his own pocket.

"What!  No pocket-book?" he demanded.

"No, nor watch," replied one of the "chimney-builders."

"Never mind," murmured the masked man who carried the big key,
in the voice of a ventriloquist, "he's a tough old fellow."

Thenardier went to the corner near the door, picked up a bundle
of ropes and threw them at the men.

"Tie him to the leg of the bed," said he.

And, catching sight of the old man who had been stretched across
the room by the blow from M. Leblanc's fist, and who made no movement,
he added:--

"Is Boulatruelle dead?"

"No," replied Bigrenaille, "he's drunk."

"Sweep him into a corner," said Thenardier.

Two of the "chimney-builders" pushed the drunken man into the corner
near the heap of old iron with their feet.

"Babet," said Thenardier in a low tone to the man with the cudgel,
"why did you bring so many; they were not needed."

"What can you do?" replied the man with the cudgel, "they all wanted
to be in it.  This is a bad season.  There's no business going on."

The pallet on which M. Leblanc had been thrown was a sort
of hospital bed, elevated on four coarse wooden legs, roughly hewn.

M. Leblanc let them take their own course.

The ruffians bound him securely, in an upright attitude, with his
feet on the ground at the head of the bed, the end which was most
remote from the window, and nearest to the fireplace.

When the last knot had been tied, Thenardier took a chair and seated
himself almost facing M. Leblanc.

Thenardier no longer looked like himself; in the course of a few
moments his face had passed from unbridled violence to tranquil
and cunning sweetness.

Marius found it difficult to recognize in that polished smile
of a man in official life the almost bestial mouth which had
been foaming but a moment before; he gazed with amazement
on that fantastic and alarming metamorphosis, and he felt
as a man might feel who should behold a tiger converted into a lawyer.

"Monsieur--" said Thenardier.

And dismissing with a gesture the ruffians who still kept their
hands on M. Leblanc:--

"Stand off a little, and let me have a talk with the gentleman."

All retired towards the door.

He went on:--

"Monsieur, you did wrong to try to jump out of the window. 
You might have broken your leg.  Now, if you will permit me,
we will converse quietly.  In the first place, I must communicate
to you an observation which I have made which is, that you have not
uttered the faintest cry."

Thenardier was right, this detail was correct, although it had
escaped Marius in his agitation.  M. Leblanc had barely pronounced
a few words, without raising his voice, and even during his
struggle with the six ruffians near the window he had preserved
the most profound and singular silence.

Thenardier continued:--

"Mon Dieu!  You might have shouted `stop thief' a bit, and I
should not have thought it improper.  `Murder!' That, too, is said
occasionally, and, so far as I am concerned, I should not have taken
it in bad part.  It is very natural that you should make a little
row when you find yourself with persons who don't inspire you
with sufficient confidence.  You might have done that, and no one
would have troubled you on that account.  You would not even have
been gagged.  And I will tell you why.  This room is very private. 
That's its only recommendation, but it has that in its favor. 
You might fire off a mortar and it would produce about as much noise
at the nearest police station as the snores of a drunken man. 
Here a cannon would make a boum, and the thunder would make a pouf. 
It's a handy lodging.  But, in short, you did not shout, and it
is better so.  I present you my compliments, and I will tell
you the conclusion that I draw from that fact:  My dear sir,
when a man shouts, who comes?  The police.  And after the police? 
Justice.  Well!  You have not made an outcry; that is because you don't
care to have the police and the courts come in any more than we do. 
It is because,--I have long suspected it,--you have some interest
in hiding something.  On our side we have the same interest. 
So we can come to an understanding."

As he spoke thus, it seemed as though Thenardier, who kept his eyes
fixed on M. Leblanc, were trying to plunge the sharp points which
darted from the pupils into the very conscience of his prisoner. 
Moreover, his language, which was stamped with a sort of moderated,
subdued insolence and crafty insolence, was reserved and almost choice,
and in that rascal, who had been nothing but a robber a short time
previously, one now felt "the man who had studied for the priesthood."

The silence preserved by the prisoner, that precaution which had
been carried to the point of forgetting all anxiety for his
own life, that resistance opposed to the first impulse of nature,
which is to utter a cry, all this, it must be confessed,
now that his attention had been called to it, troubled Marius,
and affected him with painful astonishment.

Thenardier's well-grounded observation still further obscured for
Marius the dense mystery which enveloped that grave and singular
person on whom Courfeyrac had bestowed the sobriquet of Monsieur Leblanc.

But whoever he was, bound with ropes, surrounded with executioners,
half plunged, so to speak, in a grave which was closing in upon him
to the extent of a degree with every moment that passed, in the
presence of Thenardier's wrath, as in the presence of his sweetness,
this man remained impassive; and Marius could not refrain from
admiring at such a moment the superbly melancholy visage.

Here, evidently, was a soul which was inaccessible to terror,
and which did not know the meaning of despair.  Here was one
of those men who command amazement in desperate circumstances. 
Extreme as was the crisis, inevitable as was the catastrophe,
there was nothing here of the agony of the drowning man, who opens
his horror-filled eyes under the water.

Thenardier rose in an unpretending manner, went to the fireplace,
shoved aside the screen, which he leaned against the neighboring
pallet, and thus unmasked the brazier full of glowing coals,
in which the prisoner could plainly see the chisel white-hot
and spotted here and there with tiny scarlet stars.

Then Thenardier returned to his seat beside M. Leblanc.

"I continue," said he.  "We can come to an understanding. 
Let us arrange this matter in an amicable way.  I was wrong to lose
my temper just now, I don't know what I was thinking of, I went
a great deal too far, I said extravagant things.  For example,
because you are a millionnaire, I told you that I exacted money,
a lot of money, a deal of money.  That would not be reasonable. 
Mon Dieu, in spite of your riches, you have expenses of your own--
who has not?  I don't want to ruin you, I am not a greedy fellow,
after all.  I am not one of those people who, because they
have the advantage of the position, profit by the fact to make
themselves ridiculous.  Why, I'm taking things into consideration
and making a sacrifice on my side.  I only want two hundred
thousand francs."

M. Leblanc uttered not a word.

Thenardier went on:--

"You see that I put not a little water in my wine; I'm very moderate. 
I don't know the state of your fortune, but I do know that you don't
stick at money, and a benevolent man like yourself can certainly give
two hundred thousand francs to the father of a family who is out
of luck.  Certainly, you are reasonable, too; you haven't imagined
that I should take all the trouble I have to-day and organized
this affair this evening, which has been labor well bestowed,
in the opinion of these gentlemen, merely to wind up by asking you
for enough to go and drink red wine at fifteen sous and eat veal at
Desnoyer's. Two hundred thousand francs--it's surely worth all that. 
This trifle once out of your pocket, I guarantee you that that's
the end of the matter, and that you have no further demands to fear. 
You will say to me:  `But I haven't two hundred thousand francs
about me.'  Oh!  I'm not extortionate.  I don't demand that. 
I only ask one thing of you.  Have the goodness to write what I am
about to dictate to you."

Here Thenardier paused; then he added, emphasizing his words,
and casting a smile in the direction of the brazier:--

"I warn you that I shall not admit that you don't know how to write."

A grand inquisitor might have envied that smile.

Thenardier pushed the table close to M. Leblanc, and took an inkstand,
a pen, and a sheet of paper from the drawer which he left half open,
and in which gleamed the long blade of the knife.

He placed the sheet of paper before M. Leblanc.

"Write," said he.

The prisoner spoke at last.

"How do you expect me to write?  I am bound."

"That's true, excuse me!" ejaculated Thenardier, "you are quite right."

And turning to Bigrenaille:--

"Untie the gentleman's right arm."

Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, executed
Thenardier's order.

When the prisoner's right arm was free, Thenardier dipped the pen
in the ink and presented it to him.

"Understand thoroughly, sir, that you are in our power, at our discretion,
that no human power can get you out of this, and that we shall be really
grieved if we are forced to proceed to disagreeable extremities. 
I know neither your name, nor your address, but I warn you, that you
will remain bound until the person charged with carrying the letter which
you are about to write shall have returned.  Now, be so good as to write."

"What?" demanded the prisoner.

"I will dictate."

M. Leblanc took the pen.

Thenardier began to dictate:--

"My daughter--"

The prisoner shuddered, and raised his eyes to Thenardier.

"Put down `My dear daughter'--" said Thenardier.

M. Leblanc obeyed.

Thenardier continued:--

"Come instantly--"

He paused:--

"You address her as thou, do you not?"

"Who?" asked M. Leblanc.

"Parbleu!" cried Thenardier, "the little one, the Lark."

M. Leblanc replied without the slightest apparent emotion:--

"I do not know what you mean."

"Go on, nevertheless," ejaculated Thenardier, and he continued
to dictate:--

"Come immediately, I am in absolute need of thee.  The person who
will deliver this note to thee is instructed to conduct thee to me. 
I am waiting for thee.  Come with confidence."

M. Leblanc had written the whole of this.

Thenardier resumed:--

"Ah! erase `come with confidence'; that might lead her to suppose
that everything was not as it should be, and that distrust is possible."

M. Leblanc erased the three words.

"Now," pursued Thenardier, "sign it.  What's your name?"

The prisoner laid down the pen and demanded:--

"For whom is this letter?"

"You know well," retorted Thenardier, "for the little one I just
told you so."

It was evident that Thenardier avoided naming the young girl
in question.  He said "the Lark," he said "the little one,"
but he did not pronounce her name--the precaution of a clever man
guarding his secret from his accomplices.  To mention the name
was to deliver the whole "affair" into their hands, and to tell
them more about it than there was any need of their knowing.

He went on:--

"Sign.  What is your name?"

"Urbain Fabre," said the prisoner.

Thenardier, with the movement of a cat, dashed his hand into his pocket
and drew out the handkerchief which had been seized on M. Leblanc. 
He looked for the mark on it, and held it close to the candle.

"U. F. That's it.  Urbain Fabre.  Well, sign it U. F."

The prisoner signed.

"As two hands are required to fold the letter, give it to me,
I will fold it."

That done, Thenardier resumed:--

"Address it, `Mademoiselle Fabre,' at your house.  I know that you
live a long distance from here, near Saint-Jacquesdu-Haut-Pas, because
you go to mass there every day, but I don't know in what street. 
I see that you understand your situation.  As you have not lied about
your name, you will not lie about your address.  Write it yourself."

The prisoner paused thoughtfully for a moment, then he took the pen
and wrote:--

"Mademoiselle Fabre, at M. Urbain Fabre's, Rue Saint-Dominique-D'Enfer,
No. 17."

Thenardier seized the letter with a sort of feverish convulsion.

"Wife!" he cried.

The Thenardier woman hastened to him.

"Here's the letter.  You know what you have to do.  There is
a carriage at the door.  Set out at once, and return ditto."

And addressing the man with the meat-axe:--

"Since you have taken off your nose-screen, accompany the mistress. 
You will get up behind the fiacre.  You know where you left
the team?"

"Yes," said the man.

And depositing his axe in a corner, he followed Madame Thenardier.

As they set off, Thenardier thrust his head through the half-open door,
and shouted into the corridor:--

"Above all things, don't lose the letter! remember that you carry
two hundred thousand francs with you!"

The Thenardier's hoarse voice replied:--

"Be easy.  I have it in my bosom."

A minute had not elapsed, when the sound of the cracking of a whip
was heard, which rapidly retreated and died away.

"Good!" growled Thenardier.  "They're going at a fine pace. 
At such a gallop, the bourgeoise will be back inside three-quarters
of an hour."

He drew a chair close to the fireplace, folding his arms,
and presenting his muddy boots to the brazier.

"My feet are cold!" said he.

Only five ruffians now remained in the den with Thenardier
and the prisoner.

These men, through the black masks or paste which covered their faces,
and made of them, at fear's pleasure, charcoal-burners, negroes,
or demons, had a stupid and gloomy air, and it could be felt that they
perpetrated a crime like a bit of work, tranquilly, without either
wrath or mercy, with a sort of ennui.  They were crowded together
in one corner like brutes, and remained silent.

Thenardier warmed his feet.

The prisoner had relapsed into his taciturnity.  A sombre calm had
succeeded to the wild uproar which had filled the garret but a few
moments before.

The candle, on which a large "stranger" had formed, cast but a dim
light in the immense hovel, the brazier had grown dull, and all
those monstrous heads cast misshapen shadows on the walls and ceiling.

No sound was audible except the quiet breathing of the old drunken man,
who was fast asleep.

Marius waited in a state of anxiety that was augmented by every trifle. 
The enigma was more impenetrable than ever.

Who was this "little one" whom Thenardier had called the Lark? 
Was she his "Ursule"? The prisoner had not seemed to be affected
by that word, "the Lark," and had replied in the most natural manner
in the world:  "I do not know what you mean."  On the other hand,
the two letters U. F. were explained; they meant Urbain Fabre;
and Ursule was no longer named Ursule.  This was what Marius perceived
most clearly of all.

A sort of horrible fascination held him nailed to his post,
from which he was observing and commanding this whole scene. 
There he stood, almost incapable of movement or reflection, as though
annihilated by the abominable things viewed at such close quarters. 
He waited, in the hope of some incident, no matter of what nature,
since he could not collect his thoughts and did not know upon what
course to decide.

"In any case," he said, "if she is the Lark, I shall see her,
for the Thenardier woman is to bring her hither.  That will be
the end, and then I will give my life and my blood if necessary,
but I will deliver her!  Nothing shall stop me."

Nearly half an hour passed in this manner.  Thenardier seemed
to be absorbed in gloomy reflections, the prisoner did not stir. 
Still, Marius fancied that at intervals, and for the last few moments,
he had heard a faint, dull noise in the direction of the prisoner.

All at once, Thenardier addressed the prisoner:

"By the way, Monsieur Fabre, I might as well say it to you at once."

These few words appeared to be the beginning of an explanation. 
Marius strained his ears.

"My wife will be back shortly, don't get impatient.  I think that
the Lark really is your daughter, and it seems to me quite natural
that you should keep her.  Only, listen to me a bit.  My wife will go
and hunt her up with your letter.  I told my wife to dress herself
in the way she did, so that your young lady might make no difficulty
about following her.  They will both enter the carriage with my
comrade behind.  Somewhere, outside the barrier, there is a trap
harnessed to two very good horses.  Your young lady will be taken to it. 
She will alight from the fiacre.  My comrade will enter the other
vehicle with her, and my wife will come back here to tell us: 
`It's done.'  As for the young lady, no harm will be done to her;
the trap will conduct her to a place where she will be quiet,
and just as soon as you have handed over to me those little two
hundred thousand francs, she will be returned to you.  If you have
me arrested, my comrade will give a turn of his thumb to the Lark,
that's all."

The prisoner uttered not a syllable.  After a pause,
Thenardier continued:--

"It's very simple, as you see.  There'll be no harm done unless you wish
that there should be harm done.  I'm telling you how things stand. 
I warn you so that you may be prepared."

He paused:  the prisoner did not break the silence, and Thenardier
resumed:--

"As soon as my wife returns and says to me:  `The Lark is on the way,'
we will release you, and you will be free to go and sleep at home. 
You see that our intentions are not evil."

Terrible images passed through Marius' mind.  What!  That young
girl whom they were abducting was not to be brought back? 
One of those monsters was to bear her off into the darkness? 
Whither?  And what if it were she!

It was clear that it was she.  Marius felt his heart stop beating.

What was he to do?  Discharge the pistol?  Place all those
scoundrels in the hands of justice?  But the horrible man
with the meat-axe would, none the less, be out of reach with
the young girl, and Marius reflected on Thenardier's words,
of which he perceived the bloody significance:  "If you
have me arrested, my comrade will give a turn of his thumb to the Lark."

Now, it was not alone by the colonel's testament, it was by his
own love, it was by the peril of the one he loved, that he felt
himself restrained.

This frightful situation, which had already lasted above half an hour,
was changing its aspect every moment.

Marius had sufficient strength of mind to review in succession all
the most heart-breaking conjectures, seeking hope and finding none.

The tumult of his thoughts contrasted with the funereal silence
of the den.

In the midst of this silence, the door at the bottom of the staircase
was heard to open and shut again.

The prisoner made a movement in his bonds.

"Here's the bourgeoise," said Thenardier.

He had hardly uttered the words, when the Thenardier woman did in fact
rush hastily into the room, red, panting, breathless, with flaming eyes,
and cried, as she smote her huge hands on her thighs simultaneously:--

"False address!"

The ruffian who had gone with her made his appearance behind her
and picked up his axe again.

She resumed:--

"Nobody there!  Rue Saint-Dominique, No. 17, no Monsieur Urbain Fabre! 
They know not what it means!"

She paused, choking, then went on:--

"Monsieur Thenardier!  That old fellow has duped you!  You are
too good, you see!  If it had been me, I'd have chopped the beast
in four quarters to begin with!  And if he had acted ugly, I'd have
boiled him alive!  He would have been obliged to speak, and say
where the girl is, and where he keeps his shiners!  That's the way I
should have managed matters!  People are perfectly right when they
say that men are a deal stupider than women!  Nobody at No. 17. 
It's nothing but a big carriage gate!  No Monsieur Fabre in the Rue
Saint-Dominique! And after all that racing and fee to the coachman
and all!  I spoke to both the porter and the portress, a fine,
stout woman, and they know nothing about him!"

Marius breathed freely once more.

She, Ursule or the Lark, he no longer knew what to call her,
was safe.

While his exasperated wife vociferated, Thenardier had seated
himself on the table.

For several minutes he uttered not a word, but swung his right foot,
which hung down, and stared at the brazier with an air of savage revery.

Finally, he said to the prisoner, with a slow and singularly
ferocious tone:

"A false address?  What did you expect to gain by that?"

"To gain time!" cried the prisoner in a thundering voice,
and at the same instant he shook off his bonds; they were cut. 
The prisoner was only attached to the bed now by one leg.

Before the seven men had time to collect their senses and dash forward,
he had bent down into the fireplace, had stretched out his hand
to the brazier, and had then straightened himself up again,
and now Thenardier, the female Thenardier, and the ruffians,
huddled in amazement at the extremity of the hovel, stared at him
in stupefaction, as almost free and in a formidable attitude,
he brandished above his head the red-hot chisel, which emitted
a threatening glow.

The judicial examination to which the ambush in the Gorbeau house
eventually gave rise, established the fact that a large sou piece,
cut and worked in a peculiar fashion, was found in the garret,
when the police made their descent on it.  This sou piece was
one of those marvels of industry, which are engendered by the
patience of the galleys in the shadows and for the shadows,
marvels which are nothing else than instruments of escape. 
These hideous and delicate products of wonderful art are to jewellers'
work what the metaphors of slang are to poetry.  There are Benvenuto
Cellinis in the galleys, just as there are Villons in language. 
The unhappy wretch who aspires to deliverance finds means sometimes
without tools, sometimes with a common wooden-handled knife,
to saw a sou into two thin plates, to hollow out these plates without
affecting the coinage stamp, and to make a furrow on the edge
of the sou in such a manner that the plates will adhere again. 
This can be screwed together and unscrewed at will; it is a box. 
In this box he hides a watch-spring, and this watch-spring,
properly handled, cuts good-sized chains and bars of iron. 
The unfortunate convict is supposed to possess merely a sou; not at all,
he possesses liberty.  It was a large sou of this sort which,
during the subsequent search of the police, was found under the bed
near the window.  They also found a tiny saw of blue steel which would
fit the sou.

It is probable that the prisoner had this sou piece on his person
at the moment when the ruffians searched him, that he contrived
to conceal it in his hand, and that afterward, having his right
hand free, he unscrewed it, and used it as a saw to cut the cords
which fastened him, which would explain the faint noise and almost
imperceptible movements which Marius had observed.

As he had not been able to bend down, for fear of betraying himself,
he had not cut the bonds of his left leg.

The ruffians had recovered from their first surprise.

"Be easy," said Bigrenaille to Thenardier.  "He still holds by one leg,
and he can't get away.  I'll answer for that.  I tied that paw
for him."

In the meanwhile, the prisoner had begun to speak:--

"You are wretches, but my life is not worth the trouble
of defending it.  When you think that you can make me speak,
that you can make me write what I do not choose to write,
that you can make me say what I do not choose to say--"

He stripped up his left sleeve, and added:--

"See here."

At the same moment he extended his arm, and laid the glowing chisel
which he held in his left hand by its wooden handle on his bare flesh.

The crackling of the burning flesh became audible, and the odor
peculiar to chambers of torture filled the hovel.

Marius reeled in utter horror, the very ruffians shuddered, hardly a
muscle of the old man's face contracted, and while the red-hot iron
sank into the smoking wound, impassive and almost august, he fixed
on Thenardier his beautiful glance, in which there was no hatred,
and where suffering vanished in serene majesty.

With grand and lofty natures, the revolts of the flesh and the senses
when subjected to physical suffering cause the soul to spring forth,
and make it appear on the brow, just as rebellions among the soldiery
force the captain to show himself.

"Wretches!" said he, "have no more fear of me than I have for you!"

And, tearing the chisel from the wound, he hurled it through the window,
which had been left open; the horrible, glowing tool disappeared
into the night, whirling as it flew, and fell far away on the snow.

The prisoner resumed:--

"Do what you please with me."  He was disarmed.

"Seize him!" said Thenardier.

Two of the ruffians laid their hands on his shoulder, and the masked
man with the ventriloquist's voice took up his station in front
of him, ready to smash his skull at the slightest movement.

At the same time, Marius heard below him, at the base of the partition,
but so near that he could not see who was speaking, this colloquy
conducted in a low tone:--

"There is only one thing left to do."

"Cut his throat."

"That's it."

It was the husband and wife taking counsel together.

Thenardier walked slowly towards the table, opened the drawer,
and took out the knife.  Marius fretted with the handle of his pistol. 
Unprecedented perplexity!  For the last hour he had had two
voices in his conscience, the one enjoining him to respect his
father's testament, the other crying to him to rescue the prisoner. 
These two voices continued uninterruptedly that struggle which
tormented him to agony.  Up to that moment he had cherished a vague
hope that he should find some means of reconciling these two duties,
but nothing within the limits of possibility had presented itself.

However, the peril was urgent, the last bounds of delay had
been reached; Thenardier was standing thoughtfully a few paces
distant from the prisoner.

Marius cast a wild glance about him, the last mechanical resource
of despair.  All at once a shudder ran through him.

At his feet, on the table, a bright ray of light from the full
moon illuminated and seemed to point out to him a sheet of paper. 
On this paper he read the following line written that very morning,
in large letters, by the eldest of the Thenardier girls:--

"THE BOBBIES ARE HERE."

An idea, a flash, crossed Marius' mind; this was the expedient
of which he was in search, the solution of that frightful problem
which was torturing him, of sparing the assassin and saving the victim.

He knelt down on his commode, stretched out his arm, seized the
sheet of paper, softly detached a bit of plaster from the wall,
wrapped the paper round it, and tossed the whole through the crevice
into the middle of the den.

It was high time.  Thenardier had conquered his last fears or his
last scruples, and was advancing on the prisoner.

"Something is falling!" cried the Thenardier woman.

"What is it?" asked her husband.

The woman darted forward and picked up the bit of plaster. 
She handed it to her husband.

"Where did this come from?" demanded Thenardier.

"Pardie!" ejaculated his wife, "where do you suppose it came from? 
Through the window, of course."

"I saw it pass," said Bigrenaille.

Thenardier rapidly unfolded the paper and held it close to the candle.

"It's in Eponine's handwriting.  The devil!"

He made a sign to his wife, who hastily drew near, and showed her the
line written on the sheet of paper, then he added in a subdued voice:--

"Quick!  The ladder!  Let's leave the bacon in the mousetrap
and decamp!"

"Without cutting that man's throat?" asked, the Thenardier woman.

"We haven't the time."

"Through what?" resumed Bigrenaille.

"Through the window," replied Thenardier.  "Since Ponine has
thrown the stone through the window, it indicates that the house
is not watched on that side."

The mask with the ventriloquist's voice deposited his huge key
on the floor, raised both arms in the air, and opened and clenched
his fists, three times rapidly without uttering a word.

This was the signal like the signal for clearing the decks
for action on board ship.

The ruffians who were holding the prisoner released him; in the
twinkling of an eye the rope ladder was unrolled outside the window,
and solidly fastened to the sill by the two iron hooks.

The prisoner paid no attention to what was going on around him. 
He seemed to be dreaming or praying.

As soon as the ladder was arranged, Thenardier cried:

"Come! the bourgeoise first!"

And he rushed headlong to the window.

But just as he was about to throw his leg over, Bigrenaille seized
him roughly by the collar.

"Not much, come now, you old dog, after us!"

"After us!" yelled the ruffians.

"You are children," said Thenardier, "we are losing time. 
The police are on our heels."

"Well," said the ruffians, "let's draw lots to see who shall go
down first."

Thenardier exclaimed:--

"Are you mad!  Are you crazy!  What a pack of boobies!  You want
to waste time, do you?  Draw lots, do you?  By a wet finger,
by a short straw!  With written names!  Thrown into a hat!--"

"Would you like my hat?" cried a voice on the threshold.

All wheeled round.  It was Javert.

He had his hat in his hand, and was holding it out to them with
a smile.



CHAPTER XXI

ONE SHOULD ALWAYS BEGIN BY ARRESTING THE VICTIMS


At nightfall, Javert had posted his men and had gone into ambush
himself between the trees of the Rue de la Barrieredes-Gobelins
which faced the Gorbeau house, on the other side of the boulevard. 
He had begun operations by opening "his pockets," and dropping
into it the two young girls who were charged with keeping a watch
on the approaches to the den.  But he had only "caged" Azelma. 
As for Eponine, she was not at her post, she had disappeared,
and he had not been able to seize her.  Then Javert had made a
point and had bent his ear to waiting for the signal agreed upon. 
The comings and goings of the fiacres had greatly agitated him. 
At last, he had grown impatient, and, sure that there was a nest there,
sure of being in "luck," having recognized many of the ruffians who
had entered, he had finally decided to go upstairs without waiting for
the pistol-shot.

It will be remembered that he had Marius' pass-key.

He had arrived just in the nick of time.

The terrified ruffians flung themselves on the arms which they
had abandoned in all the corners at the moment of flight.  In less
than a second, these seven men, horrible to behold, had grouped
themselves in an attitude of defence, one with his meat-axe, another
with his key, another with his bludgeon, the rest with shears,
pincers, and hammers.  Thenardier had his knife in his fist. 
The Thenardier woman snatched up an enormous paving-stone which lay
in the angle of the window and served her daughters as an ottoman.

Javert put on his hat again, and advanced a couple of paces into
the room, with arms folded, his cane under one arm, his sword
in its sheath.

"Halt there," said he.  "You shall not go out by the window,
you shall go through the door.  It's less unhealthy.  There are seven
of you, there are fifteen of us.  Don't let's fall to collaring
each other like men of Auvergne."

Bigrenaille drew out a pistol which he had kept concealed under his
blouse, and put it in Thenardier's hand, whispering in the latter's ear:--

"It's Javert.  I don't dare fire at that man.  Do you dare?"

"Parbleu!" replied Thenardier.

"Well, then, fire."

Thenardier took the pistol and aimed at Javert.

Javert, who was only three paces from him, stared intently at him
and contented himself with saying:--

"Come now, don't fire.  You'll miss fire."

Thenardier pulled the trigger.  The pistol missed fire.

"Didn't I tell you so!" ejaculated Javert.

Bigrenaille flung his bludgeon at Javert's feet.

"You're the emperor of the fiends!  I surrender."

"And you?"  Javert asked the rest of the ruffians.

They replied:--

"So do we."

Javert began again calmly:--

"That's right, that's good, I said so, you are nice fellows."

"I only ask one thing," said Bigrenaille, "and that is, that I
may not be denied tobacco while I am in confinement."

"Granted," said Javert.

And turning round and calling behind him:--

"Come in now!"

A squad of policemen, sword in hand, and agents armed with bludgeons
and cudgels, rushed in at Javert's summons.  They pinioned the ruffians.

This throng of men, sparely lighted by the single candle,
filled the den with shadows.

"Handcuff them all!" shouted Javert.

"Come on!" cried a voice which was not the voice of a man,
but of which no one would ever have said:  "It is a woman's voice."

The Thenardier woman had entrenched herself in one of the angles
of the window, and it was she who had just given vent to this roar.

The policemen and agents recoiled.

She had thrown off her shawl, but retained her bonnet;
her husband, who was crouching behind her, was almost hidden under
the discarded shawl, and she was shielding him with her body,
as she elevated the paving-stone above her head with the gesture
of a giantess on the point of hurling a rock.

"Beware!" she shouted.

All crowded back towards the corridor.  A broad open space was
cleared in the middle of the garret.

The Thenardier woman cast a glance at the ruffians who had allowed
themselves to be pinioned, and muttered in hoarse and guttural accents:--

"The cowards!"

Javert smiled, and advanced across the open space which the Thenardier
was devouring with her eyes.

"Don't come near me," she cried, "or I'll crush you."

"What a grenadier!" ejaculated Javert; "you've got a beard like
a man, mother, but I have claws like a woman."

And he continued to advance.

The Thenardier, dishevelled and terrible, set her feet far apart,
threw herself backwards, and hurled the paving-stone at Javert's head. 
Javert ducked, the stone passed over him, struck the wall behind,
knocked off a huge piece of plastering, and, rebounding from angle
to angle across the hovel, now luckily almost empty, rested at
Javert's feet.

At the same moment, Javert reached the Thenardier couple. 
One of his big hands descended on the woman's shoulder; the other
on the husband's head.

"The handcuffs!" he shouted.

The policemen trooped in in force, and in a few seconds Javert's
order had been executed.

The Thenardier female, overwhelmed, stared at her pinioned hands,
and at those of her husband, who had dropped to the floor,
and exclaimed, weeping:--

"My daughters!"

"They are in the jug," said Javert.

In the meanwhile, the agents had caught sight of the drunken man
asleep behind the door, and were shaking him:--

He awoke, stammering:--

"Is it all over, Jondrette?"

"Yes," replied Javert.

The six pinioned ruffians were standing, and still preserved their
spectral mien; all three besmeared with black, all three masked.

"Keep on your masks," said Javert.

And passing them in review with a glance of a Frederick II. 
at a Potsdam parade, he said to the three "chimney-builders":--

"Good day, Bigrenaille! good day, Brujon! good day, Deuxmilliards!"

Then turning to the three masked men, he said to the man with
the meat-axe:--

"Good day, Gueulemer!"

And to the man with the cudgel:--

"Good day, Babet!"

And to the ventriloquist:--

"Your health, Claquesous."

At that moment, he caught sight of the ruffians' prisoner.  who,
ever since the entrance of the police, had not uttered a word,
and had held his head down.

"Untie the gentleman!" said Javert, "and let no one go out!"

That said, he seated himself with sovereign dignity before the table,
where the candle and the writing-materials still remained, drew a
stamped paper from his pocket, and began to prepare his report.

When he had written the first lines, which are formulas that never vary,
he raised his eyes:--

"Let the gentleman whom these gentlemen bound step forward."

The policemen glanced round them.

"Well," said Javert, "where is he?"

The prisoner of the ruffians, M. Leblanc, M. Urbain Fabre,
the father of Ursule or the Lark, had disappeared.

The door was guarded, but the window was not.  As soon as he had
found himself released from his bonds, and while Javert was drawing
up his report, he had taken advantage of confusion, the crowd,
the darkness, and of a moment when the general attention was diverted
from him, to dash out of the window.

An agent sprang to the opening and looked out.  He saw no one outside.

The rope ladder was still shaking.

"The devil!" ejaculated Javert between his teeth, "he must have
been the most valuable of the lot."



CHAPTER XXII

THE LITTLE ONE WHO WAS CRYING IN VOLUME TWO


On the day following that on which these events took place in the
house on the Boulevard de l'Hopital, a child, who seemed to be coming
from the direction of the bridge of Austerlitz, was ascending the
side-alley on the right in the direction of the Barriere de Fontainebleau.

Night had fully come.

This lad was pale, thin, clad in rags, with linen trousers
in the month of February, and was singing at the top of his voice.

At the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, a bent old woman was
rummaging in a heap of refuse by the light of a street lantern;
the child jostled her as he passed, then recoiled, exclaiming:--

"Hello!  And I took it for an enormous, enormous dog!"

He pronounced the word enormous the second time with a jeering swell
of the voice which might be tolerably well represented by capitals: 
"an enormous, ENORMOUS dog."

The old woman straightened herself up in a fury.

"Nasty brat!" she grumbled.  "If I hadn't been bending over,
I know well where I would have planted my foot on you."

The boy was already far away.

"Kisss! kisss!" he cried.  "After that, I don't think I was mistaken!"

The old woman, choking with indignation, now rose completely upright,
and the red gleam of the lantern fully lighted up her livid face,
all hollowed into angles and wrinkles, with crow's-feet meeting the
corners of her mouth.

Her body was lost in the darkness, and only her head was visible. 
One would have pronounced her a mask of Decrepitude carved out by a
light from the night.

The boy surveyed her.

"Madame," said he, "does not possess that style of beauty which
pleases me."

He then pursued his road, and resumed his song:--

               "Le roi Coupdesabot
               S'en allait a la chasse,
               A la chasse aux corbeaux--"


At the end of these three lines he paused.  He had arrived in front
of No. 50-52, and finding the door fastened, he began to assault it
with resounding and heroic kicks, which betrayed rather the man's
shoes that he was wearing than the child's feet which he owned.

In the meanwhile, the very old woman whom he had encountered at
the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier hastened up behind him,
uttering clamorous cries and indulging in lavish and exaggerated gestures.

"What's this?  What's this?  Lord God!  He's battering the door down! 
He's knocking the house down."

The kicks continued.

The old woman strained her lungs.

"Is that the way buildings are treated nowadays?"

All at once she paused.

She had recognized the gamin.

"What! so it's that imp!"

"Why, it's the old lady," said the lad.  "Good day, Bougonmuche. 
I have come to see my ancestors."

The old woman retorted with a composite grimace, and a wonderful
improvisation of hatred taking advantage of feebleness and ugliness,
which was, unfortunately, wasted in the dark:--

"There's no one here."

"Bah!" retorted the boy, "where's my father?"

"At La Force."

"Come, now!  And my mother?"

"At Saint-Lazare."

"Well!  And my sisters?"

"At the Madelonettes."

The lad scratched his head behind his ear, stared at Ma'am Bougon,
and said:--

"Ah!"

Then he executed a pirouette on his heel; a moment later, the old woman,
who had remained on the door-step, heard him singing in his clear,
young voice, as he plunged under the black elm-trees, in the wintry wind:--

               "Le roi Coupdesabot[31]
               S'en allait a la chasse,
               A la chasse aux corbeaux,
               Monte sur deux echasses.
               Quand on passait dessous,
               On lui payait deux sous."


[31] King Bootkick went a-hunting after crows, mounted on two stilts. 
When one passed beneath them, one paid him two sous.



[The end of Volume III.  "Marius"]



VOLUME IV.


SAINT-DENIS.

THE IDYL IN THE RUE PLUMET AND THE EPIC IN THE RUE SAINT-DENIS


BOOK FIRST.--A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY

CHAPTER I

WELL CUT


1831 and 1832, the two years which are immediately connected with
the Revolution of July, form one of the most peculiar and striking
moments of history.  These two years rise like two mountains midway
between those which precede and those which follow them.  They have
a revolutionary grandeur.  Precipices are to be distinguished there. 
The social masses, the very assizes of civilization, the solid group
of superposed and adhering interests, the century-old profiles of the
ancient French formation, appear and disappear in them every instant,
athwart the storm clouds of systems, of passions, and of theories. 
These appearances and disappearances have been designated as movement
and resistance.  At intervals, truth, that daylight of the human soul,
can be descried shining there.

This remarkable epoch is decidedly circumscribed and is beginning
to be sufficiently distant from us to allow of our grasping
the principal lines even at the present day.

We shall make the attempt.

The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to define,
in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult, and which
are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at a halting-place.

These epochs are peculiar and mislead the politicians who desire
to convert them to profit.  In the beginning, the nation asks nothing
but repose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace; it has but one ambition,
to be small.  Which is the translation of remaining tranquil. 
Of great events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God,
we have seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads.  We would
exchange Caesar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the King of Yvetot. 
"What a good little king was he!"  We have marched since daybreak,
we have reached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have
made our first change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre,
the third with Bonaparte; we are worn out.  Each one demands a bed.

Devotion which is weary, heroism which has grown old, ambitions which
are sated, fortunes which are made, seek, demand, implore, solicit,
what?  A shelter.  They have it.  They take possession of peace,
of tranquillity, of leisure; behold, they are content.  But, at the
same time certain facts arise, compel recognition, and knock at
the door in their turn.  These facts are the products of revolutions
and wars, they are, they exist, they have the right to install
themselves in society, and they do install themselves therein;
and most of the time, facts are the stewards of the household
and fouriers[32] who do nothing but prepare lodgings for principles.


[32] In olden times, fouriers were the officials who preceded
the Court and allotted the lodgings.


This, then, is what appears to philosophical politicians:--

At the same time that weary men demand repose, accomplished facts
demand guarantees.  Guarantees are the same to facts that repose
is to men.

This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector;
this is what France demanded of the Bourbons after the Empire.

These guarantees are a necessity of the times.  They must be accorded. 
Princes "grant" them, but in reality, it is the force of things
which gives them.  A profound truth, and one useful to know,
which the Stuarts did not suspect in 1662 and which the Bourbons
did not even obtain a glimpse of in 1814.

The predestined family, which returned to France when Napoleon fell,
had the fatal simplicity to believe that it was itself which bestowed,
and that what it had bestowed it could take back again; that the House
of Bourbon possessed the right divine, that France possessed nothing,
and that the political right conceded in the charter of Louis XVIII. 
was merely a branch of the right divine, was detached by the House
of Bourbon and graciously given to the people until such day as it
should please the King to reassume it.  Still, the House of Bourbon
should have felt, from the displeasure created by the gift, that it
did not come from it.

This house was churlish to the nineteenth century.  It put on an
ill-tempered look at every development of the nation.  To make use
of a trivial word, that is to say, of a popular and a true word,
it looked glum.  The people saw this.

It thought it possessed strength because the Empire had been carried
away before it like a theatrical stage-setting. It did not perceive
that it had, itself, been brought in in the same fashion.  It did
not perceive that it also lay in that hand which had removed Napoleon.

It thought that it had roots, because it was the past.  It was mistaken;
it formed a part of the past, but the whole past was France. 
The roots of French society were not fixed in the Bourbons,
but in the nations.  These obscure and lively roots constituted,
not the right of a family, but the history of a people. 
They were everywhere, except under the throne.

The House of Bourbon was to France the illustrious and bleeding knot
in her history, but was no longer the principal element of her destiny,
and the necessary base of her politics.  She could get along without
the Bourbons; she had done without them for two and twenty years;
there had been a break of continuity; they did not suspect the fact. 
And how should they have suspected it, they who fancied that Louis XVII. 
reigned on the 9th of Thermidor, and that Louis XVIII.  was reigning
at the battle of Marengo?  Never, since the origin of history,
had princes been so blind in the presence of facts and the portion
of divine authority which facts contain and promulgate.  Never had
that pretension here below which is called the right of kings denied
to such a point the right from on high.

A capital error which led this family to lay its hand once more
on the guarantees "granted" in 1814, on the concessions, as it
termed them.  Sad.  A sad thing!  What it termed its concessions
were our conquests; what it termed our encroachments were our rights.

When the hour seemed to it to have come, the Restoration,
supposing itself victorious over Bonaparte and well-rooted in
the country, that is to say, believing itself to be strong and deep,
abruptly decided on its plan of action, and risked its stroke. 
One morning it drew itself up before the face of France, and, elevating
its voice, it contested the collective title and the individual
right of the nation to sovereignty, of the citizen to liberty. 
In other words, it denied to the nation that which made it a nation,
and to the citizen that which made him a citizen.

This is the foundation of those famous acts which are called
the ordinances of July.  The Restoration fell.

It fell justly.  But, we admit, it had not been absolutely hostile
to all forms of progress.  Great things had been accomplished,
with it alongside.

Under the Restoration, the nation had grown accustomed to calm discussion,
which had been lacking under the Republic, and to grandeur in peace,
which had been wanting under the Empire.  France free and strong
had offered an encouraging spectacle to the other peoples of Europe. 
The Revolution had had the word under Robespierre; the cannon
had had the word under Bonaparte; it was under Louis XVIII. 
and Charles X. that it was the turn of intelligence to have
the word.  The wind ceased, the torch was lighted once more. 
On the lofty heights, the pure light of mind could be seen flickering. 
A magnificent, useful, and charming spectacle.  For a space of
fifteen years, those great principles which are so old for the thinker,
so new for the statesman, could be seen at work in perfect peace,
on the public square; equality before the law, liberty of conscience,
liberty of speech, liberty of the press, the accessibility of
all aptitudes to all functions.  Thus it proceeded until 1830. 
The Bourbons were an instrument of civilization which broke in the
hands of Providence.

The fall of the Bourbons was full of grandeur, not on their side,
but on the side of the nation.  They quitted the throne with gravity,
but without authority; their descent into the night was not one of
those solemn disappearances which leave a sombre emotion in history;
it was neither the spectral calm of Charles I., nor the eagle scream
of Napoleon.  They departed, that is all.  They laid down the crown,
and retained no aureole.  They were worthy, but they were not august. 
They lacked, in a certain measure, the majesty of their misfortune. 
Charles X. during the voyage from Cherbourg, causing a round table
to be cut over into a square table, appeared to be more anxious
about imperilled etiquette than about the crumbling monarchy. 
This diminution saddened devoted men who loved their persons, and serious
men who honored their race.  The populace was admirable.  The nation,
attacked one morning with weapons, by a sort of royal insurrection,
felt itself in the possession of so much force that it did not go
into a rage.  It defended itself, restrained itself, restored things
to their places, the government to law, the Bourbons to exile, alas! and
then halted!  It took the old king Charles X. from beneath that dais
which had sheltered Louis XIV.  and set him gently on the ground. 
It touched the royal personages only with sadness and precaution. 
It was not one man, it was not a few men, it was France,
France entire, France victorious and intoxicated with her victory,
who seemed to be coming to herself, and who put into practice,
before the eyes of the whole world, these grave words of Guillaume
du Vair after the day of the Barricades:--

"It is easy for those who are accustomed to skim the favors
of the great, and to spring, like a bird from bough to bough,
from an afflicted fortune to a flourishing one, to show themselves
harsh towards their Prince in his adversity; but as for me,
the fortune of my Kings and especially of my afflicted Kings,
will always be venerable to me."

The Bourbons carried away with them respect, but not regret. 
As we have just stated, their misfortune was greater than they were. 
They faded out in the horizon.

The Revolution of July instantly had friends and enemies throughout
the entire world.  The first rushed toward her with joy and enthusiasm,
the others turned away, each according to his nature.  At the first blush,
the princes of Europe, the owls of this dawn, shut their eyes,
wounded and stupefied, and only opened them to threaten. 
A fright which can be comprehended, a wrath which can be pardoned. 
This strange revolution had hardly produced a shock; it had not even
paid to vanquished royalty the honor of treating it as an enemy,
and of shedding its blood.  In the eyes of despotic governments,
who are always interested in having liberty calumniate itself,
the Revolution of July committed the fault of being formidable
and of remaining gentle.  Nothing, however, was attempted or
plotted against it.  The most discontented, the most irritated,
the most trembling, saluted it; whatever our egotism and our rancor
may be, a mysterious respect springs from events in which we are
sensible of the collaboration of some one who is working above man.

The Revolution of July is the triumph of right overthrowing the fact. 
A thing which is full of splendor.

Right overthrowing the fact.  Hence the brilliancy of the Revolution
of 1830, hence, also, its mildness.  Right triumphant has no need
of being violent.

Right is the just and the true.

The property of right is to remain eternally beautiful and pure. 
The fact, even when most necessary to all appearances, even when most
thoroughly accepted by contemporaries, if it exist only as a fact,
and if it contain only too little of right, or none at all,
is infallibly destined to become, in the course of time, deformed,
impure, perhaps, even monstrous.  If one desires to learn at one blow,
to what degree of hideousness the fact can attain, viewed at the
distance of centuries, let him look at Machiavelli.  Machiavelli is
not an evil genius, nor a demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer;
he is nothing but the fact.  And he is not only the Italian fact;
he is the European fact, the fact of the sixteenth century. 
He seems hideous, and so he is, in the presence of the moral idea
of the nineteenth.

This conflict of right and fact has been going on ever since the origin
of society.  To terminate this duel, to amalgamate the pure idea
with the humane reality, to cause right to penetrate pacifically
into the fact and the fact into right, that is the task of sages.



CHAPTER II

BADLY SEWED


But the task of sages is one thing, the task of clever men is another. 
The Revolution of 1830 came to a sudden halt.

As soon as a revolution has made the coast, the skilful make haste
to prepare the shipwreck.

The skilful in our century have conferred on themselves the title
of Statesmen; so that this word, statesmen, has ended by becoming
somewhat of a slang word.  It must be borne in mind, in fact,
that wherever there is nothing but skill, there is necessarily pettiness. 
To say "the skilful" amounts to saying "the mediocre."

In the same way, to say "statesmen" is sometimes equivalent
to saying "traitors."  If, then, we are to believe the skilful,
revolutions like the Revolution of July are severed arteries; a prompt
ligature is indispensable.  The right, too grandly proclaimed, is shaken. 
Also, right once firmly fixed, the state must be strengthened. 
Liberty once assured, attention must be directed to power.

Here the sages are not, as yet, separated from the skilful,
but they begin to be distrustful.  Power, very good.  But, in the
first place, what is power?  In the second, whence comes it? 
The skilful do not seem to hear the murmured objection, and they
continue their manoeuvres.

According to the politicians, who are ingenious in putting the
mask of necessity on profitable fictions, the first requirement
of a people after a revolution, when this people forms part
of a monarchical continent, is to procure for itself a dynasty. 
In this way, say they, peace, that is to say, time to dress
our wounds, and to repair the house, can be had after a revolution. 
The dynasty conceals the scaffolding and covers the ambulance. 
Now, it is not always easy to procure a dynasty.

If it is absolutely necessary, the first man of genius or even the first
man of fortune who comes to hand suffices for the manufacturing of
a king.  You have, in the first case, Napoleon; in the second, Iturbide.

But the first family that comes to hand does not suffice to make
a dynasty.  There is necessarily required a certain modicum of antiquity
in a race, and the wrinkle of the centuries cannot be improvised.

If we place ourselves at the point of view of the "statesmen," after
making all allowances, of course, after a revolution, what are the
qualities of the king which result from it?  He may be and it is useful
for him to be a revolutionary; that is to say, a participant in his
own person in that revolution, that he should have lent a hand to it,
that he should have either compromised or distinguished himself therein,
that he should have touched the axe or wielded the sword in it.

What are the qualities of a dynasty?  It should be national; that is
to say, revolutionary at a distance, not through acts committed,
but by reason of ideas accepted.  It should be composed of past
and be historic; be composed of future and be sympathetic.

All this explains why the early revolutions contented themselves
with finding a man, Cromwell or Napoleon; and why the second
absolutely insisted on finding a family, the House of Brunswick
or the House of Orleans.

Royal houses resemble those Indian fig-trees, each branch of which,
bending over to the earth, takes root and becomes a fig-tree itself. 
Each branch may become a dynasty.  On the sole condition that it shall
bend down to the people.

Such is the theory of the skilful.

Here, then, lies the great art:  to make a little render to success
the sound of a catastrophe in order that those who profit by it may
tremble from it also, to season with fear every step that is taken,
to augment the curve of the transition to the point of retarding progress,
to dull that aurora, to denounce and retrench the harshness of enthusiasm,
to cut all angles and nails, to wad triumph, to muffle up right,
to envelop the giant-people in flannel, and to put it to bed
very speedily, to impose a diet on that excess of health, to put
Hercules on the treatment of a convalescent, to dilute the event
with the expedient, to offer to spirits thirsting for the ideal
that nectar thinned out with a potion, to take one's precautions
against too much success, to garnish the revolution with a shade.

1830 practised this theory, already applied to England by 1688.

1830 is a revolution arrested midway.  Half of progress, quasi-right. Now,
logic knows not the "almost," absolutely as the sun knows not the candle.

Who arrests revolutions half-way? The bourgeoisie?

Why?

Because the bourgeoisie is interest which has reached satisfaction. 
Yesterday it was appetite, to-day it is plenitude, to-morrow it will
be satiety.

The phenomenon of 1814 after Napoleon was reproduced in 1830 after
Charles X.

The attempt has been made, and wrongly, to make a class of
the bourgeoisie.  The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion
of the people.  The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down. 
A chair is not a caste.

But through a desire to sit down too soon, one may arrest the very march
of the human race.  This has often been the fault of the bourgeoisie.

One is not a class because one has committed a fault.  Selfishness is
not one of the divisions of the social order.

Moreover, we must be just to selfishness.  The state to which
that part of the nation which is called the bourgeoisie aspired
after the shock of 1830 was not the inertia which is complicated
with indifference and laziness, and which contains a little shame;
it was not the slumber which presupposes a momentary forgetfulness
accessible to dreams; it was the halt.

The halt is a word formed of a singular double
and almost contradictory sense:  a troop
on the march, that is to say, movement; a stand, that is to say, repose.

The halt is the restoration of forces; it is repose armed and on
the alert; it is the accomplished fact which posts sentinels
and holds itself on its guard.

The halt presupposes the combat of yesterday and the combat of to-morrow.

It is the partition between 1830 and 1848.

What we here call combat may also be designated as progress.

The bourgeoisie then, as well as the statesmen, required a man
who should express this word Halt.  An Although-Because.
A composite individuality, signifying revolution and
signifying stability, in other terms, strengthening
the present by the evident compatibility of the past with the future.

This man was "already found."  His name was Louis Philippe d'Orleans.

The 221 made Louis Philippe King.  Lafayette undertook the coronation.

He called it the best of republics.  The town-hall of Paris took
the place of the Cathedral of Rheims.

This substitution of a half-throne for a whole throne was "the work
of 1830."

When the skilful had finished, the immense vice of their
solution became apparent.  All this had been accomplished
outside the bounds of absolute right.  Absolute right cried: 
"I protest!" then, terrible to say, it retired into the darkness.



CHAPTER III

LOUIS PHILIPPE


Revolutions have a terrible arm and a happy hand, they strike firmly
and choose well.  Even incomplete, even debased and abused and reduced
to the state of a junior revolution like the Revolution of 1830,
they nearly always retain sufficient providential lucidity to prevent
them from falling amiss.  Their eclipse is never an abdication.

Nevertheless, let us not boast too loudly; revolutions also may
be deceived, and grave errors have been seen.

Let us return to 1830.  1830, in its deviation, had good luck. 
In the establishment which entitled itself order after the revolution
had been cut short, the King amounted to more than royalty. 
Louis Philippe was a rare man.

The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating
circumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been
of blame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues;
careful of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs,
knowing the value of a minute and not always the value of a year;
sober, serene, peaceable, patient; a good man and a good prince;
sleeping with his wife, and having in his palace lackeys charged
with the duty of showing the conjugal bed to the bourgeois,
an ostentation of the regular sleeping-apartment which had become
useful after the former illegitimate displays of the elder branch;
knowing all the languages of Europe, and, what is more rare,
all the languages of all interests, and speaking them; an admirable
representative of the "middle class," but outstripping it, and in every
way greater than it; possessing excellent sense, while appreciating
the blood from which he had sprung, counting most of all on his
intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race, very particular,
declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughly the first
Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a Serene Highness,
but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse in public,
concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser;
at bottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their
own fancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters;
a gentleman, but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong;
adored by his family and his household; a fascinating talker,
an undeceived statesman, inwardly cold, dominated by immediate interest,
always governing at the shortest range, incapable of rancor and
of gratitude, making use without mercy of superiority on mediocrity,
clever in getting parliamentary majorities to put in the wrong
those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully under thrones;
unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, but with
marvellous address in that imprudence; fertile in expedients,
in countenances, in masks; making France fear Europe and Europe France! 
Incontestably fond of his country, but preferring his family;
assuming more domination than authority and more authority than dignity,
a disposition which has this unfortunate property, that as it turns
everything to success, it admits of ruse and does not absolutely
repudiate baseness, but which has this valuable side, that it
preserves politics from violent shocks, the state from fractures,
and society from catastrophes; minute, correct, vigilant, attentive,
sagacious, indefatigable; contradicting himself at times and giving
himself the lie; bold against Austria at Ancona, obstinate against
England in Spain, bombarding Antwerp, and paying off Pritchard;
singing the Marseillaise with conviction, inaccessible to despondency,
to lassitude, to the taste for the beautiful and the ideal,
to daring generosity, to Utopia, to chimeras, to wrath, to vanity,
to fear; possessing all the forms of personal intrepidity; a general
at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes; attacked eight times by regicides
and always smiling.  Brave as a grenadier, courageous as a thinker;
uneasy only in the face of the chances of a European shaking up,
and unfitted for great political adventures; always ready to risk
his life, never his work; disguising his will in influence, in order
that he might be obeyed as an intelligence rather than as a king;
endowed with observation and not with divination; not very attentive
to minds, but knowing men, that is to say requiring to see in order
to judge; prompt and penetrating good sense, practical wisdom,
easy speech, prodigious memory; drawing incessantly on this memory,
his only point of resemblance with Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon;
knowing deeds, facts, details, dates, proper names, ignorant
of tendencies, passions, the diverse geniuses of the crowd,
the interior aspirations, the hidden and obscure uprisings of souls,
in a word, all that can be designated as the invisible currents
of consciences; accepted by the surface, but little in accord
with France lower down; extricating himself by dint of tact;
governing too much and not enough; his own first minister;
excellent at creating out of the pettiness of realities an obstacle
to the immensity of ideas; mingling a genuine creative faculty
of civilization, of order and organization, an indescribable spirit
of proceedings and chicanery, the founder and lawyer of a dynasty;
having something of Charlemagne and something of an attorney; in short,
a lofty and original figure, a prince who understood how to create
authority in spite of the uneasiness of France, and power in spite
of the jealousy of Europe.  Louis Philippe will be classed among
the eminent men of his century, and would be ranked among the most
illustrious governors of history had he loved glory but a little,
and if he had had the sentiment of what is great to the same degree
as the feeling for what is useful.

Louis Philippe had been handsome, and in his old age he remained graceful;
not always approved by the nation, he always was so by the masses;
he pleased.  He had that gift of charming.  He lacked majesty; he wore
no crown, although a king, and no white hair, although an old man;
his manners belonged to the old regime and his habits to the new;
a mixture of the noble and the bourgeois which suited 1830;
Louis Philippe was transition reigning; he had preserved the
ancient pronunciation and the ancient orthography which he placed
at the service of opinions modern; he loved Poland and Hungary,
but he wrote les Polonois, and he pronounced les Hongrais.  He wore
the uniform of the national guard, like Charles X., and the ribbon
of the Legion of Honor, like Napoleon.

He went a little to chapel, not at all to the chase, never to the opera. 
Incorruptible by sacristans, by whippers-in, by ballet-dancers;
this made a part of his bourgeois popularity.  He had no heart. 
He went out with his umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella
long formed a part of his aureole.  He was a bit of a mason, a bit
of a gardener, something of a doctor; he bled a postilion who had
tumbled from his horse; Louis Philippe no more went about without
his lancet, than did Henri IV.  without his poniard.  The Royalists
jeered at this ridiculous king, the first who had ever shed blood
with the object of healing.

For the grievances against Louis Philippe, there is one deduction
to be made; there is that which accuses royalty, that which
accuses the reign, that which accuses the King; three columns
which all give different totals.  Democratic right confiscated,
progress becomes a matter of secondary interest, the protests of the
street violently repressed, military execution of insurrections,
the rising passed over by arms, the Rue Transnonain, the counsels
of war, the absorption of the real country by the legal country,
on half shares with three hundred thousand privileged persons,--
these are the deeds of royalty; Belgium refused, Algeria too
harshly conquered, and, as in the case of India by the English,
with more barbarism than civilization, the breach of faith,
to Abd-el-Kader, Blaye, Deutz bought, Pritchard paid,--these are
the doings of the reign; the policy which was more domestic than
national was the doing of the King.

As will be seen, the proper deduction having been made, the King's
charge is decreased.

This is his great fault; he was modest in the name of France.

Whence arises this fault?

We will state it.

Louis Philippe was rather too much of a paternal king; that incubation
of a family with the object of founding a dynasty is afraid
of everything and does not like to be disturbed; hence excessive
timidity, which is displeasing to the people, who have the
14th of July in their civil and Austerlitz in their military tradition.

Moreover, if we deduct the public duties which require to be fulfilled
first of all, that deep tenderness of Louis Philippe towards his
family was deserved by the family.  That domestic group was worthy
of admiration.  Virtues there dwelt side by side with talents. 
One of Louis Philippe's daughters, Marie d'Orleans, placed the name
of her race among artists, as Charles d'Orleans had placed it
among poets.  She made of her soul a marble which she named Jeanne
d'Arc. Two of Louis Philippe's daughters elicited from Metternich
this eulogium:  "They are young people such as are rarely seen,
and princes such as are never seen."

This, without any dissimulation, and also without any exaggeration,
is the truth about Louis Philippe.

To be Prince Equality, to bear in his own person the contradiction
of the Restoration and the Revolution, to have that disquieting
side of the revolutionary which becomes reassuring in governing
power, therein lay the fortune of Louis Philippe in 1830;
never was there a more complete adaptation of a man to an event;
the one entered into the other, and the incarnation took place. 
Louis Philippe is 1830 made man.  Moreover, he had in his favor that
great recommendation to the throne, exile.  He had been proscribed,
a wanderer, poor.  He had lived by his own labor.  In Switzerland,
this heir to the richest princely domains in France had sold an old
horse in order to obtain bread.  At Reichenau, he gave lessons
in mathematics, while his sister Adelaide did wool work and sewed. 
These souvenirs connected with a king rendered the bourgeoisie
enthusiastic.  He had, with his own hands, demolished the iron cage
of Mont-Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI, and used by Louis XV. 
He was the companion of Dumouriez, he was the friend of Lafayette;
he had belonged to the Jacobins' club; Mirabeau had slapped
him on the shoulder; Danton had said to him:  "Young man!" 
At the age of four and twenty, in '93, being then M. de Chartres,
he had witnessed, from the depth of a box, the trial of Louis
XVI., so well named that poor tyrant.  The blind clairvoyance
of the Revolution, breaking royalty in the King and the King
with royalty, did so almost without noticing the man in the fierce
crushing of the idea, the vast storm of the Assembly-Tribunal,
the public wrath interrogating, Capet not knowing what to reply,
the alarming, stupefied vacillation by that royal head beneath that
sombre breath, the relative innocence of all in that catastrophe,
of those who condemned as well as of the man condemned,--he had looked
on those things, he had contemplated that giddiness; he had seen
the centuries appear before the bar of the Assembly-Convention;
he had beheld, behind Louis XVI., that unfortunate passer-by
who was made responsible, the terrible culprit, the monarchy,
rise through the shadows; and there had lingered in his soul
the respectful fear of these immense justices of the populace,
which are almost as impersonal as the justice of God.

The trace left in him by the Revolution was prodigious.  Its memory
was like a living imprint of those great years, minute by minute. 
One day, in the presence of a witness whom we are not permitted
to doubt, he rectified from memory the whole of the letter A in the
alphabetical list of the Constituent Assembly.

Louis Philippe was a king of the broad daylight.  While he
reigned the press was free, the tribune was free, conscience and
speech were free.  The laws of September are open to sight. 
Although fully aware of the gnawing power of light on privileges,
he left his throne exposed to the light.  History will do justice
to him for this loyalty.

Louis Philippe, like all historical men who have passed from the scene,
is to-day put on his trial by the human conscience.  His case is,
as yet, only in the lower court.

The hour when history speaks with its free and venerable accent,
has not yet sounded for him; the moment has not come to pronounce
a definite judgment on this king; the austere and illustrious
historian Louis Blanc has himself recently softened his first verdict;
Louis Philippe was elected by those two almosts which are called
the 221 and 1830, that is to say, by a half-Parliament, and
a half-revolution; and in any case, from the superior point of view
where philosophy must place itself, we cannot judge him here, as the
reader has seen above, except with certain reservations in the name
of the absolute democratic principle; in the eyes of the absolute,
outside these two rights, the right of man in the first place,
the right of the people in the second, all is usurpation; but what we
can say, even at the present day, that after making these reserves is,
that to sum up the whole, and in whatever manner he is considered,
Louis Philippe, taken in himself, and from the point of view
of human goodness, will remain, to use the antique language
of ancient history, one of the best princes who ever sat on a throne.

What is there against him?  That throne.  Take away Louis Philippe
the king, there remains the man.  And the man is good.  He is good at
times even to the point of being admirable.  Often, in the midst of his
gravest souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy
of the continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there,
exhausted with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do? 
He took a death sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit,
considering it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it
was a still greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner. 
He obstinately maintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals;
he disputed the ground with the guillotine foot by foot against the
crown attorneys, those chatterers of the law, as he called them. 
Sometimes the pile of sentences covered his table; he examined them all;
it was anguish to him to abandon these miserable, condemned heads. 
One day, he said to the same witness to whom we have recently referred: 
"I won seven last night."  During the early years of his reign,
the death penalty was as good as abolished, and the erection of a
scaffold was a violence committed against the King.  The Greve having
disappeared with the elder branch, a bourgeois place of execution
was instituted under the name of the Barriere-Saint-Jacques;
"practical men" felt the necessity of a quasi-legitimate guillotine;
and this was one of the victories of Casimir Perier, who represented
the narrow sides of the bourgeoisie, over Louis Philippe,
who represented its liberal sides.  Louis Philippe annotated Beccaria
with his own hand.  After the Fieschi machine, he exclaimed: 
"What a pity that I was not wounded!  Then I might have pardoned!" 
On another occasion, alluding to the resistance offered by his ministry,
he wrote in connection with a political criminal, who is one of the most
generous figures of our day:  "His pardon is granted; it only remains
for me to obtain it."  Louis Philippe was as gentle as Louis IX. 
and as kindly as Henri IV.

Now, to our mind, in history, where kindness is the rarest of pearls,
the man who is kindly almost takes precedence of the man who is great.

Louis Philippe having been severely judged by some, harshly, perhaps,
by others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at
the present day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his
favor before history; this deposition, whatever else it may be,
is evidently and above all things, entirely disinterested; an epitaph
penned by a dead man is sincere; one shade may console another shade;
the sharing of the same shadows confers the right to praise it;
it is not greatly to be feared that it will ever be said of two
tombs in exile:  "This one flattered the other."



CHAPTER IV

CRACKS BENEATH THE FOUNDATION


At the moment when the drama which we are narrating is on the point
of penetrating into the depths of one of the tragic clouds which
envelop the beginning of Louis Philippe's reign, it was necessary
that there should be no equivoque, and it became requisite that
this book should offer some explanation with regard to this king.

Louis Philippe had entered into possession of his royal authority
without violence, without any direct action on his part, by virtue
of a revolutionary change, evidently quite distinct from the real
aim of the Revolution, but in which he, the Duc d'Orleans,
exercised no personal initiative.  He had been born a Prince,
and he believed himself to have been elected King.  He had not served
this mandate on himself; he had not taken it; it had been offered
to him, and he had accepted it; convinced, wrongly, to be sure,
but convinced nevertheless, that the offer was in accordance with
right and that the acceptance of it was in accordance with duty. 
Hence his possession was in good faith.  Now, we say it in
good conscience, Louis Philippe being in possession in perfect
good faith, and the democracy being in good faith in its attack,
the amount of terror discharged by the social conflicts weighs neither
on the King nor on the democracy.  A clash of principles resembles
a clash of elements.  The ocean defends the water, the hurricane
defends the air, the King defends Royalty, the democracy defends
the people; the relative, which is the monarchy, resists the absolute,
which is the republic; society bleeds in this conflict, but that
which constitutes its suffering to-day will constitute its safety
later on; and, in any case, those who combat are not to be blamed;
one of the two parties is evidently mistaken; the right is not,
like the Colossus of Rhodes, on two shores at once, with one
foot on the republic, and one in Royalty; it is indivisible,
and all on one side; but those who are in error are so sincerely;
a blind man is no more a criminal than a Vendean is a ruffian. 
Let us, then, impute to the fatality of things alone these
formidable collisions.  Whatever the nature of these tempests may be,
human irresponsibility is mingled with them.

Let us complete this exposition.

The government of 1840 led a hard life immediately.  Born yesterday,
it was obliged to fight to-day.

Hardly installed, it was already everywhere conscious of vague
movements of traction on the apparatus of July so recently laid,
and so lacking in solidity.

Resistance was born on the morrow; perhaps even, it was born on
the preceding evening.  From month to month the hostility increased,
and from being concealed it became patent.

The Revolution of July, which gained but little acceptance outside
of France by kings, had been diversely interpreted in France,
as we have said.

God delivers over to men his visible will in events, an obscure text
written in a mysterious tongue.  Men immediately make translations
of it; translations hasty, incorrect, full of errors, of gaps,
and of nonsense.  Very few minds comprehend the divine language. 
The most sagacious, the calmest, the most profound, decipher slowly,
and when they arrive with their text, the task has long been completed;
there are already twenty translations on the public place. 
From each remaining springs a party, and from each misinterpretation
a faction; and each party thinks that it alone has the true text,
and each faction thinks that it possesses the light.

Power itself is often a faction.

There are, in revolutions, swimmers who go against the current;
they are the old parties.

For the old parties who clung to heredity by the grace of God,
think that revolutions, having sprung from the right to revolt,
one has the right to revolt against them.  Error.  For in these
revolutions, the one who revolts is not the people; it is the king. 
Revolution is precisely the contrary of revolt.  Every revolution,
being a normal outcome, contains within itself its legitimacy,
which false revolutionists sometimes dishonor, but which remains even
when soiled, which survives even when stained with blood.

Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity. 
A revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real.  It is
because it must be that it is.

None the less did the old legitimist parties assail the Revolution
of 1830 with all the vehemence which arises from false reasoning. 
Errors make excellent projectiles.  They strike it cleverly in its
vulnerable spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic;
they attacked this revolution in its royalty.  They shouted to it: 
"Revolution, why this king?"  Factions are blind men who aim correctly.

This cry was uttered equally by the republicans.  But coming from them,
this cry was logical.  What was blindness in the legitimists was
clearness of vision in the democrats.  1830 had bankrupted the people. 
The enraged democracy reproached it with this.

Between the attack of the past and the attack of the future,
the establishment of July struggled.  It represented the minute
at loggerheads on the one hand with the monarchical centuries,
on the other hand with eternal right.

In addition, and beside all this, as it was no longer revolution and had
become a monarchy, 1830 was obliged to take precedence of all Europe. 
To keep the peace, was an increase of complication.  A harmony
established contrary to sense is often more onerous than a war. 
From this secret conflict, always muzzled, but always growling,
was born armed peace, that ruinous expedient of civilization which
in the harness of the European cabinets is suspicious in itself. 
The Royalty of July reared up, in spite of the fact that it caught
it in the harness of European cabinets.  Metternich would gladly
have put it in kicking-straps. Pushed on in France by progress,
it pushed on the monarchies, those loiterers in Europe.  After having
been towed, it undertook to tow.

Meanwhile, within her, pauperism, the proletariat, salary,
education, penal servitude, prostitution, the fate of the woman,
wealth, misery, production, consumption, division, exchange,
coin, credit, the rights of capital, the rights of labor,--
all these questions were multiplied above society, a terrible slope.

Outside of political parties properly so called, another movement
became manifest.  Philosophical fermentation replied to democratic
fermentation.  The elect felt troubled as well as the masses;
in another manner, but quite as much.

Thinkers meditated, while the soil, that is to say, the people,
traversed by revolutionary currents, trembled under them with
indescribably vague epileptic shocks.  These dreamers, some isolated,
others united in families and almost in communion, turned over
social questions in a pacific but profound manner; impassive miners,
who tranquilly pushed their galleries into the depths of a volcano,
hardly disturbed by the dull commotion and the furnaces of which they
caught glimpses.

This tranquillity was not the least beautiful spectacle of this
agitated epoch.

These men left to political parties the question of rights,
they occupied themselves with the question of happiness.

The well-being of man, that was what they wanted to extract
from society.

They raised material questions, questions of agriculture, of industry,
of commerce, almost to the dignity of a religion.  In civilization,
such as it has formed itself, a little by the command of God, a great
deal by the agency of man, interests combine, unite, and amalgamate in a
manner to form a veritable hard rock, in accordance with a dynamic law,
patiently studied by economists, those geologists of politics. 
These men who grouped themselves under different appellations,
but who may all be designated by the generic title of socialists,
endeavored to pierce that rock and to cause it to spout forth the
living waters of human felicity.

From the question of the scaffold to the question of war, their works
embraced everything.  To the rights of man, as proclaimed by the French
Revolution, they added the rights of woman and the rights of the child.

The reader will not be surprised if, for various reasons, we do
not here treat in a thorough manner, from the theoretical point
of view, the questions raised by socialism.  We confine ourselves
to indicating them.

All the problems that the socialists proposed to themselves,
cosmogonic visions, revery and mysticism being cast aside, can be
reduced to two principal problems.

First problem:  To produce wealth.

Second problem:  To share it.

The first problem contains the question of work.

The second contains the question of salary.

In the first problem the employment of forces is in question.

In the second, the distribution of enjoyment.

From the proper employment of forces results public power.

From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness.

By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution
must be understood.

From these two things combined, the public power without,
individual happiness within, results social prosperity.

Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

England solves the first of these two problems.  She creates
wealth admirably, she divides it badly.  This solution which is
complete on one side only leads her fatally to two extremes: 
monstrous opulence, monstrous wretchedness.  All enjoyments for some,
all privations for the rest, that is to say, for the people;
privilege, exception, monopoly, feudalism, born from toil itself. 
A false and dangerous situation, which sates public power or
private misery, which sets the roots of the State in the sufferings
of the individual.  A badly constituted grandeur in which are combined
all the material elements and into which no moral element enters.

Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem. 
They are mistaken.  Their division kills production.  Equal partition
abolishes emulation; and consequently labor.  It is a partition
made by the butcher, which kills that which it divides.  It is
therefore impossible to pause over these pretended solutions. 
Slaying wealth is not the same thing as dividing it.

The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved. 
The two problems must be combined and made but one.

Solve only the first of the two problems; you will be Venice,
you will be England.  You will have, like Venice, an artificial
power, or, like England, a material power; you will be the wicked
rich man.  You will die by an act of violence, as Venice died,
or by bankruptcy, as England will fall.  And the world will allow
to die and fall all that is merely selfishness, all that does
not represent for the human race either a virtue or an idea.

It is well understood here, that by the words Venice, England,
we designate not the peoples, but social structures; the oligarchies
superposed on nations, and not the nations themselves.  The nations
always have our respect and our sympathy.  Venice, as a people,
will live again; England, the aristocracy, will fall, but England,
the nation, is immortal.  That said, we continue.

Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor,
suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the
feeble by the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy
of the man who is making his way against the man who has reached
the goal, adjust, mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor,
mingle gratuitous and compulsory education with the growth of childhood,
and make of science the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping
arms busy, be at one and the same time a powerful people and a family
of happy men, render property democratic, not by abolishing it,
but by making it universal, so that every citizen, without exception,
may be a proprietor, an easier matter than is generally supposed;
in two words, learn how to produce wealth and how to distribute it,
and you will have at once moral and material greatness; and you will
be worthy to call yourself France.

This is what socialism said outside and above a few sects
which have gone astray; that is what it sought in facts,
that is what it sketched out in minds.

Efforts worthy of admiration!  Sacred attempts!

These doctrines, these theories, these resistances, the unforeseen
necessity for the statesman to take philosophers into account,
confused evidences of which we catch a glimpse, a new system
of politics to be created, which shall be in accord with the old
world without too much disaccord with the new revolutionary ideal,
a situation in which it became necessary to use Lafayette to
defend Polignac, the intuition of progress transparent beneath
the revolt, the chambers and streets, the competitions to be
brought into equilibrium around him, his faith in the Revolution,
perhaps an eventual indefinable resignation born of the vague
acceptance of a superior definitive right, his desire to remain
of his race, his domestic spirit, his sincere respect for the people,
his own honesty, preoccupied Louis Philippe almost painfully,
and there were moments when strong and courageous as he was,
he was overwhelmed by the difficulties of being a king.

He felt under his feet a formidable disaggregation, which was not,
nevertheless, a reduction to dust, France being more France than ever.

Piles of shadows covered the horizon.  A strange shade,
gradually drawing nearer, extended little by little over men,
over things, over ideas; a shade which came from wraths and systems. 
Everything which had been hastily stifled was moving and fermenting. 
At times the conscience of the honest man resumed its breathing,
so great was the discomfort of that air in which sophisms were
intermingled with truths.  Spirits trembled in the social anxiety
like leaves at the approach of a storm.  The electric tension
was such that at certain instants, the first comer, a stranger,
brought light.  Then the twilight obscurity closed in again. 
At intervals, deep and dull mutterings allowed a judgment to be formed
as to the quantity of thunder contained by the cloud.

Twenty months had barely elapsed since the Revolution of July,
the year 1832 had opened with an aspect of something impending
and threatening.

The distress of the people, the laborers without bread, the last Prince
de Conde engulfed in the shadows, Brussels expelling the Nassaus
as Paris did the Bourbons, Belgium offering herself to a French
Prince and giving herself to an English Prince, the Russian hatred
of Nicolas, behind us the demons of the South, Ferdinand in Spain,
Miguel in Portugal, the earth quaking in Italy, Metternich extending
his hand over Bologna, France treating Austria sharply at Ancona,
at the North no one knew what sinister sound of the hammer nailing up
Poland in her coffin, irritated glances watching France narrowly all
over Europe, England, a suspected ally, ready to give a push to that
which was tottering and to hurl herself on that which should fall,
the peerage sheltering itself behind Beccaria to refuse four heads
to the law, the fleurs-de-lys erased from the King's carriage,
the cross torn from Notre Dame, Lafayette lessened, Laffitte ruined,
Benjamin Constant dead in indigence, Casimir Perier dead in the
exhaustion of his power; political and social malady breaking
out simultaneously in the two capitals of the kingdom, the one
in the city of thought, the other in the city of toil; at Paris
civil war, at Lyons servile war; in the two cities, the same glare
of the furnace; a crater-like crimson on the brow of the people;
the South rendered fanatic, the West troubled, the Duchesse
de Berry in la Vendee, plots, conspiracies, risings, cholera,
added the sombre roar of tumult of events to the sombre roar of ideas.



CHAPTER V

FACTS WHENCE HISTORY SPRINGS AND WHICH HISTORY IGNORES


Towards the end of April, everything had become aggravated. 
The fermentation entered the boiling state.  Ever since 1830,
petty partial revolts had been going on here and there,
which were quickly suppressed, but ever bursting forth afresh,
the sign of a vast underlying conflagration.  Something terrible
was in preparation.  Glimpses could be caught of the features still
indistinct and imperfectly lighted, of a possible revolution. 
France kept an eye on Paris; Paris kept an eye on the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which was in a dull glow, was beginning
its ebullition.

The wine-shops of the Rue de Charonne were, although the union
of the two epithets seems singular when applied to wine-shops,
grave and stormy.

The government was there purely and simply called in question. 
There people publicly discussed the question of fighting or of
keeping quiet.  There were back shops where workingmen were made to
swear that they would hasten into the street at the first cry of alarm,
and "that they would fight without counting the number of the enemy." 
This engagement once entered into, a man seated in the corner of the
wine-shop "assumed a sonorous tone," and said, "You understand! 
You have sworn!"

Sometimes they went up stairs, to a private room on the first floor,
and there scenes that were almost masonic were enacted.  They made
the initiated take oaths to render service to himself as well as
to the fathers of families.  That was the formula.

In the tap-rooms, "subversive" pamphlets were read.  They treated
the government with contempt, says a secret report of that time.

Words like the following could be heard there:--

"I don't know the names of the leaders.  We folks shall not
know the day until two hours beforehand."  One workman said: 
"There are three hundred of us, let each contribute ten sous,
that will make one hundred and fifty francs with which to procure
powder and shot."

Another said:  "I don't ask for six months, I don't ask for even two. 
In less than a fortnight we shall be parallel with the government. 
With twenty-five thousand men we can face them."  Another said: 
"I don't sleep at night, because I make cartridges all night." 
From time to time, men "of bourgeois appearance, and in good coats"
came and "caused embarrassment," and with the air of "command,"
shook hands with the most important, and then went away.  They never
stayed more than ten minutes.  Significant remarks were exchanged
in a low tone:  "The plot is ripe, the matter is arranged."  "It was
murmured by all who were there," to borrow the very expression of one
of those who were present.  The exaltation was such that one day,
a workingman exclaimed, before the whole wine-shop: "We have no arms!" 
One of his comrades replied:  "The soldiers have!" thus parodying
without being aware of the fact, Bonaparte's proclamation to the army
in Italy:  "When they had anything of a more secret nature on hand,"
adds one report, "they did not communicate it to each other." 
It is not easy to understand what they could conceal after what they
said.

These reunions were sometimes periodical.  At certain ones of them,
there were never more than eight or ten persons present, and they
were always the same.  In others, any one entered who wished,
and the room was so full that they were forced to stand. 
Some went thither through enthusiasm and passion; others because
it was on their way to their work.  As during the Revolution,
there were patriotic women in some of these wine-shops who embraced
new-comers.

Other expressive facts came to light.

A man would enter a shop, drink, and go his way with the remark: 
"Wine-merchant, the revolution will pay what is due to you."

Revolutionary agents were appointed in a wine-shop facing the Rue
de Charonne.  The balloting was carried on in their caps.

Workingmen met at the house of a fencing-master who gave lessons
in the Rue de Cotte.  There there was a trophy of arms formed of
wooden broadswords, canes, clubs, and foils.  One day, the buttons
were removed from the foils.

A workman said:  "There are twenty-five of us, but they don't
count on me, because I am looked upon as a machine."  Later on,
that machine became Quenisset.

The indefinite things which were brewing gradually acquired a strange
and indescribable notoriety.  A woman sweeping off her doorsteps said
to another woman:  "For a long time, there has been a strong force
busy making cartridges."  In the open street, proclamation could
be seen addressed to the National Guard in the departments. 
One of these proclamations was signed:  Burtot, wine-merchant.

One day a man with his beard worn like a collar and with an Italian
accent mounted a stone post at the door of a liquor-seller in the
Marche Lenoir, and read aloud a singular document, which seemed
to emanate from an occult power.  Groups formed around him,
and applauded.

The passages which touched the crowd most deeply were collected and
noted down.  "--Our doctrines are trammelled, our proclamations torn,
our bill-stickers are spied upon and thrown into prison."--"The
breakdown which has recently taken place in cottons has converted
to us many mediums."--"The future of nations is being worked out in
our obscure ranks."--" Here are the fixed terms:  action or reaction,
revolution or counter-revolution. For, at our epoch, we no longer
believe either in inertia or in immobility.  For the people
against the people, that is the question.  There is no other."--"On
the day when we cease to suit you, break us, but up to that day,
help us to march on."  All this in broad daylight.

Other deeds, more audacious still, were suspicious in the eyes of the
people by reason of their very audacity.  On the 4th of April, 1832,
a passer-by mounted the post on the corner which forms the angle
of the Rue Sainte-Marguerite and shouted:  "I am a Babouvist!" 
But beneath Babeuf, the people scented Gisquet.

Among other things, this man said:--

"Down with property!  The opposition of the left is cowardly
and treacherous.  When it wants to be on the right side,
it preaches revolution, it is democratic in order to escape
being beaten, and royalist so that it may not have to fight. 
The republicans are beasts with feathers.  Distrust the republicans,
citizens of the laboring classes."

"Silence, citizen spy!" cried an artisan.

This shout put an end to the discourse.

Mysterious incidents occurred.

At nightfall, a workingman encountered near the canal a "very
well dressed man," who said to him:  "Whither are you bound,
citizen?"  "Sir," replied the workingman, "I have not the honor
of your acquaintance."  "I know you very well, however."  And the
man added:  "Don't be alarmed, I am an agent of the committee. 
You are suspected of not being quite faithful.  You know that if you
reveal anything, there is an eye fixed on you."  Then he shook hands
with the workingman and went away, saying:  "We shall meet again soon."

The police, who were on the alert, collected singular dialogues,
not only in the wine-shops, but in the street.

"Get yourself received very soon," said a weaver to a cabinet-maker.

"Why?"

"There is going to be a shot to fire."

Two ragged pedestrians exchanged these remarkable replies,
fraught with evident Jacquerie:--

"Who governs us?"

"M. Philippe."

"No, it is the bourgeoisie."

The reader is mistaken if he thinks that we take the word Jacquerie
in a bad sense.  The Jacques were the poor.

On another occasion two men were heard to say to each other as they
passed by:  "We have a good plan of attack."

Only the following was caught of a private conversation between four
men who were crouching in a ditch of the circle of the Barriere
du Trone:--

"Everything possible will be done to prevent his walking about Paris
any more."

Who was the he?  Menacing obscurity.

"The principal leaders," as they said in the faubourg, held themselves
apart.  It was supposed that they met for consultation in a wine-shop
near the point Saint-Eustache. A certain Aug--, chief of the Society
aid for tailors, Rue Mondetour, had the reputation of serving
as intermediary central between the leaders and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

Nevertheless, there was always a great deal of mystery about
these leaders, and no certain fact can invalidate the singular
arrogance of this reply made later on by a man accused before
the Court of Peers:--

"Who was your leader?"

"I knew of none and I recognized none."

There was nothing but words, transparent but vague; sometimes
idle reports, rumors, hearsay.  Other indications cropped up.

A carpenter, occupied in nailing boards to a fence around
the ground on which a house was in process of construction,
in the Rue de Reuilly found on that plot the torn fragment
of a letter on which were still legible the following lines:--


The committee must take measures to prevent recruiting in the
sections for the different societies.


And, as a postscript:--


We have learned that there are guns in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere,
No. 5 [bis], to the number of five or six thousand, in the house
of a gunsmith in that court.  The section owns no arms.


What excited the carpenter and caused him to show this thing to his
neighbors was the fact, that a few paces further on he picked up
another paper, torn like the first, and still more significant,
of which we reproduce a facsimile, because of the historical interest
attaching to these strange documents:--

+------------------------------------------------------------+ | Q
| C | D | E | Learn this list by heart.  After so doing | | | | |
| you will tear it up.  The men admitted | | | | | | will do the
same when you have transmitted | | | | | | their orders to them. 
| | | | | | Health and Fraternity, | | | | | | u og a fe L. |
+------------------------------------------------------------+


It was only later on that the persons who were in the secret
of this find at the time, learned the significance of those four
capital letters:  quinturions, centurions, decurions, eclaireurs
[scouts], and the sense of the letters:  u og a fe, which was a date,
and meant April 15th, 1832.  Under each capital letter were inscribed
names followed by very characteristic notes.  Thus:  Q. Bannerel. 
8 guns, 83 cartridges.  A safe man.--C. Boubiere.  1 pistol,
40 cartridges.--D. Rollet.  1 foil, 1 pistol, 1 pound of powder.--
E. Tessier.  1 sword, 1 cartridge-box. Exact.--Terreur.  8 guns. 
Brave, etc.

Finally, this carpenter found, still in the same enclosure,
a third paper on which was written in pencil, but very legibly,
this sort of enigmatical list:--

          Unite:  Blanchard: Arbre-Sec. 6.
          Barra.  Soize.  Salle-au-Comte.
          Kosciusko. Aubry the Butcher?
          J. J. R.
          Caius Gracchus.
          Right of revision.  Dufond.  Four.
          Fall of the Girondists.  Derbac.  Maubuee.
          Washington.  Pinson.  1 pistol, 86 cartridges.
          Marseillaise.
          Sovereignty of the people. Michel. Quincampoix. Sword.
          Hoche.
          Marceau.  Plato.  Arbre-Sec.
          Warsaw.  Tilly, crier of the Populaire.


The honest bourgeois into whose hands this list fell knew
its significance.  It appears that this list was the complete nomenclature
of the sections of the fourth arondissement of the Society of the Rights
of Man, with the names and dwellings of the chiefs of sections. 
To-day, when all these facts which were obscure are nothing more than
history, we may publish them.  It should be added, that the foundation
of the Society of the Rights of Man seems to have been posterior to
the date when this paper was found.  Perhaps this was only a rough draft.

Still, according to all the remarks and the words, according to
written notes, material facts begin to make their appearance.

In the Rue Popincourt, in the house of a dealer in bric-abrac, there
were seized seven sheets of gray paper, all folded alike lengthwise
and in four; these sheets enclosed twenty-six squares of this
same gray paper folded in the form of a cartridge, and a card,
on which was written the following:--

           Saltpetre . . . . . . . . . . .  12 ounces.
           Sulphur   . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces.
           Charcoal  . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces and a half.
           Water     . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces.


The report of the seizure stated that the drawer exhaled a strong
smell of powder.

A mason returning from his day's work, left behind him a little
package on a bench near the bridge of Austerlitz.  This package
was taken to the police station.  It was opened, and in it were
found two printed dialogues, signed Lahautiere, a song entitled: 
"Workmen, band together," and a tin box full of cartridges.

One artisan drinking with a comrade made the latter feel him to see
how warm he was; the other man felt a pistol under his waistcoat.

In a ditch on the boulevard, between Pere-Lachaise and the Barriere
du Trone, at the most deserted spot, some children, while playing,
discovered beneath a mass of shavings and refuse bits of wood,
a bag containing a bullet-mould, a wooden punch for the preparation
of cartridges, a wooden bowl, in which there were grains of
hunting-powder, and a little cast-iron pot whose interior presented
evident traces of melted lead.

Police agents, making their way suddenly and unexpectedly at five
o'clock in the morning, into the dwelling of a certain Pardon,
who was afterwards a member of the Barricade-Merry section and got
himself killed in the insurrection of April, 1834, found him standing
near his bed, and holding in his hand some cartridges which he
was in the act of preparing.

Towards the hour when workingmen repose, two men were seen to meet
between the Barriere Picpus and the Barriere Charenton in a little
lane between two walls, near a wine-shop, in front of which there
was a "Jeu de Siam."[33] One drew a pistol from beneath his blouse
and handed it to the other.  As he was handing it to him, he noticed
that the perspiration of his chest had made the powder damp. 
He primed the pistol and added more powder to what was already
in the pan.  Then the two men parted.


[33] A game of ninepins, in which one side of the ball is smaller
than the other, so that it does not roll straight, but describes
a curve on the ground.


A certain Gallais, afterwards killed in the Rue Beaubourg in the
affair of April, boasted of having in his house seven hundred
cartridges and twenty-four flints.

The government one day received a warning that arms and two hundred
thousand cartridges had just been distributed in the faubourg. 
On the following week thirty thousand cartridges were distributed. 
The remarkable point about it was, that the police were not able to
seize a single one.

An intercepted letter read:  "The day is not far distant when,
within four hours by the clock, eighty thousand patriots will be
under arms."

All this fermentation was public, one might almost say tranquil. 
The approaching insurrection was preparing its storm calmly in the
face of the government.  No singularity was lacking to this still
subterranean crisis, which was already perceptible.  The bourgeois
talked peaceably to the working-classes of what was in preparation. 
They said:  "How is the rising coming along?" in the same tone in
which they would have said:  "How is your wife?"

A furniture-dealer, of the Rue Moreau, inquired:  "Well, when are
you going to make the attack?"

Another shop-keeper said:--

"The attack will be made soon."

"I know it.  A month ago, there were fifteen thousand of you,
now there are twenty-five thousand."  He offered his gun,
and a neighbor offered a small pistol which he was willing to sell
for seven francs.

Moreover, the revolutionary fever was growing.  Not a point in Paris
nor in France was exempt from it.  The artery was beating everywhere. 
Like those membranes which arise from certain inflammations and form
in the human body, the network of secret societies began to spread
all over the country.  From the associations of the Friends
of the People, which was at the same time public and secret,
sprang the Society of the Rights of Man, which also dated from one
of the orders of the day:  Pluviose, Year 40 of the republican era,
which was destined to survive even the mandate of the Court of
Assizes which pronounced its dissolution, and which did not hesitate
to bestow on its sections significant names like the following:--

     Pikes.
     Tocsin.
     Signal cannon.
     Phrygian cap.
     January 21.
     The beggars.
     The vagabonds.
     Forward march.
     Robespierre.
     Level.
     Ca Ira.

The Society of the Rights of Man engendered the Society of Action. 
These were impatient individuals who broke away and hastened ahead. 
Other associations sought to recruit themselves from the great
mother societies.  The members of sections complained that they
were torn asunder.  Thus, the Gallic Society, and the committee
of organization of the Municipalities.  Thus the associations for the
liberty of the press, for individual liberty, for the instruction
of the people against indirect taxes.  Then the Society of Equal
Workingmen which was divided into three fractions, the levellers,
the communists, the reformers.  Then the Army of the Bastilles,
a sort of cohort organized on a military footing, four men commanded
by a corporal, ten by a sergeant, twenty by a sub-lieutenant, forty by
a lieutenant; there were never more than five men who knew each other. 
Creation where precaution is combined with audacity and which seemed
stamped with the genius of Venice.

The central committee, which was at the head, had two arms,
the Society of Action, and the Army of the Bastilles.

A legitimist association, the Chevaliers of Fidelity, stirred about
among these the republican affiliations.  It was denounced
and repudiated there.

The Parisian societies had ramifications in the principal cities,
Lyons, Nantes, Lille, Marseilles, and each had its Society
of the Rights of Man, the Charbonniere, and The Free Men. 
All had a revolutionary society which was called the Cougourde. 
We have already mentioned this word.

In Paris, the Faubourg Saint-Marceau kept up an equal buzzing with
the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the schools were no less moved than
the faubourgs.  A cafe in the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe and the wine-shop
of the Seven Billiards, Rue des Mathurins-Saint-Jacques, served
as rallying points for the students.  The Society of the Friends
of the A B C affiliated to the Mutualists of Angers, and to the
Cougourde of Aix, met, as we have seen, in the Cafe Musain. 
These same young men assembled also, as we have stated already, in a
restaurant wine-shop of the Rue Mondetour which was called Corinthe. 
These meetings were secret.  Others were as public as possible,
and the reader can judge of their boldness from these fragments
of an interrogatory undergone in one of the ulterior prosecutions: 
"Where was this meeting held?"  "In the Rue de la Paix." 
"At whose house?"  "In the street."  "What sections were there?" 
"Only one."  "Which?"  "The Manuel section."  "Who was its leader?" 
"I." "You are too young to have decided alone upon the bold course
of attacking the government.  Where did your instructions come from?" 
"From the central committee."

The army was mined at the same time as the population, as was proved
subsequently by the operations of Beford, Luneville, and Epinard. 
They counted on the fifty-second regiment, on the fifth, on the eighth,
on the thirty-seventh, and on the twentieth light cavalry. 
In Burgundy and in the southern towns they planted the liberty tree;
that is to say, a pole surmounted by a red cap.

Such was the situation.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, more than any other group of the population,
as we stated in the beginning, accentuated this situation and made
it felt.  That was the sore point.  This old faubourg, peopled like
an ant-hill, laborious, courageous, and angry as a hive of bees,
was quivering with expectation and with the desire for a tumult. 
Everything was in a state of agitation there, without any interruption,
however, of the regular work.  It is impossible to convey an idea
of this lively yet sombre physiognomy.  In this faubourg exists
poignant distress hidden under attic roofs; there also exist rare
and ardent minds.  It is particularly in the matter of distress
and intelligence that it is dangerous to have extremes meet.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine had also other causes to tremble;
for it received the counter-shock of commercial crises, of failures,
strikes, slack seasons, all inherent to great political disturbances. 
In times of revolution misery is both cause and effect.  The blow
which it deals rebounds upon it.  This population full of proud virtue,
capable to the highest degree of latent heat, always ready to fly
to arms, prompt to explode, irritated, deep, undermined, seemed to
be only awaiting the fall of a spark.  Whenever certain sparks
float on the horizon chased by the wind of events, it is impossible
not to think of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and of the formidable
chance which has placed at the very gates of Paris that powder-house
of suffering and ideas.

The wine-shops of the Faubourg Antoine, which have been more than
once drawn in the sketches which the reader has just perused,
possess historical notoriety.  In troublous times people grow
intoxicated there more on words than on wine.  A sort of prophetic
spirit and an afflatus of the future circulates there, swelling hearts
and enlarging souls.  The cabarets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine
resemble those taverns of Mont Aventine erected on the cave of
the Sibyl and communicating with the profound and sacred breath;
taverns where the tables were almost tripods, and where was drunk
what Ennius calls the sibylline wine.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine is a reservoir of people. 
Revolutionary agitations create fissures there, through which
trickles the popular sovereignty.  This sovereignty may do evil;
it can be mistaken like any other; but, even when led astray,
it remains great.  We may say of it as of the blind cyclops, Ingens.

In '93, according as the idea which was floating about was good
or evil, according as it was the day of fanaticism or of enthusiasm,
there leaped forth from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine now savage legions,
now heroic bands.

Savage.  Let us explain this word.  When these bristling men,
who in the early days of the revolutionary chaos, tattered, howling,
wild, with uplifted bludgeon, pike on high, hurled themselves
upon ancient Paris in an uproar, what did they want?  They wanted
an end to oppression, an end to tyranny, an end to the sword,
work for men, instruction for the child, social sweetness for
the woman, liberty, equality, fraternity, bread for all, the idea
for all, the Edenizing of the world.  Progress; and that holy,
sweet, and good thing, progress, they claimed in terrible wise,
driven to extremities as they were, half naked, club in fist, a roar
in their mouths.  They were savages, yes; but the savages of civilization.

They proclaimed right furiously; they were desirous, if only
with fear and trembling, to force the human race to paradise. 
They seemed barbarians, and they were saviours.  They demanded
light with the mask of night.

Facing these men, who were ferocious, we admit, and terrifying,
but ferocious and terrifying for good ends, there are other men,
smiling, embroidered, gilded, beribboned, starred, in silk stockings,
in white plumes, in yellow gloves, in varnished shoes, who, with their
elbows on a velvet table, beside a marble chimney-piece, insist gently
on demeanor and the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages,
of divine right, of fanaticism, of innocence, of slavery, of the
death penalty, of war, glorifying in low tones and with politeness,
the sword, the stake, and the scaffold.  For our part, if we were
forced to make a choice between the barbarians of civilization
and the civilized men of barbarism, we should choose the barbarians.

But, thank Heaven, still another choice is possible.  No perpendicular
fall is necessary, in front any more than in the rear.

Neither despotism nor terrorism.  We desire progress with a gentle slope.

God takes care of that.  God's whole policy consists in rendering
slopes less steep.



CHAPTER VI

ENJOLRAS AND HIS LIEUTENANTS


It was about this epoch that Enjolras, in view of a possible catastrophe,
instituted a kind of mysterious census.

All were present at a secret meeting at the Cafe Musain.

Enjolras said, mixing his words with a few half-enigmatical
but significant metaphors:--

"It is proper that we should know where we stand and on whom we
may count.  If combatants are required, they must be provided. 
It can do no harm to have something with which to strike. 
Passers-by always have more chance of being gored when there are
bulls on the road than when there are none.  Let us, therefore,
reckon a little on the herd.  How many of us are there? 
There is no question of postponing this task until to-morrow.
Revolutionists should always be hurried; progress has no time to lose. 
Let us mistrust the unexpected.  Let us not be caught unprepared. 
We must go over all the seams that we have made and see whether they
hold fast.  This business ought to be concluded to-day. Courfeyrac,
you will see the polytechnic students.  It is their day to go out. 
To-day is Wednesday.  Feuilly, you will see those of the Glaciere,
will you not?  Combeferre has promised me to go to Picpus. 
There is a perfect swarm and an excellent one there.  Bahorel will
visit the Estrapade.  Prouvaire, the masons are growing lukewarm;
you will bring us news from the lodge of the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honore.
Joly will go to Dupuytren's clinical lecture, and feel the pulse
of the medical school.  Bossuet will take a little turn in the court
and talk with the young law licentiates.  I will take charge of the
Cougourde myself."

"That arranges everything," said Courfeyrac.

"No."

"What else is there?"

"A very important thing."

"What is that?" asked Courfeyrac.

"The Barriere du Maine," replied Enjolras.

Enjolras remained for a moment as though absorbed in reflection,
then he resumed:--

"At the Barriere du Maine there are marble-workers, painters,
and journeymen in the studios of sculptors.  They are an enthusiastic
family, but liable to cool off.  I don't know what has been the matter
with them for some time past.  They are thinking of something else. 
They are becoming extinguished.  They pass their time playing dominoes. 
There is urgent need that some one should go and talk with them a little,
but with firmness.  They meet at Richefeu's. They are to be found
there between twelve and one o'clock. Those ashes must be fanned into
a glow.  For that errand I had counted on that abstracted Marius,
who is a good fellow on the whole, but he no longer comes to us. 
I need some one for the Barriere du Maine.  I have no one."

"What about me?" said Grantaire.  "Here am I."

"You?"

"I."

"You indoctrinate republicans! you warm up hearts that have grown
cold in the name of principle!"

"Why not?"

"Are you good for anything?"

"I have a vague ambition in that direction," said Grantaire.

"You do not believe in everything."

"I believe in you."

"Grantaire will you do me a service?"

"Anything.  I'll black your boots."

"Well, don't meddle with our affairs.  Sleep yourself sober from
your absinthe."

"You are an ingrate, Enjolras."

"You the man to go to the Barriere du Maine!  You capable of it!"

"I am capable of descending the Rue de Gres, of crossing the Place
Saint-Michel, of sloping through the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, of taking
the Rue de Vaugirard, of passing the Carmelites, of turning into the
Rue d'Assas, of reaching the Rue du Cherche-Midi, of leaving behind
me the Conseil de Guerre, of pacing the Rue des Vielles Tuileries,
of striding across the boulevard, of following the Chaussee du Maine,
of passing the barrier, and entering Richefeu's. I am capable of that. 
My shoes are capable of that."

"Do you know anything of those comrades who meet at Richefeu's?"

"Not much.  We only address each other as thou."

"What will you say to them?"

"I will speak to them of Robespierre, pardi!  Of Danton. 
Of principles."

"You?"

"I. But I don't receive justice.  When I set about it, I am terrible. 
I have read Prudhomme, I know the Social Contract, I know my
constitution of the year Two by heart.  `The liberty of one citizen
ends where the liberty of another citizen begins.'  Do you take me
for a brute?  I have an old bank-bill of the Republic in my drawer. 
The Rights of Man, the sovereignty of the people, sapristi!  I am
even a bit of a Hebertist.  I can talk the most superb twaddle
for six hours by the clock, watch in hand."

"Be serious," said Enjolras.

"I am wild," replied Grantaire.

Enjolras meditated for a few moments, and made the gesture of a man
who has taken a resolution.

"Grantaire," he said gravely, "I consent to try you.  You shall go
to the Barriere du Maine."

Grantaire lived in furnished lodgings very near the Cafe Musain. 
He went out, and five minutes later he returned.  He had gone home
to put on a Robespierre waistcoat.

"Red," said he as he entered, and he looked intently at Enjolras. 
Then, with the palm of his energetic hand, he laid the two scarlet
points of the waistcoat across his breast.

And stepping up to Enjolras, he whispered in his ear:--

"Be easy."

He jammed his hat on resolutely and departed.

A quarter of an hour later, the back room of the Cafe Musain
was deserted.  All the friends of the A B C were gone, each in his
own direction, each to his own task.  Enjolras, who had reserved
the Cougourde of Aix for himself, was the last to leave.

Those members of the Cougourde of Aix who were in Paris then met
on the plain of Issy, in one of the abandoned quarries which are
so numerous in that side of Paris.

As Enjolras walked towards this place, he passed the whole situation
in review in his own mind.  The gravity of events was self-evident.
When facts, the premonitory symptoms of latent social malady,
move heavily, the slightest complication stops and entangles them. 
A phenomenon whence arises ruin and new births.  Enjolras descried
a luminous uplifting beneath the gloomy skirts of the future. 
Who knows?  Perhaps the moment was at hand.  The people were
again taking possession of right, and what a fine spectacle! 
The revolution was again majestically taking possession of France and
saying to the world:  "The sequel to-morrow!" Enjolras was content. 
The furnace was being heated.  He had at that moment a powder train
of friends scattered all over Paris.  He composed, in his own mind,
with Combeferre's philosophical and penetrating eloquence,
Feuilly's cosmopolitan enthusiasm, Courfeyrac's dash, Bahorel's smile,
Jean Prouvaire's melancholy, Joly's science, Bossuet's sarcasms,
a sort of electric spark which took fire nearly everywhere at once. 
All hands to work.  Surely, the result would answer to the effort. 
This was well.  This made him think of Grantaire.

"Hold," said he to himself, "the Barriere du Maine will not take me
far out of my way.  What if I were to go on as far as Richefeu's?
Let us have a look at what Grantaire is about, and see how he
is getting on."

One o'clock was striking from the Vaugirard steeple when Enjolras
reached the Richefeu smoking-room.

He pushed open the door, entered, folded his arms, letting the door
fall to and strike his shoulders, and gazed at that room filled
with tables, men, and smoke.

A voice broke forth from the mist of smoke, interrupted by another voice. 
It was Grantaire holding a dialogue with an adversary.

Grantaire was sitting opposite another figure, at a marble Saint-Anne
table, strewn with grains of bran and dotted with dominos.  He was
hammering the table with his fist, and this is what Enjolras heard:--

"Double-six."

"Fours."

"The pig!  I have no more."

"You are dead.  A two."

"Six."

"Three."

"One."

"It's my move."

"Four points."

"Not much."

"It's your turn."

"I have made an enormous mistake."

"You are doing well."

"Fifteen."

"Seven more."

"That makes me twenty-two." [Thoughtfully, "Twenty-two!"]

"You weren't expecting that double-six. If I had placed it
at the beginning, the whole play would have been changed."

"A two again."

"One."

"One!  Well, five."

"I haven't any."

"It was your play, I believe?"

"Yes."

"Blank."

"What luck he has!  Ah!  You are lucky!  [Long revery.] Two."

"One."

"Neither five nor one.  That's bad for you."

"Domino."

"Plague take it!"



BOOK SECOND.--EPONINE


CHAPTER I

THE LARK'S MEADOW


Marius had witnessed the unexpected termination of the ambush upon
whose track he had set Javert; but Javert had no sooner quitted
the building, bearing off his prisoners in three hackney-coaches,
than Marius also glided out of the house.  It was only nine
o'clock in the evening.  Marius betook himself to Courfeyrac. 
Courfeyrac was no longer the imperturbable inhabitant of the
Latin Quarter, he had gone to live in the Rue de la Verrerie "for
political reasons"; this quarter was one where, at that epoch,
insurrection liked to install itself.  Marius said to Courfeyrac: 
"I have come to sleep with you."  Courfeyrac dragged a mattress off
his bed, which was furnished with two, spread it out on the floor,
and said:  "There."

At seven o'clock on the following morning, Marius returned to
the hovel, paid the quarter's rent which he owed to Ma'am Bougon,
had his books, his bed, his table, his commode, and his two chairs
loaded on a hand-cart and went off without leaving his address,
so that when Javert returned in the course of the morning,
for the purpose of questioning Marius as to the events of the
preceding evening, he found only Ma'am Bougon, who answered: 
"Moved away!"

Ma'am Bougon was convinced that Marius was to some extent an
accomplice of the robbers who had been seized the night before. 
"Who would ever have said it?" she exclaimed to the portresses
of the quarter, "a young man like that, who had the air of a girl!"

Marius had two reasons for this prompt change of residence. 
The first was, that he now had a horror of that house, where he
had beheld, so close at hand, and in its most repulsive and most
ferocious development, a social deformity which is, perhaps,
even more terrible than the wicked rich man, the wicked poor man. 
The second was, that he did not wish to figure in the lawsuit
which would insue in all probability, and be brought in to testify
against Thenardier.

Javert thought that the young man, whose name he had forgotten,
was afraid, and had fled, or perhaps, had not even returned home
at the time of the ambush; he made some efforts to find him,
however, but without success.

A month passed, then another.  Marius was still with Courfeyrac. 
He had learned from a young licentiate in law, an habitual frequenter
of the courts, that Thenardier was in close confinement.  Every Monday,
Marius had five francs handed in to the clerk's office of La Force
for Thenardier.

As Marius had no longer any money, he borrowed the five francs
from Courfeyrac.  It was the first time in his life that he had ever
borrowed money.  These periodical five francs were a double riddle
to Courfeyrac who lent and to Thenardier who received them.  "To whom
can they go?" thought Courfeyrac.  "Whence can this come to me?" 
Thenardier asked himself.

Moreover, Marius was heart-broken. Everything had plunged through
a trap-door once more.  He no longer saw anything before him;
his life was again buried in mystery where he wandered fumblingly. 
He had for a moment beheld very close at hand, in that obscurity,
the young girl whom he loved, the old man who seemed to be her father,
those unknown beings, who were his only interest and his only hope
in this world; and, at the very moment when he thought himself on
the point of grasping them, a gust had swept all these shadows away. 
Not a spark of certainty and truth had been emitted even in the
most terrible of collisions.  No conjecture was possible.  He no
longer knew even the name that he thought he knew.  It certainly
was not Ursule.  And the Lark was a nickname.  And what was he to
think of the old man?  Was he actually in hiding from the police? 
The white-haired workman whom Marius had encountered in the vicinity
of the Invalides recurred to his mind.  It now seemed probable that
that workingman and M. Leblanc were one and the same person.  So he
disguised himself?  That man had his heroic and his equivocal sides. 
Why had he not called for help?  Why had he fled?  Was he,
or was he not, the father of the young girl?  Was he, in short,
the man whom Thenardier thought that he recognized?  Thenardier might
have been mistaken.  These formed so many insoluble problems. 
All this, it is true, detracted nothing from the angelic charms
of the young girl of the Luxembourg.  Heart-rending distress;
Marius bore a passion in his heart, and night over his eyes. 
He was thrust onward, he was drawn, and he could not stir. 
All had vanished, save love.  Of love itself he had lost the instincts
and the sudden illuminations.  Ordinarily, this flame which burns
us lights us also a little, and casts some useful gleams without. 
But Marius no longer even heard these mute counsels of passion. 
He never said to himself:  "What if I were to go to such a place? 
What if I were to try such and such a thing?"  The girl whom he could
no longer call Ursule was evidently somewhere; nothing warned Marius
in what direction he should seek her.  His whole life was now summed
up in two words; absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog. 
To see her once again; he still aspired to this, but he no longer
expected it.

To crown all, his poverty had returned.  He felt that icy breath
close to him, on his heels.  In the midst of his torments, and long
before this, he had discontinued his work, and nothing is more
dangerous than discontinued work; it is a habit which vanishes. 
A habit which is easy to get rid of, and difficult to take up again.

A certain amount of dreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. 
It lulls to sleep the fevers of the mind at labor, which are
sometimes severe, and produces in the spirit a soft and fresh
vapor which corrects the over-harsh contours of pure thought,
fills in gaps here and there, binds together and rounds off the
angles of the ideas.  But too much dreaming sinks and drowns. 
Woe to the brain-worker who allows himself to fall entirely from
thought into revery!  He thinks that he can re-ascend with equal ease,
and he tells himself that, after all, it is the same thing.  Error!

Thought is the toil of the intelligence, revery its voluptuousness. 
To replace thought with revery is to confound a poison with a food.

Marius had begun in that way, as the reader will remember. 
Passion had supervened and had finished the work of precipitating
him into chimaeras without object or bottom.  One no longer emerges
from one's self except for the purpose of going off to dream. 
Idle production.  Tumultuous and stagnant gulf.  And, in proportion
as labor diminishes, needs increase.  This is a law.  Man, in a state
of revery, is generally prodigal and slack; the unstrung mind cannot
hold life within close bounds.

There is, in that mode of life, good mingled with evil,
for if enervation is baleful, generosity is good and healthful. 
But the poor man who is generous and noble, and who does not work,
is lost.  Resources are exhausted, needs crop up.

Fatal declivity down which the most honest and the firmest as well
as the most feeble and most vicious are drawn, and which ends
in one of two holds, suicide or crime.

By dint of going outdoors to think, the day comes when one goes
out to throw one's self in the water.

Excess of revery breeds men like Escousse and Lebras.

Marius was descending this declivity at a slow pace, with his eyes
fixed on the girl whom he no longer saw.  What we have just written
seems strange, and yet it is true.  The memory of an absent being
kindles in the darkness of the heart; the more it has disappeared,
the more it beams; the gloomy and despairing soul sees this light
on its horizon; the star of the inner night.  She--that was Marius'
whole thought.  He meditated of nothing else; he was confusedly
conscious that his old coat was becoming an impossible coat, and that
his new coat was growing old, that his shirts were wearing out,
that his hat was wearing out, that his boots were giving out,
and he said to himself:  "If I could but see her once again before
I die!"

One sweet idea alone was left to him, that she had loved him,
that her glance had told him so, that she did not know his name,
but that she did know his soul, and that, wherever she was,
however mysterious the place, she still loved him perhaps. 
Who knows whether she were not thinking of him as he was thinking
of her?  Sometimes, in those inexplicable hours such as are experienced
by every heart that loves, though he had no reasons for anything but
sadness and yet felt an obscure quiver of joy, he said to himself: 
"It is her thoughts that are coming to me!"  Then he added: 
"Perhaps my thoughts reach her also."

This illusion, at which he shook his head a moment later,
was sufficient, nevertheless, to throw beams, which at times
resembled hope, into his soul.  From time to time, especially at
that evening hour which is the most depressing to even the dreamy,
he allowed the purest, the most impersonal, the most ideal
of the reveries which filled his brain, to fall upon a notebook
which contained nothing else.  He called this "writing to her."

It must not be supposed that his reason was deranged. 
Quite the contrary.  He had lost the faculty of working and of
moving firmly towards any fixed goal, but he was endowed with
more clear-sightedness and rectitude than ever.  Marius surveyed
by a calm and real, although peculiar light, what passed before
his eyes, even the most indifferent deeds and men; he pronounced
a just criticism on everything with a sort of honest dejection
and candid disinterestedness.  His judgment, which was almost
wholly disassociated from hope, held itself aloof and soared on high.

In this state of mind nothing escaped him, nothing deceived him,
and every moment he was discovering the foundation of life,
of humanity, and of destiny.  Happy, even in the midst of anguish,
is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of unhappiness! 
He who has not viewed the things of this world and the heart of man
under this double light has seen nothing and knows nothing of
the true.

The soul which loves and suffers is in a state of sublimity.

However, day followed day, and nothing new presented itself. 
It merely seemed to him, that the sombre space which still remained
to be traversed by him was growing shorter with every instant. 
He thought that he already distinctly perceived the brink of the
bottomless abyss.

"What!" he repeated to himself, "shall I not see her again before then!"

When you have ascended the Rue Saint-Jacques, left the barrier on
one side and followed the old inner boulevard for some distance,
you reach the Rue de la Sante, then the Glaciere, and, a little
while before arriving at the little river of the Gobelins, you come
to a sort of field which is the only spot in the long and monotonous
chain of the boulevards of Paris, where Ruysdeel would be tempted
to sit down.

There is something indescribable there which exhales grace, a green
meadow traversed by tightly stretched lines, from which flutter
rags drying in the wind, and an old market-gardener's house,
built in the time of Louis XIII., with its great roof oddly
pierced with dormer windows, dilapidated palisades, a little
water amid poplar-trees, women, voices, laughter; on the horizon
the Pantheon, the pole of the Deaf-Mutes, the Val-de-Grace, black,
squat, fantastic, amusing, magnificent, and in the background,
the severe square crests of the towers of Notre Dame.

As the place is worth looking at, no one goes thither.  Hardly one
cart or wagoner passes in a quarter of an hour.

It chanced that Marius' solitary strolls led him to this plot of ground,
near the water.  That day, there was a rarity on the boulevard,
a passer-by. Marius, vaguely impressed with the almost savage beauty
of the place, asked this passer-by:--"What is the name of this spot?"

The person replied:  "It is the Lark's meadow."

And he added:  "It was here that Ulbach killed the shepherdess
of Ivry."

But after the word "Lark" Marius heard nothing more.  These sudden
congealments in the state of revery, which a single word suffices
to evoke, do occur.  The entire thought is abruptly condensed around
an idea, and it is no longer capable of perceiving anything else.

The Lark was the appellation which had replaced Ursule in the depths
of Marius' melancholy.--"Stop," said he with a sort of unreasoning
stupor peculiar to these mysterious asides, "this is her meadow. 
I shall know where she lives now."

It was absurd, but irresistible.

And every day he returned to that meadow of the Lark.



CHAPTER II

EMBRYONIC FORMATION OF CRIMES IN THE INCUBATION OF PRISONS


Javert's triumph in the Gorbeau hovel seemed complete, but had
not been so.

In the first place, and this constituted the principal anxiety,
Javert had not taken the prisoner prisoner.  The assassinated man
who flees is more suspicious than the assassin, and it is probable that
this personage, who had been so precious a capture for the ruffians,
would be no less fine a prize for the authorities.

And then, Montparnasse had escaped Javert.

Another opportunity of laying hands on that "devil's dandy"
must be waited for.  Montparnasse had, in fact, encountered Eponine
as she stood on the watch under the trees of the boulevard, and had
led her off, preferring to play Nemorin with the daughter rather
than Schinderhannes with the father.  It was well that he did so. 
He was free.  As for Eponine, Javert had caused her to be seized;
a mediocre consolation.  Eponine had joined Azelma at Les Madelonettes.

And finally, on the way from the Gorbeau house to La Force, one of
the principal prisoners, Claquesous, had been lost.  It was not known
how this had been effected, the police agents and the sergeants "could
not understand it at all."  He had converted himself into vapor,
he had slipped through the handcuffs, he had trickled through the
crevices of the carriage, the fiacre was cracked, and he had fled;
all that they were able to say was, that on arriving at the prison,
there was no Claquesous.  Either the fairies or the police had had a
hand in it.  Had Claquesous melted into the shadows like a snow-flake
in water?  Had there been unavowed connivance of the police agents? 
Did this man belong to the double enigma of order and disorder? 
Was he concentric with infraction and repression?  Had this
sphinx his fore paws in crime and his hind paws in authority? 
Javert did not accept such comminations, and would have bristled up
against such compromises; but his squad included other inspectors
besides himself, who were more initiated than he, perhaps, although they
were his subordinates in the secrets of the Prefecture, and Claquesous
had been such a villain that he might make a very good agent. 
It is an excellent thing for ruffianism and an admirable thing for
the police to be on such intimate juggling terms with the night. 
These double-edged rascals do exist.  However that may be,
Claquesous had gone astray and was not found again.  Javert appeared
to be more irritated than amazed at this.

As for Marius, "that booby of a lawyer," who had probably become
frightened, and whose name Javert had forgotten, Javert attached
very little importance to him.  Moreover, a lawyer can be hunted
up at any time.  But was he a lawyer after all?

The investigation had begun.

The magistrate had thought it advisable not to put one of these men
of the band of Patron Minette in close confinement, in the hope that he
would chatter.  This man was Brujon, the long-haired man of the Rue du
Petit-Banquier. He had been let loose in the Charlemagne courtyard,
and the eyes of the watchers were fixed on him.

This name of Brujon is one of the souvenirs of La Force. 
In that hideous courtyard, called the court of the Batiment-Neuf (New
Building), which the administration called the court Saint-Bernard,
and which the robbers called the Fosseaux-Lions (The Lion's Ditch),
on that wall covered with scales and leprosy, which rose on the
left to a level with the roofs, near an old door of rusty iron
which led to the ancient chapel of the ducal residence of La Force,
then turned in a dormitory for ruffians, there could still be seen,
twelve years ago, a sort of fortress roughly carved in the stone
with a nail, and beneath it this signature:--

                       BRUJON, 1811.


The Brujon of 1811 was the father of the Brujon of 1832.

The latter, of whom the reader caught but a glimpse at the
Gorbeau house, was a very cunning and very adroit young spark,
with a bewildered and plaintive air.  It was in consequence of this
plaintive air that the magistrate had released him, thinking him
more useful in the Charlemagne yard than in close confinement.

Robbers do not interrupt their profession because they are in the hands
of justice.  They do not let themselves be put out by such a trifle
as that.  To be in prison for one crime is no reason for not beginning
on another crime.  They are artists, who have one picture in the salon,
and who toil, none the less, on a new work in their studios.

Brujon seemed to be stupefied by prison.  He could sometimes
be seen standing by the hour together in front of the sutler's
window in the Charlemagne yard, staring like an idiot at the
sordid list of prices which began with:  garlic, 62 centimes,
and ended with:  cigar, 5 centimes.  Or he passed his time in trembling,
chattering his teeth, saying that he had a fever, and inquiring
whether one of the eight and twenty beds in the fever ward was vacant.

All at once, towards the end of February, 1832, it was discovered
that Brujon, that somnolent fellow, had had three different
commissions executed by the errand-men of the establishment,
not under his own name, but in the name of three of his comrades;
and they had cost him in all fifty sous, an exorbitant outlay
which attracted the attention of the prison corporal.

Inquiries were instituted, and on consulting the tariff of
commissions posted in the convict's parlor, it was learned that
the fifty sous could be analyzed as follows:  three commissions;
one to the Pantheon, ten sous; one to Val-de-Grace, fifteen sous;
and one to the Barriere de Grenelle, twenty-five sous.  This last
was the dearest of the whole tariff.  Now, at the Pantheon,
at the Val-de-Grace, and at the Barriere de Grenelle were situated
the domiciles of the three very redoubtable prowlers of the barriers,
Kruideniers, alias Bizarre, Glorieux, an ex-convict, and Barre-Carosse,
upon whom the attention of the police was directed by this incident. 
It was thought that these men were members of Patron Minette;
two of those leaders, Babet and Gueulemer, had been captured. 
It was supposed that the messages, which had been addressed,
not to houses, but to people who were waiting for them in the street,
must have contained information with regard to some crime that
had been plotted.  They were in possession of other indications;
they laid hand on the three prowlers, and supposed that they had
circumvented some one or other of Brujon's machinations.

About a week after these measures had been taken, one night,
as the superintendent of the watch, who had been inspecting the lower
dormitory in the Batiment-Neuf, was about to drop his chestnut in
the box--this was the means adopted to make sure that the watchmen
performed their duties punctually; every hour a chestnut must be
dropped into all the boxes nailed to the doors of the dormitories--
a watchman looked through the peep-hole of the dormitory and beheld
Brujon sitting on his bed and writing something by the light of the
hall-lamp. The guardian entered, Brujon was put in a solitary cell
for a month, but they were not able to seize what he had written. 
The police learned nothing further about it.

What is certain is, that on the following morning, a "postilion"
was flung from the Charlemagne yard into the Lions' Ditch, over the
five-story building which separated the two court-yards.

What prisoners call a "postilion" is a pallet of bread
artistically moulded, which is sent into Ireland, that is to say,
over the roofs of a prison, from one courtyard to another. 
Etymology:  over England; from one land to another; into Ireland. 
This little pellet falls in the yard.  The man who picks it up opens
it and finds in it a note addressed to some prisoner in that yard. 
If it is a prisoner who finds the treasure, he forwards the note to
its destination; if it is a keeper, or one of the prisoners secretly
sold who are called sheep in prisons and foxes in the galleys,
the note is taken to the office and handed over to the police.

On this occasion, the postilion reached its address,
although the person to whom it was addressed was, at that moment,
in solitary confinement.  This person was no other than Babet,
one of the four heads of Patron Minette.

The postilion contained a roll of paper on which only these two
lines were written:--

"Babet.  There is an affair in the Rue Plumet.  A gate on a garden."

This is what Brujon had written the night before.

In spite of male and female searchers, Babet managed to pass
the note on from La Force to the Salpetriere, to a "good friend"
whom he had and who was shut up there.  This woman in turn transmitted
the note to another woman of her acquaintance, a certain Magnon,
who was strongly suspected by the police, though not yet arrested. 
This Magnon, whose name the reader has already seen, had relations
with the Thenardier, which will be described in detail later on,
and she could, by going to see Eponine, serve as a bridge between the
Salpetriere and Les Madelonettes.

It happened, that at precisely that moment, as proofs were wanting
in the investigation directed against Thenardier in the matter
of his daughters, Eponine and Azelma were released.  When Eponine
came out, Magnon, who was watching the gate of the Madelonettes,
handed her Brujon's note to Babet, charging her to look into
the matter.

Eponine went to the Rue Plumet, recognized the gate and the garden,
observed the house, spied, lurked, and, a few days later,
brought to Magnon, who delivers in the Rue Clocheperce, a biscuit,
which Magnon transmitted to Babet's mistress in the Salpetriere. 
A biscuit, in the shady symbolism of prisons, signifies:  Nothing to
be done.

So that in less than a week from that time, as Brujon and Babet met
in the circle of La Force, the one on his way to the examination,
the other on his way from it:--

"Well?" asked Brujon, "the Rue P.?"

"Biscuit," replied Babet.  Thus did the foetus of crime engendered
by Brujon in La Force miscarry.

This miscarriage had its consequences, however, which were perfectly
distinct from Brujon's programme.  The reader will see what they were.

Often when we think we are knotting one thread, we are tying
quite another.



CHAPTER III

APPARITION TO FATHER MABEUF


Marius no longer went to see any one, but he sometimes encountered
Father Mabeuf by chance.

While Marius was slowly descending those melancholy steps
which may be called the cellar stairs, and which lead to places
without light, where the happy can be heard walking overhead,
M. Mabeuf was descending on his side.

The Flora of Cauteretz no longer sold at all.  The experiments on
indigo had not been successful in the little garden of Austerlitz,
which had a bad exposure.  M. Mabeuf could cultivate there only
a few plants which love shade and dampness.  Nevertheless, he did
not become discouraged.  He had obtained a corner in the Jardin
des Plantes, with a good exposure, to make his trials with indigo "at
his own expense."  For this purpose he had pawned his copperplates
of the Flora.  He had reduced his breakfast to two eggs, and he left
one of these for his old servant, to whom he had paid no wages for
the last fifteen months.  And often his breakfast was his only meal. 
He no longer smiled with his infantile smile, he had grown morose
and no longer received visitors.  Marius did well not to dream
of going thither.  Sometimes, at the hour when M. Mabeuf was on
his way to the Jardin des Plantes, the old man and the young man
passed each other on the Boulevard de l'Hopital. They did not speak,
and only exchanged a melancholy sign of the head.  A heart-breaking
thing it is that there comes a moment when misery looses bonds! 
Two men who have been friends become two chance passers-by.

Royal the bookseller was dead.  M. Mabeuf no longer knew his books,
his garden, or his indigo:  these were the three forms which happiness,
pleasure, and hope had assumed for him.  This sufficed him for
his living.  He said to himself:  "When I shall have made my balls
of blueing, I shall be rich, I will withdraw my copperplates from
the pawn-shop, I will put my Flora in vogue again with trickery,
plenty of money and advertisements in the newspapers and I will buy,
I know well where, a copy of Pierre de Medine's Art de Naviguer,
with wood-cuts, edition of 1655."  In the meantime, he toiled
all day over his plot of indigo, and at night he returned home
to water his garden, and to read his books.  At that epoch,
M. Mabeuf was nearly eighty years of age.

One evening he had a singular apparition.

He had returned home while it was still broad daylight. 
Mother Plutarque, whose health was declining, was ill and in bed. 
He had dined on a bone, on which a little meat lingered, and a bit
of bread that he had found on the kitchen table, and had seated
himself on an overturned stone post, which took the place of a bench
in his garden.

Near this bench there rose, after the fashion in orchard-gardens,
a sort of large chest, of beams and planks, much dilapidated,
a rabbit-hutch on the ground floor, a fruit-closet on the first. 
There was nothing in the hutch, but there were a few apples in
the fruit-closet,--the remains of the winter's provision.

M. Mabeuf had set himself to turning over and reading, with the
aid of his glasses, two books of which he was passionately fond
and in which, a serious thing at his age, he was interested. 
His natural timidity rendered him accessible to the acceptance of
superstitions in a certain degree.  The first of these books was the
famous treatise of President Delancre, De l'inconstance des Demons;
the other was a quarto by Mutor de la Rubaudiere, Sur les Diables
de Vauvert et les Gobelins de la Bievre.  This last-mentioned old
volume interested him all the more, because his garden had been
one of the spots haunted by goblins in former times.  The twilight
had begun to whiten what was on high and to blacken all below. 
As he read, over the top of the book which he held in his hand,
Father Mabeuf was surveying his plants, and among others
a magnificent rhododendron which was one of his consolations;
four days of heat, wind, and sun without a drop of rain, had passed;
the stalks were bending, the buds drooping, the leaves falling;
all this needed water, the rhododendron was particularly sad. 
Father Mabeuf was one of those persons for whom plants have souls. 
The old man had toiled all day over his indigo plot, he was worn out
with fatigue, but he rose, laid his books on the bench, and walked,
all bent over and with tottering footsteps, to the well, but when he
had grasped the chain, he could not even draw it sufficiently to
unhook it.  Then he turned round and cast a glance of anguish toward
heaven which was becoming studded with stars.

The evening had that serenity which overwhelms the troubles of man
beneath an indescribably mournful and eternal joy.  The night
promised to be as arid as the day had been.

"Stars everywhere!" thought the old man; "not the tiniest cloud! 
Not a drop of water!"

And his head, which had been upraised for a moment, fell back upon
his breast.

He raised it again, and once more looked at the sky, murmuring:--

"A tear of dew!  A little pity!"

He tried again to unhook the chain of the well, and could not.

At that moment, he heard a voice saying:--

"Father Mabeuf, would you like to have me water your garden for you?"

At the same time, a noise as of a wild animal passing became
audible in the hedge, and he beheld emerging from the shrubbery
a sort of tall, slender girl, who drew herself up in front of him
and stared boldly at him.  She had less the air of a human being
than of a form which had just blossomed forth from the twilight.

Before Father Mabeuf, who was easily terrified, and who was, as we
have said, quick to take alarm, was able to reply by a single syllable,
this being, whose movements had a sort of odd abruptness in the darkness,
had unhooked the chain, plunged in and withdrawn the bucket,
and filled the watering-pot, and the goodman beheld this apparition,
which had bare feet and a tattered petticoat, running about among
the flower-beds distributing life around her.  The sound of the
watering-pot on the leaves filled Father Mabeuf's soul with ecstasy. 
It seemed to him that the rhododendron was happy now.

The first bucketful emptied, the girl drew a second, then a third. 
She watered the whole garden.

There was something about her, as she thus ran about among paths,
where her outline appeared perfectly black, waving her angular arms,
and with her fichu all in rags, that resembled a bat.

When she had finished, Father Mabeuf approached her with tears
in his eyes, and laid his hand on her brow.

"God will bless you," said he, "you are an angel since you take
care of the flowers."

"No," she replied.  "I am the devil, but that's all the same to me."

The old man exclaimed, without either waiting for or hearing
her response:--

"What a pity that I am so unhappy and so poor, and that I can
do nothing for you!"

"You can do something," said she.

"What?"

"Tell me where M. Marius lives."

The old man did not understand.  "What Monsieur Marius?"

He raised his glassy eyes and seemed to be seeking something
that had vanished.

"A young man who used to come here."

In the meantime, M. Mabeuf had searched his memory.

"Ah! yes--" he exclaimed.  "I know what you mean.  Wait! 
Monsieur Marius--the Baron Marius Pontmercy, parbleu!  He lives,--
or rather, he no longer lives,--ah well, I don't know."

As he spoke, he had bent over to train a branch of rhododendron,
and he continued:--

"Hold, I know now.  He very often passes along the boulevard,
and goes in the direction of the Glaciere, Rue Croulebarbe. 
The meadow of the Lark.  Go there.  It is not hard to meet him."

When M. Mabeuf straightened himself up, there was no longer any
one there; the girl had disappeared.

He was decidedly terrified.

"Really," he thought, "if my garden had not been watered, I should
think that she was a spirit."

An hour later, when he was in bed, it came back to him,
and as he fell asleep, at that confused moment when thought,
like that fabulous bird which changes itself into a fish in order
to cross the sea, little by little assumes the form of a dream
in order to traverse slumber, he said to himself in a bewildered way:--

"In sooth, that greatly resembles what Rubaudiere narrates
of the goblins.  Could it have been a goblin?"



CHAPTER IV

AN APPARITION TO MARIUS


Some days after this visit of a "spirit" to Farmer Mabeuf, one morning,--
it was on a Monday, the day when Marius borrowed the hundred-sou
piece from Courfeyrac for Thenardier--Marius had put this coin
in his pocket, and before carrying it to the clerk's office,
he had gone "to take a little stroll," in the hope that this would
make him work on his return.  It was always thus, however.  As soon
as he rose, he seated himself before a book and a sheet of paper
in order to scribble some translation; his task at that epoch
consisted in turning into French a celebrated quarrel between Germans,
the Gans and Savigny controversy; he took Savigny, he took Gans,
read four lines, tried to write one, could not, saw a star between him
and his paper, and rose from his chair, saying:  "I shall go out. 
That will put me in spirits."

And off he went to the Lark's meadow.

There he beheld more than ever the star, and less than ever Savigny
and Gans.

He returned home, tried to take up his work again, and did not succeed;
there was no means of re-knotting a single one of the threads which
were broken in his brain; then he said to himself:  "I will not go
out to-morrow. It prevents my working."  And he went out every day.

He lived in the Lark's meadow more than in Courfeyrac's lodgings. 
That was his real address:  Boulevard de la Sante, at the seventh
tree from the Rue Croulebarbe.

That morning he had quitted the seventh tree and had seated himself
on the parapet of the River des Gobelins.  A cheerful sunlight
penetrated the freshly unfolded and luminous leaves.

He was dreaming of "Her."  And his meditation turning to a reproach,
fell back upon himself; he reflected dolefully on his idleness,
his paralysis of soul, which was gaining on him, and of that night
which was growing more dense every moment before him, to such a point
that he no longer even saw the sun.

Nevertheless, athwart this painful extrication of indistinct ideas
which was not even a monologue, so feeble had action become in him,
and he had no longer the force to care to despair, athwart this
melancholy absorption, sensations from without did reach him. 
He heard behind him, beneath him, on both banks of the river,
the laundresses of the Gobelins beating their linen, and above
his head, the birds chattering and singing in the elm-trees.
On the one hand, the sound of liberty, the careless happiness
of the leisure which has wings; on the other, the sound of toil. 
What caused him to meditate deeply, and almost reflect, were two
cheerful sounds.

All at once, in the midst of his dejected ecstasy, he heard
a familiar voice saying:--

"Come!  Here he is!"

He raised his eyes, and recognized that wretched child who had come to him
one morning, the elder of the Thenardier daughters, Eponine; he knew
her name now.  Strange to say, she had grown poorer and prettier,
two steps which it had not seemed within her power to take. 
She had accomplished a double progress, towards the light and
towards distress.  She was barefooted and in rags, as on the day
when she had so resolutely entered his chamber, only her rags were two
months older now, the holes were larger, the tatters more sordid. 
It was the same harsh voice, the same brow dimmed and wrinkled with tan,
the same free, wild, and vacillating glance.  She had besides,
more than formerly, in her face that indescribably terrified
and lamentable something which sojourn in a prison adds to wretchedness.

She had bits of straw and hay in her hair, not like Ophelia
through having gone mad from the contagion of Hamlet's madness,
but because she had slept in the loft of some stable.

And in spite of it all, she was beautiful.  What a star art thou,
O youth!

In the meantime, she had halted in front of Marius with a trace
of joy in her livid countenance, and something which resembled a smile.

She stood for several moments as though incapable of speech.

"So I have met you at last!" she said at length.  "Father Mabeuf
was right, it was on this boulevard!  How I have hunted for you! 
If you only knew!  Do you know?  I have been in the jug.  A fortnight! 
They let me out! seeing that there was nothing against me,
and that, moreover, I had not reached years of discretion.  I lack
two months of it.  Oh! how I have hunted for you!  These six weeks! 
So you don't live down there any more?"

"No," said Marius.

"Ah!  I understand.  Because of that affair.  Those take-downs
are disagreeable.  You cleared out.  Come now!  Why do you wear old
hats like this!  A young man like you ought to have fine clothes. 
Do you know, Monsieur Marius, Father Mabeuf calls you Baron Marius,
I don't know what.  It isn't true that you are a baron?  Barons are
old fellows, they go to the Luxembourg, in front of the chateau,
where there is the most sun, and they read the Quotidienne for a sou. 
I once carried a letter to a baron of that sort.  He was over a hundred
years old.  Say, where do you live now?"

Marius made no reply.

"Ah!" she went on, "you have a hole in your shirt.  I must sew it
up for you."

She resumed with an expression which gradually clouded over:--

"You don't seem glad to see me."

Marius held his peace; she remained silent for a moment, then exclaimed:--

"But if I choose, nevertheless, I could force you to look glad!"

"What?" demanded Marius.  "What do you mean?"

"Ah! you used to call me thou," she retorted.

"Well, then, what dost thou mean?"

She bit her lips; she seemed to hesitate, as though a prey to some
sort of inward conflict.  At last she appeared to come to a decision.

"So much the worse, I don't care.  You have a melancholy air,
I want you to be pleased.  Only promise me that you will smile. 
I want to see you smile and hear you say:  `Ah, well, that's good.' 
Poor Mr. Marius! you know?  You promised me that you would give me
anything I like--"

"Yes!  Only speak!"

She looked Marius full in the eye, and said:--

"I have the address."

Marius turned pale.  All the blood flowed back to his heart.

"What address?"

"The address that you asked me to get!"

She added, as though with an effort:--

"The address--you know very well!"

"Yes!" stammered Marius.

"Of that young lady."

This word uttered, she sighed deeply.

Marius sprang from the parapet on which he had been sitting
and seized her hand distractedly.

"Oh!  Well! lead me thither!  Tell me!  Ask of me anything you wish! 
Where is it?"

"Come with me," she responded.  "I don't know the street or number
very well; it is in quite the other direction from here, but I know
the house well, I will take you to it."

She withdrew her hand and went on, in a tone which could have rent
the heart of an observer, but which did not even graze Marius
in his intoxicated and ecstatic state:--

"Oh! how glad you are!"

A cloud swept across Marius' brow.  He seized Eponine by the arm:--

"Swear one thing to me!"

"Swear!" said she, "what does that mean?  Come!  You want me to swear?"

And she laughed.

"Your father! promise me, Eponine!  Swear to me that you will not
give this address to your father!"

She turned to him with a stupefied air.

"Eponine!  How do you know that my name is Eponine?"

"Promise what I tell you!"

But she did not seem to hear him.

"That's nice!  You have called me Eponine!"

Marius grasped both her arms at once.

"But answer me, in the name of Heaven! pay attention to what I am
saying to you, swear to me that you will not tell your father this
address that you know!"

"My father!" said she.  "Ah yes, my father!  Be at ease. 
He's in close confinement.  Besides, what do I care for my father!"

"But you do not promise me!" exclaimed Marius.

"Let go of me!" she said, bursting into a laugh, "how you do shake me! 
Yes!  Yes!  I promise that!  I swear that to you!  What is that to me? 
I will not tell my father the address.  There!  Is that right? 
Is that it?"

"Nor to any one?" said Marius.

"Nor to any one."

"Now," resumed Marius, "take me there."

"Immediately?"

"Immediately."

"Come along.  Ah! how pleased he is!" said she.

After a few steps she halted.

"You are following me too closely, Monsieur Marius.  Let me go
on ahead, and follow me so, without seeming to do it.  A nice
young man like you must not be seen with a woman like me."

No tongue can express all that lay in that word, woman, thus pronounced
by that child.

She proceeded a dozen paces and then halted once more; Marius joined her. 
She addressed him sideways, and without turning towards him:--

"By the way, you know that you promised me something?"

Marius fumbled in his pocket.  All that he owned in the world
was the five francs intended for Thenardier the father.  He took
them and laid them in Eponine's hand.

She opened her fingers and let the coin fall to the ground,
and gazed at him with a gloomy air.

"I don't want your money," said she.



BOOK THIRD.--THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET



CHAPTER I

THE HOUSE WITH A SECRET


About the middle of the last century, a chief justice in the Parliament
of Paris having a mistress and concealing the fact, for at that period
the grand seignors displayed their mistresses, and the bourgeois
concealed them, had "a little house" built in the Faubourg Saint-Germain,
in the deserted Rue Blomet, which is now called Rue Plumet,
not far from the spot which was then designated as Combat des Animaux.

This house was composed of a single-storied pavilion; two rooms
on the ground floor, two chambers on the first floor, a kitchen
down stairs, a boudoir up stairs, an attic under the roof, the whole
preceded by a garden with a large gate opening on the street. 
This garden was about an acre and a half in extent.  This was all
that could be seen by passers-by; but behind the pavilion there was
a narrow courtyard, and at the end of the courtyard a low building
consisting of two rooms and a cellar, a sort of preparation destined
to conceal a child and nurse in case of need.  This building communicated
in the rear by a masked door which opened by a secret spring,
with a long, narrow, paved winding corridor, open to the sky,
hemmed in with two lofty walls, which, hidden with wonderful art,
and lost as it were between garden enclosures and cultivated land,
all of whose angles and detours it followed, ended in another door,
also with a secret lock which opened a quarter of a league away,
almost in another quarter, at the solitary extremity of the Rue
du Babylone.

Through this the chief justice entered, so that even those who were
spying on him and following him would merely have observed that the
justice betook himself every day in a mysterious way somewhere,
and would never have suspected that to go to the Rue de Babylone
was to go to the Rue Blomet.  Thanks to clever purchasers of land,
the magistrate had been able to make a secret, sewer-like passage on
his own property, and consequently, without interference.  Later on,
he had sold in little parcels, for gardens and market gardens,
the lots of ground adjoining the corridor, and the proprietors
of these lots on both sides thought they had a party wall before
their eyes, and did not even suspect the long, paved ribbon winding
between two walls amid their flower-beds and their orchards. 
Only the birds beheld this curiosity.  It is probable that the
linnets and tomtits of the last century gossiped a great deal about
the chief justice.

The pavilion, built of stone in the taste of Mansard,
wainscoted and furnished in the Watteau style, rocaille on
the inside, old-fashioned on the outside, walled in with a
triple hedge of flowers, had something discreet, coquettish,
and solemn about it, as befits a caprice of love and magistracy.

This house and corridor, which have now disappeared, were in
existence fifteen years ago.  In '93 a coppersmith had purchased
the house with the idea of demolishing it, but had not been able
to pay the price; the nation made him bankrupt.  So that it was
the house which demolished the coppersmith.  After that, the house
remained uninhabited, and fell slowly to ruin, as does every
dwelling to which the presence of man does not communicate life. 
It had remained fitted with its old furniture, was always for sale
or to let, and the ten or a dozen people who passed through
the Rue Plumet were warned of the fact by a yellow and illegible
bit of writing which had hung on the garden wall since 1819.

Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers-by might have
noticed that the bill had disappeared, and even that the shutters
on the first floor were open.  The house was occupied, in fact. 
The windows had short curtains, a sign that there was a woman about.

In the month of October, 1829, a man of a certain age had presented
himself and had hired the house just as it stood, including, of course,
the back building and the lane which ended in the Rue de Babylone. 
He had had the secret openings of the two doors to this passage repaired. 
The house, as we have just mentioned, was still very nearly
furnished with the justice's old fitting; the new tenant had
ordered some repairs, had added what was lacking here and there,
had replaced the paving-stones in the yard, bricks in the floors,
steps in the stairs, missing bits in the inlaid floors and the glass
in the lattice windows, and had finally installed himself there
with a young girl and an elderly maid-servant, without commotion,
rather like a person who is slipping in than like a man who is
entering his own house.  The neighbors did not gossip about him,
for the reason that there were no neighbors.

This unobtrusive tenant was Jean Valjean, the young girl was Cosette. 
The servant was a woman named Toussaint, whom Jean Valjean had
saved from the hospital and from wretchedness, and who was elderly,
a stammerer, and from the provinces, three qualities which had
decided Jean Valjean to take her with him.  He had hired the
house under the name of M. Fauchelevent, independent gentleman. 
In all that has been related heretofore, the reader has, doubtless,
been no less prompt than Thenardier to recognize Jean Valjean.

Why had Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Petit-Picpus? What
had happened?

Nothing had happened.

It will be remembered that Jean Valjean was happy in the convent,
so happy that his conscience finally took the alarm.  He saw
Cosette every day, he felt paternity spring up and develop within
him more and more, he brooded over the soul of that child, he said
to himself that she was his, that nothing could take her from him,
that this would last indefinitely, that she would certainly become
a nun, being thereto gently incited every day, that thus the convent
was henceforth the universe for her as it was for him, that he
should grow old there, and that she would grow up there, that she
would grow old there, and that he should die there; that, in short,
delightful hope, no separation was possible.  On reflecting upon this,
he fell into perplexity.  He interrogated himself.  He asked himself
if all that happiness were really his, if it were not composed of
the happiness of another, of the happiness of that child which he,
an old man, was confiscating and stealing; if that were not theft? 
He said to himself, that this child had a right to know life before
renouncing it, that to deprive her in advance, and in some sort
without consulting her, of all joys, under the pretext of saving her
from all trials, to take advantage of her ignorance of her isolation,
in order to make an artificial vocation germinate in her,
was to rob a human creature of its nature and to lie to God. 
And who knows if, when she came to be aware of all this some day,
and found herself a nun to her sorrow, Cosette would not come
to hate him?  A last, almost selfish thought, and less heroic than
the rest, but which was intolerable to him.  He resolved to quit
the convent.

He resolved on this; he recognized with anguish, the fact
that it was necessary.  As for objections, there were none. 
Five years' sojourn between these four walls and of disappearance
had necessarily destroyed or dispersed the elements of fear. 
He could return tranquilly among men.  He had grown old,
and all had undergone a change.  Who would recognize him now? 
And then, to face the worst, there was danger only for himself,
and he had no right to condemn Cosette to the cloister for the reason
that he had been condemned to the galleys.  Besides, what is danger
in comparison with the right?  Finally, nothing prevented his being
prudent and taking his precautions.

As for Cosette's education, it was almost finished and complete.

His determination once taken, he awaited an opportunity. 
It was not long in presenting itself.  Old Fauchelevent died.

Jean Valjean demanded an audience with the revered prioress and told
her that, having come into a little inheritance at the death of
his brother, which permitted him henceforth to live without working,
he should leave the service of the convent and take his daughter
with him; but that, as it was not just that Cosette, since she had
not taken the vows, should have received her education gratuitously,
he humbly begged the Reverend Prioress to see fit that he
should offer to the community, as indemnity, for the five years
which Cosette had spent there, the sum of five thousand francs.

It was thus that Jean Valjean quitted the convent
of the Perpetual Adoration.

On leaving the convent, he took in his own arms the little valise
the key to which he still wore on his person, and would permit
no porter to touch it.  This puzzled Cosette, because of the odor
of embalming which proceeded from it.

Let us state at once, that this trunk never quitted him more. 
He always had it in his chamber.  It was the first and only thing
sometimes, that he carried off in his moving when he moved about. 
Cosette laughed at it, and called this valise his inseparable, saying: 
"I am jealous of it."

Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not reappear in the open air without
profound anxiety.

He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet, and hid himself from
sight there.  Henceforth he was in the possession of the name:--
Ultime Fauchelevent.

At the same time he hired two other apartments in Paris, in order
that he might attract less attention than if he were to remain
always in the same quarter, and so that he could, at need,
take himself off at the slightest disquietude which should assail him,
and in short, so that he might not again be caught unprovided
as on the night when he had so miraculously escaped from Javert. 
These two apartments were very pitiable, poor in appearance,
and in two quarters which were far remote from each other, the one
in the Rue de l'Ouest, the other in the Rue de l'Homme Arme.

He went from time to time, now to the Rue de l'Homme Arme,
now to the Rue de l'Ouest, to pass a month or six weeks,
without taking Toussaint.  He had himself served by the porters,
and gave himself out as a gentleman from the suburbs, living on
his funds, and having a little temporary resting-place in town. 
This lofty virtue had three domiciles in Paris for the sake
of escaping from the police.



CHAPTER II

JEAN VALJEAN AS A NATIONAL GUARD


However, properly speaking, he lived in the Rue Plumet, and he
had arranged his existence there in the following fashion:--

Cosette and the servant occupied the pavilion; she had the big
sleeping-room with the painted pier-glasses, the boudoir with the
gilded fillets, the justice's drawing-room furnished with tapestries
and vast arm-chairs; she had the garden.  Jean Valjean had a canopied
bed of antique damask in three colors and a beautiful Persian rug
purchased in the Rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul at Mother Gaucher's, put
into Cosette's chamber, and, in order to redeem the severity of these
magnificent old things, he had amalgamated with this bric-a-brac all
the gay and graceful little pieces of furniture suitable to young girls,
an etagere, a bookcase filled with gilt-edged books, an inkstand,
a blotting-book, paper, a work-table incrusted with mother of pearl,
a silver-gilt dressing-case, a toilet service in Japanese porcelain. 
Long damask curtains with a red foundation and three colors,
like those on the bed, hung at the windows of the first floor. 
On the ground floor, the curtains were of tapestry.  All winter long,
Cosette's little house was heated from top to bottom.  Jean Valjean
inhabited the sort of porter's lodge which was situated at the end
of the back courtyard, with a mattress on a folding-bed, a white
wood table, two straw chairs, an earthenware water-jug, a few old
volumes on a shelf, his beloved valise in one corner, and never
any fire.  He dined with Cosette, and he had a loaf of black bread
on the table for his own use.

When Toussaint came, he had said to her:  "It is the young lady who is
the mistress of this house."--"And you, monsieur?"  Toussaint replied in
amazement.--"I am a much better thing than the master, I am the father."

Cosette had been taught housekeeping in the convent, and she
regulated their expenditure, which was very modest.  Every day,
Jean Valjean put his arm through Cosette's and took her for a walk. 
He led her to the Luxembourg, to the least frequented walk,
and every Sunday he took her to mass at Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas,
because that was a long way off.  As it was a very poor quarter,
he bestowed alms largely there, and the poor people surrounded him
in church, which had drawn down upon him Thenardier's epistle: 
"To the benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas."
He was fond of taking Cosette to visit the poor and the sick. 
No stranger ever entered the house in the Rue Plumet.  Toussaint brought
their provisions, and Jean Valjean went himself for water to a
fountain near by on the boulevard.  Their wood and wine were put
into a half-subterranean hollow lined with rock-work which lay near
the Rue de Babylone and which had formerly served the chief-justice
as a grotto; for at the epoch of follies and "Little Houses" no love
was without a grotto.

In the door opening on the Rue de Babylone, there was a box destined
for the reception of letters and papers; only, as the three inhabitants
of the pavilion in the Rue Plumet received neither papers nor letters,
the entire usefulness of that box, formerly the go-between of a
love affair, and the confidant of a love-lorn lawyer, was now limited
to the tax-collector's notices, and the summons of the guard. 
For M. Fauchelevent, independent gentleman, belonged to the national
guard; he had not been able to escape through the fine meshes of the
census of 1831.  The municipal information collected at that time had
even reached the convent of the Petit-Picpus, a sort of impenetrable
and holy cloud, whence Jean Valjean had emerged in venerable guise,
and, consequently, worthy of mounting guard in the eyes of the townhall.

Three or four times a year, Jean Valjean donned his uniform and
mounted guard; he did this willingly, however; it was a correct
disguise which mixed him with every one, and yet left him solitary. 
Jean Valjean had just attained his sixtieth birthday, the age
of legal exemption; but he did not appear to be over fifty;
moreover, he had no desire to escape his sergeant-major nor
to quibble with Comte de Lobau; he possessed no civil status,
he was concealing his name, he was concealing his identity,
so he concealed his age, he concealed everything; and, as we have
just said, he willingly did his duty as a national guard; the sum
of his ambition lay in resembling any other man who paid his taxes. 
This man had for his ideal, within, the angel, without, the bourgeois.

Let us note one detail, however; when Jean Valjean went out with Cosette,
he dressed as the reader has already seen, and had the air of a
retired officer.  When he went out alone, which was generally at night,
he was always dressed in a workingman's trousers and blouse, and wore
a cap which concealed his face.  Was this precaution or humility? 
Both.  Cosette was accustomed to the enigmatical side of her destiny,
and hardly noticed her father's peculiarities.  As for Toussaint,
she venerated Jean Valjean, and thought everything he did right.

One day, her butcher, who had caught a glimpse of Jean Valjean,
said to her:  "That's a queer fish."  She replied:  "He's a saint."

Neither Jean Valjean nor Cosette nor Toussaint ever entered or emerged
except by the door on the Rue de Babylone.  Unless seen through
the garden gate it would have been difficult to guess that they
lived in the Rue Plumet.  That gate was always closed.  Jean Valjean
had left the garden uncultivated, in order not to attract attention.

In this, possibly, he made a mistake.



CHAPTER III

FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS


The garden thus left to itself for more than half a century had
become extraordinary and charming.  The passers-by of forty years
ago halted to gaze at it, without a suspicion of the secrets which
it hid in its fresh and verdant depths.  More than one dreamer
of that epoch often allowed his thoughts and his eyes to penetrate
indiscreetly between the bars of that ancient, padlocked gate,
twisted, tottering, fastened to two green and moss-covered pillars,
and oddly crowned with a pediment of undecipherable arabesque.

There was a stone bench in one corner, one or two mouldy statues,
several lattices which had lost their nails with time, were rotting
on the wall, and there were no walks nor turf; but there was
enough grass everywhere.  Gardening had taken its departure,
and nature had returned.  Weeds abounded, which was a great piece
of luck for a poor corner of land.  The festival of gilliflowers
was something splendid.  Nothing in this garden obstructed the
sacred effort of things towards life; venerable growth reigned
there among them.  The trees had bent over towards the nettles,
the plant had sprung upward, the branch had inclined, that which crawls
on the earth had gone in search of that which expands in the air,
that which floats on the wind had bent over towards that which trails
in the moss; trunks, boughs, leaves, fibres, clusters, tendrils,
shoots, spines, thorns, had mingled, crossed, married, confounded
themselves in each other; vegetation in a deep and close embrace,
had celebrated and accomplished there, under the well-pleased
eye of the Creator, in that enclosure three hundred feet square,
the holy mystery of fraternity, symbol of the human fraternity. 
This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket,
that is to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as peopled
as a city, quivering like a nest, sombre like a cathedral,
fragrant like a bouquet, solitary as a tomb, living as a throng.

In Floreal[34] this enormous thicket, free behind its gate and within
its four walls, entered upon the secret labor of germination,
quivered in the rising sun, almost like an animal which drinks
in the breaths of cosmic love, and which feels the sap of April
rising and boiling in its veins, and shakes to the wind its
enormous wonderful green locks, sprinkled on the damp earth,
on the defaced statues, on the crumbling steps of the pavilion,
and even on the pavement of the deserted street, flowers like stars,
dew like pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy, perfumes.  At midday,
a thousand white butterflies took refuge there, and it was a divine
spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling about there
in flakes amid the shade.  There, in those gay shadows of verdure,
a throng of innocent voices spoke sweetly to the soul, and what the
twittering forgot to say the humming completed.  In the evening,
a dreamy vapor exhaled from the garden and enveloped it; a shroud
of mist, a calm and celestial sadness covered it; the intoxicating
perfume of the honeysuckles and convolvulus poured out from every
part of it, like an exquisite and subtle poison; the last appeals
of the woodpeckers and the wagtails were audible as they dozed among
the branches; one felt the sacred intimacy of the birds and the trees;
by day the wings rejoice the leaves, by night the leaves protect
the wings.


[34] From April 19 to May 20.


In winter the thicket was black, dripping, bristling, shivering,
and allowed some glimpse of the house.  Instead of flowers on the branches
and dew in the flowers, the long silvery tracks of the snails were
visible on the cold, thick carpet of yellow leaves; but in any fashion,
under any aspect, at all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn,
this tiny enclosure breathed forth melancholy, contemplation,
solitude, liberty, the absence of man, the presence of God; and
the rusty old gate had the air of saying:  "This garden belongs to me."

It was of no avail that the pavements of Paris were there on
every side, the classic and splendid hotels of the Rue de Varennes
a couple of paces away, the dome of the Invalides close at hand,
the Chamber of Deputies not far off; the carriages of the Rue de
Bourgogne and of the Rue Saint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously, in vain,
in the vicinity, in vain did the yellow, brown, white, and red
omnibuses cross each other's course at the neighboring cross-roads;
the Rue Plumet was the desert; and the death of the former proprietors,
the revolution which had passed over it, the crumbling away of
ancient fortunes, absence, forgetfulness, forty years of abandonment
and widowhood, had sufficed to restore to this privileged spot ferns,
mulleins, hemlock, yarrow, tall weeds, great crimped plants,
with large leaves of pale green cloth, lizards, beetles, uneasy and
rapid insects; to cause to spring forth from the depths of the earth
and to reappear between those four walls a certain indescribable
and savage grandeur; and for nature, which disconcerts the petty
arrangements of man, and which sheds herself always thoroughly
where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant as well as in
the eagle, to blossom out in a petty little Parisian garden with
as much rude force and majesty as in a virgin forest of the New World.

Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound
and penetrating influence of nature knows this.  Although no
absolute satisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe
the cause or to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into
those unfathomable ecstasies caused by these decompositions
of force terminating in unity.  Everything toils at everything.

Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profits
the rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of the
hawthorn is useless to the constellations.  Who, then, can calculate
the course of a molecule?  How do we know that the creation of worlds
is not determined by the fall of grains of sand?  Who knows the
reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely
little, the reverberations of causes in the precipices of being,
and the avalanches of creation?  The tiniest worm is of importance;
the great is little, the little is great; everything is balanced
in necessity; alarming vision for the mind.  There are marvellous
relations between beings and things; in that inexhaustible whole,
from the sun to the grub, nothing despises the other; all have
need of each other.  The light does not bear away terrestrial
perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what it is doing;
the night distributes stellar essences to the sleeping flowers. 
All birds that fly have round their leg the thread of the infinite. 
Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor
and with the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on
one level the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates. 
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins.  Which of the two
possesses the larger field of vision?  Choose.  A bit of mould
is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars. 
The same promiscuousness, and yet more unprecedented, exists between
the things of the intelligence and the facts of substance. 
Elements and principles mingle, combine, wed, multiply with each other,
to such a point that the material and the moral world are brought
eventually to the same clearness.  The phenomenon is perpetually
returning upon itself.  In the vast cosmic exchanges the universal life
goes and comes in unknown quantities, rolling entirely in the invisible
mystery of effluvia, employing everything, not losing a single dream,
not a single slumber, sowing an animalcule here, crumbling to bits
a planet there, oscillating and winding, making of light a force
and of thought an element, disseminated and invisible, dissolving all,
except that geometrical point, the I; bringing everything back to
the soul-atom; expanding everything in God, entangling all activity,
from summit to base, in the obscurity of a dizzy mechanism,
attaching the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth,
subordinating, who knows?  Were it only by the identity of the law,
the evolution of the comet in the firmament to the whirling
of the infusoria in the drop of water.  A machine made of mind. 
Enormous gearing, the prime motor of which is the gnat, and whose
final wheel is the zodiac.



CHAPTER IV

CHANGE OF GATE


It seemed that this garden, created in olden days to conceal
wanton mysteries, had been transformed and become fitted to shelter
chaste mysteries.  There were no longer either arbors, or bowling greens,
or tunnels, or grottos; there was a magnificent, dishevelled obscurity
falling like a veil over all.  Paphos had been made over into Eden. 
It is impossible to say what element of repentance had rendered
this retreat wholesome.  This flower-girl now offered her blossom
to the soul.  This coquettish garden, formerly decidedly compromised,
had returned to virginity and modesty.  A justice assisted by a gardener,
a goodman who thought that he was a continuation of Lamoignon,
and another goodman who thought that he was a continuation of Lenotre,
had turned it about, cut, ruffled, decked, moulded it to gallantry;
nature had taken possession of it once more, had filled it with shade,
and had arranged it for love.

There was, also, in this solitude, a heart which was quite ready. 
Love had only to show himself; he had here a temple composed
of verdure, grass, moss, the sight of birds, tender shadows,
agitated branches, and a soul made of sweetness, of faith, of candor,
of hope, of aspiration, and of illusion.

Cosette had left the convent when she was still almost a child;
she was a little more than fourteen, and she was at the "ungrateful age";
we have already said, that with the exception of her eyes, she was
homely rather than pretty; she had no ungraceful feature, but she
was awkward, thin, timid and bold at once, a grown-up little girl,
in short.

Her education was finished, that is to say, she has been taught religion,
and even and above all, devotion; then "history," that is to say
the thing that bears that name in convents, geography, grammar,
the participles, the kings of France, a little music, a little
drawing, etc.; but in all other respects she was utterly ignorant,
which is a great charm and a great peril.  The soul of a young
girl should not be left in the dark; later on, mirages that are
too abrupt and too lively are formed there, as in a dark chamber. 
She should be gently and discreetly enlightened, rather with the
reflection of realities than with their harsh and direct light. 
A useful and graciously austere half-light which dissipates puerile
fears and obviates falls.  There is nothing but the maternal instinct,
that admirable intuition composed of the memories of the virgin
and the experience of the woman, which knows how this half-light
is to be created and of what it should consist.

Nothing supplies the place of this instinct.  All the nuns in
the world are not worth as much as one mother in the formation
of a young girl's soul.

Cosette had had no mother.  She had only had many mothers,
in the plural.

As for Jean Valjean, he was, indeed, all tenderness, all solicitude;
but he was only an old man and he knew nothing at all.

Now, in this work of education, in this grave matter of preparing
a woman for life, what science is required to combat that vast
ignorance which is called innocence!

Nothing prepares a young girl for passions like the convent. 
The convent turns the thoughts in the direction of the unknown. 
The heart, thus thrown back upon itself, works downward within itself,
since it cannot overflow, and grows deep, since it cannot expand. 
Hence visions, suppositions, conjectures, outlines of romances,
a desire for adventures, fantastic constructions, edifices built
wholly in the inner obscurity of the mind, sombre and secret abodes
where the passions immediately find a lodgement as soon as the open
gate permits them to enter.  The convent is a compression which,
in order to triumph over the human heart, should last during the
whole life.

On quitting the convent, Cosette could have found nothing more
sweet and more dangerous than the house in the Rue Plumet. 
It was the continuation of solitude with the beginning of liberty;
a garden that was closed, but a nature that was acrid, rich, voluptuous,
and fragrant; the same dreams as in the convent, but with glimpses
of young men; a grating, but one that opened on the street.

Still, when she arrived there, we repeat, she was only a child. 
Jean Valjean gave this neglected garden over to her.  "Do what you
like with it," he said to her.  This amused Cosette; she turned
over all the clumps and all the stones, she hunted for "beasts"; she
played in it, while awaiting the time when she would dream in it;
she loved this garden for the insects that she found beneath
her feet amid the grass, while awaiting the day when she would
love it for the stars that she would see through the boughs above
her head.

And then, she loved her father, that is to say, Jean Valjean,
with all her soul, with an innocent filial passion which made
the goodman a beloved and charming companion to her.  It will be
remembered that M. Madeleine had been in the habit of reading a
great deal.  Jean Valjean had continued this practice; he had come
to converse well; he possessed the secret riches and the eloquence
of a true and humble mind which has spontaneously cultivated itself. 
He retained just enough sharpness to season his kindness; his mind
was rough and his heart was soft.  During their conversations
in the Luxembourg, he gave her explanations of everything,
drawing on what he had read, and also on what he had suffered. 
As she listened to him, Cosette's eyes wandered vaguely about.

This simple man sufficed for Cosette's thought, the same as the wild
garden sufficed for her eyes.  When she had had a good chase after
the butterflies, she came panting up to him and said:  "Ah!  How I
have run!"  He kissed her brow.

Cosette adored the goodman.  She was always at his heels. 
Where Jean Valjean was, there happiness was.  Jean Valjean lived
neither in the pavilion nor the garden; she took greater pleasure
in the paved back courtyard, than in the enclosure filled with flowers,
and in his little lodge furnished with straw-seated chairs than
in the great drawing-room hung with tapestry, against which stood
tufted easy-chairs. Jean Valjean sometimes said to her, smiling at
his happiness in being importuned:  "Do go to your own quarters! 
Leave me alone a little!"

She gave him those charming and tender scoldings which are
so graceful when they come from a daughter to her father.

"Father, I am very cold in your rooms; why don't you have a carpet
here and a stove?"

"Dear child, there are so many people who are better than I
and who have not even a roof over their heads."

"Then why is there a fire in my rooms, and everything that is needed?"

"Because you are a woman and a child."

"Bah! must men be cold and feel uncomfortable?"

"Certain men."

"That is good, I shall come here so often that you will be obliged
to have a fire."

And again she said to him:--

"Father, why do you eat horrible bread like that?"

"Because, my daughter."

"Well, if you eat it, I will eat it too."

Then, in order to prevent Cosette eating black bread, Jean Valjean
ate white bread.

Cosette had but a confused recollection of her childhood.  She prayed
morning and evening for her mother whom she had never known. 
The Thenardiers had remained with her as two hideous figures
in a dream.  She remembered that she had gone "one day, at night,"
to fetch water in a forest.  She thought that it had been very far
from Paris.  It seemed to her that she had begun to live in an abyss,
and that it was Jean Valjean who had rescued her from it. 
Her childhood produced upon her the effect of a time when there
had been nothing around her but millepeds, spiders, and serpents. 
When she meditated in the evening, before falling asleep, as she
had not a very clear idea that she was Jean Valjean's daughter,
and that he was her father, she fancied that the soul of her mother had
passed into that good man and had come to dwell near her.

When he was seated, she leaned her cheek against his white hair,
and dropped a silent tear, saying to herself:  "Perhaps this man is
my mother."

Cosette, although this is a strange statement to make,
in the profound ignorance of a girl brought up in a convent,--
maternity being also absolutely unintelligible to virginity,--
had ended by fancying that she had had as little mother as possible. 
She did not even know her mother's name.  Whenever she asked Jean Valjean,
Jean Valjean remained silent.  If she repeated her question,
he responded with a smile.  Once she insisted; the smile ended in a tear.

This silence on the part of Jean Valjean covered Fantine with darkness.

Was it prudence?  Was it respect?  Was it a fear that he should
deliver this name to the hazards of another memory than his own?

So long as Cosette had been small, Jean Valjean had been willing to talk
to her of her mother; when she became a young girl, it was impossible
for him to do so.  It seemed to him that he no longer dared.  Was it
because of Cosette?  Was it because of Fantine?  He felt a certain
religious horror at letting that shadow enter Cosette's thought;
and of placing a third in their destiny.  The more sacred this
shade was to him, the more did it seem that it was to be feared. 
He thought of Fantine, and felt himself overwhelmed with silence.

Through the darkness, he vaguely perceived something which appeared
to have its finger on its lips.  Had all the modesty which had been
in Fantine, and which had violently quitted her during her lifetime,
returned to rest upon her after her death, to watch in indignation
over the peace of that dead woman, and in its shyness, to keep her in
her grave?  Was Jean Valjean unconsciously submitting to the pressure? 
We who believe in death, are not among the number who will reject
this mysterious explanation.

Hence the impossibility of uttering, even for Cosette, that name
of Fantine.

One day Cosette said to him:--

"Father, I saw my mother in a dream last night.  She had two big wings. 
My mother must have been almost a saint during her life."

"Through martyrdom," replied Jean Valjean.

However, Jean Valjean was happy.

When Cosette went out with him, she leaned on his arm, proud and happy,
in the plenitude of her heart.  Jean Valjean felt his heart melt within
him with delight, at all these sparks of a tenderness so exclusive,
so wholly satisfied with himself alone.  The poor man trembled,
inundated with angelic joy; he declared to himself ecstatically
that this would last all their lives; he told himself that he
really had not suffered sufficiently to merit so radiant a bliss,
and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted
him to be loved thus, he, a wretch, by that innocent being.



CHAPTER V

THE ROSE PERCEIVES THAT IT IS AN ENGINE OF WAR


One day, Cosette chanced to look at herself in her mirror,
and she said to herself:  "Really!"  It seemed to her almost that
she was pretty.  This threw her in a singularly troubled state
of mind.  Up to that moment she had never thought of her face. 
She saw herself in her mirror, but she did not look at herself. 
And then, she had so often been told that she was homely;
Jean Valjean alone said gently:  "No indeed! no indeed!" 
At all events, Cosette had always thought herself homely, and had
grown up in that belief with the easy resignation of childhood. 
And here, all at once, was her mirror saying to her, as Jean Valjean
had said:  "No indeed!"  That night, she did not sleep.  "What if I
were pretty!" she thought.  "How odd it would be if I were pretty!" 
And she recalled those of her companions whose beauty had produced
a sensation in the convent, and she said to herself:  "What!  Am I to
be like Mademoiselle So-and-So?"

The next morning she looked at herself again, not by accident this time,
and she was assailed with doubts:  "Where did I get such an idea?"
said she; "no, I am ugly."  She had not slept well, that was all,
her eyes were sunken and she was pale.  She had not felt very joyous
on the preceding evening in the belief that she was beautiful,
but it made her very sad not to be able to believe in it any longer. 
She did not look at herself again, and for more than a fortnight she
tried to dress her hair with her back turned to the mirror.

In the evening, after dinner, she generally embroidered in wool
or did some convent needlework in the drawing-room, and Jean
Valjean read beside her.  Once she raised her eyes from her work,
and was rendered quite uneasy by the manner in which her father
was gazing at her.

On another occasion, she was passing along the street,
and it seemed to her that some one behind her, whom she
did not see, said:  "A pretty woman! but badly dressed." 
"Bah!" she thought, "he does not mean me.  I am well dressed
and ugly."  She was then wearing a plush hat and her merino gown.

At last, one day when she was in the garden, she heard poor old
Toussaint saying:  "Do you notice how pretty Cosette is growing, sir?" 
Cosette did not hear her father's reply, but Toussaint's words
caused a sort of commotion within her.  She fled from the garden,
ran up to her room, flew to the looking-glass,--it was three
months since she had looked at herself,--and gave vent to a cry. 
She had just dazzled herself.

She was beautiful and lovely; she could not help agreeing with
Toussaint and her mirror.  Her figure was formed, her skin had
grown white, her hair was lustrous, an unaccustomed splendor had
been lighted in her blue eyes.  The consciousness of her beauty
burst upon her in an instant, like the sudden advent of daylight;
other people noticed it also, Toussaint had said so, it was
evidently she of whom the passer-by had spoken, there could no
longer be any doubt of that; she descended to the garden again,
thinking herself a queen, imagining that she heard the birds singing,
though it was winter, seeing the sky gilded, the sun among the trees,
flowers in the thickets, distracted, wild, in inexpressible delight.

Jean Valjean, on his side, experienced a deep and undefinable
oppression at heart.

In fact, he had, for some time past, been contemplating with terror
that beauty which seemed to grow more radiant every day on Cosette's
sweet face.  The dawn that was smiling for all was gloomy for him.

Cosette had been beautiful for a tolerably long time before she
became aware of it herself.  But, from the very first day,
that unexpected light which was rising slowly and enveloping the whole
of the young girl's person, wounded Jean Valjean's sombre eye. 
He felt that it was a change in a happy life, a life so happy
that he did not dare to move for fear of disarranging something. 
This man, who had passed through all manner of distresses,
who was still all bleeding from the bruises of fate, who had been
almost wicked and who had become almost a saint, who, after having
dragged the chain of the galleys, was now dragging the invisible
but heavy chain of indefinite misery, this man whom the law had
not released from its grasp and who could be seized at any moment
and brought back from the obscurity of his virtue to the broad
daylight of public opprobrium, this man accepted all, excused all,
pardoned all, and merely asked of Providence, of man, of the law,
of society, of nature, of the world, one thing, that Cosette might
love him!

That Cosette might continue to love him!  That God would not prevent
the heart of the child from coming to him, and from remaining with him! 
Beloved by Cosette, he felt that he was healed, rested, appeased,
loaded with benefits, recompensed, crowned.  Beloved by Cosette,
it was well with him!  He asked nothing more!  Had any one said
to him:  "Do you want anything better?" he would have answered: 
"No." God might have said to him:  "Do you desire heaven?" and he
would have replied:  "I should lose by it."

Everything which could affect this situation, if only on the surface,
made him shudder like the beginning of something new.  He had never
known very distinctly himself what the beauty of a woman means;
but he understood instinctively, that it was something terrible.

He gazed with terror on this beauty, which was blossoming out ever
more triumphant and superb beside him, beneath his very eyes,
on the innocent and formidable brow of that child, from the depths
of her homeliness, of his old age, of his misery, of his reprobation.

He said to himself:  "How beautiful she is!  What is to become
of me?"

There, moreover, lay the difference between his tenderness
and the tenderness of a mother.  What he beheld with anguish,
a mother would have gazed upon with joy.

The first symptoms were not long in making their appearance.

On the very morrow of the day on which she had said to herself: 
"Decidedly I am beautiful!"  Cosette began to pay attention to
her toilet.  She recalled the remark of that passer-by: "Pretty,
but badly dressed," the breath of an oracle which had passed
beside her and had vanished, after depositing in her heart one
of the two germs which are destined, later on, to fill the whole
life of woman, coquetry.  Love is the other.

With faith in her beauty, the whole feminine soul expanded within her. 
She conceived a horror for her merinos, and shame for her plush hat. 
Her father had never refused her anything.  She at once acquired
the whole science of the bonnet, the gown, the mantle, the boot,
the cuff, the stuff which is in fashion, the color which is becoming,
that science which makes of the Parisian woman something so charming,
so deep, and so dangerous.  The words heady woman were invented for
the Parisienne.

In less than a month, little Cosette, in that Thebaid of the Rue
de Babylone, was not only one of the prettiest, but one of the
"best dressed" women in Paris, which means a great deal more.

She would have liked to encounter her "passer-by," to see
what he would say, and to "teach him a lesson!"  The truth is,
that she was ravishing in every respect, and that she distinguished
the difference between a bonnet from Gerard and one from Herbaut
in the most marvellous way.

Jean Valjean watched these ravages with anxiety.  He who felt
that he could never do anything but crawl, walk at the most,
beheld wings sprouting on Cosette.

Moreover, from the mere inspection of Cosette's toilet,
a woman would have recognized the fact that she had no mother. 
Certain little proprieties, certain special conventionalities,
were not observed by Cosette.  A mother, for instance, would have
told her that a young girl does not dress in damask.

The first day that Cosette went out in her black damask gown
and mantle, and her white crape bonnet, she took Jean Valjean's arm,
gay, radiant, rosy, proud, dazzling.  "Father," she said, "how do
you like me in this guise?"  Jean Valjean replied in a voice which
resembled the bitter voice of an envious man:  "Charming!"  He was the
same as usual during their walk.  On their return home, he asked Cosette:--

"Won't you put on that other gown and bonnet again,--you know
the ones I mean?"

This took place in Cosette's chamber.  Cosette turned towards
the wardrobe where her cast-off schoolgirl's clothes were hanging.

"That disguise!" said she.  "Father, what do you want me to do with it? 
Oh no, the idea!  I shall never put on those horrors again. 
With that machine on my head, I have the air of Madame Mad-dog."

Jean Valjean heaved a deep sigh.

From that moment forth, he noticed that Cosette, who had always
heretofore asked to remain at home, saying:  "Father, I enjoy myself
more here with you," now was always asking to go out.  In fact,
what is the use of having a handsome face and a delicious costume
if one does not display them?

He also noticed that Cosette had no longer the same taste for the
back garden.  Now she preferred the garden, and did not dislike
to promenade back and forth in front of the railed fence. 
Jean Valjean, who was shy, never set foot in the garden. 
He kept to his back yard, like a dog.

Cosette, in gaining the knowledge that she was beautiful, lost the
grace of ignoring it.  An exquisite grace, for beauty enhanced by
ingenuousness is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as a dazzling
and innocent creature who walks along, holding in her hand the key
to paradise without being conscious of it.  But what she had lost
in ingenuous grace, she gained in pensive and serious charm. 
Her whole person, permeated with the joy of youth, of innocence,
and of beauty, breathed forth a splendid melancholy.

It was at this epoch that Marius, after the lapse of six months,
saw her once more at the Luxembourg.



CHAPTER VI

THE BATTLE BEGUN


Cosette in her shadow, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire. 
Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, slowly drew together
these two beings, all charged and all languishing with the stormy
electricity of passion, these two souls which were laden with love
as two clouds are laden with lightning, and which were bound
to overflow and mingle in a look like the clouds in a flash of fire.

The glance has been so much abused in love romances that it has
finally fallen into disrepute.  One hardly dares to say, nowadays,
that two beings fell in love because they looked at each other. 
That is the way people do fall in love, nevertheless, and the
only way.  The rest is nothing, but the rest comes afterwards. 
Nothing is more real than these great shocks which two souls convey
to each other by the exchange of that spark.

At that particular hour when Cosette unconsciously darted
that glance which troubled Marius, Marius had no suspicion
that he had also launched a look which disturbed Cosette.

He caused her the same good and the same evil.

She had been in the habit of seeing him for a long time, and she had
scrutinized him as girls scrutinize and see, while looking elsewhere. 
Marius still considered Cosette ugly, when she had already begun
to think Marius handsome.  But as he paid no attention to her,
the young man was nothing to her.

Still, she could not refrain from saying to herself that he had
beautiful hair, beautiful eyes, handsome teeth, a charming tone
of voice when she heard him conversing with his comrades, that he
held himself badly when he walked, if you like, but with a grace
that was all his own, that he did not appear to be at all stupid,
that his whole person was noble, gentle, simple, proud, and that,
in short, though he seemed to be poor, yet his air was fine.

On the day when their eyes met at last, and said to each other
those first, obscure, and ineffable things which the glance lisps,
Cosette did not immediately understand.  She returned thoughtfully
to the house in the Rue de l'Ouest, where Jean Valjean, according to
his custom, had come to spend six weeks.  The next morning, on waking,
she thought of that strange young man, so long indifferent and icy,
who now seemed to pay attention to her, and it did not appear to her
that this attention was the least in the world agreeable to her. 
She was, on the contrary, somewhat incensed at this handsome and
disdainful individual.  A substratum of war stirred within her. 
It struck her, and the idea caused her a wholly childish joy, that she
was going to take her revenge at last.

Knowing that she was beautiful, she was thoroughly conscious,
though in an indistinct fashion, that she possessed a weapon. 
Women play with their beauty as children do with a knife. 
They wound themselves.

The reader will recall Marius' hesitations, his palpitations,
his terrors.  He remained on his bench and did not approach. 
This vexed Cosette.  One day, she said to Jean Valjean: 
"Father, let us stroll about a little in that direction." 
Seeing that Marius did not come to her, she went to him.  In such cases,
all women resemble Mahomet.  And then, strange to say, the first
symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young girl it
is boldness.  This is surprising, and yet nothing is more simple. 
It is the two sexes tending to approach each other and assuming,
each the other's qualities.

That day, Cosette's glance drove Marius beside himself, and Marius'
glance set Cosette to trembling.  Marius went away confident,
and Cosette uneasy.  From that day forth, they adored each other.

The first thing that Cosette felt was a confused and profound melancholy. 
It seemed to her that her soul had become black since the day before. 
She no longer recognized it.  The whiteness of soul in young girls,
which is composed of coldness and gayety, resembles snow.  It melts
in love, which is its sun.

Cosette did not know what love was.  She had never heard the word
uttered in its terrestrial sense.  On the books of profane music
which entered the convent, amour (love) was replaced by tambour (drum)
or pandour.  This created enigmas which exercised the imaginations
of the big girls, such as:  Ah, how delightful is the drum! or,
Pity is not a pandour.  But Cosette had left the convent too early
to have occupied herself much with the "drum."  Therefore, she did
not know what name to give to what she now felt.  Is any one
the less ill because one does not know the name of one's malady?

She loved with all the more passion because she loved ignorantly. 
She did not know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing,
useful or dangerous, eternal or temporary, allowable or prohibited;
she loved.  She would have been greatly astonished, had any
one said to her:  "You do not sleep?  But that is forbidden! 
You do not eat?  Why, that is very bad!  You have oppressions
and palpitations of the heart?  That must not be!  You blush
and turn pale, when a certain being clad in black appears at
the end of a certain green walk?  But that is abominable!" 
She would not have understood, and she would have replied: 
"What fault is there of mine in a matter in which I have no power
and of which I know nothing?"

It turned out that the love which presented itself was exactly
suited to the state of her soul.  It was a sort of admiration at
a distance, a mute contemplation, the deification of a stranger. 
It was the apparition of youth to youth, the dream of nights
become a reality yet remaining a dream, the longed-for phantom
realized and made flesh at last, but having as yet, neither name,
nor fault, nor spot, nor exigence, nor defect; in a word,
the distant lover who lingered in the ideal, a chimaera with a form. 
Any nearer and more palpable meeting would have alarmed Cosette
at this first stage, when she was still half immersed in the
exaggerated mists of the cloister.  She had all the fears of children
and all the fears of nuns combined.  The spirit of the convent,
with which she had been permeated for the space of five years,
was still in the process of slow evaporation from her person,
and made everything tremble around her.  In this situation he
was not a lover, he was not even an admirer, he was a vision. 
She set herself to adoring Marius as something charming, luminous,
and impossible.

As extreme innocence borders on extreme coquetry, she smiled at him
with all frankness.

Every day, she looked forward to the hour for their walk with impatience,
she found Marius there, she felt herself unspeakably happy,
and thought in all sincerity that she was expressing her whole
thought when she said to Jean Valjean:--

"What a delicious garden that Luxembourg is!"

Marius and Cosette were in the dark as to one another.  They did
not address each other, they did not salute each other, they did
not know each other; they saw each other; and like stars of heaven
which are separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing
at each other.

It was thus that Cosette gradually became a woman and developed,
beautiful and loving, with a consciousness of her beauty,
and in ignorance of her love.  She was a coquette to boot through
her ignorance.



CHAPTER VII

TO ONE SADNESS OPPOSE A SADNESS AND A HALF


All situations have their instincts.  Old and eternal Mother Nature
warned Jean Valjean in a dim way of the presence of Marius. 
Jean Valjean shuddered to the very bottom of his soul.  Jean Valjean
saw nothing, knew nothing, and yet he scanned with obstinate attention,
the darkness in which he walked, as though he felt on one side of him
something in process of construction, and on the other, something which
was crumbling away.  Marius, also warned, and, in accordance with
the deep law of God, by that same Mother Nature, did all he could
to keep out of sight of "the father."  Nevertheless, it came to pass
that Jean Valjean sometimes espied him.  Marius' manners were no
longer in the least natural.  He exhibited ambiguous prudence and
awkward daring.  He no longer came quite close to them as formerly. 
He seated himself at a distance and pretended to be reading;
why did he pretend that?  Formerly he had come in his old coat,
now he wore his new one every day; Jean Valjean was not sure that he
did not have his hair curled, his eyes were very queer, he wore gloves;
in short, Jean Valjean cordially detested this young man.

Cosette allowed nothing to be divined.  Without knowing just what
was the matter with her she was convinced that there was something
in it, and that it must be concealed.

There was a coincidence between the taste for the toilet which had
recently come to Cosette, and the habit of new clothes developed
by that stranger which was very repugnant to Jean Valjean.  It might
be accidental, no doubt, certainly, but it was a menacing accident.

He never opened his mouth to Cosette about this stranger.  One day,
however, he could not refrain from so doing, and, with that vague
despair which suddenly casts the lead into the depths of its despair,
he said to her:  "What a very pedantic air that young man has!"

Cosette, but a year before only an indifferent little girl,
would have replied:  "Why, no, he is charming."  Ten years later,
with the love of Marius in her heart, she would have answered: 
"A pedant, and insufferable to the sight!  You are right!"--
At the moment in life and the heart which she had then attained,
she contented herself with replying, with supreme calmness: 
"That young man!"

As though she now beheld him for the first time in her life.

"How stupid I am!" thought Jean Valjean.  "She had not noticed him. 
It is I who have pointed him out to her."

Oh, simplicity of the old! oh, the depth of children!

It is one of the laws of those fresh years of suffering and trouble,
of those vivacious conflicts between a first love and the first
obstacles, that the young girl does not allow herself to be caught
in any trap whatever, and that the young man falls into every one. 
Jean Valjean had instituted an undeclared war against Marius,
which Marius, with the sublime stupidity of his passion and his age,
did not divine.  Jean Valjean laid a host of ambushes for him;
he changed his hour, he changed his bench, he forgot his handkerchief,
he came alone to the Luxembourg; Marius dashed headlong into
all these snares; and to all the interrogation marks planted
by Jean Valjean in his pathway, he ingenuously answered "yes." 
But Cosette remained immured in her apparent unconcern and in her
imperturbable tranquillity, so that Jean Valjean arrived at the
following conclusion:  "That ninny is madly in love with Cosette,
but Cosette does not even know that he exists."

None the less did he bear in his heart a mournful tremor. 
The minute when Cosette would love might strike at any moment. 
Does not everything begin with indifference?

Only once did Cosette make a mistake and alarm him.  He rose from
his seat to depart, after a stay of three hours, and she said: 
"What, already?"

Jean Valjean had not discontinued his trips to the Luxembourg, as he
did not wish to do anything out of the way, and as, above all things,
he feared to arouse Cosette; but during the hours which were so
sweet to the lovers, while Cosette was sending her smile to the
intoxicated Marius, who perceived nothing else now, and who now saw
nothing in all the world but an adored and radiant face, Jean Valjean
was fixing on Marius flashing and terrible eyes.  He, who had
finally come to believe himself incapable of a malevolent feeling,
experienced moments when Marius was present, in which he thought he
was becoming savage and ferocious once more, and he felt the old
depths of his soul, which had formerly contained so much wrath,
opening once more and rising up against that young man.  It almost
seemed to him that unknown craters were forming in his bosom.

What! he was there, that creature!  What was he there for? 
He came creeping about, smelling out, examining, trying! 
He came, saying:  "Hey!  Why not?"  He came to prowl about his,
Jean Valjean's, life! to prowl about his happiness, with the
purpose of seizing it and bearing it away!

Jean Valjean added:  "Yes, that's it!  What is he in search of? 
An adventure!  What does he want?  A love affair!  A love affair! 
And I?  What!  I have been first, the most wretched of men,
and then the most unhappy, and I have traversed sixty years of life
on my knees, I have suffered everything that man can suffer, I have
grown old without having been young, I have lived without a family,
without relatives, without friends, without life, without children,
I have left my blood on every stone, on every bramble, on every
mile-post, along every wall, I have been gentle, though others have
been hard to me, and kind, although others have been malicious,
I have become an honest man once more, in spite of everything,
I have repented of the evil that I have done and have forgiven
the evil that has been done to me, and at the moment when I
receive my recompense, at the moment when it is all over,
at the moment when I am just touching the goal, at the moment
when I have what I desire, it is well, it is good, I have paid,
I have earned it, all this is to take flight, all this will vanish,
and I shall lose Cosette, and I shall lose my life, my joy,
my soul, because it has pleased a great booby to come and lounge at
the Luxembourg."

Then his eyes were filled with a sad and extraordinary gleam.

It was no longer a man gazing at a man; it was no longer an enemy
surveying an enemy.  It was a dog scanning a thief.

The reader knows the rest.  Marius pursued his senseless course. 
One day he followed Cosette to the Rue de l'Ouest. Another day he
spoke to the porter.  The porter, on his side, spoke, and said
to Jean Valjean:  "Monsieur, who is that curious young man who is
asking for you?"  On the morrow Jean Valjean bestowed on Marius
that glance which Marius at last perceived.  A week later,
Jean Valjean had taken his departure.  He swore to himself that he
would never again set foot either in the Luxembourg or in the Rue
de l'Ouest. He returned to the Rue Plumet.

Cosette did not complain, she said nothing, she asked no questions,
she did not seek to learn his reasons; she had already reached the point
where she was afraid of being divined, and of betraying herself. 
Jean Valjean had no experience of these miseries, the only miseries
which are charming and the only ones with which he was not acquainted;
the consequence was that he did not understand the grave significance
of Cosette's silence.

He merely noticed that she had grown sad, and he grew gloomy. 
On his side and on hers, inexperience had joined issue.

Once he made a trial.  He asked Cosette:--

"Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?"

A ray illuminated Cosette's pale face.

"Yes," said she.

They went thither.  Three months had elapsed.  Marius no longer
went there.  Marius was not there.

On the following day, Jean Valjean asked Cosette again:--

"Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?"

She replied, sadly and gently:--

"No."

Jean Valjean was hurt by this sadness, and heart-broken
at this gentleness.

What was going on in that mind which was so young and yet already
so impenetrable?  What was on its way there within?  What was taking place
in Cosette's soul?  Sometimes, instead of going to bed, Jean Valjean
remained seated on his pallet, with his head in his hands, and he
passed whole nights asking himself:  "What has Cosette in her mind?"
and in thinking of the things that she might be thinking about.

Oh! at such moments, what mournful glances did he cast towards
that cloister, that chaste peak, that abode of angels, that inaccessible
glacier of virtue!  How he contemplated, with despairing ecstasy,
that convent garden, full of ignored flowers and cloistered virgins,
where all perfumes and all souls mount straight to heaven! 
How he adored that Eden forever closed against him, whence he had
voluntarily and madly emerged!  How he regretted his abnegation
and his folly in having brought Cosette back into the world,
poor hero of sacrifice, seized and hurled to the earth by his
very self-devotion! How he said to himself, "What have I done?"

However, nothing of all this was perceptible to Cosette. 
No ill-temper, no harshness.  His face was always serene and kind. 
Jean Valjean's manners were more tender and more paternal than ever. 
If anything could have betrayed his lack of joy, it was his
increased suavity.

On her side, Cosette languished.  She suffered from the absence of
Marius as she had rejoiced in his presence, peculiarly, without exactly
being conscious of it.  When Jean Valjean ceased to take her on
their customary strolls, a feminine instinct murmured confusedly,
at the bottom of her heart, that she must not seem to set store
on the Luxembourg garden, and that if this proved to be a matter
of indifference to her, her father would take her thither once more. 
But days, weeks, months, elapsed.  Jean Valjean had tacitly accepted
Cosette's tacit consent.  She regretted it.  It was too late. 
So Marius had disappeared; all was over.  The day on which she returned
to the Luxembourg, Marius was no longer there.  What was to be done? 
Should she ever find him again?  She felt an anguish at her heart,
which nothing relieved, and which augmented every day; she no
longer knew whether it was winter or summer, whether it was raining
or shining, whether the birds were singing, whether it was the season
for dahlias or daisies, whether the Luxembourg was more charming
than the Tuileries, whether the linen which the laundress brought
home was starched too much or not enough, whether Toussaint had
done "her marketing" well or ill; and she remained dejected,
absorbed, attentive to but a single thought, her eyes vague
and staring as when one gazes by night at a black and fathomless
spot where an apparition has vanished.

However, she did not allow Jean Valjean to perceive anything of this,
except her pallor.

She still wore her sweet face for him.

This pallor sufficed but too thoroughly to trouble Jean Valjean. 
Sometimes he asked her:--

"What is the matter with you?"

She replied:  "There is nothing the matter with me."

And after a silence, when she divined that he was sad also,
she would add:--

"And you, father--is there anything wrong with you?"

"With me?  Nothing," said he.

These two beings who had loved each other so exclusively,
and with so touching an affection, and who had lived so long for
each other now suffered side by side, each on the other's account;
without acknowledging it to each other, without anger towards
each other, and with a smile.



CHAPTER VIII

THE CHAIN-GANG


Jean Valjean was the more unhappy of the two.  Youth, even in
its sorrows, always possesses its own peculiar radiance.

At times, Jean Valjean suffered so greatly that he became puerile. 
It is the property of grief to cause the childish side of man
to reappear.  He had an unconquerable conviction that Cosette was
escaping from him.  He would have liked to resist, to retain her,
to arouse her enthusiasm by some external and brilliant matter. 
These ideas, puerile, as we have just said, and at the same time senile,
conveyed to him, by their very childishness, a tolerably just notion
of the influence of gold lace on the imaginations of young girls. 
He once chanced to see a general on horseback, in full uniform,
pass along the street, Comte Coutard, the commandant of Paris. 
He envied that gilded man; what happiness it would be, he said to himself,
if he could put on that suit which was an incontestable thing;
and if Cosette could behold him thus, she would be dazzled, and when
he had Cosette on his arm and passed the gates of the Tuileries,
the guard would present arms to him, and that would suffice for Cosette,
and would dispel her idea of looking at young men.

An unforeseen shock was added to these sad reflections.

In the isolated life which they led, and since they had come
to dwell in the Rue Plumet, they had contracted one habit. 
They sometimes took a pleasure trip to see the sun rise, a mild
species of enjoyment which befits those who are entering life
and those who are quitting it.

For those who love solitude, a walk in the early morning is equivalent
to a stroll by night, with the cheerfulness of nature added. 
The streets are deserted and the birds are singing.  Cosette, a bird
herself, liked to rise early.  These matutinal excursions were
planned on the preceding evening.  He proposed, and she agreed. 
It was arranged like a plot, they set out before daybreak,
and these trips were so many small delights for Cosette. 
These innocent eccentricities please young people.

Jean Valjean's inclination led him, as we have seen, to the least
frequented spots, to solitary nooks, to forgotten places. 
There then existed, in the vicinity of the barriers of Paris,
a sort of poor meadows, which were almost confounded with the city,
where grew in summer sickly grain, and which, in autumn,
after the harvest had been gathered, presented the appearance,
not of having been reaped, but peeled.  Jean Valjean loved to haunt
these fields.  Cosette was not bored there.  It meant solitude
to him and liberty to her.  There, she became a little girl
once more, she could run and almost play; she took off her hat,
laid it on Jean Valjean's knees, and gathered bunches of flowers. 
She gazed at the butterflies on the flowers, but did not catch them;
gentleness and tenderness are born with love, and the young girl
who cherishes within her breast a trembling and fragile ideal has
mercy on the wing of a butterfly.  She wove garlands of poppies,
which she placed on her head, and which, crossed and penetrated
with sunlight, glowing until they flamed, formed for her rosy face a
crown of burning embers.

Even after their life had grown sad, they kept up their custom
of early strolls.

One morning in October, therefore, tempted by the serene perfection
of the autumn of 1831, they set out, and found themselves at break
of day near the Barriere du Maine.  It was not dawn, it was daybreak;
a delightful and stern moment.  A few constellations here and there
in the deep, pale azure, the earth all black, the heavens all white,
a quiver amid the blades of grass, everywhere the mysterious
chill of twilight.  A lark, which seemed mingled with the stars,
was carolling at a prodigious height, and one would have declared
that that hymn of pettiness calmed immensity.  In the East,
the Valde-Grace projected its dark mass on the clear horizon
with the sharpness of steel; Venus dazzlingly brilliant was rising
behind that dome and had the air of a soul making its escape from
a gloomy edifice.

All was peace and silence; there was no one on the road;
a few stray laborers, of whom they caught barely a glimpse,
were on their way to their work along the side-paths.

Jean Valjean was sitting in a cross-walk on some planks deposited at
the gate of a timber-yard. His face was turned towards the highway,
his back towards the light; he had forgotten the sun which was on the
point of rising; he had sunk into one of those profound absorptions
in which the mind becomes concentrated, which imprison even the eye,
and which are equivalent to four walls.  There are meditations
which may be called vertical; when one is at the bottom of them,
time is required to return to earth.  Jean Valjean had plunged into
one of these reveries.  He was thinking of Cosette, of the happiness
that was possible if nothing came between him and her, of the light
with which she filled his life, a light which was but the emanation
of her soul.  He was almost happy in his revery.  Cosette, who was
standing beside him, was gazing at the clouds as they turned rosy.

All at once Cosette exclaimed:  "Father, I should think some one
was coming yonder."  Jean Valjean raised his eyes.

Cosette was right.  The causeway which leads to the ancient Barriere
du Maine is a prolongation, as the reader knows, of the Rue
de Sevres, and is cut at right angles by the inner boulevard. 
At the elbow of the causeway and the boulevard, at the spot where
it branches, they heard a noise which it was difficult to account
for at that hour, and a sort of confused pile made its appearance. 
Some shapeless thing which was coming from the boulevard was turning
into the road.

It grew larger, it seemed to move in an orderly manner,
though it was bristling and quivering; it seemed to be a vehicle,
but its load could not be distinctly made out.  There were horses,
wheels, shouts; whips were cracking.  By degrees the outlines
became fixed, although bathed in shadows.  It was a vehicle,
in fact, which had just turned from the boulevard into the highway,
and which was directing its course towards the barrier near which sat
Jean Valjean; a second, of the same aspect, followed, then a third,
then a fourth; seven chariots made their appearance in succession,
the heads of the horses touching the rear of the wagon in front. 
Figures were moving on these vehicles, flashes were visible
through the dusk as though there were naked swords there,
a clanking became audible which resembled the rattling of chains,
and as this something advanced, the sound of voices waxed louder,
and it turned into a terrible thing such as emerges from the cave
of dreams.

As it drew nearer, it assumed a form, and was outlined behind the trees
with the pallid hue of an apparition; the mass grew white; the day,
which was slowly dawning, cast a wan light on this swarming heap
which was at once both sepulchral and living, the heads of the figures
turned into the faces of corpses, and this is what it proved to be:--

Seven wagons were driving in a file along the road.  The first
six were singularly constructed.  They resembled coopers' drays;
they consisted of long ladders placed on two wheels and forming
barrows at their rear extremities.  Each dray, or rather let us say,
each ladder, was attached to four horses harnessed tandem. 
On these ladders strange clusters of men were being drawn. 
In the faint light, these men were to be divined rather than seen. 
Twenty-four on each vehicle, twelve on a side, back to back,
facing the passers-by, their legs dangling in the air,--this was
the manner in which these men were travelling, and behind their backs
they had something which clanked, and which was a chain, and on
their necks something which shone, and which was an iron collar. 
Each man had his collar, but the chain was for all; so that if these
four and twenty men had occasion to alight from the dray and walk,
they were seized with a sort of inexorable unity, and were obliged
to wind over the ground with the chain for a backbone, somewhat after
the fashion of millepeds.  In the back and front of each vehicle,
two men armed with muskets stood erect, each holding one end
of the chain under his foot.  The iron necklets were square. 
The seventh vehicle, a huge rack-sided baggage wagon, without a hood,
had four wheels and six horses, and carried a sonorous pile of
iron boilers, cast-iron pots, braziers, and chains, among which were
mingled several men who were pinioned and stretched at full length,
and who seemed to be ill.  This wagon, all lattice-work, was
garnished with dilapidated hurdles which appeared to have served for
former punishments.  These vehicles kept to the middle of the road. 
On each side marched a double hedge of guards of infamous aspect,
wearing three-cornered hats, like the soldiers under the Directory,
shabby, covered with spots and holes, muffled in uniforms
of veterans and the trousers of undertakers' men, half gray,
half blue, which were almost hanging in rags, with red epaulets,
yellow shoulder belts, short sabres, muskets, and cudgels; they were
a species of soldier-blackguards. These myrmidons seemed composed
of the abjectness of the beggar and the authority of the executioner. 
The one who appeared to be their chief held a postilion's whip
in his hand.  All these details, blurred by the dimness of dawn,
became more and more clearly outlined as the light increased. 
At the head and in the rear of the convoy rode mounted gendarmes,
serious and with sword in fist.

This procession was so long that when the first vehicle reached
the barrier, the last was barely debauching from the boulevard. 
A throng, sprung, it is impossible to say whence, and formed in
a twinkling, as is frequently the case in Paris, pressed forward
from both sides of the road and looked on.  In the neighboring lanes
the shouts of people calling to each other and the wooden shoes
of market-gardeners hastening up to gaze were audible.

The men massed upon the drays allowed themselves to be jolted
along in silence.  They were livid with the chill of morning. 
They all wore linen trousers, and their bare feet were thrust into
wooden shoes.  The rest of their costume was a fantasy of wretchedness. 
Their accoutrements were horribly incongruous; nothing is more funereal
than the harlequin in rags.  Battered felt hats, tarpaulin caps,
hideous woollen nightcaps, and, side by side with a short blouse,
a black coat broken at the elbow; many wore women's headgear,
others had baskets on their heads; hairy breasts were visible,
and through the rent in their garments tattooed designs could be descried;
temples of Love, flaming hearts, Cupids; eruptions and unhealthy red
blotches could also be seen.  Two or three had a straw rope attached
to the cross-bar of the dray, and suspended under them like a stirrup,
which supported their feet.  One of them held in his hand and raised
to his mouth something which had the appearance of a black stone
and which he seemed to be gnawing; it was bread which he was eating. 
There were no eyes there which were not either dry, dulled, or flaming
with an evil light.  The escort troop cursed, the men in chains did
not utter a syllable; from time to time the sound of a blow became
audible as the cudgels descended on shoulder-blades or skulls;
some of these men were yawning; their rags were terrible; their feet
hung down, their shoulders oscillated, their heads clashed together,
their fetters clanked, their eyes glared ferociously, their fists
clenched or fell open inertly like the hands of corpses; in the rear
of the convoy ran a band of children screaming with laughter.

This file of vehicles, whatever its nature was, was mournful. 
It was evident that to-morrow, that an hour hence, a pouring rain
might descend, that it might be followed by another and another,
and that their dilapidated garments would be drenched, that once soaked,
these men would not get dry again, that once chilled, they would
not again get warm, that their linen trousers would be glued to
their bones by the downpour, that the water would fill their shoes,
that no lashes from the whips would be able to prevent their jaws
from chattering, that the chain would continue to bind them
by the neck, that their legs would continue to dangle, and it was
impossible not to shudder at the sight of these human beings thus
bound and passive beneath the cold clouds of autumn, and delivered
over to the rain, to the blast, to all the furies of the air,
like trees and stones.

Blows from the cudgel were not omitted even in the case of the sick men,
who lay there knotted with ropes and motionless on the seventh wagon,
and who appeared to have been tossed there like sacks filled with misery.

Suddenly, the sun made its appearance; the immense light of the Orient
burst forth, and one would have said that it had set fire to all
those ferocious heads.  Their tongues were unloosed; a conflagration
of grins, oaths, and songs exploded.  The broad horizontal sheet
of light severed the file in two parts, illuminating heads and bodies,
leaving feet and wheels in the obscurity.  Thoughts made their
appearance on these faces; it was a terrible moment; visible demons
with their masks removed, fierce souls laid bare.  Though lighted up,
this wild throng remained in gloom.  Some, who were gay, had in
their mouths quills through which they blew vermin over the crowd,
picking out the women; the dawn accentuated these lamentable
profiles with the blackness of its shadows; there was not one of
these creatures who was not deformed by reason of wretchedness;
and the whole was so monstrous that one would have said that the
sun's brilliancy had been changed into the glare of the lightning. 
The wagon-load which headed the line had struck up a song, and were
shouting at the top of their voices with a haggard joviality,
a potpourri by Desaugiers, then famous, called The Vestal; the trees
shivered mournfully; in the cross-lanes, countenances of bourgeois
listened in an idiotic delight to these coarse strains droned by spectres.

All sorts of distress met in this procession as in chaos; here were
to be found the facial angles of every sort of beast, old men, youths,
bald heads, gray beards, cynical monstrosities, sour resignation,
savage grins, senseless attitudes, snouts surmounted by caps,
heads like those of young girls with corkscrew curls on the temples,
infantile visages, and by reason of that, horrible thin skeleton faces,
to which death alone was lacking.  On the first cart was a negro,
who had been a slave, in all probability, and who could make
a comparison of his chains.  The frightful leveller from below,
shame, had passed over these brows; at that degree of abasement,
the last transformations were suffered by all in their extremest depths,
and ignorance, converted into dulness, was the equal of intelligence
converted into despair.  There was no choice possible between
these men who appeared to the eye as the flower of the mud. 
It was evident that the person who had had the ordering of that
unclean procession had not classified them.  These beings had been
fettered and coupled pell-mell, in alphabetical disorder, probably,
and loaded hap-hazard on those carts.  Nevertheless, horrors,
when grouped together, always end by evolving a result; all additions
of wretched men give a sum total, each chain exhaled a common soul,
and each dray-load had its own physiognomy.  By the side of the one
where they were singing, there was one where they were howling;
a third where they were begging; one could be seen in which they
were gnashing their teeth; another load menaced the spectators,
another blasphemed God; the last was as silent as the tomb. 
Dante would have thought that he beheld his seven circles of hell
on the march.  The march of the damned to their tortures, performed
in sinister wise, not on the formidable and flaming chariot of
the Apocalypse, but, what was more mournful than that, on the gibbet cart.

One of the guards, who had a hook on the end of his cudgel, made a
pretence from time to time, of stirring up this mass of human filth. 
An old woman in the crowd pointed them out to her little boy five
years old, and said to him:  "Rascal, let that be a warning to you!"

As the songs and blasphemies increased, the man who appeared to be
the captain of the escort cracked his whip, and at that signal
a fearful dull and blind flogging, which produced the sound of hail,
fell upon the seven dray-loads; many roared and foamed at the mouth;
which redoubled the delight of the street urchins who had hastened up,
a swarm of flies on these wounds.

Jean Valjean's eyes had assumed a frightful expression. 
They were no longer eyes; they were those deep and glassy objects
which replace the glance in the case of certain wretched men,
which seem unconscious of reality, and in which flames the reflection
of terrors and of catastrophes.  He was not looking at a spectacle,
he was seeing a vision.  He tried to rise, to flee, to make
his escape; he could not move his feet.  Sometimes, the things
that you see seize upon you and hold you fast.  He remained nailed
to the spot, petrified, stupid, asking himself, athwart confused
and inexpressible anguish, what this sepulchral persecution signified,
and whence had come that pandemonium which was pursuing him. 
All at once, he raised his hand to his brow, a gesture habitual
to those whose memory suddenly returns; he remembered that this was,
in fact, the usual itinerary, that it was customary to make this
detour in order to avoid all possibility of encountering royalty on
the road to Fontainebleau, and that, five and thirty years before,
he had himself passed through that barrier.

Cosette was no less terrified, but in a different way.  She did
not understand; what she beheld did not seem to her to be possible;
at length she cried:--

"Father!  What are those men in those carts?"

Jean Valjean replied:  "Convicts."

"Whither are they going?"

"To the galleys."

At that moment, the cudgelling, multiplied by a hundred hands,
became zealous, blows with the flat of the sword were mingled
with it, it was a perfect storm of whips and clubs; the convicts
bent before it, a hideous obedience was evoked by the torture,
and all held their peace, darting glances like chained wolves.

Cosette trembled in every limb; she resumed:--

"Father, are they still men?"

"Sometimes," answered the unhappy man.

It was the chain-gang, in fact, which had set out before daybreak
from Bicetre, and had taken the road to Mans in order to avoid
Fontainebleau, where the King then was.  This caused the horrible
journey to last three or four days longer; but torture may surely
be prolonged with the object of sparing the royal personage a sight of it.

Jean Valjean returned home utterly overwhelmed.  Such encounters
are shocks, and the memory that they leave behind them resembles
a thorough shaking up.

Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not observe that, on his way back
to the Rue de Babylone with Cosette, the latter was plying him
with other questions on the subject of what they had just seen;
perhaps he was too much absorbed in his own dejection to notice
her words and reply to them.  But when Cosette was leaving him
in the evening, to betake herself to bed, he heard her say in a
low voice, and as though talking to herself:  "It seems to me,
that if I were to find one of those men in my pathway, oh, my God,
I should die merely from the sight of him close at hand."

Fortunately, chance ordained that on the morrow of that tragic day,
there was some official solemnity apropos of I know not what,--
fetes in Paris, a review in the Champ de Mars, jousts on the Seine,
theatrical performances in the Champs-Elysees, fireworks at
the Arc de l'Etoile, illuminations everywhere.  Jean Valjean did
violence to his habits, and took Cosette to see these rejoicings,
for the purpose of diverting her from the memory of the day before,
and of effacing, beneath the smiling tumult of all Paris,
the abominable thing which had passed before her.  The review
with which the festival was spiced made the presence of uniforms
perfectly natural; Jean Valjean donned his uniform of a national
guard with the vague inward feeling of a man who is betaking himself
to shelter.  However, this trip seemed to attain its object. 
Cosette, who made it her law to please her father, and to whom,
moreover, all spectacles were a novelty, accepted this diversion
with the light and easy good grace of youth, and did not pout too
disdainfully at that flutter of enjoyment called a public fete;
so that Jean Valjean was able to believe that he had succeeded,
and that no trace of that hideous vision remained.

Some days later, one morning, when the sun was shining brightly,
and they were both on the steps leading to the garden, another infraction
of the rules which Jean Valjean seemed to have imposed upon himself,
and to the custom of remaining in her chamber which melancholy had
caused Cosette to adopt, Cosette, in a wrapper, was standing erect
in that negligent attire of early morning which envelops young girls
in an adorable way and which produces the effect of a cloud drawn over
a star; and, with her head bathed in light, rosy after a good sleep,
submitting to the gentle glances of the tender old man, she was picking
a daisy to pieces.  Cosette did not know the delightful legend,
I love a little, passionately, etc.--who was there who could
have taught her?  She was handling the flower instinctively,
innocently, without a suspicion that to pluck a daisy apart is to
do the same by a heart.  If there were a fourth, and smiling Grace
called Melancholy, she would have worn the air of that Grace. 
Jean Valjean was fascinated by the contemplation of those tiny
fingers on that flower, and forgetful of everything in the radiance
emitted by that child.  A red-breast was warbling in the thicket,
on one side.  White cloudlets floated across the sky, so gayly,
that one would have said that they had just been set at liberty. 
Cosette went on attentively tearing the leaves from her flower;
she seemed to be thinking about something; but whatever it was,
it must be something charming; all at once she turned her head
over her shoulder with the delicate languor of a swan, and said
to Jean Valjean:  "Father, what are the galleys like?"



BOOK FOURTH.--SUCCOR FROM BELOW MAY TURN OUT TO BE SUCCOR FROM ON
HIGH



CHAPTER I

A WOUND WITHOUT, HEALING WITHIN


Thus their life clouded over by degrees.

But one diversion, which had formerly been a happiness, remained to them,
which was to carry bread to those who were hungry, and clothing to those
who were cold.  Cosette often accompanied Jean Valjean on these visits
to the poor, on which they recovered some remnants of their former
free intercourse; and sometimes, when the day had been a good one,
and they had assisted many in distress, and cheered and warmed
many little children, Cosette was rather merry in the evening. 
It was at this epoch that they paid their visit to the Jondrette den.

On the day following that visit, Jean Valjean made his appearance
in the pavilion in the morning, calm as was his wont, but with a
large wound on his left arm which was much inflamed, and very angry,
which resembled a burn, and which he explained in some way or other. 
This wound resulted in his being detained in the house for a month
with fever.  He would not call in a doctor.  When Cosette urged him,
"Call the dog-doctor," said he.

Cosette dressed the wound morning and evening with so divine an air
and such angelic happiness at being of use to him, that Jean Valjean
felt all his former joy returning, his fears and anxieties dissipating,
and he gazed at Cosette, saying:  "Oh! what a kindly wound! 
Oh! what a good misfortune!"

Cosette on perceiving that her father was ill, had deserted the pavilion
and again taken a fancy to the little lodging and the back courtyard. 
She passed nearly all her days beside Jean Valjean and read to him
the books which he desired.  Generally they were books of travel. 
Jean Valjean was undergoing a new birth; his happiness was reviving
in these ineffable rays; the Luxembourg, the prowling young stranger,
Cosette's coldness,--all these clouds upon his soul were growing dim. 
He had reached the point where he said to himself:  "I imagined all that. 
I am an old fool."

His happiness was so great that the horrible discovery of the Thenardiers
made in the Jondrette hovel, unexpected as it was, had, after a fashion,
glided over him unnoticed.  He had succeeded in making his escape;
all trace of him was lost--what more did he care for! he only thought
of those wretched beings to pity them.  "Here they are in prison,
and henceforth they will be incapacitated for doing any harm,"
he thought, "but what a lamentable family in distress!"

As for the hideous vision of the Barriere du Maine, Cosette had
not referred to it again.

Sister Sainte-Mechtilde had taught Cosette music in the convent;
Cosette had the voice of a linnet with a soul, and sometimes,
in the evening, in the wounded man's humble abode, she warbled
melancholy songs which delighted Jean Valjean.

Spring came; the garden was so delightful at that season of the year,
that Jean Valjean said to Cosette:--

"You never go there; I want you to stroll in it."

"As you like, father," said Cosette.

And for the sake of obeying her father, she resumed her walks
in the garden, generally alone, for, as we have mentioned,
Jean Valjean, who was probably afraid of being seen through the fence,
hardly ever went there.

Jean Valjean's wound had created a diversion.

When Cosette saw that her father was suffering less, that he
was convalescing, and that he appeared to be happy, she experienced
a contentment which she did not even perceive, so gently and naturally
had it come.  Then, it was in the month of March, the days were
growing longer, the winter was departing, the winter always bears
away with it a portion of our sadness; then came April, that daybreak
of summer, fresh as dawn always is, gay like every childhood;
a little inclined to weep at times like the new-born being that it is. 
In that month, nature has charming gleams which pass from the sky,
from the trees, from the meadows and the flowers into the heart
of man.

Cosette was still too young to escape the penetrating influence
of that April joy which bore so strong a resemblance to herself. 
Insensibly, and without her suspecting the fact, the blackness
departed from her spirit.  In spring, sad souls grow light,
as light falls into cellars at midday.  Cosette was no longer sad. 
However, though this was so, she did not account for it to herself. 
In the morning, about ten o'clock, after breakfast, when she had
succeeded in enticing her father into the garden for a quarter
of an hour, and when she was pacing up and down in the sunlight
in front of the steps, supporting his left arm for him, she did
not perceive that she laughed every moment and that she was happy.

Jean Valjean, intoxicated, beheld her growing fresh and rosy once more.

"Oh!  What a good wound!" he repeated in a whisper.

And he felt grateful to the Thenardiers.

His wound once healed, he resumed his solitary twilight strolls.

It is a mistake to suppose that a person can stroll alone in
that fashion in the uninhabited regions of Paris without meeting
with some adventure.



CHAPTER II

MOTHER PLUTARQUE FINDS NO DIFFICULTY IN EXPLAINING A PHENOMENON


One evening, little Gavroche had had nothing to eat; he remembered
that he had not dined on the preceding day either; this was becoming
tiresome.  He resolved to make an effort to secure some supper. 
He strolled out beyond the Salpetriere into deserted regions;
that is where windfalls are to be found; where there is no one,
one always finds something.  He reached a settlement which appeared
to him to be the village of Austerlitz.

In one of his preceding lounges he had noticed there an old garden
haunted by an old man and an old woman, and in that garden, a passable
apple-tree. Beside the apple-tree stood a sort of fruit-house,
which was not securely fastened, and where one might contrive to get
an apple.  One apple is a supper; one apple is life.  That which was
Adam's ruin might prove Gavroche's salvation.  The garden abutted
on a solitary, unpaved lane, bordered with brushwood while awaiting
the arrival of houses; the garden was separated from it by a hedge.

Gavroche directed his steps towards this garden; he found the lane,
he recognized the apple-tree, he verified the fruit-house, he examined
the hedge; a hedge means merely one stride.  The day was declining,
there was not even a cat in the lane, the hour was propitious. 
Gavroche began the operation of scaling the hedge, then suddenly paused. 
Some one was talking in the garden.  Gavroche peeped through one of
the breaks in the hedge.

A couple of paces distant, at the foot of the hedge on the other side,
exactly at the point where the gap which he was meditating would
have been made, there was a sort of recumbent stone which formed
a bench, and on this bench was seated the old man of the garden,
while the old woman was standing in front of him.  The old woman
was grumbling.  Gavroche, who was not very discreet, listened.

"Monsieur Mabeuf!" said the old woman.

"Mabeuf!" thought Gavroche, "that name is a perfect farce."

The old man who was thus addressed, did not stir.  The old
woman repeated:--

"Monsieur Mabeuf!"

The old man, without raising his eyes from the ground, made up
his mind to answer:--

"What is it, Mother Plutarque?"

"Mother Plutarque!" thought Gavroche, "another farcical name."

Mother Plutarque began again, and the old man was forced to accept
the conversation:--

"The landlord is not pleased."

"Why?"

"We owe three quarters rent."

"In three months, we shall owe him for four quarters."

"He says that he will turn you out to sleep."

"I will go."

"The green-grocer insists on being paid.  She will no longer
leave her fagots.  What will you warm yourself with this winter? 
We shall have no wood."

"There is the sun."

"The butcher refuses to give credit; he will not let us have any
more meat."

"That is quite right.  I do not digest meat well.  It is too heavy."

"What shall we have for dinner?"

"Bread."

"The baker demands a settlement, and says, `no money, no bread.'"

"That is well."

"What will you eat?"

"We have apples in the apple-room."

"But, Monsieur, we can't live like that without money."

"I have none."

The old woman went away, the old man remained alone.  He fell
into thought.  Gavroche became thoughtful also.  It was almost dark.

The first result of Gavroche's meditation was, that instead
of scaling the hedge, he crouched down under it.  The branches
stood apart a little at the foot of the thicket.

"Come," exclaimed Gavroche mentally, "here's a nook!" and he curled up
in it.  His back was almost in contact with Father Mabeuf's bench. 
He could hear the octogenarian breathe.

Then, by way of dinner, he tried to sleep.

It was a cat-nap, with one eye open.  While he dozed, Gavroche kept
on the watch.

The twilight pallor of the sky blanched the earth, and the lane
formed a livid line between two rows of dark bushes.

All at once, in this whitish band, two figures made their appearance. 
One was in front, the other some distance in the rear.

"There come two creatures," muttered Gavroche.

The first form seemed to be some elderly bourgeois, who was bent
and thoughtful, dressed more than plainly, and who was walking slowly
because of his age, and strolling about in the open evening air.

The second was straight, firm, slender.  It regulated its pace
by that of the first; but in the voluntary slowness of its gait,
suppleness and agility were discernible.  This figure had also
something fierce and disquieting about it, the whole shape was
that of what was then called an elegant; the hat was of good shape,
the coat black, well cut, probably of fine cloth, and well fitted
in at the waist.  The head was held erect with a sort of robust grace,
and beneath the hat the pale profile of a young man could be made
out in the dim light.  The profile had a rose in its mouth. 
This second form was well known to Gavroche; it was Montparnasse.

He could have told nothing about the other, except that he was
a respectable old man.

Gavroche immediately began to take observations.

One of these two pedestrians evidently had a project connected with
the other.  Gavroche was well placed to watch the course of events. 
The bedroom had turned into a hiding-place at a very opportune moment.

Montparnasse on the hunt at such an hour, in such a place,
betokened something threatening.  Gavroche felt his gamin's heart
moved with compassion for the old man.

What was he to do?  Interfere?  One weakness coming to the aid
of another!  It would be merely a laughing matter for Montparnasse. 
Gavroche did not shut his eyes to the fact that the old man,
in the first place, and the child in the second, would make but two
mouthfuls for that redoubtable ruffian eighteen years of age.

While Gavroche was deliberating, the attack took place,
abruptly and hideously.  The attack of the tiger on the wild ass,
the attack of the spider on the fly.  Montparnasse suddenly tossed
away his rose, bounded upon the old man, seized him by the collar,
grasped and clung to him, and Gavroche with difficulty restrained
a scream.  A moment later one of these men was underneath
the other, groaning, struggling, with a knee of marble upon
his breast.  Only, it was not just what Gavroche had expected. 
The one who lay on the earth was Montparnasse; the one who was on top
was the old man.  All this took place a few paces distant from Gavroche.

The old man had received the shock, had returned it, and that
in such a terrible fashion, that in a twinkling, the assailant
and the assailed had exchanged roles.

"Here's a hearty veteran!" thought Gavroche.

He could not refrain from clapping his hands.  But it was applause
wasted.  It did not reach the combatants, absorbed and deafened
as they were, each by the other, as their breath mingled in the struggle.

Silence ensued.  Montparnasse ceased his struggles.  Gavroche indulged
in this aside:  "Can he be dead!"

The goodman had not uttered a word, nor given vent to a cry. 
He rose to his feet, and Gavroche heard him say to Montparnasse:--

"Get up."

Montparnasse rose, but the goodman held him fast. 
Montparnasse's attitude was the humiliated
and furious attitude of the wolf who has been caught by a sheep.

Gavroche looked on and listened, making an effort to reinforce
his eyes with his ears.  He was enjoying himself immensely.

He was repaid for his conscientious anxiety in the character
of a spectator.  He was able to catch on the wing a dialogue
which borrowed from the darkness an indescribably tragic accent. 
The goodman questioned, Montparnasse replied.

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen."

"You are strong and healthy.  Why do you not work?"

"It bores me."

"What is your trade?"

"An idler."

"Speak seriously.  Can anything be done for you?  What would you
like to be?"

"A thief."

A pause ensued.  The old man seemed absorbed in profound thought. 
He stood motionless, and did not relax his hold on Montparnasse.

Every moment the vigorous and agile young ruffian indulged in the
twitchings of a wild beast caught in a snare.  He gave a jerk,
tried a crook of the knee, twisted his limbs desperately, and made
efforts to escape.

The old man did not appear to notice it, and held both his arms
with one hand, with the sovereign indifference of absolute force.

The old man's revery lasted for some time, then, looking steadily
at Montparnasse, he addressed to him in a gentle voice,
in the midst of the darkness where they stood, a solemn harangue,
of which Gavroche did not lose a single syllable:--

"My child, you are entering, through indolence, on one of the most
laborious of lives.  Ah!  You declare yourself to be an idler! prepare
to toil.  There is a certain formidable machine, have you seen it? 
It is the rolling-mill. You must be on your guard against it,
it is crafty and ferocious; if it catches hold of the skirt of
your coat, you will be drawn in bodily.  That machine is laziness. 
Stop while there is yet time, and save yourself!  Otherwise, it is
all over with you; in a short time you will be among the gearing. 
Once entangled, hope for nothing more.  Toil, lazybones! there is no
more repose for you!  The iron hand of implacable toil has seized you. 
You do not wish to earn your living, to have a task, to fulfil a duty! 
It bores you to be like other men?  Well!  You will be different. 
Labor is the law; he who rejects it will find ennui his torment. 
You do not wish to be a workingman, you will be a slave. 
Toil lets go of you on one side only to grasp you again on
the other.  You do not desire to be its friend, you shall be its
negro slave.  Ah!  You would have none of the honest weariness
of men, you shall have the sweat of the damned.  Where others sing,
you will rattle in your throat.  You will see afar off, from below,
other men at work; it will seem to you that they are resting. 
The laborer, the harvester, the sailor, the blacksmith, will appear
to you in glory like the blessed spirits in paradise.  What radiance
surrounds the forge!  To guide the plough, to bind the sheaves,
is joy.  The bark at liberty in the wind, what delight!  Do you,
lazy idler, delve, drag on, roll, march!  Drag your halter. 
You are a beast of burden in the team of hell!  Ah!  To do nothing
is your object.  Well, not a week, not a day, not an hour shall
you have free from oppression.  You will be able to lift nothing
without anguish.  Every minute that passes will make your muscles crack. 
What is a feather to others will be a rock to you.  The simplest
things will become steep acclivities.  Life will become monstrous
all about you.  To go, to come, to breathe, will be just so many
terrible labors.  Your lungs will produce on you the effect of weighing
a hundred pounds.  Whether you shall walk here rather than there,
will become a problem that must be solved.  Any one who wants to go
out simply gives his door a push, and there he is in the open air. 
If you wish to go out, you will be obliged to pierce your wall. 
What does every one who wants to step into the street do?  He goes
down stairs; you will tear up your sheets, little by little you
will make of them a rope, then you will climb out of your window,
and you will suspend yourself by that thread over an abyss, and it
will be night, amid storm, rain, and the hurricane, and if the
rope is too short, but one way of descending will remain to you,
to fall.  To drop hap-hazard into the gulf, from an unknown height,
on what?  On what is beneath, on the unknown.  Or you will crawl up
a chimney-flue, at the risk of burning; or you will creep through
a sewer-pipe, at the risk of drowning; I do not speak of the holes
that you will be obliged to mask, of the stones which you will have
to take up and replace twenty times a day, of the plaster that you
will have to hide in your straw pallet.  A lock presents itself;
the bourgeois has in his pocket a key made by a locksmith.  If you
wish to pass out, you will be condemned to execute a terrible work
of art; you will take a large sou, you will cut it in two plates;
with what tools?  You will have to invent them.  That is your business. 
Then you will hollow out the interior of these plates, taking great
care of the outside, and you will make on the edges a thread, so that
they can be adjusted one upon the other like a box and its cover. 
The top and bottom thus screwed together, nothing will be suspected. 
To the overseers it will be only a sou; to you it will be a box. 
What will you put in this box?  A small bit of steel.  A watch-spring,
in which you will have cut teeth, and which will form a saw. 
With this saw, as long as a pin, and concealed in a sou, you will
cut the bolt of the lock, you will sever bolts, the padlock of
your chain, and the bar at your window, and the fetter on your leg. 
This masterpiece finished, this prodigy accomplished, all these miracles
of art, address, skill, and patience executed, what will be your
recompense if it becomes known that you are the author?  The dungeon. 
There is your future.  What precipices are idleness and pleasure! 
Do you know that to do nothing is a melancholy resolution? 
To live in idleness on the property of society! to be useless,
that is to say, pernicious!  This leads straight to the depth
of wretchedness.  Woe to the man who desires to be a parasite! 
He will become vermin!  Ah!  So it does not please you to work? 
Ah!  You have but one thought, to drink well, to eat well,
to sleep well.  You will drink water, you will eat black bread,
you will sleep on a plank with a fetter whose cold touch you
will feel on your flesh all night long, riveted to your limbs. 
You will break those fetters, you will flee.  That is well. 
You will crawl on your belly through the brushwood, and you will eat
grass like the beasts of the forest.  And you will be recaptured. 
And then you will pass years in a dungeon, riveted to a wall,
groping for your jug that you may drink, gnawing at a horrible
loaf of darkness which dogs would not touch, eating beans that
the worms have eaten before you.  You will be a wood-louse in
a cellar.  Ah!  Have pity on yourself, you miserable young child,
who were sucking at nurse less than twenty years ago, and who have,
no doubt, a mother still alive!  I conjure you, listen to me,
I entreat you.  You desire fine black cloth, varnished shoes,
to have your hair curled and sweet-smelling oils on your locks,
to please low women, to be handsome.  You will be shaven clean,
and you will wear a red blouse and wooden shoes.  You want rings
on your fingers, you will have an iron necklet on your neck. 
If you glance at a woman, you will receive a blow.  And you will
enter there at the age of twenty.  And you will come out at fifty! 
You will enter young, rosy, fresh, with brilliant eyes, and all
your white teeth, and your handsome, youthful hair; you will come
out broken, bent, wrinkled, toothless, horrible, with white locks! 
Ah! my poor child, you are on the wrong road; idleness is
counselling you badly; the hardest of all work is thieving. 
Believe me, do not undertake that painful profession of an idle man. 
It is not comfortable to become a rascal.  It is less disagreeable
to be an honest man.  Now go, and ponder on what I have said
to you.  By the way, what did you want of me?  My purse?  Here it
is."

And the old man, releasing Montparnasse, put his purse in the
latter's hand; Montparnasse weighed it for a moment, after which
he allowed it to slide gently into the back pocket of his coat,
with the same mechanical precaution as though he had stolen it.

All this having been said and done, the goodman turned his back
and tranquilly resumed his stroll.

"The blockhead!" muttered Montparnasse.

Who was this goodman?  The reader has, no doubt, already divined.

Montparnasse watched him with amazement, as he disappeared in the dusk. 
This contemplation was fatal to him.

While the old man was walking away, Gavroche drew near.

Gavroche had assured himself, with a sidelong glance, that Father
Mabeuf was still sitting on his bench, probably sound asleep. 
Then the gamin emerged from his thicket, and began to crawl after
Montparnasse in the dark, as the latter stood there motionless. 
In this manner he came up to Montparnasse without being seen or heard,
gently insinuated his hand into the back pocket of that frock-coat
of fine black cloth, seized the purse, withdrew his hand, and having
recourse once more to his crawling, he slipped away like an adder
through the shadows.  Montparnasse, who had no reason to be on his guard,
and who was engaged in thought for the first time in his life,
perceived nothing.  When Gavroche had once more attained the point
where Father Mabeuf was, he flung the purse over the hedge, and fled
as fast as his legs would carry him.

The purse fell on Father Mabeuf's foot.  This commotion roused him.

He bent over and picked up the purse.

He did not understand in the least, and opened it.

The purse had two compartments; in one of them there was some
small change; in the other lay six napoleons.

M. Mabeuf, in great alarm, referred the matter to his housekeeper.

"That has fallen from heaven," said Mother Plutarque.



BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING



CHAPTER I

SOLITUDE AND THE BARRACKS COMBINED


Cosette's grief, which had been so poignant and lively four or five
months previously, had, without her being conscious of the fact,
entered upon its convalescence.  Nature, spring, youth, love for
her father, the gayety of the birds and flowers, caused something
almost resembling forgetfulness to filter gradually, drop by drop,
into that soul, which was so virgin and so young.  Was the fire wholly
extinct there?  Or was it merely that layers of ashes had formed? 
The truth is, that she hardly felt the painful and burning spot
any longer.

One day she suddenly thought of Marius:  "Why!" said she, "I no
longer think of him."

That same week, she noticed a very handsome officer of lancers,
with a wasp-like waist, a delicious uniform, the cheeks of a young girl,
a sword under his arm, waxed mustaches, and a glazed schapka,
passing the gate.  Moreover, he had light hair, prominent blue eyes,
a round face, was vain, insolent and good-looking; quite the reverse
of Marius.  He had a cigar in his mouth.  Cosette thought that this
officer doubtless belonged to the regiment in barracks in the Rue
de Babylone.

On the following day, she saw him pass again.  She took note
of the hour.

From that time forth, was it chance? she saw him pass nearly every day.

The officer's comrades perceived that there was, in that "badly kept"
garden, behind that malicious rococo fence, a very pretty creature,
who was almost always there when the handsome lieutenant,--who is not
unknown to the reader, and whose name was Theodule Gillenormand,--
passed by.

"See here!" they said to him, "there's a little creature there
who is making eyes at you, look."

"Have I the time," replied the lancer, "to look at all the girls
who look at me?"

This was at the precise moment when Marius was descending heavily
towards agony, and was saying:  "If I could but see her before I die!"--
Had his wish been realized, had he beheld Cosette at that moment
gazing at the lancer, he would not have been able to utter a word,
and he would have expired with grief.

Whose fault was it?  No one's.

Marius possessed one of those temperaments which bury themselves
in sorrow and there abide; Cosette was one of those persons
who plunge into sorrow and emerge from it again.

Cosette was, moreover, passing through that dangerous period,
the fatal phase of feminine revery abandoned to itself, in which
the isolated heart of a young girl resembles the tendrils of the
vine which cling, as chance directs, to the capital of a marble
column or to the post of a wine-shop: A rapid and decisive moment,
critical for every orphan, be she rich or poor, for wealth does not
prevent a bad choice; misalliances are made in very high circles,
real misalliance is that of souls; and as many an unknown young man,
without name, without birth, without fortune, is a marble column
which bears up a temple of grand sentiments and grand ideas, so such
and such a man of the world satisfied and opulent, who has polished
boots and varnished words, if looked at not outside, but inside,
a thing which is reserved for his wife, is nothing more than a
block obscurely haunted by violent, unclean, and vinous passions;
the post of a drinking-shop.

What did Cosette's soul contain?  Passion calmed or lulled to sleep;
something limpid, brilliant, troubled to a certain depth,
and gloomy lower down.  The image of the handsome officer was
reflected in the surface.  Did a souvenir linger in the depths?--
Quite at the bottom?--Possibly.  Cosette did not know.

A singular incident supervened.



CHAPTER II

COSETTE'S APPREHENSIONS


During the first fortnight in April, Jean Valjean took a journey. 
This, as the reader knows, happened from time to time, at very
long intervals.  He remained absent a day or two days at the utmost. 
Where did he go?  No one knew, not even Cosette.  Once only,
on the occasion of one of these departures, she had accompanied him
in a hackney-coach as far as a little blind-alley at the corner
of which she read:  Impasse de la Planchette.  There he alighted,
and the coach took Cosette back to the Rue de Babylone.  It was
usually when money was lacking in the house that Jean Valjean took
these little trips.

So Jean Valjean was absent.  He had said:  "I shall return
in three days."

That evening, Cosette was alone in the drawing-room. In order to get
rid of her ennui, she had opened her piano-organ, and had begun
to sing, accompanying herself the while, the chorus from Euryanthe: 
"Hunters astray in the wood!" which is probably the most beautiful
thing in all the sphere of music.  When she had finished, she remained
wrapped in thought.

All at once, it seemed to her that she heard the sound of footsteps
in the garden.

It could not be her father, he was absent; it could not be Toussaint,
she was in bed, and it was ten o'clock at night.

She stepped to the shutter of the drawing-room, which was closed,
and laid her ear against it.

It seemed to her that it was the tread of a man, and that he was
walking very softly.

She mounted rapidly to the first floor, to her own chamber,
opened a small wicket in her shutter, and peeped into the garden. 
The moon was at the full.  Everything could be seen as plainly as
by day.

There was no one there.

She opened the window.  The garden was absolutely calm, and all
that was visible was that the street was deserted as usual.

Cosette thought that she had been mistaken.  She thought that she
had heard a noise.  It was a hallucination produced by the melancholy
and magnificent chorus of Weber, which lays open before the mind
terrified depths, which trembles before the gaze like a dizzy forest,
and in which one hears the crackling of dead branches beneath
the uneasy tread of the huntsmen of whom one catches a glimpse
through the twilight.

She thought no more about it.

Moreover, Cosette was not very timid by nature.  There flowed
in her veins some of the blood of the bohemian and the adventuress
who runs barefoot.  It will be remembered that she was more of a lark
than a dove.  There was a foundation of wildness and bravery in her.

On the following day, at an earlier hour, towards nightfall, she was
strolling in the garden.  In the midst of the confused thoughts
which occupied her, she fancied that she caught for an instant a sound
similar to that of the preceding evening, as though some one were
walking beneath the trees in the dusk, and not very far from her;
but she told herself that nothing so closely resembles a step on
the grass as the friction of two branches which have moved from side
to side, and she paid no heed to it.  Besides, she could see nothing.

She emerged from "the thicket"; she had still to cross a small lawn
to regain the steps.

The moon, which had just risen behind her, cast Cosette's shadow
in front of her upon this lawn, as she came out from the shrubbery.

Cosette halted in alarm.

Beside her shadow, the moon outlined distinctly upon the turf
another shadow, which was particularly startling and terrible,
a shadow which had a round hat.

It was the shadow of a man, who must have been standing on the border
of the clump of shrubbery, a few paces in the rear of Cosette.

She stood for a moment without the power to speak, or cry, or call,
or stir, or turn her head.

Then she summoned up all her courage, and turned round resolutely.

There was no one there.

She glanced on the ground.  The figure had disappeared.

She re-entered the thicket, searched the corners boldly, went as far
as the gate, and found nothing.

She felt herself absolutely chilled with terror.  Was this
another hallucination?  What!  Two days in succession! 
One hallucination might pass, but two hallucinations? 
The disquieting point about it was, that the
shadow had assuredly not been a phantom.  Phantoms do not wear round hats.

On the following day Jean Valjean returned.  Cosette told him what
she thought she had heard and seen.  She wanted to be reassured
and to see her father shrug his shoulders and say to her: 
"You are a little goose."

Jean Valjean grew anxious.

"It cannot be anything," said he.

He left her under some pretext, and went into the garden, and she
saw him examining the gate with great attention.

During the night she woke up; this time she was sure, and she distinctly
heard some one walking close to the flight of steps beneath her window. 
She ran to her little wicket and opened it.  In point of fact,
there was a man in the garden, with a large club in his hand. 
Just as she was about to scream, the moon lighted up the man's profile. 
It was her father.  She returned to her bed, saying to herself: 
"He is very uneasy!"

Jean Valjean passed that night and the two succeeding nights
in the garden.  Cosette saw him through the hole in her shutter.

On the third night, the moon was on the wane, and had begun
to rise later; at one o'clock in the morning, possibly, she heard
a loud burst of laughter and her father's voice calling her:--

"Cosette!"

She jumped out of bed, threw on her dressing-gown, and opened
her window.

Her father was standing on the grass-plot below.

"I have waked you for the purpose of reassuring you," said he;
"look, there is your shadow with the round hat."

And he pointed out to her on the turf a shadow cast by the moon,
and which did indeed, bear considerable resemblance to the spectre of a
man wearing a round hat.  It was the shadow produced by a chimney-pipe
of sheet iron, with a hood, which rose above a neighboring roof.

Cosette joined in his laughter, all her lugubrious suppositions
were allayed, and the next morning, as she was at breakfast
with her father, she made merry over the sinister garden haunted
by the shadows of iron chimney-pots.

Jean Valjean became quite tranquil once more; as for Cosette,
she did not pay much attention to the question whether the chimney-pot
was really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen,
or thought she had seen, and whether the moon had been in the same
spot in the sky.

She did not question herself as to the peculiarity of a chimney-pot
which is afraid of being caught in the act, and which retires
when some one looks at its shadow, for the shadow had taken
the alarm when Cosette had turned round, and Cosette had thought
herself very sure of this.  Cosette's serenity was fully restored. 
The proof appeared to her to be complete, and it quite vanished
from her mind, whether there could possibly be any one walking
in the garden during the evening or at night.

A few days later, however, a fresh incident occurred.



CHAPTER III

ENRICHED WITH COMMENTARIES BY TOUSSAINT


In the garden, near the railing on the street, there was a stone bench,
screened from the eyes of the curious by a plantation of yoke-elms,
but which could, in case of necessity, be reached by an arm from
the outside, past the trees and the gate.

One evening during that same month of April, Jean Valjean had
gone out; Cosette had seated herself on this bench after sundown. 
The breeze was blowing briskly in the trees, Cosette was meditating;
an objectless sadness was taking possession of her little by little,
that invincible sadness evoked by the evening, and which arises,
perhaps, who knows, from the mystery of the tomb which is ajar at
that hour.

Perhaps Fantine was within that shadow.

Cosette rose, slowly made the tour of the garden, walking on
the grass drenched in dew, and saying to herself, through the
species of melancholy somnambulism in which she was plunged: 
"Really, one needs wooden shoes for the garden at this hour. 
One takes cold."

She returned to the bench.

As she was about to resume her seat there, she observed on the
spot which she had quitted, a tolerably large stone which had,
evidently, not been there a moment before.

Cosette gazed at the stone, asking herself what it meant.  All at once
the idea occurred to her that the stone had not reached the bench
all by itself, that some one had placed it there, that an arm had been
thrust through the railing, and this idea appeared to alarm her. 
This time, the fear was genuine; the stone was there.  No doubt
was possible; she did not touch it, fled without glancing behind her,
took refuge in the house, and immediately closed with shutter,
bolt, and bar the door-like window opening on the flight of steps. 
She inquired of Toussaint:--

"Has my father returned yet?"

"Not yet, Mademoiselle."

[We have already noted once for all the fact that Toussaint stuttered. 
May we be permitted to dispense with it for the future.  The musical
notation of an infirmity is repugnant to us.]

Jean Valjean, a thoughtful man, and given to nocturnal strolls,
often returned quite late at night.

"Toussaint," went on Cosette, "are you careful to thoroughly
barricade the shutters opening on the garden, at least with bars,
in the evening, and to put the little iron things in the little
rings that close them?"

"Oh! be easy on that score, Miss."

Toussaint did not fail in her duty, and Cosette was well aware
of the fact, but she could not refrain from adding:--

"It is so solitary here."

"So far as that is concerned," said Toussaint, "it is true. 
We might be assassinated before we had time to say ouf! 
And Monsieur does not sleep in the house, to boot. 
But fear nothing, Miss, I fasten the shutters up like prisons. 
Lone women!  That is enough to make one shudder, I believe you! 
Just imagine, what if you were to see men enter your chamber at
night and say:  `Hold your tongue!' and begin to cut your throat. 
It's not the dying so much; you die, for one must die, and that's
all right; it's the abomination of feeling those people touch you. 
And then, their knives; they can't be able to cut well with them! 
Ah, good gracious!"

"Be quiet," said Cosette.  "Fasten everything thoroughly."

Cosette, terrified by the melodrama improvised by Toussaint,
and possibly, also, by the recollection of the apparitions of the
past week, which recurred to her memory, dared not even say to her: 
"Go and look at the stone which has been placed on the bench!"
for fear of opening the garden gate and allowing "the men" to enter. 
She saw that all the doors and windows were carefully fastened,
made Toussaint go all over the house from garret to cellar, locked herself
up in her own chamber, bolted her door, looked under her couch,
went to bed and slept badly.  All night long she saw that big stone,
as large as a mountain and full of caverns.

At sunrise,--the property of the rising sun is to make us laugh
at all our terrors of the past night, and our laughter is in direct
proportion to our terror which they have caused,--at sunrise Cosette,
when she woke, viewed her fright as a nightmare, and said to herself: 
"What have I been thinking of?  It is like the footsteps that I
thought I heard a week or two ago in the garden at night! 
It is like the shadow of the chimney-pot! Am I becoming a coward?" 
The sun, which was glowing through the crevices in her shutters,
and turning the damask curtains crimson, reassured her to such an extent
that everything vanished from her thoughts, even the stone.

"There was no more a stone on the bench than there was a man in a round
hat in the garden; I dreamed about the stone, as I did all the rest."

She dressed herself, descended to the garden, ran to the bench,
and broke out in a cold perspiration.  The stone was there.

But this lasted only for a moment.  That which is terror by night
is curiosity by day.

"Bah!" said she, "come, let us see what it is."

She lifted the stone, which was tolerably large.  Beneath it was
something which resembled a letter.  It was a white envelope. 
Cosette seized it.  There was no address on one side, no seal
on the other.  Yet the envelope, though unsealed, was not empty. 
Papers could be seen inside.

Cosette examined it.  It was no longer alarm, it was no longer curiosity;
it was a beginning of anxiety.

Cosette drew from the envelope its contents, a little notebook
of paper, each page of which was numbered and bore a few lines
in a very fine and rather pretty handwriting, as Cosette thought.

Cosette looked for a name; there was none.  To whom was this addressed? 
To her, probably, since a hand had deposited the packet on her bench. 
From whom did it come?  An irresistible fascination took possession
of her; she tried to turn away her eyes from the leaflets which were
trembling in her hand, she gazed at the sky, the street, the acacias
all bathed in light, the pigeons fluttering over a neighboring roof,
and then her glance suddenly fell upon the manuscript, and she said
to herself that she must know what it contained.

This is what she read.



CHAPTER IV

A HEART BENEATH A STONE


The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion
of a single being even to God, that is love.


Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.


How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!


What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills
the world!  Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God. 
One could comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God
the Father of all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul
for love.


The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac
curtain is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace
of dreams.


God is behind everything, but everything
hides God.  Things are black, creatures
are opaque.  To love a being is to render that being transparent.


Certain thoughts are prayers.  There are moments when, whatever the
attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.


Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices,
which possess, however, a reality of their own.  They are
prevented from seeing each other, they cannot write to each other;
they discover a multitude of mysterious means to correspond. 
They send each other the song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers,
the smiles of children, the light of the sun, the sighings
of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation.  And why not? 
All the works of God are made to serve love.  Love is sufficiently
potent to charge all nature with its messages.

Oh Spring!  Thou art a letter that I write to her.


The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. 
Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. 
In the infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite.


Love participates of the soul itself.  It is of the same nature. 
Like it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible,
indivisible, imperishable.  It is a point of fire that exists
within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine,
and which nothing can extinguish.  We feel it burning even to the
very marrow of our bones, and we see it beaming in the very depths
of heaven.


Oh Love!  Adorations! voluptuousness of two minds which understand each
other, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glances which
penetrate each other!  You will come to me, will you not, bliss! strolls
by twos in the solitudes!  Blessed and radiant days!  I have sometimes
dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from the
lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies of men.


God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give
them endless duration.  After a life of love, an eternity of love is,
in fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the
ineffable felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world,
is impossible, even to God.  God is the plenitude of heaven;
love is the plenitude of man.


You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous,
and because it is impenetrable.  You have beside you a sweeter
radiance and a greater mystery, woman.


All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings.  We lack air
and we stifle.  Then we die.  To die for lack of love is horrible. 
Suffocation of the soul.


When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred
and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered
so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything
more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they
are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit.  Love, soar.


On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as she walks,
you are lost, you love.  But one thing remains for you to do: 
to think of her so intently that she is constrained to think of you.


What love commences can be finished by God alone.


True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost
or a handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its
devotion and its hopes.  It is composed both of the infinitely
great and the infinitely little.


If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the
sensitive plant; if you are a man, be love.


Nothing suffices for love.  We have happiness, we desire paradise;
we possess paradise, we desire heaven.

Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. 
Understand how to find it there.  Love has contemplation as well
as heaven, and more than heaven, it has voluptuousness.


"Does she still come to the Luxembourg?"  "No, sir."  "This is the church
where she attends mass, is it not?"  "She no longer comes here." 
"Does she still live in this house?"  "She has moved away." 
"Where has she gone to dwell?"

"She did not say."

What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one's soul!

Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses. 
Shame on the passions which belittle man!  Honor to the one which
makes a child of him!


There is one strange thing, do you know it?  I dwell in the night. 
There is a being who carried off my sky when she went away.


Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave,
hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing
a finger,--that would suffice for my eternity!


Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more.  To die of love,
is to live in it.


Love.  A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture. 
There is ecstasy in agony.


Oh joy of the birds!  It is because they have nests that they sing.


Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.


Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a
long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. 
This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step
inside the tomb.  Then something appears to him, and he begins to
distinguish the definitive.  The definitive, meditate upon that word. 
The living perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself
to be seen only by the dead.  In the meanwhile, love and suffer,
hope and contemplate.  Woe, alas! to him who shall have loved
only bodies, forms, appearances!  Death will deprive him of all. 
Try to love souls, you will find them again.


I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. 
His hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes;
water trickled through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.


What a grand thing it is to be loved!  What a far grander thing
it is to love!  The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. 
It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer
rests on anything that is not elevated and great.  An unworthy
thought can no more germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. 
The serene and lofty soul, inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions,
dominating the clouds and the shades of this world, its follies,
its lies, its hatreds, its vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue
of heaven, and no longer feels anything but profound and subterranean
shocks of destiny, as the crests of mountains feel the shocks
of earthquake.


If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct.



CHAPTER V

COSETTE AFTER THE LETTER


As Cosette read, she gradually fell into thought.  At the very moment
when she raised her eyes from the last line of the note-book,
the handsome officer passed triumphantly in front of the gate,--
it was his hour; Cosette thought him hideous.

She resumed her contemplation of the book.  It was written in the
most charming of chirography, thought Cosette; in the same hand,
but with divers inks, sometimes very black, again whitish,
as when ink has been added to the inkstand, and consequently on
different days.  It was, then, a mind which had unfolded itself there,
sigh by sigh, irregularly, without order, without choice,
without object, hap-hazard. Cosette had never read anything like it. 
This manuscript, in which she already perceived more light than
obscurity, produced upon her the effect of a half-open sanctuary. 
Each one of these mysterious lines shone before her eyes and inundated
her heart with a strange radiance.  The education which she had
received had always talked to her of the soul, and never of love,
very much as one might talk of the firebrand and not of the flame. 
This manuscript of fifteen pages suddenly and sweetly revealed
to her all of love, sorrow, destiny, life, eternity, the beginning,
the end.  It was as if a hand had opened and suddenly flung upon
her a handful of rays of light.  In these few lines she felt
a passionate, ardent, generous, honest nature, a sacred will,
an immense sorrow, and an immense despair, a suffering heart,
an ecstasy fully expanded.  What was this manuscript?  A letter. 
A letter without name, without address, without date, without signature,
pressing and disinterested, an enigma composed of truths, a message
of love made to be brought by an angel and read by a virgin,
an appointment made beyond the bounds of earth, the love-letter of
a phantom to a shade.  It was an absent one, tranquil and dejected,
who seemed ready to take refuge in death and who sent to the absent love,
his lady, the secret of fate, the key of life, love.  This had been
written with one foot in the grave and one finger in heaven. 
These lines, which had fallen one by one on the paper, were what
might be called drops of soul.

Now, from whom could these pages come?  Who could have penned them?

Cosette did not hesitate a moment.  One man only.

He!

Day had dawned once more in her spirit; all had reappeared. 
She felt an unheard-of joy, and a profound anguish.  It was he! he
who had written! he was there! it was he whose arm had been thrust
through that railing!  While she was forgetful of him, he had found
her again!  But had she forgotten him?  No, never!  She was foolish
to have thought so for a single moment.  She had always loved him,
always adored him.  The fire had been smothered, and had smouldered
for a time, but she saw all plainly now; it had but made headway,
and now it had burst forth afresh, and had inflamed her whole being. 
This note-book was like a spark which had fallen from that other soul
into hers.  She felt the conflagration starting up once more.

She imbued herself thoroughly with every word of the manuscript: 
"Oh yes!" said she, "how perfectly I recognize all that!  That is
what I had already read in his eyes."  As she was finishing it
for the third time, Lieutenant Theodule passed the gate once more,
and rattled his spurs upon the pavement.  Cosette was forced
to raise her eyes.  She thought him insipid, silly, stupid,
useless, foppish, displeasing, impertinent, and extremely ugly. 
The officer thought it his duty to smile at her.

She turned away as in shame and indignation.  She would gladly
have thrown something at his head.

She fled, re-entered the house, and shut herself up in her
chamber to peruse the manuscript once more, to learn it by heart,
and to dream.  When she had thoroughly mastered it she kissed
it and put it in her bosom.

All was over, Cosette had fallen back into deep, seraphic love. 
The abyss of Eden had yawned once more.

All day long, Cosette remained in a sort of bewilderment. 
She scarcely thought, her ideas were in the state of a tangled
skein in her brain, she could not manage to conjecture anything,
she hoped through a tremor, what? vague things.  She dared make
herself no promises, and she did not wish to refuse herself anything. 
Flashes of pallor passed over her countenance, and shivers ran through
her frame.  It seemed to her, at intervals, that she was entering
the land of chimaeras; she said to herself:  "Is this reality?" 
Then she felt of the dear paper within her bosom under her gown,
she pressed it to her heart, she felt its angles against her flesh;
and if Jean Valjean had seen her at the moment, he would have shuddered
in the presence of that luminous and unknown joy, which overflowed
from beneath her eyelids.--"Oh yes!" she thought, "it is certainly he! 
This comes from him, and is for me!"

And she told herself that an intervention of the angels,
a celestial chance, had given him back to her.

Oh transfiguration of love!  Oh dreams!  That celestial chance,
that intervention of the angels, was a pellet of bread tossed
by one thief to another thief, from the Charlemagne Courtyard
to the Lion's Ditch, over the roofs of La Force.



CHAPTER VI

OLD PEOPLE ARE MADE TO GO OUT OPPORTUNELY


When evening came, Jean Valjean went out; Cosette dressed herself. 
She arranged her hair in the most becoming manner, and she put on
a dress whose bodice had received one snip of the scissors too much,
and which, through this slope, permitted a view of the beginning
of her throat, and was, as young girls say, "a trifle indecent." 
It was not in the least indecent, but it was prettier than usual. 
She made her toilet thus without knowing why she did so.

Did she mean to go out?  No.

Was she expecting a visitor?  No.

At dusk, she went down to the garden.  Toussaint was busy
in her kitchen, which opened on the back yard.

She began to stroll about under the trees, thrusting aside
the branches from time to time with her hand, because there
were some which hung very low.

In this manner she reached the bench.

The stone was still there.

She sat down, and gently laid her white hand on this stone as though
she wished to caress and thank it.

All at once, she experienced that indefinable impression which one
undergoes when there is some one standing behind one, even when she
does not see the person.

She turned her head and rose to her feet.

It was he.

His head was bare.  He appeared to have grown thin and pale. 
His black clothes were hardly discernible.  The twilight threw
a wan light on his fine brow, and covered his eyes in shadows. 
Beneath a veil of incomparable sweetness, he had something about
him that suggested death and night.  His face was illuminated
by the light of the dying day, and by the thought of a soul that is
taking flight.

He seemed to be not yet a ghost, and he was no longer a man.

He had flung away his hat in the thicket, a few paces distant.

Cosette, though ready to swoon, uttered no cry.  She retreated slowly,
for she felt herself attracted.  He did not stir.  By virtue
of something ineffable and melancholy which enveloped him,
she felt the look in his eyes which she could not see.

Cosette, in her retreat, encountered a tree and leaned against it. 
Had it not been for this tree, she would have fallen.

Then she heard his voice, that voice which she had really never heard,
barely rising above the rustle of the leaves, and murmuring:--

"Pardon me, here I am.  My heart is full.  I could not live on as I
was living, and I have come.  Have you read what I placed there
on the bench?  Do you recognize me at all?  Have no fear of me. 
It is a long time, you remember the day, since you looked at me
at the Luxembourg, near the Gladiator.  And the day when you passed
before me?  It was on the 16th of June and the 2d of July.  It is nearly
a year ago.  I have not seen you for a long time.  I inquired of the
woman who let the chairs, and she told me that she no longer saw you. 
You lived in the Rue de l'Ouest, on the third floor, in the front
apartments of a new house,--you see that I know!  I followed you. 
What else was there for me to do?  And then you disappeared. 
I thought I saw you pass once, while I was reading the newspapers
under the arcade of the Odeon.  I ran after you.  But no.  It was
a person who had a bonnet like yours.  At night I came hither. 
Do not be afraid, no one sees me.  I come to gaze upon your windows
near at hand.  I walk very softly, so that you may not hear,
for you might be alarmed.  The other evening I was behind you,
you turned round, I fled.  Once, I heard you singing.  I was happy. 
Did it affect you because I heard you singing through the shutters? 
That could not hurt you.  No, it is not so?  You see, you are
my angel!  Let me come sometimes; I think that I am going to die. 
If you only knew!  I adore you.  Forgive me, I speak to you, but I
do not know what I am saying; I may have displeased you; have I
displeased you?"

"Oh! my mother!" said she.

And she sank down as though on the point of death.

He grasped her, she fell, he took her in his arms, he pressed her close,
without knowing what he was doing.  He supported her, though he was
tottering himself.  It was as though his brain were full of smoke;
lightnings darted between his lips; his ideas vanished; it seemed
to him that he was accomplishing some religious act, and that he
was committing a profanation.  Moreover, he had not the least passion
for this lovely woman whose force he felt against his breast. 
He was beside himself with love.

She took his hand and laid it on her heart.  He felt the paper there,
he stammered:--

"You love me, then?"

She replied in a voice so low that it was no longer anything more
than a barely audible breath:--

"Hush!  Thou knowest it!"

And she hid her blushing face on the breast of the superb
and intoxicated young man.

He fell upon the bench, and she beside him.  They had no words more. 
The stars were beginning to gleam.  How did it come to pass that their
lips met?  How comes it to pass that the birds sing, that snow melts,
that the rose unfolds, that May expands, that the dawn grows white
behind the black trees on the shivering crest of the hills?

A kiss, and that was all.

Both started, and gazed into the darkness with sparkling eyes.

They felt neither the cool night, nor the cold stone, nor the
damp earth, nor the wet grass; they looked at each other, and their
hearts were full of thoughts.  They had clasped hands unconsciously.

She did not ask him, she did not even wonder, how he had entered there,
and how he had made his way into the garden.  It seemed so simple
to her that he should be there!

From time to time, Marius' knee touched Cosette's knee, and both shivered.

At intervals, Cosette stammered a word.  Her soul fluttered
on her lips like a drop of dew on a flower.

Little by little they began to talk to each other.  Effusion followed
silence, which is fulness.  The night was serene and splendid overhead. 
These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything,
their dreams, their intoxications, their ecstasies, their chimaeras,
their weaknesses, how they had adored each other from afar,
how they had longed for each other, their despair when they
had ceased to see each other.  They confided to each other in an
ideal intimacy, which nothing could augment, their most secret and
most mysterious thoughts.  They related to each other, with candid
faith in their illusions, all that love, youth, and the remains of
childhood which still lingered about them, suggested to their minds. 
Their two hearts poured themselves out into each other in such wise,
that at the expiration of a quarter of an hour, it was the young
man who had the young girl's soul, and the young girl who had
the young man's soul.  Each became permeated with the other,
they were enchanted with each other, they dazzled each other.

When they had finished, when they had told each other everything,
she laid her head on his shoulder and asked him:--

"What is your name?"

"My name is Marius," said he.  "And yours?"

"My name is Cosette."



BOOK SIXTH.--LITTLE GAVROCHE



CHAPTER I

THE MALICIOUS PLAYFULNESS OF THE WIND


Since 1823, when the tavern of Montfermeil was on the way to shipwreck
and was being gradually engulfed, not in the abyss of a bankruptcy,
but in the cesspool of petty debts, the Thenardier pair had had two
other children; both males.  That made five; two girls and three boys.

Madame Thenardier had got rid of the last two, while they were still
young and very small, with remarkable luck.

Got rid of is the word.  There was but a mere fragment of nature
in that woman.  A phenomenon, by the way, of which there
is more than one example extant.  Like the Marechale de La
Mothe-Houdancourt, the Thenardier was a mother to her daughters only. 
There her maternity ended.  Her hatred of the human race began
with her own sons.  In the direction of her sons her evil
disposition was uncompromising, and her heart had a lugubrious
wall in that quarter.  As the reader has seen, she detested
the eldest; she cursed the other two.  Why?  Because.  The most
terrible of motives, the most unanswerable of retorts--Because. 
"I have no need of a litter of squalling brats," said this mother.

Let us explain how the Thenardiers had succeeded in getting rid of
their last two children; and even in drawing profit from the operation.

The woman Magnon, who was mentioned a few pages further back, was the
same one who had succeeded in making old Gillenormand support the two
children which she had had.  She lived on the Quai des Celestins,
at the corner of this ancient street of the Petit-Musc which afforded
her the opportunity of changing her evil repute into good odor. 
The reader will remember the great epidemic of croup which ravaged
the river districts of the Seine in Paris thirty-five years ago,
and of which science took advantage to make experiments on a grand
scale as to the efficacy of inhalations of alum, so beneficially
replaced at the present day by the external tincture of iodine. 
During this epidemic, the Magnon lost both her boys, who were still
very young, one in the morning, the other in the evening of the same day. 
This was a blow.  These children were precious to their mother;
they represented eighty francs a month.  These eighty francs were
punctually paid in the name of M. Gillenormand, by collector of his rents,
M. Barge, a retired tip-staff, in the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile. The
children dead, the income was at an end.  The Magnon sought an expedient. 
In that dark free-masonry of evil of which she formed a part,
everything is known, all secrets are kept, and all lend mutual aid. 
Magnon needed two children; the Thenardiers had two.  The same sex,
the same age.  A good arrangement for the one, a good investment
for the other.  The little Thenardiers became little Magnons. 
Magnon quitted the Quai des Celestins and went to live in the
Rue Clocheperce.  In Paris, the identity which binds an individual
to himself is broken between one street and another.

The registry office being in no way warned, raised no objections,
and the substitution was effected in the most simple manner
in the world.  Only, the Thenardier exacted for this loan of
her children, ten francs a month, which Magnon promised to pay,
and which she actually did pay.  It is unnecessary to add that
M. Gillenormand continued to perform his compact.  He came to see
the children every six months.  He did not perceive the change. 
"Monsieur," Magnon said to him, "how much they resemble you!"

Thenardier, to whom avatars were easy, seized this occasion
to become Jondrette.  His two daughters and Gavroche had hardly
had time to discover that they had two little brothers.  When a
certain degree of misery is reached, one is overpowered with a sort
of spectral indifference, and one regards human beings as though
they were spectres.  Your nearest relations are often no more for
you than vague shadowy forms, barely outlined against a nebulous
background of life and easily confounded again with the invisible.

On the evening of the day when she had handed over her two little
ones to Magnon, with express intention of renouncing them forever,
the Thenardier had felt, or had appeared to feel, a scruple.  She said
to her husband:  "But this is abandoning our children!"  Thenardier,
masterful and phlegmatic, cauterized the scruple with this saying: 
"Jean Jacques Rousseau did even better!"  From scruples, the mother
proceeded to uneasiness:  "But what if the police were to annoy us? 
Tell me, Monsieur Thenardier, is what we have done permissible?" 
Thenardier replied:  "Everything is permissible.  No one will see
anything but true blue in it.  Besides, no one has any interest in
looking closely after children who have not a sou."

Magnon was a sort of fashionable woman in the sphere of crime. 
She was careful about her toilet.  She shared her lodgings,
which were furnished in an affected and wretched style, with a clever
gallicized English thief.  This English woman, who had become
a naturalized Parisienne, recommended by very wealthy relations,
intimately connected with the medals in the Library and Mademoiselle
Mar's diamonds, became celebrated later on in judicial accounts. 
She was called Mamselle Miss.

The two little creatures who had fallen to Magnon had no reason to
complain of their lot.  Recommended by the eighty francs, they were
well cared for, as is everything from which profit is derived;
they were neither badly clothed, nor badly fed; they were treated
almost like "little gentlemen,"--better by their false mother than
by their real one.  Magnon played the lady, and talked no thieves'
slang in their presence.

Thus passed several years.  Thenardier augured well from the fact. 
One day, he chanced to say to Magnon as she handed him his monthly
stipend of ten francs:  "The father must give them some education."

All at once, these two poor children, who had up to that time been
protected tolerably well, even by their evil fate, were abruptly
hurled into life and forced to begin it for themselves.

A wholesale arrest of malefactors, like that in the Jondrette garret,
necessarily complicated by investigations and subsequent incarcerations,
is a veritable disaster for that hideous and occult counter-society
which pursues its existence beneath public society; an adventure of this
description entails all sorts of catastrophes in that sombre world. 
The Thenardier catastrophe involved the catastrophe of Magnon.


One day, a short time after Magnon had handed to Eponine the note
relating to the Rue Plumet, a sudden raid was made by the police
in the Rue Clocheperce; Magnon was seized, as was also Mamselle Miss;
and all the inhabitants of the house, which was of a suspicious character,
were gathered into the net.  While this was going on, the two little
boys were playing in the back yard, and saw nothing of the raid. 
When they tried to enter the house again, they found the door
fastened and the house empty.  A cobbler opposite called them to him,
and delivered to them a paper which "their mother" had left for them. 
On this paper there was an address:  M. Barge, collector of rents,
Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, No. 8.  The proprietor of the stall said to them: 
"You cannot live here any longer.  Go there.  It is near by. 
The first street on the left.  Ask your way from this paper."

The children set out, the elder leading the younger, and holding
in his hand the paper which was to guide them.  It was cold,
and his benumbed little fingers could not close very firmly,
and they did not keep a very good hold on the paper.  At the
corner of the Rue Clocheperce, a gust of wind tore it from him,
and as night was falling, the child was not able to find it again.

They began to wander aimlessly through the streets.



CHAPTER II

IN WHICH LITTLE GAVROCHE EXTRACTS PROFIT FROM NAPOLEON THE GREAT


Spring in Paris is often traversed by harsh and piercing breezes which
do not precisely chill but freeze one; these north winds which sadden
the most beautiful days produce exactly the effect of those puffs
of cold air which enter a warm room through the cracks of a badly
fitting door or window.  It seems as though the gloomy door of winter
had remained ajar, and as though the wind were pouring through it. 
In the spring of 1832, the epoch when the first great epidemic
of this century broke out in Europe, these north gales were more
harsh and piercing than ever.  It was a door even more glacial than
that of winter which was ajar.  It was the door of the sepulchre. 
In these winds one felt the breath of the cholera.

From a meteorological point of view, these cold winds possessed
this peculiarity, that they did not preclude a strong electric tension. 
Frequent storms, accompanied by thunder and lightning, burst forth
at this epoch.

One evening, when these gales were blowing rudely, to such a degree
that January seemed to have returned and that the bourgeois had
resumed their cloaks, Little Gavroche, who was always shivering
gayly under his rags, was standing as though in ecstasy before a
wig-maker's shop in the vicinity of the Orme-Saint-Gervais. He was
adorned with a woman's woollen shawl, picked up no one knows where,
and which he had converted into a neck comforter.  Little Gavroche
appeared to be engaged in intent admiration of a wax bride,
in a low-necked dress, and crowned with orange-flowers, who was
revolving in the window, and displaying her smile to passers-by,
between two argand lamps; but in reality, he was taking an observation
of the shop, in order to discover whether he could not "prig"
from the shop-front a cake of soap, which he would then proceed
to sell for a sou to a "hair-dresser" in the suburbs.  He had often
managed to breakfast off of such a roll.  He called his species
of work, for which he possessed special aptitude, "shaving barbers."

While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap,
he muttered between his teeth:  "Tuesday.  It was not Tuesday. 
Was it Tuesday?  Perhaps it was Tuesday.  Yes, it was Tuesday."

No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred.

Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last
occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now Friday.

The barber in his shop, which was warmed by a good stove, was shaving
a customer and casting a glance from time to time at the enemy,
that freezing and impudent street urchin both of whose hands were
in his pockets, but whose mind was evidently unsheathed.

While Gavroche was scrutinizing the shop-window and the cakes of
windsor soap, two children of unequal stature, very neatly dressed,
and still smaller than himself, one apparently about seven years
of age, the other five, timidly turned the handle and entered
the shop, with a request for something or other, alms possibly,
in a plaintive murmur which resembled a groan rather than a prayer. 
They both spoke at once, and their words were unintelligible because
sobs broke the voice of the younger, and the teeth of the elder were
chattering with cold.  The barber wheeled round with a furious look,
and without abandoning his razor, thrust back the elder with his left
hand and the younger with his knee, and slammed his door, saying: 
"The idea of coming in and freezing everybody for nothing!"

The two children resumed their march in tears.  In the meantime,
a cloud had risen; it had begun to rain.

Little Gavroche ran after them and accosted them:--

"What's the matter with you, brats?"

"We don't know where we are to sleep," replied the elder.

"Is that all?" said Gavroche.  "A great matter, truly.  The idea
of bawling about that.  They must be greenies!"

And adopting, in addition to his superiority, which was rather bantering,
an accent of tender authority and gentle patronage:--

"Come along with me, young 'uns!"

"Yes, sir," said the elder.

And the two children followed him as they would have followed
an archbishop.  They had stopped crying.

Gavroche led them up the Rue Saint-Antoine in the direction
of the Bastille.

As Gavroche walked along, he cast an indignant backward glance
at the barber's shop.

"That fellow has no heart, the whiting,"[35] he muttered. 
"He's an Englishman."


[35] Merlan:  a sobriquet given to hairdressers because they are
white with powder.


A woman who caught sight of these three marching in a file,
with Gavroche at their head, burst into noisy laughter.  This laugh
was wanting in respect towards the group.

"Good day, Mamselle Omnibus," said Gavroche to her.

An instant later, the wig-maker occurred to his mind once more,
and he added:--

"I am making a mistake in the beast; he's not a whiting,
he's a serpent.  Barber, I'll go and fetch a locksmith, and I'll
have a bell hung to your tail."

This wig-maker had rendered him aggressive.  As he strode over
a gutter, he apostrophized a bearded portress who was worthy
to meet Faust on the Brocken, and who had a broom in her hand.

"Madam," said he, "so you are going out with your horse?"

And thereupon, he spattered the polished boots of a pedestrian.

"You scamp!" shouted the furious pedestrian.

Gavroche elevated his nose above his shawl.

"Is Monsieur complaining?"

"Of you!" ejaculated the man.

"The office is closed," said Gavroche, "I do not receive any
more complaints."

In the meanwhile, as he went on up the street, he perceived a
beggar-girl, thirteen or fourteen years old, and clad in so short
a gown that her knees were visible, lying thoroughly chilled
under a porte-cochere. The little girl was getting to be too old
for such a thing.  Growth does play these tricks.  The petticoat
becomes short at the moment when nudity becomes indecent.

"Poor girl!" said Gavroche.  "She hasn't even trousers.  Hold on,
take this."

And unwinding all the comfortable woollen which he had around his neck,
he flung it on the thin and purple shoulders of the beggar-girl,
where the scarf became a shawl once more.

The child stared at him in astonishment, and received the shawl
in silence.  When a certain stage of distress has been reached
in his misery, the poor man no longer groans over evil, no longer
returns thanks for good.

That done:  "Brrr!" said Gavroche, who was shivering more than
Saint Martin, for the latter retained one-half of his cloak.

At this brrr! the downpour of rain, redoubled in its spite,
became furious.  The wicked skies punish good deeds.

"Ah, come now!" exclaimed Gavroche, "what's the meaning of this? 
It's re-raining! Good Heavens, if it goes on like this, I shall stop
my subscription."

And he set out on the march once more.

"It's all right," he resumed, casting a glance at the beggar-girl,
as she coiled up under the shawl, "she's got a famous peel."

And looking up at the clouds he exclaimed:--

"Caught!"

The two children followed close on his heels.

As they were passing one of these heavy grated lattices,
which indicate a baker's shop, for bread is put behind
bars like gold, Gavroche turned round:--

"Ah, by the way, brats, have we dined?"

"Monsieur," replied the elder, "we have had nothing to eat since
this morning."

"So you have neither father nor mother?" resumed Gavroche majestically.

"Excuse us, sir, we have a papa and a mamma, but we don't know
where they are."

"Sometimes that's better than knowing where they are," said Gavroche,
who was a thinker.

"We have been wandering about these two hours," continued the elder,
"we have hunted for things at the corners of the streets, but we
have found nothing."

"I know," ejaculated Gavroche, "it's the dogs who eat everything."

He went on, after a pause:--

"Ah! we have lost our authors.  We don't know what we have done
with them.  This should not be, gamins.  It's stupid to let old people
stray off like that.  Come now! we must have a snooze all the same."

However, he asked them no questions.  What was more simple than
that they should have no dwelling place!

The elder of the two children, who had almost entirely recovered
the prompt heedlessness of childhood, uttered this exclamation:--

"It's queer, all the same.  Mamma told us that she would take us
to get a blessed spray on Palm Sunday."

"Bosh," said Gavroche.

"Mamma," resumed the elder, "is a lady who lives with Mamselle Miss."

"Tanflute!" retorted Gavroche.

Meanwhile he had halted, and for the last two minutes he had been
feeling and fumbling in all sorts of nooks which his rags contained.

At last he tossed his head with an air intended to be merely satisfied,
but which was triumphant, in reality.

"Let us be calm, young 'uns.  Here's supper for three."

And from one of his pockets he drew forth a sou.

Without allowing the two urchins time for amazement, he pushed
both of them before him into the baker's shop, and flung his sou
on the counter, crying:--

"Boy! five centimes' worth of bread."

The baker, who was the proprietor in person, took up a loaf and a knife.

"In three pieces, my boy!" went on Gavroche.

And he added with dignity:--

"There are three of us."

And seeing that the baker, after scrutinizing the three customers,
had taken down a black loaf, he thrust his finger far up his nose
with an inhalation as imperious as though he had had a pinch of the
great Frederick's snuff on the tip of his thumb, and hurled this
indignant apostrophe full in the baker's face:--

"Keksekca?"

Those of our readers who might be tempted to espy in this
interpellation of Gavroche's to the baker a Russian or a Polish word,
or one of those savage cries which the Yoways and the Botocudos hurl
at each other from bank to bank of a river, athwart the solitudes,
are warned that it is a word which they [our readers] utter every day,
and which takes the place of the phrase:  "Qu'est-ce que c'est
que cela?"  The baker understood perfectly, and replied:--

"Well!  It's bread, and very good bread of the second quality."

"You mean larton brutal [black bread]!" retorted Gavroche,
calmly and coldly disdainful.  "White bread, boy! white bread
[larton savonne]! I'm standing treat."

The baker could not repress a smile, and as he cut the white bread
he surveyed them in a compassionate way which shocked Gavroche.

"Come, now, baker's boy!" said he, "what are you taking our measure
like that for?"

All three of them placed end to end would have hardly made a measure.

When the bread was cut, the baker threw the sou into his drawer,
and Gavroche said to the two children:--

"Grub away."

The little boys stared at him in surprise.

Gavroche began to laugh.

"Ah! hullo, that's so! they don't understand yet, they're too small."

And he repeated:--

"Eat away."

At the same time, he held out a piece of bread to each of them.

And thinking that the elder, who seemed to him the more worthy
of his conversation, deserved some special encouragement and ought
to be relieved from all hesitation to satisfy his appetite, he added,
as be handed him the largest share:--

"Ram that into your muzzle."

One piece was smaller than the others; he kept this for himself.

The poor children, including Gavroche, were famished. 
As they tore their bread apart in big mouthfuls, they blocked up
the shop of the baker, who, now that they had paid their money,
looked angrily at them.

"Let's go into the street again," said Gavroche.

They set off once more in the direction of the Bastille.

From time to time, as they passed the lighted shop-windows,
the smallest halted to look at the time on a leaden watch
which was suspended from his neck by a cord.

"Well, he is a very green 'un," said Gavroche.

Then, becoming thoughtful, he muttered between his teeth:--

"All the same, if I had charge of the babes I'd lock 'em up better
than that."

Just as they were finishing their morsel of bread, and had reached
the angle of that gloomy Rue des Ballets, at the other end
of which the low and threatening wicket of La Force was visible:--

"Hullo, is that you, Gavroche?" said some one.

"Hullo, is that you, Montparnasse?" said Gavroche.

A man had just accosted the street urchin, and the man was no
other than Montparnasse in disguise, with blue spectacles,
but recognizable to Gavroche.

"The bow-wows!" went on Gavroche, "you've got a hide the color
of a linseed plaster, and blue specs like a doctor.  You're putting
on style, 'pon my word!"

"Hush!" ejaculated Montparnasse, "not so loud."

And he drew Gavroche hastily out of range of the lighted shops.

The two little ones followed mechanically, holding each other
by the hand.

When they were ensconced under the arch of a portecochere,
sheltered from the rain and from all eyes:--

"Do you know where I'm going?" demanded Montparnasse.

"To the Abbey of Ascend-with-Regret,"[36] replied Gavroche.


[36] The scaffold.


"Joker!"

And Montparnasse went on:--

"I'm going to find Babet."

"Ah!" exclaimed Gavroche, "so her name is Babet."

Montparnasse lowered his voice:--

"Not she, he."

"Ah!  Babet."

"Yes, Babet."

"I thought he was buckled."

"He has undone the buckle," replied Montparnasse.

And he rapidly related to the gamin how, on the morning of that very day,
Babet, having been transferred to La Conciergerie, had made his escape,
by turning to the left instead of to the right in "the police office."

Gavroche expressed his admiration for this skill.

"What a dentist!" he cried.

Montparnasse added a few details as to Babet's flight, and ended with:--

"Oh!  That's not all."

Gavroche, as he listened, had seized a cane that Montparnasse
held in his hand, and mechanically pulled at the upper part,
and the blade of a dagger made its appearance.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, pushing the dagger back in haste, "you have
brought along your gendarme disguised as a bourgeois."

Montparnasse winked.

"The deuce!" resumed Gavroche, "so you're going to have a bout
with the bobbies?"

"You can't tell," replied Montparnasse with an indifferent air. 
"It's always a good thing to have a pin about one."

Gavroche persisted:--

"What are you up to to-night?"

Again Montparnasse took a grave tone, and said, mouthing
every syllable:  "Things."

And abruptly changing the conversation:--

"By the way!"

"What?"

"Something happened t'other day.  Fancy.  I meet a bourgeois. 
He makes me a present of a sermon and his purse.  I put it in my pocket. 
A minute later, I feel in my pocket.  There's nothing there."

"Except the sermon," said Gavroche.

"But you," went on Montparnasse, "where are you bound for now?"

Gavroche pointed to his two proteges, and said:--

"I'm going to put these infants to bed."

"Whereabouts is the bed?"

"At my house."

"Where's your house?"

"At my house."

"So you have a lodging?"

"Yes, I have."

"And where is your lodging?"

"In the elephant," said Gavroche.

Montparnasse, though not naturally inclined to astonishment,
could not restrain an exclamation.

"In the elephant!"

"Well, yes, in the elephant!" retorted Gavroche.  "Kekcaa?"

This is another word of the language which no one writes,
and which every one speaks.

Kekcaa signifies:  Quest que c'est que cela a?  [What's the matter
with that?]

The urchin's profound remark recalled Montparnasse to calmness
and good sense.  He appeared to return to better sentiments
with regard to Gavroche's lodging.

"Of course," said he, "yes, the elephant.  Is it comfortable there?"

"Very," said Gavroche.  "It's really bully there.  There ain't
any draughts, as there are under the bridges."

"How do you get in?"

"Oh, I get in."

"So there is a hole?" demanded Montparnasse.

"Parbleu!  I should say so.  But you mustn't tell.  It's between
the fore legs.  The bobbies haven't seen it."

"And you climb up?  Yes, I understand."

"A turn of the hand, cric, crac, and it's all over, no one there."

After a pause, Gavroche added:--

"I shall have a ladder for these children."

Montparnasse burst out laughing:--

"Where the devil did you pick up those young 'uns?"

Gavroche replied with great simplicity:--

"They are some brats that a wig-maker made me a present of."

Meanwhile, Montparnasse had fallen to thinking:--

"You recognized me very readily," he muttered.

He took from his pocket two small objects which were nothing more than
two quills wrapped in cotton, and thrust one up each of his nostrils. 
This gave him a different nose.

"That changes you," remarked Gavroche, "you are less homely so,
you ought to keep them on all the time."

Montparnasse was a handsome fellow, but Gavroche was a tease.

"Seriously," demanded Montparnasse, "how do you like me so?"

The sound of his voice was different also.  In a twinkling,
Montparnasse had become unrecognizable.

"Oh!  Do play Porrichinelle for us!" exclaimed Gavroche.

The two children, who had not been listening up to this point,
being occupied themselves in thrusting their fingers up their noses,
drew near at this name, and stared at Montparnasse with dawning joy
and admiration.

Unfortunately, Montparnasse was troubled.

He laid his hand on Gavroche's shoulder, and said to him,
emphasizing his words:  "Listen to what I tell you, boy! if I
were on the square with my dog, my knife, and my wife, and if you
were to squander ten sous on me, I wouldn't refuse to work,
but this isn't Shrove Tuesday."

This odd phrase produced a singular effect on the gamin. 
He wheeled round hastily, darted his little sparkling eyes about him
with profound attention, and perceived a police sergeant standing
with his back to them a few paces off.  Gavroche allowed an: 
"Ah! good!" to escape him, but immediately suppressed it, and shaking
Montparnasse's hand:--

"Well, good evening," said he, "I'm going off to my elephant
with my brats.  Supposing that you should need me some night,
you can come and hunt me up there.  I lodge on the entresol. 
There is no porter.  You will inquire for Monsieur Gavroche."

"Very good," said Montparnasse.

And they parted, Montparnasse betaking himself in the direction
of the Greve, and Gavroche towards the Bastille.  The little one
of five, dragged along by his brother who was dragged by Gavroche,
turned his head back several times to watch "Porrichinelle" as he went.

The ambiguous phrase by means of which Montparnasse had warned Gavroche
of the presence of the policeman, contained no other talisman than
the assonance dig repeated five or six times in different forms. 
This syllable, dig, uttered alone or artistically mingled with the
words of a phrase, means:  "Take care, we can no longer talk freely." 
There was besides, in Montparnasse's sentence, a literary beauty
which was lost upon Gavroche, that is mon dogue, ma dague et ma digue,
a slang expression of the Temple, which signifies my dog, my knife,
and my wife, greatly in vogue among clowns and the red-tails in the
great century when Moliere wrote and Callot drew.

Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest corner
of the Place de la Bastille, near the basin of the canal, excavated in
the ancient ditch of the fortress-prison, a singular monument,
which has already been effaced from the memories of Parisians,
and which deserved to leave some trace, for it was the idea of
a "member of the Institute, the General-in-chief of the army of Egypt."

We say monument, although it was only a rough model.  But this
model itself, a marvellous sketch, the grandiose skeleton of an idea
of Napoleon's, which successive gusts of wind have carried away
and thrown, on each occasion, still further from us, had become
historical and had acquired a certain definiteness which contrasted
with its provisional aspect.  It was an elephant forty feet high,
constructed of timber and masonry, bearing on its back a tower
which resembled a house, formerly painted green by some dauber,
and now painted black by heaven, the wind, and time.  In this deserted
and unprotected corner of the place, the broad brow of the colossus,
his trunk, his tusks, his tower, his enormous crupper, his four feet,
like columns produced, at night, under the starry heavens, a surprising
and terrible form.  It was a sort of symbol of popular force. 
It was sombre, mysterious, and immense.  It was some mighty,
visible phantom, one knew not what, standing erect beside the invisible
spectre of the Bastille.

Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at it. 
It was falling into ruins; every season the plaster which detached
itself from its sides formed hideous wounds upon it.  "The aediles,"
as the expression ran in elegant dialect, had forgotten it ever
since 1814.  There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling,
surrounded by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen;
cracks meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail,
tall grass flourished between its legs; and, as the level of the
place had been rising all around it for a space of thirty years,
by that slow and continuous movement which insensibly elevates
the soil of large towns, it stood in a hollow, and it looked
as though the ground were giving way beneath it.  It was unclean,
despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the eyes of the bourgeois,
melancholy in the eyes of the thinker.  There was something about it
of the dirt which is on the point of being swept out, and something
of the majesty which is on the point of being decapitated. 
As we have said, at night, its aspect changed.  Night is the real
element of everything that is dark.  As soon as twilight descended,
the old elephant became transfigured; he assumed a tranquil and
redoubtable appearance in the formidable serenity of the shadows. 
Being of the past, he belonged to night; and obscurity was in keeping
with his grandeur.

This rough, squat, heavy, hard, austere, almost misshapen,
but assuredly majestic monument, stamped with a sort of magnificent
and savage gravity, has disappeared, and left to reign in peace,
a sort of gigantic stove, ornamented with its pipe, which has replaced
the sombre fortress with its nine towers, very much as the bourgeoisie
replaces the feudal classes.  It is quite natural that a stove
should be the symbol of an epoch in which a pot contains power. 
This epoch will pass away, people have already begun to understand that,
if there can be force in a boiler, there can be no force except in
the brain; in other words, that which leads and drags on the world,
is not locomotives, but ideas.  Harness locomotives to ideas,--
that is well done; but do not mistake the horse for the rider.

At all events, to return to the Place de la Bastille, the architect
of this elephant succeeded in making a grand thing out of plaster;
the architect of the stove has succeeded in making a pretty thing
out of bronze.

This stove-pipe, which has been baptized by a sonorous name, and called
the column of July, this monument of a revolution that miscarried,
was still enveloped in 1832, in an immense shirt of woodwork,
which we regret, for our part, and by a vast plank enclosure,
which completed the task of isolating the elephant.

It was towards this corner of the place, dimly lighted by the reflection
of a distant street lamp, that the gamin guided his two "brats."

The reader must permit us to interrupt ourselves here and to remind
him that we are dealing with simple reality, and that twenty
years ago, the tribunals were called upon to judge, under the charge
of vagabondage, and mutilation of a public monument, a child
who had been caught asleep in this very elephant of the Bastille. 
This fact noted, we proceed.

On arriving in the vicinity of the colossus,
Gavroche comprehended the effect which
the infinitely great might produce on the infinitely small, and said:--

"Don't be scared, infants."

Then he entered through a gap in the fence into the elephant's
enclosure and helped the young ones to clamber through the breach. 
The two children, somewhat frightened, followed Gavroche without
uttering a word, and confided themselves to this little Providence
in rags which had given them bread and had promised them a shelter.

There, extended along the fence, lay a ladder which by day
served the laborers in the neighboring timber-yard. Gavroche
raised it with remarkable vigor, and placed it against one of
the elephant's forelegs.  Near the point where the ladder ended,
a sort of black hole in the belly of the colossus could be distinguished.

Gavroche pointed out the ladder and the hole to his guests,
and said to them:--

"Climb up and go in."

The two little boys exchanged terrified glances.

"You're afraid, brats!" exclaimed Gavroche.

And he added:--

"You shall see!"

He clasped the rough leg of the elephant, and in a twinkling,
without deigning to make use of the ladder, he had reached
the aperture.  He entered it as an adder slips through a crevice,
and disappeared within, and an instant later, the two children
saw his head, which looked pale, appear vaguely, on the edge
of the shadowy hole, like a wan and whitish spectre.

"Well!" he exclaimed, "climb up, young 'uns!  You'll see how snug
it is here!  Come up, you!" he said to the elder, "I'll lend you
a hand."

The little fellows nudged each other, the gamin frightened and
inspired them with confidence at one and the same time, and then,
it was raining very hard.  The elder one undertook the risk. 
The younger, on seeing his brother climbing up, and himself left alone
between the paws of this huge beast, felt greatly inclined to cry,
but he did not dare.

The elder lad climbed, with uncertain steps, up the rungs of the ladder;
Gavroche, in the meanwhile, encouraging him with exclamations
like a fencing-master to his pupils, or a muleteer to his mules.

"Don't be afraid!--That's it!--Come on!--Put your feet there!--
Give us your hand here!--Boldly!"

And when the child was within reach, he seized him suddenly
and vigorously by the arm, and pulled him towards him.

"Nabbed!" said he.

The brat had passed through the crack.

"Now," said Gavroche, "wait for me.  Be so good as to take
a seat, Monsieur."

And making his way out of the hole as he had entered it, he slipped
down the elephant's leg with the agility of a monkey, landed on
his feet in the grass, grasped the child of five round the body,
and planted him fairly in the middle of the ladder, then he began
to climb up behind him, shouting to the elder:--

"I'm going to boost him, do you tug."

And in another instant, the small lad was pushed, dragged, pulled,
thrust, stuffed into the hole, before he had time to recover himself,
and Gavroche, entering behind him, and repulsing the ladder with a
kick which sent it flat on the grass, began to clap his hands and to cry:--

"Here we are!  Long live General Lafayette!"

This explosion over, he added:--

"Now, young 'uns, you are in my house."

Gavroche was at home, in fact.

Oh, unforeseen utility of the useless!  Charity of great things! 
Goodness of giants!  This huge monument, which had embodied
an idea of the Emperor's, had become the box of a street urchin. 
The brat had been accepted and sheltered by the colossus. 
The bourgeois decked out in their Sunday finery who passed the
elephant of the Bastille, were fond of saying as they scanned it
disdainfully with their prominent eyes:  "What's the good of that?" 
It served to save from the cold, the frost, the hail, and rain,
to shelter from the winds of winter, to preserve from slumber
in the mud which produces fever, and from slumber in the snow
which produces death, a little being who had no father, no mother,
no bread, no clothes, no refuge.  It served to receive the innocent
whom society repulsed.  It served to diminish public crime. 
It was a lair open to one against whom all doors were shut. 
It seemed as though the miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin
and oblivion, covered with warts, with mould, and ulcers, tottering,
worm-eaten, abandoned, condemned, a sort of mendicant colossus,
asking alms in vain with a benevolent look in the midst of the
cross-roads, had taken pity on that other mendicant, the poor pygmy,
who roamed without shoes to his feet, without a roof over his head,
blowing on his fingers, clad in rags, fed on rejected scraps. 
That was what the elephant of the Bastille was good for. 
This idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken back by God. 
That which had been merely illustrious, had become august. 
In order to realize his thought, the Emperor should have had porphyry,
brass, iron, gold, marble; the old collection of planks, beams and
plaster sufficed for God.  The Emperor had had the dream of a genius;
in that Titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, with trunk uplifted,
bearing its tower and scattering on all sides its merry and vivifying
waters, he wished to incarnate the people.  God had done a grander
thing with it, he had lodged a child there.

The hole through which Gavroche had entered was a breach which was
hardly visible from the outside, being concealed, as we have stated,
beneath the elephant's belly, and so narrow that it was only cats
and homeless children who could pass through it.

"Let's begin," said Gavroche, "by telling the porter that we are
not at home."

And plunging into the darkness with the assurance of a person who is
well acquainted with his apartments, he took a plank and stopped
up the aperture.

Again Gavroche plunged into the obscurity.  The children heard
the crackling of the match thrust into the phosphoric bottle. 
The chemical match was not yet in existence; at that epoch the Fumade
steel represented progress.

A sudden light made them blink; Gavroche had just managed to
ignite one of those bits of cord dipped in resin which are called
cellar rats.  The cellar rat, which emitted more smoke than light,
rendered the interior of the elephant confusedly visible.

Gavroche's two guests glanced about them, and the sensation
which they experienced was something like that which one would
feel if shut up in the great tun of Heidelberg, or, better still,
like what Jonah must have felt in the biblical belly of the whale. 
An entire and gigantic skeleton appeared enveloping them.  Above, a long
brown beam, whence started at regular distances, massive, arching ribs,
represented the vertebral column with its sides, stalactites of
plaster depended from them like entrails, and vast spiders'
webs stretching from side to side, formed dirty diaphragms. 
Here and there, in the corners, were visible large blackish spots
which had the appearance of being alive, and which changed places
rapidly with an abrupt and frightened movement.

Fragments which had fallen from the elephant's back into his belly
had filled up the cavity, so that it was possible to walk upon it
as on a floor.

The smaller child nestled up against his brother, and whispered
to him:--

"It's black."

This remark drew an exclamation from Gavroche.  The petrified air
of the two brats rendered some shock necessary.

"What's that you are gabbling about there?" he exclaimed. 
"Are you scoffing at me?  Are you turning up your noses? 
Do you want the tuileries?  Are you brutes?  Come, say!  I warn you
that I don't belong to the regiment of simpletons.  Ah, come now,
are you brats from the Pope's establishment?"

A little roughness is good in cases of fear.  It is reassuring. 
The two children drew close to Gavroche.

Gavroche, paternally touched by this confidence, passed from grave
to gentle, and addressing the smaller:--

"Stupid," said he, accenting the insulting word, with a caressing
intonation, "it's outside that it is black.  Outside it's raining,
here it does not rain; outside it's cold, here there's not an atom
of wind; outside there are heaps of people, here there's no one;
outside there ain't even the moon, here there's my candle,
confound it!"

The two children began to look upon the apartment with less terror;
but Gavroche allowed them no more time for contemplation.

"Quick," said he.

And he pushed them towards what we are very glad to be able to call
the end of the room.

There stood his bed.

Gavroche's bed was complete; that is to say, it had a mattress,
a blanket, and an alcove with curtains.

The mattress was a straw mat, the blanket a rather large strip
of gray woollen stuff, very warm and almost new.  This is what
the alcove consisted of:--

Three rather long poles, thrust into and consolidated, with the rubbish
which formed the floor, that is to say, the belly of the elephant,
two in front and one behind, and united by a rope at their summits,
so as to form a pyramidal bundle.  This cluster supported
a trellis-work of brass wire which was simply placed upon it,
but artistically applied, and held by fastenings of iron wire,
so that it enveloped all three holes.  A row of very heavy stones kept
this network down to the floor so that nothing could pass under it. 
This grating was nothing else than a piece of the brass screens
with which aviaries are covered in menageries.  Gavroche's bed stood
as in a cage, behind this net.  The whole resembled an Esquimaux tent.

This trellis-work took the place of curtains.

Gavroche moved aside the stones which fastened the net down in front,
and the two folds of the net which lapped over each other fell apart.

"Down on all fours, brats!" said Gavroche.

He made his guests enter the cage with great precaution, then he
crawled in after them, pulled the stones together, and closed
the opening hermetically again.

All three had stretched out on the mat.  Gavroche still had
the cellar rat in his hand.

"Now," said he, "go to sleep!  I'm going to suppress the candelabra."

"Monsieur," the elder of the brothers asked Gavroche, pointing to
the netting, "what's that for?"

"That," answered Gavroche gravely, "is for the rats.  Go to sleep!"

Nevertheless, he felt obliged to add a few words of instruction
for the benefit of these young creatures, and he continued:--

"It's a thing from the Jardin des Plantes.  It's used for fierce animals. 
There's a whole shopful of them there.  All you've got to do is to
climb over a wall, crawl through a window, and pass through a door. 
You can get as much as you want."

As he spoke, he wrapped the younger one up bodily in a fold
of the blanket, and the little one murmured:--

"Oh! how good that is!  It's warm!"

Gavroche cast a pleased eye on the blanket.

"That's from the Jardin des Plantes, too," said he.  "I took
that from the monkeys."

And, pointing out to the eldest the mat on which he was lying,
a very thick and admirably made mat, he added:--

"That belonged to the giraffe."

After a pause he went on:--

"The beasts had all these things.  I took them away from them. 
It didn't trouble them.  I told them:  `It's for the elephant.'"

He paused, and then resumed:--

"You crawl over the walls and you don't care a straw for the government. 
So there now!"

The two children gazed with timid and stupefied respect on this
intrepid and ingenious being, a vagabond like themselves,
isolated like themselves, frail like themselves, who had something
admirable and all-powerful about him, who seemed supernatural
to them, and whose physiognomy was composed of all the grimaces
of an old mountebank, mingled with the most ingenuous and charming smiles.

"Monsieur," ventured the elder timidly, "you are not afraid
of the police, then?"

Gavroche contented himself with replying:--

"Brat!  Nobody says `police,' they say `bobbies.'"

The smaller had his eyes wide open, but he said nothing. 
As he was on the edge of the mat, the elder being in the middle,
Gavroche tucked the blanket round him as a mother might have done,
and heightened the mat under his head with old rags, in such a way
as to form a pillow for the child.  Then he turned to the elder:--

"Hey!  We're jolly comfortable here, ain't we?"

"Ah, yes!" replied the elder, gazing at Gavroche with the expression
of a saved angel.

The two poor little children who had been soaked through,
began to grow warm once more.

"Ah, by the way," continued Gavroche, "what were you bawling about?"

And pointing out the little one to his brother:--

"A mite like that, I've nothing to say about, but the idea of a big
fellow like you crying!  It's idiotic; you looked like a calf."

"Gracious," replied the child, "we have no lodging."

"Bother!" retorted Gavroche, "you don't say `lodgings,' you say
`crib.'"

"And then, we were afraid of being alone like that at night."

"You don't say `night,' you say `darkmans.'"

"Thank you, sir," said the child.

"Listen," went on Gavroche, "you must never bawl again over anything. 
I'll take care of you.  You shall see what fun we'll have. 
In summer, we'll go to the Glaciere with Navet, one of my pals,
we'll bathe in the Gare, we'll run stark naked in front of the rafts
on the bridge at Austerlitz,--that makes the laundresses raging. 
They scream, they get mad, and if you only knew how ridiculous they are! 
We'll go and see the man-skeleton. And then I'll take you to the play. 
I'll take you to see Frederick Lemaitre.  I have tickets, I know
some of the actors, I even played in a piece once.  There were a lot
of us fellers, and we ran under a cloth, and that made the sea. 
I'll get you an engagement at my theatre.  We'll go to see the savages. 
They ain't real, those savages ain't. They wear pink tights
that go all in wrinkles, and you can see where their elbows have
been darned with white.  Then, we'll go to the Opera.  We'll get
in with the hired applauders.  The Opera claque is well managed. 
I wouldn't associate with the claque on the boulevard.  At the Opera,
just fancy! some of them pay twenty sous, but they're ninnies. 
They're called dishclouts.  And then we'll go to see the guillotine work. 
I'll show you the executioner.  He lives in the Rue des Marais. 
Monsieur Sanson.  He has a letter-box at his door.  Ah! we'll have
famous fun!"

At that moment a drop of wax fell on Gavroche's finger, and recalled
him to the realities of life.

"The deuce!" said he, "there's the wick giving out.  Attention! 
I can't spend more than a sou a month on my lighting.  When a body
goes to bed, he must sleep.  We haven't the time to read M. Paul de
Kock's romances.  And besides, the light might pass through the cracks
of the porte-cochere, and all the bobbies need to do is to see it."

"And then," remarked the elder timidly,--he alone dared talk
to Gavroche, and reply to him, "a spark might fall in the straw,
and we must look out and not burn the house down."

"People don't say `burn the house down,'" remarked Gavroche,
"they say `blaze the crib.'"

The storm increased in violence, and the heavy downpour
beat upon the back of the colossus amid claps of thunder. 
"You're taken in, rain!" said Gavroche.  "It amuses me to hear
the decanter run down the legs of the house.  Winter is a stupid;
it wastes its merchandise, it loses its labor, it can't wet us,
and that makes it kick up a row, old water-carrier that it is."

This allusion to the thunder, all the consequences of which Gavroche,
in his character of a philosopher of the nineteenth century, accepted,
was followed by a broad flash of lightning, so dazzling that a
hint of it entered the belly of the elephant through the crack. 
Almost at the same instant, the thunder rumbled with great fury. 
The two little creatures uttered a shriek, and started up so eagerly
that the network came near being displaced, but Gavroche turned
his bold face to them, and took advantage of the clap of thunder
to burst into a laugh.

"Calm down, children.  Don't topple over the edifice.  That's fine,
first-class thunder; all right.  That's no slouch of a streak
of lightning.  Bravo for the good God!  Deuce take it!  It's almost
as good as it is at the Ambigu."

That said, he restored order in the netting, pushed the two children
gently down on the bed, pressed their knees, in order to stretch
them out at full length, and exclaimed:--

"Since the good God is lighting his candle, I can blow out mine. 
Now, babes, now, my young humans, you must shut your peepers. 
It's very bad not to sleep.  It'll make you swallow the strainer,
or, as they say, in fashionable society, stink in the gullet. 
Wrap yourself up well in the hide!  I'm going to put out the light. 
Are you ready?"

"Yes," murmured the elder, "I'm all right.  I seem to have feathers
under my head."

"People don't say `head,'" cried Gavroche, "they say `nut'."

The two children nestled close to each other, Gavroche finished arranging
them on the mat, drew the blanket up to their very ears, then repeated,
for the third time, his injunction in the hieratical tongue:--

"Shut your peepers!"

And he snuffed out his tiny light.

Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling
began to affect the netting under which the three children lay.

It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced a
metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper wire. 
This was accompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries.

The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead,
and chilled with terror, jogged his brother's elbow; but the elder
brother had already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered. 
Then the little one, who could no longer control his terror,
questioned Gavroche, but in a very low tone, and with bated breath:--

"Sir?"

"Hey?" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.

"What is that?"

"It's the rats," replied Gavroche.

And he laid his head down on the mat again.

The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass of
the elephant, and who were the living black spots which we have
already mentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle,
so long as it had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern,
which was the same as their city, had returned to darkness,
scenting what the good story-teller Perrault calls "fresh meat,"
they had hurled themselves in throngs on Gavroche's tent,
had climbed to the top of it, and had begun to bite the meshes
as though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap.

Still the little one could not sleep.

"Sir?" he began again.

"Hey?" said Gavroche.

"What are rats?"

"They are mice."

This explanation reassured the child a little.  He had seen white
mice in the course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. 
Nevertheless, he lifted up his voice once more.

"Sir?"

"Hey?" said Gavroche again.

"Why don't you have a cat?"

"I did have one," replied Gavroche, "I brought one here, but they
ate her."

This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little
fellow began to tremble again.

The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the fourth time:--

"Monsieur?"

"Hey?"

"Who was it that was eaten?"

"The cat."

"And who ate the cat?"

"The rats."

"The mice?"

"Yes, the rats."

The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice
which ate cats, pursued:--

"Sir, would those mice eat us?"

"Wouldn't they just!" ejaculated Gavroche.

The child's terror had reached its climax.  But Gavroche added:--

"Don't be afraid.  They can't get in.  And besides, I'm here! 
Here, catch hold of my hand.  Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!"

At the same time Gavroche grasped the little fellow's hand
across his brother.  The child pressed the hand close to him,
and felt reassured.  Courage and strength have these mysterious
ways of communicating themselves.  Silence reigned round them
once more, the sound of their voices had frightened off the rats;
at the expiration of a few minutes, they came raging back, but in vain,
the three little fellows were fast asleep and heard nothing more.

The hours of the night fled away.  Darkness covered the vast
Place de la Bastille.  A wintry gale, which mingled with
the rain, blew in gusts, the patrol searched all the doorways,
alleys, enclosures, and obscure nooks, and in their search for
nocturnal vagabonds they passed in silence before the elephant;
the monster, erect, motionless, staring open-eyed into the shadows,
had the appearance of dreaming happily over his good deed;
and sheltered from heaven and from men the three poor sleeping children.

In order to understand what is about to follow, the reader must
remember, that, at that epoch, the Bastille guard-house was situated
at the other end of the square, and that what took place in the
vicinity of the elephant could neither be seen nor heard by the sentinel.

Towards the end of that hour which immediately precedes the dawn,
a man turned from the Rue Saint-Antoine at a run, made the circuit
of the enclosure of the column of July, and glided between
the palings until he was underneath the belly of the elephant. 
If any light had illuminated that man, it might have been divined
from the thorough manner in which he was soaked that he had passed
the night in the rain.  Arrived beneath the elephant, he uttered
a peculiar cry, which did not belong to any human tongue, and which
a paroquet alone could have imitated.  Twice he repeated this cry,
of whose orthography the following barely conveys an idea:--

"Kirikikiou!"

At the second cry, a clear, young, merry voice responded from
the belly of the elephant:--

"Yes!"

Almost immediately, the plank which closed the hole was drawn aside,
and gave passage to a child who descended the elephant's leg, and fell
briskly near the man.  It was Gavroche.  The man was Montparnasse.

As for his cry of Kirikikiou,--that was, doubtless, what the child
had meant, when he said:--

"You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche."

On hearing it, he had waked with a start, had crawled out of his
"alcove," pushing apart the netting a little, and carefully drawing
it together again, then he had opened the trap, and descended.

The man and the child recognized each other silently amid the gloom: 
Montparnasse confined himself to the remark:--

"We need you.  Come, lend us a hand."

The lad asked for no further enlightenment.

"I'm with you," said he.

And both took their way towards the Rue Saint-Antoine, whence
Montparnasse had emerged, winding rapidly through the long file
of market-gardeners' carts which descend towards the markets at that hour.

The market-gardeners, crouching, half-asleep, in their wagons,
amid the salads and vegetables, enveloped to their very eyes in
their mufflers on account of the beating rain, did not even glance
at these strange pedestrians.



CHAPTER III

THE VICISSITUDES OF FLIGHT


This is what had taken place that same night at the La Force:--

An escape had been planned between Babet, Brujon, Guelemer,
and Thenardier, although Thenardier was in close confinement. 
Babet had arranged the matter for his own benefit, on the same day,
as the reader has seen from Montparnasse's account to Gavroche. 
Montparnasse was to help them from outside.

Brujon, after having passed a month in the punishment cell,
had had time, in the first place, to weave a rope, in the second,
to mature a plan.  In former times, those severe places where the
discipline of the prison delivers the convict into his own hands,
were composed of four stone walls, a stone ceiling, a flagged pavement,
a camp bed, a grated window, and a door lined with iron, and were
called dungeons; but the dungeon was judged to be too terrible;
nowadays they are composed of an iron door, a grated window,
a camp bed, a flagged pavement, four stone walls, and a stone ceiling,
and are called chambers of punishment.  A little light penetrates
towards mid-day. The inconvenient point about these chambers which,
as the reader sees, are not dungeons, is that they allow the persons
who should be at work to think.

So Brujon meditated, and he emerged from the chamber of punishment
with a rope.  As he had the name of being very dangerous in
the Charlemagne courtyard, he was placed in the New Building. 
The first thing he found in the New Building was Guelemer, the second
was a nail; Guelemer, that is to say, crime; a nail, that is
to say, liberty.  Brujon, of whom it is high time that the reader
should have a complete idea, was, with an appearance of delicate health
and a profoundly premeditated languor, a polished, intelligent sprig,
and a thief, who had a caressing glance, and an atrocious smile. 
His glance resulted from his will, and his smile from his nature. 
His first studies in his art had been directed to roofs.  He had
made great progress in the industry of the men who tear off lead,
who plunder the roofs and despoil the gutters by the process called
double pickings.

The circumstance which put the finishing touch on the moment
peculiarly favorable for an attempt at escape, was that the roofers
were re-laying and re-jointing, at that very moment, a portion of
the slates on the prison.  The Saint-Bernard courtyard was no longer
absolutely isolated from the Charlemagne and the Saint-Louis courts. 
Up above there were scaffoldings and ladders; in other words,
bridges and stairs in the direction of liberty.

The New Building, which was the most cracked and decrepit thing
to be seen anywhere in the world, was the weak point in the prison. 
The walls were eaten by saltpetre to such an extent that the
authorities had been obliged to line the vaults of the dormitories
with a sheathing of wood, because stones were in the habit of
becoming detached and falling on the prisoners in their beds. 
In spite of this antiquity, the authorities committed the error
of confining in the New Building the most troublesome prisoners,
of placing there "the hard cases," as they say in prison parlance.

The New Building contained four dormitories, one above the other,
and a top story which was called the Bel-Air (FineAir). A large
chimney-flue, probably from some ancient kitchen of the Dukes de
la Force, started from the groundfloor, traversed all four stories,
cut the dormitories, where it figured as a flattened pillar,
into two portions, and finally pierced the roof.

Guelemer and Brujon were in the same dormitory.  They had been placed,
by way of precaution, on the lower story.  Chance ordained that
the heads of their beds should rest against the chimney.

Thenardier was directly over their heads in the top story
known as Fine-Air. The pedestrian who halts on the Rue
Culture-Sainte-Catherine, after passing the barracks of the firemen,
in front of the porte-cochere of the bathing establishment,
beholds a yard full of flowers and shrubs in wooden boxes, at the
extremity of which spreads out a little white rotunda with two wings,
brightened up with green shutters, the bucolic dream of Jean Jacques.

Not more than ten years ago, there rose above that rotunda
an enormous black, hideous, bare wall by which it was backed up.

This was the outer wall of La Force.

This wall, beside that rotunda, was Milton viewed through Berquin.

Lofty as it was, this wall was overtopped by a still blacker roof,
which could be seen beyond.  This was the roof of the New Building. 
There one could descry four dormer-windows, guarded with bars;
they were the windows of the Fine-Air.

A chimney pierced the roof; this was the chimney which traversed
the dormitories.

The Bel-Air, that top story of the New Building, was a sort of
large hall, with a Mansard roof, guarded with triple gratings and
double doors of sheet iron, which were studded with enormous bolts. 
When one entered from the north end, one had on one's left the four
dormer-windows, on one's right, facing the windows, at regular intervals,
four square, tolerably vast cages, separated by narrow passages,
built of masonry to about the height of the elbow, and the rest,
up to the roof, of iron bars.

Thenardier had been in solitary confinement in one of these cages
since the night of the 3d of February.  No one was ever able to
discover how, and by what connivance, he succeeded in procuring,
and secreting a bottle of wine, invented, so it is said, by Desrues,
with which a narcotic is mixed, and which the band of the Endormeurs,
or Sleep-compellers, rendered famous.

There are, in many prisons, treacherous employees, half-jailers,
half-thieves, who assist in escapes, who sell to the police
an unfaithful service, and who turn a penny whenever they can.

On that same night, then, when Little Gavroche picked up the two
lost children, Brujon and Guelemer, who knew that Babet, who had
escaped that morning, was waiting for them in the street as well
as Montparnasse, rose softly, and with the nail which Brujon had found,
began to pierce the chimney against which their beds stood. 
The rubbish fell on Brujon's bed, so that they were not heard. 
Showers mingled with thunder shook the doors on their hinges,
and created in the prison a terrible and opportune uproar. 
Those of the prisoners who woke, pretended to fall asleep again,
and left Guelemer and Brujon to their own devices.  Brujon was adroit;
Guelemer was vigorous.  Before any sound had reached the watcher,
who was sleeping in the grated cell which opened into the dormitory,
the wall had, been pierced, the chimney scaled, the iron grating which
barred the upper orifice of the flue forced, and the two redoubtable
ruffians were on the roof.  The wind and rain redoubled, the roof
was slippery.

"What a good night to leg it!" said Brujon.

An abyss six feet broad and eighty feet deep separated them from
the surrounding wall.  At the bottom of this abyss, they could
see the musket of a sentinel gleaming through the gloom. 
They fastened one end of the rope which Brujon had spun in his dungeon
to the stumps of the iron bars which they had just wrenched off,
flung the other over the outer wall, crossed the abyss at one bound,
clung to the coping of the wall, got astride of it, let themselves slip,
one after the other, along the rope, upon a little roof which
touches the bath-house, pulled their rope after them, jumped down
into the courtyard of the bath-house, traversed it, pushed open
the porter's wicket, beside which hung his rope, pulled this,
opened the porte-cochere, and found themselves in the street.

Three-quarters of an hour had not elapsed since they had risen
in bed in the dark, nail in hand, and their project in their heads.

A few moments later they had joined Babet and Montparnasse,
who were prowling about the neighborhood.

They had broken their rope in pulling it after them, and a bit
of it remained attached to the chimney on the roof.  They had
sustained no other damage, however, than that of scratching
nearly all the skin off their hands.

That night, Thenardier was warned, without any one being able
to explain how, and was not asleep.

Towards one o'clock in the morning, the night being very dark,
he saw two shadows pass along the roof, in the rain and squalls,
in front of the dormer-window which was opposite his cage. 
One halted at the window, long enough to dart in a glance. 
This was Brujon.

Thenardier recognized him, and understood.  This was enough.

Thenardier, rated as a burglar, and detained as a measure of precaution
under the charge of organizing a nocturnal ambush, with armed force,
was kept in sight.  The sentry, who was relieved every two hours,
marched up and down in front of his cage with loaded musket. 
The Fine-Air was lighted by a skylight.  The prisoner had on his
feet fetters weighing fifty pounds.  Every day, at four o'clock
in the afternoon, a jailer, escorted by two dogs,--this was still
in vogue at that time,--entered his cage, deposited beside his bed
a loaf of black bread weighing two pounds, a jug of water, a bowl
filled with rather thin bouillon, in which swam a few Mayagan beans,
inspected his irons and tapped the bars.  This man and his dogs made
two visits during the night.

Thenardier had obtained permission to keep a sort of iron bolt
which he used to spike his bread into a crack in the wall, "in order
to preserve it from the rats," as he said.  As Thenardier was kept
in sight, no objection had been made to this spike.  Still, it was
remembered afterwards, that one of the jailers had said: 
"It would be better to let him have only a wooden spike."

At two o'clock in the morning, the sentinel, who was an old soldier,
was relieved, and replaced by a conscript.  A few moments later,
the man with the dogs paid his visit, and went off without
noticing anything, except, possibly, the excessive youth and "the
rustic air" of the "raw recruit."  Two hours afterwards, at four
o'clock, when they came to relieve the conscript, he was found
asleep on the floor, lying like a log near Thenardier's cage. 
As for Thenardier, he was no longer there.  There was a hole in
the ceiling of his cage, and, above it, another hole in the roof. 
One of the planks of his bed had been wrenched off, and probably
carried away with him, as it was not found.  They also seized
in his cell a half-empty bottle which contained the remains
of the stupefying wine with which the soldier had been drugged. 
The soldier's bayonet had disappeared.

At the moment when this discovery was made, it was assumed that
Thenardier was out of reach.  The truth is, that he was no longer
in the New Building, but that he was still in great danger.

Thenardier, on reaching the roof of the New Building, had found
the remains of Brujon's rope hanging to the bars of the upper trap
of the chimney, but, as this broken fragment was much too short,
he had not been able to escape by the outer wall, as Brujon and
Guelemer had done.

When one turns from the Rue des Ballets into the Rue du
Roi-de-Sicile, one almost immediately encounters a repulsive ruin. 
There stood on that spot, in the last century, a house of which only
the back wall now remains, a regular wall of masonry, which rises
to the height of the third story between the adjoining buildings. 
This ruin can be recognized by two large square windows which are
still to be seen there; the middle one, that nearest the right gable,
is barred with a worm-eaten beam adjusted like a prop.  Through these
windows there was formerly visible a lofty and lugubrious wall,
which was a fragment of the outer wall of La Force.

The empty space on the street left by the demolished house is
half-filled by a fence of rotten boards, shored up by five stone posts. 
In this recess lies concealed a little shanty which leans against
the portion of the ruin which has remained standing.  The fence
has a gate, which, a few years ago, was fastened only by a latch.

It was the crest of this ruin that Thenardier had succeeded
in reaching, a little after one o'clock in the morning.

How had he got there?  That is what no one has ever been able
to explain or understand.  The lightning must, at the same time,
have hindered and helped him.  Had he made use of the ladders
and scaffoldings of the slaters to get from roof to roof,
from enclosure to enclosure, from compartment to compartment,
to the buildings of the Charlemagne court, then to the buildings
of the Saint-Louis court, to the outer wall, and thence to the hut
on the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile? But in that itinerary there existed
breaks which seemed to render it an impossibility.  Had he placed
the plank from his bed like a bridge from the roof of the Fine-Air
to the outer wall, and crawled flat, on his belly on the coping of the
outer wall the whole distance round the prison as far as the hut? 
But the outer wall of La Force formed a crenellated and unequal line;
it mounted and descended, it dropped at the firemen's barracks,
it rose towards the bath-house, it was cut in twain by buildings,
it was not even of the same height on the Hotel Lamoignon as on
the Rue Pavee; everywhere occurred falls and right angles; and then,
the sentinels must have espied the dark form of the fugitive; hence,
the route taken by Thenardier still remains rather inexplicable. 
In two manners, flight was impossible.  Had Thenardier, spurred on
by that thirst for liberty which changes precipices into ditches,
iron bars into wattles of osier, a legless man into an athlete, a gouty
man into a bird, stupidity into instinct, instinct into intelligence,
and intelligence into genius, had Thenardier invented a third mode? 
No one has ever found out.

The marvels of escape cannot always be accounted for.  The man
who makes his escape, we repeat, is inspired; there is something
of the star and of the lightning in the mysterious gleam of flight;
the effort towards deliverance is no less surprising than the
flight towards the sublime, and one says of the escaped thief: 
"How did he contrive to scale that wall?" in the same way that one
says of Corneille:  "Where did he find the means of dying?"

At all events, dripping with perspiration, drenched with rain,
with his clothes hanging in ribbons, his hands flayed, his elbows
bleeding, his knees torn, Thenardier had reached what children,
in their figurative language, call the edge of the wall of the ruin,
there he had stretched himself out at full length, and there his
strength had failed him.  A steep escarpment three stories high
separated him from the pavement of the street.

The rope which he had was too short.

There he waited, pale, exhausted, desperate with all the despair
which he had undergone, still hidden by the night, but telling
himself that the day was on the point of dawning, alarmed at the idea
of hearing the neighboring clock of Saint-Paul strike four within
a few minutes, an hour when the sentinel was relieved and when the
latter would be found asleep under the pierced roof, staring in
horror at a terrible depth, at the light of the street lanterns,
the wet, black pavement, that pavement longed for yet frightful,
which meant death, and which meant liberty.

He asked himself whether his three accomplices in flight had succeeded,
if they had heard him, and if they would come to his assistance. 
He listened.  With the exception of the patrol, no one had passed
through the street since he had been there.  Nearly the whole of
the descent of the market-gardeners from Montreuil, from Charonne,
from Vincennes, and from Bercy to the markets was accomplished
through the Rue Saint-Antoine.

Four o'clock struck.  Thenardier shuddered.  A few moments later,
that terrified and confused uproar which follows the discovery
of an escape broke forth in the prison.  The sound of doors opening
and shutting, the creaking of gratings on their hinges, a tumult
in the guard-house, the hoarse shouts of the turnkeys, the shock
of musket-butts on the pavement of the courts, reached his ears. 
Lights ascended and descended past the grated windows of the dormitories,
a torch ran along the ridge-pole of the top story of the New Building,
the firemen belonging in the barracks on the right had been summoned. 
Their helmets, which the torch lighted up in the rain, went and came
along the roofs.  At the same time, Thenardier perceived in the
direction of the Bastille a wan whiteness lighting up the edge
of the sky in doleful wise.

He was on top of a wall ten inches wide, stretched out under the
heavy rains, with two gulfs to right and left, unable to stir,
subject to the giddiness of a possible fall, and to the horror
of a certain arrest, and his thoughts, like the pendulum of a clock,
swung from one of these ideas to the other:  "Dead if I fall,
caught if I stay."  In the midst of this anguish, he suddenly saw,
the street being still dark, a man who was gliding along the walls
and coming from the Rue Pavee, halt in the recess above which
Thenardier was, as it were, suspended.  Here this man was joined
by a second, who walked with the same caution, then by a third,
then by a fourth.  When these men were re-united, one of them lifted
the latch of the gate in the fence, and all four entered the enclosure
in which the shanty stood.  They halted directly under Thenardier. 
These men had evidently chosen this vacant space in order that they
might consult without being seen by the passers-by or by the
sentinel who guards the wicket of La Force a few paces distant. 
It must be added, that the rain kept this sentinel blocked in
his box.  Thenardier, not being able to distinguish their visages,
lent an ear to their words with the desperate attention of a wretch
who feels himself lost.

Thenardier saw something resembling a gleam of hope flash before
his eyes,--these men conversed in slang.

The first said in a low but distinct voice:--

"Let's cut.  What are we up to here?"

The second replied:  "It's raining hard enough to put out the
very devil's fire.  And the bobbies will be along instanter. 
There's a soldier on guard yonder.  We shall get nabbed here."

These two words, icigo and icicaille, both of which mean ici,
and which belong, the first to the slang of the barriers, the second
to the slang of the Temple, were flashes of light for Thenardier. 
By the icigo he recognized Brujon, who was a prowler of the barriers,
by the icicaille he knew Babet, who, among his other trades, had been
an old-clothes broker at the Temple.

The antique slang of the great century is no longer spoken except
in the Temple, and Babet was really the only person who spoke it in
all its purity.  Had it not been for the icicaille, Thenardier would
not have recognized him, for he had entirely changed his voice.

In the meanwhile, the third man had intervened.

"There's no hurry yet, let's wait a bit.  How do we know that he
doesn't stand in need of us?"

By this, which was nothing but French, Thenardier recognized
Montparnasse, who made it a point in his elegance to understand
all slangs and to speak none of them.

As for the fourth, he held his peace, but his huge shoulders
betrayed him.  Thenardier did not hesitate.  It was Guelemer.

Brujon replied almost impetuously but still in a low tone:--

"What are you jabbering about?  The tavern-keeper hasn't managed
to cut his stick.  He don't tumble to the racket, that he don't!
You have to be a pretty knowing cove to tear up your shirt, cut up
your sheet to make a rope, punch holes in doors, get up false papers,
make false keys, file your irons, hang out your cord, hide yourself,
and disguise yourself!  The old fellow hasn't managed to play it,
he doesn't understand how to work the business."

Babet added, still in that classical slang which was spoken
by Poulailler and Cartouche, and which is to the bold, new,
highly colored and risky argot used by Brujon what the language
of Racine is to the language of Andre Chenier:--

"Your tavern-keeper must have been nabbed in the act.  You have
to be knowing.  He's only a greenhorn.  He must have let himself be
taken in by a bobby, perhaps even by a sheep who played it on him as
his pal.  Listen, Montparnasse, do you hear those shouts in the prison? 
You have seen all those lights.  He's recaptured, there!  He'll get
off with twenty years.  I ain't afraid, I ain't a coward, but there
ain't anything more to do, or otherwise they'd lead us a dance.  Don't
get mad, come with us, let's go drink a bottle of old wine together."

"One doesn't desert one's friends in a scrape," grumbled Montparnasse.

"I tell you he's nabbed!" retorted Brujon.  "At the present moment,
the inn-keeper ain't worth a ha'penny. We can't do nothing for him. 
Let's be off.  Every minute I think a bobby has got me in his fist."

Montparnasse no longer offered more than a feeble resistance;
the fact is, that these four men, with the fidelity of ruffians who
never abandon each other, had prowled all night long about La Force,
great as was their peril, in the hope of seeing Thenardier make
his appearance on the top of some wall.  But the night, which was
really growing too fine,--for the downpour was such as to render
all the streets deserted,--the cold which was overpowering them,
their soaked garments, their hole-ridden shoes, the alarming noise
which had just burst forth in the prison, the hours which had elapsed,
the patrol which they had encountered, the hope which was vanishing,
all urged them to beat a retreat.  Montparnasse himself, who was,
perhaps, almost Thenardier's son-in-law, yielded.  A moment more,
and they would be gone.  Thenardier was panting on his wall like the
shipwrecked sufferers of the Meduse on their raft when they beheld
the vessel which had appeared in sight vanish on the horizon.

He dared not call to them; a cry might be heard and ruin everything. 
An idea occurred to him, a last idea, a flash of inspiration;
he drew from his pocket the end of Brujon's rope, which he had detached
from the chimney of the New Building, and flung it into the space
enclosed by the fence.

This rope fell at their feet.

"A widow,"[37] said Babet.


[37] Argot of the Temple.


"My tortouse!"[38] said Brujon.


[38] Argot of the barriers.


"The tavern-keeper is there," said Montparnasse.

They raised their eyes.  Thenardier thrust out his head a very little.

"Quick!" said Montparnasse, "have you the other end of the rope, Brujon?"

"Yes."

"Knot the two pieces together, we'll fling him the rope, he can
fasten it to the wall, and he'll have enough of it to get down with."

Thenardier ran the risk, and spoke:--

"I am paralyzed with cold."

"We'll warm you up."

"I can't budge."

"Let yourself slide, we'll catch you."

"My hands are benumbed."

"Only fasten the rope to the wall."

"I can't."

"Then one of us must climb up," said Montparnasse.

"Three stories!" ejaculated Brujon.

An ancient plaster flue, which had served for a stove that had
been used in the shanty in former times, ran along the wall and
mounted almost to the very spot where they could see Thenardier. 
This flue, then much damaged and full of cracks, has since fallen,
but the marks of it are still visible.

It was very narrow.

"One might get up by the help of that," said Montparnasse.

"By that flue?" exclaimed Babet, "a grown-up cove, never! it would
take a brat."

"A brat must be got," resumed Brujon.

"Where are we to find a young 'un?" said Guelemer.

"Wait," said Montparnasse.  "I've got the very article."

He opened the gate of the fence very softly, made sure that no one
was passing along the street, stepped out cautiously, shut the gate
behind him, and set off at a run in the direction of the Bastille.

Seven or eight minutes elapsed, eight thousand centuries to Thenardier;
Babet, Brujon, and Guelemer did not open their lips; at last the gate
opened once more, and Montparnasse appeared, breathless, and followed
by Gavroche.  The rain still rendered the street completely deserted.

Little Gavroche entered the enclosure and gazed at the forms of these
ruffians with a tranquil air.  The water was dripping from his hair. 
Guelemer addressed him:--

"Are you a man, young 'un?"

Gavroche shrugged his shoulders, and replied:--

"A young 'un like me's a man, and men like you are babes."

"The brat's tongue's well hung!" exclaimed Babet.

"The Paris brat ain't made of straw," added Brujon.

"What do you want?" asked Gavroche.

Montparnasse answered:--

"Climb up that flue."

"With this rope," said Babet.

"And fasten it," continued Brujon.

"To the top of the wall," went on Babet.

"To the cross-bar of the window," added Brujon.

"And then?" said Gavroche.

"There!" said Guelemer.

The gamin examined the rope, the flue, the wall, the windows,
and made that indescribable and disdainful noise with his lips
which signifies:--

"Is that all!"

"There's a man up there whom you are to save," resumed Montparnasse.

"Will you?" began Brujon again.

"Greenhorn!" replied the lad, as though the question appeared
a most unprecedented one to him.

And he took off his shoes.

Guelemer seized Gavroche by one arm, set him on the roof of the shanty,
whose worm-eaten planks bent beneath the urchin's weight,
and handed him the rope which Brujon had knotted together during
Montparnasse's absence.  The gamin directed his steps towards
the flue, which it was easy to enter, thanks to a large crack
which touched the roof.  At the moment when he was on the point
of ascending, Thenardier, who saw life and safety approaching,
bent over the edge of the wall; the first light of dawn struck white
upon his brow dripping with sweat, upon his livid cheek-bones, his sharp
and savage nose, his bristling gray beard, and Gavroche recognized him.

"Hullo! it's my father!  Oh, that won't hinder."

And taking the rope in his teeth, he resolutely began the ascent.

He reached the summit of the hut, bestrode the old wall as though
it had been a horse, and knotted the rope firmly to the upper
cross-bar of the window.

A moment later, Thenardier was in the street.

As soon as he touched the pavement, as soon as he found himself out
of danger, he was no longer either weary, or chilled or trembling;
the terrible things from which he had escaped vanished like smoke,
all that strange and ferocious mind awoke once more, and stood erect
and free, ready to march onward.

These were this man's first words:--

"Now, whom are we to eat?"

It is useless to explain the sense of this frightfully transparent remark,
which signifies both to kill, to assassinate, and to plunder. 
To eat, true sense:  to devour.

"Let's get well into a corner," said Brujon.  "Let's settle it
in three words, and part at once.  There was an affair that promised
well in the Rue Plumet, a deserted street, an isolated house,
an old rotten gate on a garden, and lone women."

"Well! why not?" demanded Thenardier.

"Your girl, Eponine, went to see about the matter," replied Babet.

"And she brought a biscuit to Magnon," added Guelemer.  "Nothing to
be made there."

"The girl's no fool," said Thenardier.  "Still, it must be seen to."

"Yes, yes," said Brujon, "it must be looked up."

In the meanwhile, none of the men seemed to see Gavroche, who,
during this colloquy, had seated himself on one of the fence-posts;
he waited a few moments, thinking that perhaps his father would
turn towards him, then he put on his shoes again, and said:--

"Is that all?  You don't want any more, my men?  Now you're out
of your scrape.  I'm off.  I must go and get my brats out of bed."

And off he went.

The five men emerged, one after another, from the enclosure.

When Gavroche had disappeared at the corner of the Rue des Ballets,
Babet took Thenardier aside.

"Did you take a good look at that young 'un?" he asked.

"What young 'un?"

"The one who climbed the wall and carried you the rope."

"Not particularly."

"Well, I don't know, but it strikes me that it was your son."

"Bah!" said Thenardier, "do you think so?"



BOOK SEVENTH.--SLANG



CHAPTER I

ORIGIN


Pigritia is a terrible word.

It engenders a whole world, la pegre, for which read theft,
and a hell, la pegrenne, for which read hunger.

Thus, idleness is the mother.

She has a son, theft, and a daughter, hunger.

Where are we at this moment?  In the land of slang.

What is slang?  It is at one and the same time, a nation and a dialect;
it is theft in its two kinds; people and language.

When, four and thirty years ago, the narrator of this grave
and sombre history introduced into a work written with the same
aim as this[39] a thief who talked argot, there arose amazement
and clamor.--"What! How!  Argot!  Why, argot is horrible! 
It is the language of prisons, galleys, convicts, of everything
that is most abominable in society!" etc., etc.


[39] The Last Day of a Condemned Man.


We have never understood this sort of objections.

Since that time, two powerful romancers, one of whom is a profound
observer of the human heart, the other an intrepid friend of
the people, Balzac and Eugene Sue, having represented their ruffians
as talking their natural language, as the author of The Last Day
of a Condemned Man did in 1828, the same objections have been raised. 
People repeated:  "What do authors mean by that revolting dialect? 
Slang is odious!  Slang makes one shudder!"

Who denies that?  Of course it does.

When it is a question of probing a wound, a gulf, a society,
since when has it been considered wrong to go too far? to go
to the bottom?  We have always thought that it was sometimes a
courageous act, and, at least, a simple and useful deed, worthy of
the sympathetic attention which duty accepted and fulfilled merits. 
Why should one not explore everything, and study everything? 
Why should one halt on the way?  The halt is a matter depending
on the sounding-line, and not on the leadsman.

Certainly, too, it is neither an attractive nor an easy task to
undertake an investigation into the lowest depths of the social order,
where terra firma comes to an end and where mud begins, to rummage
in those vague, murky waves, to follow up, to seize and to fling,
still quivering, upon the pavement that abject dialect which is dripping
with filth when thus brought to the light, that pustulous vocabulary
each word of which seems an unclean ring from a monster of the mire
and the shadows.  Nothing is more lugubrious than the contemplation
thus in its nudity, in the broad light of thought, of the horrible
swarming of slang.  It seems, in fact, to be a sort of horrible beast
made for the night which has just been torn from its cesspool. 
One thinks one beholds a frightful, living, and bristling thicket
which quivers, rustles, wavers, returns to shadow, threatens and glares. 
One word resembles a claw, another an extinguished and bleeding eye,
such and such a phrase seems to move like the claw of a crab. 
All this is alive with the hideous vitality of things which have been
organized out of disorganization.

Now, when has horror ever excluded study?  Since when has malady
banished medicine?  Can one imagine a naturalist refusing to study
the viper, the bat, the scorpion, the centipede, the tarantula,
and one who would cast them back into their darkness, saying:  "Oh! how
ugly that is!"  The thinker who should turn aside from slang would
resemble a surgeon who should avert his face from an ulcer or a wart. 
He would be like a philologist refusing to examine a fact in language,
a philosopher hesitating to scrutinize a fact in humanity. 
For, it must be stated to those who are ignorant of the case,
that argot is both a literary phenomenon and a social result. 
What is slang, properly speaking?  It is the language of wretchedness.

We may be stopped; the fact may be put to us in general terms,
which is one way of attenuating it; we may be told, that all trades,
professions, it may be added, all the accidents of the social
hierarchy and all forms of intelligence, have their own slang. 
The merchant who says:  "Montpellier not active, Marseilles fine quality,"
the broker on 'change who says:  "Assets at end of current month,"
the gambler who says:  "Tiers et tout, refait de pique," the sheriff
of the Norman Isles who says:  "The holder in fee reverting to his landed
estate cannot claim the fruits of that estate during the hereditary
seizure of the real estate by the mortgagor," the playwright who says: 
"The piece was hissed," the comedian who says:  "I've made a hit,"
the philosopher who says:  "Phenomenal triplicity," the huntsman
who says:  "Voileci allais, Voileci fuyant," the phrenologist
who says:  "Amativeness, combativeness, secretiveness," the infantry
soldier who says:  "My shooting-iron," the cavalry-man who says: 
"My turkey-cock," the fencing-master who says:  "Tierce, quarte, break,"
the printer who says:  "My shooting-stick and galley,"--all, printer,
fencing-master, cavalry dragoon, infantry-man, phrenologist,
huntsman, philosopher, comedian, playwright, sheriff, gambler,
stock-broker, and merchant, speak slang.  The painter who says: 
"My grinder," the notary who says:  "My Skip-the-Gutter,"
the hairdresser who says:  "My mealyback," the cobbler who says: 
"My cub," talks slang.  Strictly speaking, if one absolutely insists on
the point, all the different fashions of saying the right and the left,
the sailor's port and starboard, the scene-shifter's court-side, and
garden-side, the beadle's Gospel-side and Epistle-side, are slang. 
There is the slang of the affected lady as well as of the precieuses. 
The Hotel Rambouillet nearly adjoins the Cour des Miracles.  There is
a slang of duchesses, witness this phrase contained in a love-letter
from a very great lady and a very pretty woman of the Restoration: 
"You will find in this gossip a fultitude of reasons why I should
libertize."[40] Diplomatic ciphers are slang; the pontifical
chancellery by using 26 for Rome, grkztntgzyal for despatch,
and abfxustgrnogrkzu tu XI.  for the Due de Modena, speaks slang. 
The physicians of the Middle Ages who, for carrot, radish, and turnip,
said Opoponach, perfroschinum, reptitalmus, dracatholicum, angelorum,
postmegorum, talked slang.  The sugar-manufacturer who says: 
"Loaf, clarified, lumps, bastard, common, burnt,"--this honest
manufacturer talks slang.  A certain school of criticism twenty years ago,
which used to say:  "Half of the works of Shakespeare consists of plays
upon words and puns,"--talked slang.  The poet, and the artist who,
with profound understanding, would designate M. de Montmorency
as "a bourgeois," if he were not a judge of verses and statues,
speak slang.  The classic Academician who calls flowers "Flora," fruits,
"Pomona," the sea, "Neptune," love, "fires," beauty, "charms," a horse,
"a courser," the white or tricolored cockade, "the rose of Bellona,"
the three-cornered hat, "Mars' triangle,"--that classical Academician
talks slang.  Algebra, medicine, botany, have each their slang. 
The tongue which is employed on board ship, that wonderful language
of the sea, which is so complete and so picturesque, which was spoken
by Jean Bart, Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperre, which mingles with
the whistling of the rigging, the sound of the speaking-trumpets,
the shock of the boarding-irons, the roll of the sea, the wind,
the gale, the cannon, is wholly a heroic and dazzling slang, which
is to the fierce slang of the thieves what the lion is to the jackal.


[40] "Vous trouverez dans ces potains-la, une foultitude de raisons
pour que je me libertise."


No doubt.  But say what we will, this manner of understanding
the word slang is an extension which every one will not admit. 
For our part, we reserve to the word its ancient and precise,
circumscribed and determined significance, and we restrict slang
to slang.  The veritable slang and the slang that is pre-eminently
slang, if the two words can be coupled thus, the slang immemorial
which was a kingdom, is nothing else, we repeat, than the homely,
uneasy, crafty, treacherous, venomous, cruel, equivocal, vile, profound,
fatal tongue of wretchedness.  There exists, at the extremity of all
abasement and all misfortunes, a last misery which revolts and makes
up its mind to enter into conflict with the whole mass of fortunate
facts and reigning rights; a fearful conflict, where, now cunning,
now violent, unhealthy and ferocious at one and the same time,
it attacks the social order with pin-pricks through vice, and with
club-blows through crime.  To meet the needs of this conflict,
wretchedness has invented a language of combat, which is slang.

To keep afloat and to rescue from oblivion, to hold above the gulf,
were it but a fragment of some language which man has spoken and
which would, otherwise, be lost, that is to say, one of the elements,
good or bad, of which civilization is composed, or by which it
is complicated, to extend the records of social observation;
is to serve civilization itself.  This service Plautus rendered,
consciously or unconsciously, by making two Carthaginian soldiers
talk Phoenician; that service Moliere rendered, by making so many
of his characters talk Levantine and all sorts of dialects. 
Here objections spring up afresh.  Phoenician, very good! 
Levantine, quite right!  Even dialect, let that pass!  They are
tongues which have belonged to nations or provinces; but slang! 
What is the use of preserving slang?  What is the good of assisting
slang "to survive"?

To this we reply in one word, only.  Assuredly, if the tongue
which a nation or a province has spoken is worthy of interest,
the language which has been spoken by a misery is still more worthy
of attention and study.

It is the language which has been spoken, in France, for example,
for more than four centuries, not only by a misery, but by every
possible human misery.

And then, we insist upon it, the study of social deformities
and infirmities, and the task of pointing them out with a view
to remedy, is not a business in which choice is permitted. 
The historian of manners and ideas has no less austere a mission than
the historian of events.  The latter has the surface of civilization,
the conflicts of crowns, the births of princes, the marriages of kings,
battles, assemblages, great public men, revolutions in the daylight,
everything on the exterior; the other historian has the interior,
the depths, the people who toil, suffer, wait, the oppressed woman,
the agonizing child, the secret war between man and man,
obscure ferocities, prejudices, plotted iniquities, the subterranean,
the indistinct tremors of multitudes, the die-of-hunger,
the counter-blows of the law, the secret evolution of souls,
the go-bare-foot, the bare-armed, the disinherited, the orphans,
the unhappy, and the infamous, all the forms which roam through
the darkness.  He must descend with his heart full of charity,
and severity at the same time, as a brother and as a judge, to those
impenetrable casemates where crawl, pell-mell, those who bleed
and those who deal the blow, those who weep and those who curse,
those who fast and those who devour, those who endure evil and those
who inflict it.  Have these historians of hearts and souls duties
at all inferior to the historians of external facts?  Does any one
think that Alighieri has any fewer things to say than Machiavelli? 
Is the under side of civilization any less important than the upper
side merely because it is deeper and more sombre?  Do we really
know the mountain well when we are not acquainted with the cavern?

Let us say, moreover, parenthetically, that from a few words
of what precedes a marked separation might be inferred between
the two classes of historians which does not exist in our mind. 
No one is a good historian of the patent, visible, striking,
and public life of peoples, if he is not, at the same time,
in a certain measure, the historian of their deep and hidden life;
and no one is a good historian of the interior unless he
understands how, at need, to be the historian of the exterior also. 
The history of manners and ideas permeates the history of events,
and this is true reciprocally.  They constitute two different orders
of facts which correspond to each other, which are always interlaced,
and which often bring forth results.  All the lineaments which
providence traces on the surface of a nation have their parallels,
sombre but distinct, in their depths, and all convulsions of the
depths produce ebullitions on the surface.  True history being
a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything.

Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with
a double focus.  Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.

Slang is nothing but a dressing-room where the tongue having some
bad action to perform, disguises itself.  There it clothes itself
in word-masks, in metaphor-rags. In this guise it becomes horrible.

One finds it difficult to recognize.  Is it really the French tongue,
the great human tongue?  Behold it ready to step upon the stage
and to retort upon crime, and prepared for all the employments
of the repertory of evil.  It no longer walks, it hobbles; it limps
on the crutch of the Court of Miracles, a crutch metamorphosable
into a club; it is called vagrancy; every sort of spectre,
its dressers, have painted its face, it crawls and rears, the double
gait of the reptile.  Henceforth, it is apt at all roles, it is made
suspicious by the counterfeiter, covered with verdigris by the forger,
blacked by the soot of the incendiary; and the murderer applies its rouge.

When one listens, by the side of honest men, at the portals of society,
one overhears the dialogues of those who are on the outside. 
One distinguishes questions and replies.  One perceives, without
understanding it, a hideous murmur, sounding almost like human accents,
but more nearly resembling a howl than an articulate word. 
It is slang.  The words are misshapen and stamped with an indescribable
and fantastic bestiality.  One thinks one hears hydras talking.

It is unintelligible in the dark.  It gnashes and whispers,
completing the gloom with mystery.  It is black in misfortune,
it is blacker still in crime; these two blacknesses amalgamated,
compose slang.  Obscurity in the atmosphere, obscurity in acts,
obscurity in voices.  Terrible, toad-like tongue which goes
and comes, leaps, crawls, slobbers, and stirs about in monstrous
wise in that immense gray fog composed of rain and night, of hunger,
of vice, of falsehood, of injustice, of nudity, of suffocation,
and of winter, the high noonday of the miserable.

Let us have compassion on the chastised.  Alas!  Who are we ourselves? 
Who am I who now address you?  Who are you who are listening to me? 
And are you very sure that we have done nothing before we were born? 
The earth is not devoid of resemblance to a jail.  Who knows
whether man is not a recaptured offender against divine justice? 
Look closely at life.  It is so made, that everywhere we feel the sense
of punishment.

Are you what is called a happy man?  Well! you are sad every day. 
Each day has its own great grief or its little care.  Yesterday you
were trembling for a health that is dear to you, to-day you fear
for your own; to-morrow it will be anxiety about money, the day
after to-morrow the diatribe of a slanderer, the day after that,
the misfortune of some friend; then the prevailing weather, then something
that has been broken or lost, then a pleasure with which your
conscience and your vertebral column reproach you; again, the course
of public affairs.  This without reckoning in the pains of the heart. 
And so it goes on.  One cloud is dispelled, another forms. 
There is hardly one day out of a hundred which is wholly joyous
and sunny.  And you belong to that small class who are happy! 
As for the rest of mankind, stagnating night rests upon them.

Thoughtful minds make but little use of the phrase:  the fortunate
and the unfortunate.  In this world, evidently the vestibule
of another, there are no fortunate.

The real human division is this:  the luminous and the shady. 
To diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number
of the luminous,--that is the object.  That is why we cry: 
Education! science!  To teach reading, means to light the fire;
every syllable spelled out sparkles.

However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. 
People suffer in the light; excess burns.  The flame is the enemy
of the wing.  To burn without ceasing to fly,--therein lies the
marvel of genius.

When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will
still suffer.  The day is born in tears.  The luminous weep,
if only over those in darkness.



CHAPTER II

ROOTS


Slang is the tongue of those who sit in darkness.

Thought is moved in its most sombre depths, social philosophy
is bidden to its most poignant meditations, in the presence
of that enigmatic dialect at once so blighted and rebellious. 
Therein lies chastisement made visible.  Every syllable has
an air of being marked.  The words of the vulgar tongue appear
therein wrinkled and shrivelled, as it were, beneath the hot iron
of the executioner.  Some seem to be still smoking.  Such and such
a phrase produces upon you the effect of the shoulder of a thief
branded with the fleur-de-lys, which has suddenly been laid bare. 
Ideas almost refuse to be expressed in these substantives which
are fugitives from justice.  Metaphor is sometimes so shameless,
that one feels that it has worn the iron neck-fetter.

Moreover, in spite of all this, and because of all this, this strange
dialect has by rights, its own compartment in that great impartial
case of pigeon-holes where there is room for the rusty farthing
as well as for the gold medal, and which is called literature. 
Slang, whether the public admit the fact or not has its syntax
and its poetry.  It is a language.  Yes, by the deformity of
certain terms, we recognize the fact that it was chewed by Mandrin,
and by the splendor of certain metonymies, we feel that Villon spoke it.

That exquisite and celebrated verse--

          Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?
          But where are the snows of years gone by?

is a verse of slang.  Antam--ante annum--is a word of Thunes slang,
which signified the past year, and by extension, formerly. 
Thirty-five years ago, at the epoch of the departure of the great
chain-gang, there could be read in one of the cells at Bicetre,
this maxim engraved with a nail on the wall by a king of Thunes
condemned to the galleys:  Les dabs d'antan trimaient siempre pour
la pierre du Coesre.  This means Kings in days gone by always
went and had themselves anointed.  In the opinion of that king,
anointment meant the galleys.

The word decarade, which expresses the departure of heavy vehicles
at a gallop, is attributed to Villon, and it is worthy of him. 
This word, which strikes fire with all four of its feet, sums up in a
masterly onomatopoeia the whole of La Fontaine's admirable verse:--

          Six forts chevaux tiraient un coche.
          Six stout horses drew a coach.


From a purely literary point of view, few studies would prove more
curious and fruitful than the study of slang.  It is a whole language
within a language, a sort of sickly excrescence, an unhealthy graft
which has produced a vegetation, a parasite which has its roots
in the old Gallic trunk, and whose sinister foliage crawls all over
one side of the language.  This is what may be called the first,
the vulgar aspect of slang.  But, for those who study the tongue as it
should be studied, that is to say, as geologists study the earth,
slang appears like a veritable alluvial deposit.  According as one digs
a longer or shorter distance into it, one finds in slang, below the old
popular French, Provencal, Spanish, Italian, Levantine, that language
of the Mediterranean ports, English and German, the Romance language
in its three varieties, French, Italian, and Romance Romance, Latin,
and finally Basque and Celtic.  A profound and unique formation. 
A subterranean edifice erected in common by all the miserable. 
Each accursed race has deposited its layer, each suffering has
dropped its stone there, each heart has contributed its pebble. 
A throng of evil, base, or irritated souls, who have traversed
life and have vanished into eternity, linger there almost entirely
visible still beneath the form of some monstrous word.

Do you want Spanish?  The old Gothic slang abounded in it. 
Here is boffete, a box on the ear, which is derived from bofeton;
vantane, window (later on vanterne), which comes from vantana;
gat, cat, which comes from gato; acite, oil, which comes from aceyte. 
Do you want Italian?  Here is spade, sword, which comes from spada;
carvel, boat, which comes from caravella.  Do you want English? 
Here is bichot, which comes from bishop; raille, spy, which comes from
rascal, rascalion; pilche, a case, which comes from pilcher, a sheath. 
Do you want German?  Here is the caleur, the waiter, kellner; the hers,
the master, herzog (duke). Do you want Latin?  Here is frangir,
to break, frangere; affurer, to steal, fur; cadene, chain, catena. 
There is one word which crops up in every language of the continent,
with a sort of mysterious power and authority.  It is the word magnus;
the Scotchman makes of it his mac, which designates the chief
of the clan; Mac-Farlane, Mac-Callumore, the great Farlane,
the great Callumore[41]; slang turns it into meck and later le meg,
that is to say, God.  Would you like Basque?  Here is gahisto,
the devil, which comes from gaiztoa, evil; sorgabon, good night,
which comes from gabon, good evening.  Do you want Celtic? 
Here is blavin, a handkerchief, which comes from blavet, gushing water;
menesse, a woman (in a bad sense), which comes from meinec, full
of stones; barant, brook, from baranton, fountain; goffeur, locksmith,
from goff, blacksmith; guedouze, death, which comes from guenn-du,
black-white. Finally, would you like history?  Slang calls crowns les
malteses, a souvenir of the coin in circulation on the galleys of Malta.


[41] It must be observed, however, that mac in Celtic means son.


In addition to the philological origins just indicated, slang possesses
other and still more natural roots, which spring, so to speak,
from the mind of man itself.

In the first place, the direct creation of words.  Therein lies
the mystery of tongues.  To paint with words, which contains
figures one knows not how or why, is the primitive foundation
of all human languages, what may be called their granite.

Slang abounds in words of this description, immediate words,
words created instantaneously no one knows either where or by whom,
without etymology, without analogies, without derivatives, solitary,
barbarous, sometimes hideous words, which at times possess a singular
power of expression and which live.  The executioner, le taule;
the forest, le sabri; fear, flight, taf; the lackey, le larbin;
the mineral, the prefect, the minister, pharos; the devil, le rabouin. 
Nothing is stranger than these words which both mask and reveal. 
Some, le rabouin, for example, are at the same time grotesque
and terrible, and produce on you the effect of a cyclopean grimace.

In the second place, metaphor.  The peculiarity of a language which
is desirous of saying all yet concealing all is that it is rich
in figures.  Metaphor is an enigma, wherein the thief who is plotting
a stroke, the prisoner who is arranging an escape, take refuge. 
No idiom is more metaphorical than slang:  devisser le coco (to
unscrew the nut), to twist the neck; tortiller (to wriggle), to eat;
etre gerbe, to be tried; a rat, a bread thief; il lansquine, it rains,
a striking, ancient figure which partly bears its date about it,
which assimilates long oblique lines of rain, with the dense and
slanting pikes of the lancers, and which compresses into a single word
the popular expression:  it rains halberds.  Sometimes, in proportion
as slang progresses from the first epoch to the second, words pass
from the primitive and savage sense to the metaphorical sense. 
The devil ceases to be le rabouin, and becomes le boulanger (the
baker), who puts the bread into the oven.  This is more witty,
but less grand, something like Racine after Corneille, like Euripides
after AEschylus.  Certain slang phrases which participate in the two
epochs and have at once the barbaric character and the metaphorical
character resemble phantasmagories.  Les sorgueuers vont solliciter
des gails a la lune--the prowlers are going to steal horses by night,--
this passes before the mind like a group of spectres.  One knows not
what one sees.

In the third place, the expedient.  Slang lives on the language. 
It uses it in accordance with its fancy, it dips into it hap-hazard,
and it often confines itself, when occasion arises, to alter it
in a gross and summary fashion.  Occasionally, with the ordinary
words thus deformed and complicated with words of pure slang,
picturesque phrases are formed, in which there can be felt the mixture
of the two preceding elements, the direct creation and the metaphor: 
le cab jaspine, je marronne que la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri,
the dog is barking, I suspect that the diligence for Paris is passing
through the woods.  Le dab est sinve, la dabuge est merloussiere,
la fee est bative, the bourgeois is stupid, the bourgeoise is cunning,
the daughter is pretty.  Generally, to throw listeners off the track,
slang confines itself to adding to all the words of the language
without distinction, an ignoble tail, a termination in aille,
in orgue, in iergue, or in uche.  Thus:  Vousiergue trouvaille
bonorgue ce gigotmuche?  Do you think that leg of mutton good? 
A phrase addressed by Cartouche to a turnkey in order to find out
whether the sum offered for his escape suited him.

The termination in mar has been added recently.

Slang, being the dialect of corruption, quickly becomes corrupted itself. 
Besides this, as it is always seeking concealment, as soon as it feels
that it is understood, it changes its form.  Contrary to what happens
with every other vegetation, every ray of light which falls upon
it kills whatever it touches.  Thus slang is in constant process
of decomposition and recomposition; an obscure and rapid work which
never pauses.  It passes over more ground in ten years than a language
in ten centuries.  Thus le larton (bread) becomes le lartif; le gail
(horse) becomes le gaye; la fertanche (straw) becomes la fertille;
le momignard (brat), le momacque; les fiques (duds), frusques;
la chique (the church), l'egrugeoir; le colabre (neck), le colas. 
The devil is at first, gahisto, then le rabouin, then the baker;
the priest is a ratichon, then the boar (le sanglier); the dagger is
le vingt-deux (twenty-two), then le surin, then le lingre; the police
are railles, then roussins, then rousses, then marchands de lacets
(dealers in stay-laces), then coquers, then cognes; the executioner
is le taule, then Charlot, l'atigeur, then le becquillard. 
In the seventeenth century, to fight was "to give each other snuff";
in the nineteenth it is "to chew each other's throats." 
There have been twenty different phrases between these two extremes. 
Cartouche's talk would have been Hebrew to Lacenaire.  All the words
of this language are perpetually engaged in flight like the men
who utter them.

Still, from time to time, and in consequence of this very movement,
the ancient slang crops up again and becomes new once more.  It has
its headquarters where it maintains its sway.  The Temple preserved
the slang of the seventeenth century; Bicetre, when it was a prison,
preserved the slang of Thunes.  There one could hear the termination
in anche of the old Thuneurs.  Boyanches-tu (bois-tu), do you drink? 
But perpetual movement remains its law, nevertheless.

If the philosopher succeeds in fixing, for a moment, for purposes
of observation, this language which is incessantly evaporating,
he falls into doleful and useful meditation.  No study is more
efficacious and more fecund in instruction.  There is not a metaphor,
not an analogy, in slang, which does not contain a lesson. 
Among these men, to beat means to feign; one beats a malady;
ruse is their strength.

For them, the idea of the man is not separated from the idea
of darkness.  The night is called la sorgue; man, l'orgue. Man
is a derivative of the night.

They have taken up the practice of considering society in the
light of an atmosphere which kills them, of a fatal force,
and they speak of their liberty as one would speak of his health. 
A man under arrest is a sick man; one who is condemned is a dead man.

The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four walls
in which he is buried, is a sort of glacial chastity, and he calls
the dungeon the castus.  In that funereal place, life outside
always presents itself under its most smiling aspect.  The prisoner
has irons on his feet; you think, perhaps, that his thought
is that it is with the feet that one walks?  No; he is thinking
that it is with the feet that one dances; so, when he has succeeded
in severing his fetters, his first idea is that now he can dance,
and he calls the saw the bastringue (public-house ball).--A name
is a centre; profound assimilation.--The ruffian has two heads,
one of which reasons out his actions and leads him all his life long,
and the other which he has upon his shoulders on the day of his death;
he calls the head which counsels him in crime la sorbonne,
and the head which expiates it la tronche.--When a man has no
longer anything but rags upon his body and vices in his heart,
when he has arrived at that double moral and material degradation
which the word blackguard characterizes in its two acceptations,
he is ripe for crime; he is like a well-whetted knife; he has
two cutting edges, his distress and his malice; so slang does
not say a blackguard, it says un reguise.--What are the galleys? 
A brazier of damnation, a hell.  The convict calls himself a fagot.--
And finally, what name do malefactors give to their prison? 
The college.  A whole penitentiary system can be evolved from
that word.

Does the reader wish to know where the majority of the songs of
the galleys, those refrains called in the special vocabulary lirlonfa,
have had their birth?

Let him listen to what follows:--

There existed at the Chatelet in Paris a large and long cellar. 
This cellar was eight feet below the level of the Seine.  It had
neither windows nor air-holes, its only aperture was the door;
men could enter there, air could not.  This vault had for ceiling
a vault of stone, and for floor ten inches of mud.  It was flagged;
but the pavement had rotted and cracked under the oozing of the water. 
Eight feet above the floor, a long and massive beam traversed this
subterranean excavation from side to side; from this beam hung,
at short distances apart, chains three feet long, and at the end
of these chains there were rings for the neck.  In this vault,
men who had been condemned to the galleys were incarcerated until the
day of their departure for Toulon.  They were thrust under this beam,
where each one found his fetters swinging in the darkness and waiting
for him.

The chains, those pendant arms, and the necklets, those open hands,
caught the unhappy wretches by the throat.  They were rivetted and
left there.  As the chain was too short, they could not lie down. 
They remained motionless in that cavern, in that night, beneath
that beam, almost hanging, forced to unheard-of efforts to reach
their bread, jug, or their vault overhead, mud even to mid-leg,
filth flowing to their very calves, broken asunder with fatigue,
with thighs and knees giving way, clinging fast to the chain with
their hands in order to obtain some rest, unable to sleep except
when standing erect, and awakened every moment by the strangling
of the collar; some woke no more.  In order to eat, they pushed
the bread, which was flung to them in the mud, along their leg
with their heel until it reached their hand.

How long did they remain thus?  One month, two months, six months
sometimes; one stayed a year.  It was the antechamber of the galleys. 
Men were put there for stealing a hare from the king.  In this
sepulchre-hell, what did they do?  What man can do in a sepulchre,
they went through the agonies of death, and what can man do in hell,
they sang; for song lingers where there is no longer any hope. 
In the waters of Malta, when a galley was approaching, the song could
be heard before the sound of the oars.  Poor Survincent, the poacher,
who had gone through the prison-cellar of the Chatelet, said: 
"It was the rhymes that kept me up."  Uselessness of poetry. 
What is the good of rhyme?

It is in this cellar that nearly all the slang songs had
their birth.  It is from the dungeon of the Grand-Chatelet of Paris
that comes the melancholy refrain of the Montgomery galley: 
"Timaloumisaine, timaloumison."  The majority of these

       Icicaille est la theatre        Here is the theatre
       Du petit dardant.               Of the little archer (Cupid).


Do what you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic
in the heart of man, love.

In this world of dismal deeds, people keep their secrets. 
The secret is the thing above all others.  The secret, in the eyes
of these wretches, is unity which serves as a base of union. 
To betray a secret is to tear from each member of this fierce
community something of his own personality.  To inform against,
in the energetic slang dialect, is called:  "to eat the bit." 
As though the informer drew to himself a little of the substance
of all and nourished himself on a bit of each one's flesh.

What does it signify to receive a box on the ear? 
Commonplace metaphor replies:  "It is to see thirty-six candles."

Here slang intervenes and takes it up:  Candle, camoufle. 
Thereupon, the ordinary tongue gives camouflet[42] as the synonym
for soufflet.  Thus, by a sort of infiltration from below upwards,
with the aid of metaphor, that incalculable, trajectory slang
mounts from the cavern to the Academy; and Poulailler saying: 
"I light my camoufle," causes Voltaire to write:  "Langleviel La
Beaumelle deserves a hundred camouflets."


[42] Smoke puffed in the face of a person asleep.


Researches in slang mean discoveries at every step.  Study and
investigation of this strange idiom lead to the mysterious point
of intersection of regular society with society which is accursed.

The thief also has his food for cannon, stealable matter, you, I,
whoever passes by; le pantre.  (Pan, everybody.)

Slang is language turned convict.

That the thinking principle of man be thrust down ever so low, that it
can be dragged and pinioned there by obscure tyrannies of fatality,
that it can be bound by no one knows what fetters in that abyss,
is sufficient to create consternation.

Oh, poor thought of miserable wretches!

Alas! will no one come to the succor of the human soul in that darkness? 
Is it her destiny there to await forever the mind, the liberator,
the immense rider of Pegasi and hippo-griffs, the combatant of heroes
of the dawn who shall descend from the azure between two wings,
the radiant knight of the future?  Will she forever summon in vain
to her assistance the lance of light of the ideal?  Is she condemned
to hear the fearful approach of Evil through the density of the gulf,
and to catch glimpses, nearer and nearer at hand, beneath the
hideous water of that dragon's head, that maw streaked with foam,
and that writhing undulation of claws, swellings, and rings? 
Must it remain there, without a gleam of light, without hope,
given over to that terrible approach, vaguely scented out
by the monster, shuddering, dishevelled, wringing its arms,
forever chained to the rock of night, a sombre Andromeda white
and naked amid the shadows!



CHAPTER III

SLANG WHICH WEEPS AND SLANG WHICH LAUGHS


As the reader perceives, slang in its entirety, slang of four hundred
years ago, like the slang of to-day, is permeated with that sombre,
symbolical spirit which gives to all words a mien which is now mournful,
now menacing.  One feels in it the wild and ancient sadness of those
vagrants of the Court of Miracles who played at cards with packs
of their own, some of which have come down to us.  The eight of clubs,
for instance, represented a huge tree bearing eight enormous
trefoil leaves, a sort of fantastic personification of the forest. 
At the foot of this tree a fire was burning, over which three hares
were roasting a huntsman on a spit, and behind him, on another fire,
hung a steaming pot, whence emerged the head of a dog.  Nothing can be
more melancholy than these reprisals in painting, by a pack of cards,
in the presence of stakes for the roasting of smugglers and of the
cauldron for the boiling of counterfeiters.  The diverse forms
assumed by thought in the realm of slang, even song, even raillery,
even menace, all partook of this powerless and dejected character. 
All the songs, the melodies of some of which have been collected,
were humble and lamentable to the point of evoking tears. 
The pegre is always the poor pegre, and he is always the hare
in hiding, the fugitive mouse, the flying bird.  He hardly complains,
he contents himself with sighing; one of his moans has come
down to us:  "I do not understand how God, the father of men,
can torture his children and his grandchildren and hear them cry,
without himself suffering torture."[43] The wretch, whenever he has
time to think, makes himself small before the low, and frail in the
presence of society; he lies down flat on his face, he entreats,
he appeals to the side of compassion; we feel that he is conscious
of his guilt.


[43] Je n'entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron des orgues,
peut atiger ses momes et ses momignards et les locher criblant sans
etre agite lui-meme.


Towards the middle of the last century a change took place,
prison songs and thieves' ritournelles assumed, so to speak, an insolent
and jovial mien.  The plaintive malure was replaced by the larifla. 
We find in the eighteenth century, in nearly all the songs of
the galleys and prisons, a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. 
We hear this strident and lilting refrain which we should say had
been lighted up by a phosphorescent gleam, and which seems to have
been flung into the forest by a will-o'-the-wisp playing the fife:--

                    Miralabi suslababo
                    Mirliton ribonribette
                    Surlababi mirlababo
                    Mirliton ribonribo.


This was sung in a cellar or in a nook of the forest while cutting
a man's throat.

A serious symptom.  In the eighteenth century, the ancient
melancholy of the dejected classes vanishes.  They began to laugh. 
They rally the grand meg and the grand dab.  Given Louis XV. 
they call the King of France "le Marquis de Pantin."  And behold,
they are almost gay.  A sort of gleam proceeds from these miserable
wretches, as though their consciences were not heavy within them
any more.  These lamentable tribes of darkness have no longer
merely the desperate audacity of actions, they possess the heedless
audacity of mind.  A sign that they are losing the sense of their
criminality, and that they feel, even among thinkers and dreamers,
some indefinable support which the latter themselves know not of. 
A sign that theft and pillage are beginning to filter into doctrines
and sophisms, in such a way as to lose somewhat of their ugliness,
while communicating much of it to sophisms and doctrines.  A sign,
in short, of some outbreak which is prodigious and near unless some
diversion shall arise.

Let us pause a moment.  Whom are we accusing here?  Is it the
eighteenth century?  Is it philosophy?  Certainly not.  The work
of the eighteenth century is healthy and good and wholesome. 
The encyclopedists, Diderot at their head; the physiocrates,
Turgot at their head; the philosophers, Voltaire at their head;
the Utopians, Rousseau at their head,--these are four sacred legions. 
Humanity's immense advance towards the light is due to them. 
They are the four vanguards of the human race, marching towards
the four cardinal points of progress.  Diderot towards the beautiful,
Turgot towards the useful, Voltaire towards the true, Rousseau
towards the just.  But by the side of and above the philosophers,
there were the sophists, a venomous vegetation mingled with a
healthy growth, hemlock in the virgin forest.  While the executioner
was burning the great books of the liberators of the century
on the grand staircase of the court-house, writers now forgotten
were publishing, with the King's sanction, no one knows what strangely
disorganizing writings, which were eagerly read by the unfortunate. 
Some of these publications, odd to say, which were patronized
by a prince, are to be found in the Secret Library.  These facts,
significant but unknown, were imperceptible on the surface. 
Sometimes, in the very obscurity of a fact lurks its danger. 
It is obscure because it is underhand.  Of all these writers,
the one who probably then excavated in the masses the most unhealthy
gallery was Restif de La Bretonne.

This work, peculiar to the whole of Europe, effected more ravages
in Germany than anywhere else.  In Germany, during a given period,
summed up by Schiller in his famous drama The Robbers, theft and pillage
rose up in protest against property and labor, assimilated certain
specious and false elementary ideas, which, though just in appearance,
were absurd in reality, enveloped themselves in these ideas,
disappeared within them, after a fashion, assumed an abstract name,
passed into the state of theory, and in that shape circulated
among the laborious, suffering, and honest masses, unknown even to
the imprudent chemists who had prepared the mixture, unknown even
to the masses who accepted it.  Whenever a fact of this sort
presents itself, the case is grave.  Suffering engenders wrath;
and while the prosperous classes blind themselves or fall asleep,
which is the same thing as shutting one's eyes, the hatred of the
unfortunate classes lights its torch at some aggrieved or ill-made
spirit which dreams in a corner, and sets itself to the scrutiny
of society.  The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible thing.

Hence, if the ill-fortune of the times so wills it, those fearful
commotions which were formerly called jacqueries, beside which purely
political agitations are the merest child's play, which are no
longer the conflict of the oppressed and the oppressor, but the
revolt of discomfort against comfort.  Then everything crumbles.

Jacqueries are earthquakes of the people.

It is this peril, possibly imminent towards the close of the
eighteenth century, which the French Revolution, that immense
act of probity, cut short.

The French Revolution, which is nothing else than the idea armed
with the sword, rose erect, and, with the same abrupt movement,
closed the door of ill and opened the door of good.

It put a stop to torture, promulgated the truth, expelled miasma,
rendered the century healthy, crowned the populace.

It may be said of it that it created man a second time, by giving
him a second soul, the right.

The nineteenth century has inherited and profited by its work,
and to-day, the social catastrophe to which we lately alluded is
simply impossible.  Blind is he who announces it!  Foolish is he
who fears it!  Revolution is the vaccine of Jacquerie.

Thanks to the Revolution, social conditions have changed. 
Feudal and monarchical maladies no longer run in our blood. 
There is no more of the Middle Ages in our constitution.  We no
longer live in the days when terrible swarms within made irruptions,
when one heard beneath his feet the obscure course of a dull rumble,
when indescribable elevations from mole-like tunnels appeared
on the surface of civilization, where the soil cracked open,
where the roofs of caverns yawned, and where one suddenly beheld
monstrous heads emerging from the earth.

The revolutionary sense is a moral sense.  The sentiment of right,
once developed, develops the sentiment of duty.  The law of all
is liberty, which ends where the liberty of others begins,
according to Robespierre's admirable definition.  Since '89, the
whole people has been dilating into a sublime individual; there is
not a poor man, who, possessing his right, has not his ray of sun;
the die-of-hunger feels within him the honesty of France; the dignity
of the citizen is an internal armor; he who is free is scrupulous;
he who votes reigns.  Hence incorruptibility; hence the miscarriage
of unhealthy lusts; hence eyes heroically lowered before temptations. 
The revolutionary wholesomeness is such, that on a day of deliverance,
a 14th of July, a 10th of August, there is no longer any populace. 
The first cry of the enlightened and increasing throngs is: 
death to thieves!  Progress is an honest man; the ideal and the
absolute do not filch pocket-handkerchiefs. By whom were the wagons
containing the wealth of the Tuileries escorted in 1848?  By the
rag-pickers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Rags mounted guard over
the treasure.  Virtue rendered these tatterdemalions resplendent. 
In those wagons in chests, hardly closed, and some, even, half-open,
amid a hundred dazzling caskets, was that ancient crown of France,
studded with diamonds, surmounted by the carbuncle of royalty,
by the Regent diamond, which was worth thirty millions.  Barefooted,
they guarded that crown.

Hence, no more Jacquerie.  I regret it for the sake of the skilful. 
The old fear has produced its last effects in that quarter;
and henceforth it can no longer be employed in politics.  The principal
spring of the red spectre is broken.  Every one knows it now. 
The scare-crow scares no longer.  The birds take liberties with
the mannikin, foul creatures alight upon it, the bourgeois laugh
at it.



CHAPTER IV

THE TWO DUTIES:  TO WATCH AND TO HOPE


This being the case, is all social danger dispelled?  Certainly not. 
There is no Jacquerie; society may rest assured on that point;
blood will no longer rush to its head.  But let society take heed to
the manner in which it breathes.  Apoplexy is no longer to be feared,
but phthisis is there.  Social phthisis is called misery.

One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck
by lightning.

Let us not weary of repeating, and sympathetic souls must not forget
that this is the first of fraternal obligations, and selfish hearts
must understand that the first of political necessities consists
in thinking first of all of the disinherited and sorrowing throngs,
in solacing, airing, enlightening, loving them, in enlarging
their horizon to a magnificent extent, in lavishing upon them
education in every form, in offering them the example of labor,
never the example of idleness, in diminishing the individual burden
by enlarging the notion of the universal aim, in setting a limit
to poverty without setting a limit to wealth, in creating vast
fields of public and popular activity, in having, like Briareus,
a hundred hands to extend in all directions to the oppressed
and the feeble, in employing the collective power for that grand
duty of opening workshops for all arms, schools for all aptitudes,
and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in augmenting salaries,
diminishing trouble, balancing what should be and what is, that is
to say, in proportioning enjoyment to effort and a glut to need;
in a word, in evolving from the social apparatus more light and more
comfort for the benefit of those who suffer and those who are ignorant.

And, let us say it, all this is but the beginning.  The true
question is this:  labor cannot be a law without being a right.

We will not insist upon this point; this is not the proper place
for that.

If nature calls itself Providence, society should call itself foresight.

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than
material improvement.  To know is a sacrament, to think is
the prime necessity, truth is nourishment as well as grain. 
A reason which fasts from science and wisdom grows thin.  Let us
enter equal complaint against stomachs and minds which do not eat. 
If there is anything more heart-breaking than a body perishing
for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from hunger for the light.

The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. 
Some day we shall be amazed.  As the human race mounts upward,
the deep layers emerge naturally from the zone of distress. 
The obliteration of misery will be accomplished by a simple elevation
of level.

We should do wrong were we to doubt this blessed consummation.

The past is very strong, it is true, at the present moment.  It censures. 
This rejuvenation of a corpse is surprising.  Behold, it is walking
and advancing.  It seems a victor; this dead body is a conqueror. 
He arrives with his legions, superstitions, with his sword, despotism,
with his banner, ignorance; a while ago, he won ten battles. 
He advances, he threatens, he laughs, he is at our doors.  Let us
not despair, on our side.  Let us sell the field on which Hannibal
is encamped.

What have we to fear, we who believe?

No such thing as a back-flow of ideas exists any more than there
exists a return of a river on its course.

But let those who do not desire a future reflect on this matter. 
When they say "no" to progress, it is not the future but themselves
that they are condemning.  They are giving themselves a sad malady;
they are inoculating themselves with the past.  There is but one way
of rejecting To-morrow, and that is to die.

Now, no death, that of the body as late as possible, that of the
soul never,--this is what we desire.

Yes, the enigma will utter its word, the sphinx will speak,
the problem will be solved.

Yes, the people, sketched out by the eighteenth century, will be
finished by the nineteenth.  He who doubts this is an idiot! 
The future blossoming, the near blossoming forth of universal
well-being, is a divinely fatal phenomenon.

Immense combined propulsions direct human affairs and conduct
them within a given time to a logical state, that is to say,
to a state of equilibrium; that is to say, to equity.  A force
composed of earth and heaven results from humanity and governs it;
this force is a worker of miracles; marvellous issues are no more
difficult to it than extraordinary vicissitudes.  Aided by science,
which comes from one man, and by the event, which comes from another,
it is not greatly alarmed by these contradictions in the attitude
of problems, which seem impossibilities to the vulgar herd. 
It is no less skilful at causing a solution to spring forth from the
reconciliation of ideas, than a lesson from the reconciliation of facts,
and we may expect anything from that mysterious power of progress,
which brought the Orient and the Occident face to face one fine day,
in the depths of a sepulchre, and made the imaums converse with
Bonaparte in the interior of the Great Pyramid.

In the meantime, let there be no halt, no hesitation, no pause
in the grandiose onward march of minds.  Social philosophy consists
essentially in science and peace.  Its object is, and its result
must be, to dissolve wrath by the study of antagonisms.  It examines,
it scrutinizes, it analyzes; then it puts together once more,
it proceeds by means of reduction, discarding all hatred.

More than once, a society has been seen to give way before the wind
which is let loose upon mankind; history is full of the shipwrecks
of nations and empires; manners, customs, laws, religions,--and some
fine day that unknown force, the hurricane, passes by and bears them
all away.  The civilizations of India, of Chaldea, of Persia, of Syria,
of Egypt, have disappeared one after the other.  Why?  We know not. 
What are the causes of these disasters?  We do not know. 
Could these societies have been saved?  Was it their fault? 
Did they persist in the fatal vice which destroyed them? 
What is the amount of suicide in these terrible deaths of a
nation and a race?  Questions to which there exists no reply. 
Darkness enwraps condemned civilizations.  They sprung a leak,
then they sank.  We have nothing more to say; and it is with a sort
of terror that we look on, at the bottom of that sea which is called
the past, behind those colossal waves, at the shipwreck of those
immense vessels, Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome, beneath the
fearful gusts which emerge from all the mouths of the shadows. 
But shadows are there, and light is here.  We are not acquainted
with the maladies of these ancient civilizations, we do not know
the infirmities of our own.  Everywhere upon it we have the right
of light, we contemplate its beauties, we lay bare its defects. 
Where it is ill, we probe; and the sickness once diagnosed,
the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy. 
Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is its law and
its prodigy; it is worth the trouble of saving.  It will be saved. 
It is already much to have solaced it; its enlightenment is yet
another point.  All the labors of modern social philosophies must
converge towards this point.  The thinker of to-day has a great duty--
to auscultate civilization.

We repeat, that this auscultation brings encouragement; it is by this
persistence in encouragement that we wish to conclude these pages,
an austere interlude in a mournful drama.  Beneath the social mortality,
we feel human imperishableness.  The globe does not perish,
because it has these wounds, craters, eruptions, sulphur pits,
here and there, nor because of a volcano which ejects its pus. 
The maladies of the people do not kill man.

And yet, any one who follows the course of social clinics shakes
his head at times.  The strongest, the tenderest, the most logical
have their hours of weakness.

Will the future arrive?  It seems as though we might almost
put this question, when we behold so much terrible darkness. 
Melancholy face-to-face encounter of selfish and wretched.  On the
part of the selfish, the prejudices, shadows of costly education,
appetite increasing through intoxication, a giddiness of prosperity
which dulls, a fear of suffering which, in some, goes as far
as an aversion for the suffering, an implacable satisfaction,
the I so swollen that it bars the soul; on the side of the
wretched covetousness, envy, hatred of seeing others enjoy,
the profound impulses of the human beast towards assuaging its desires,
hearts full of mist, sadness, need, fatality, impure and simple ignorance.

Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? is the luminous
point which we distinguish there one of those which vanish? 
The ideal is frightful to behold, thus lost in the depths, small,
isolated, imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great,
black menaces, monstrously heaped around it; yet no more in danger
than a star in the maw of the clouds.



BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS



CHAPTER I

FULL LIGHT


The reader has probably understood that Eponine, having recognized
through the gate, the inhabitant of that Rue Plumet whither
Magnon had sent her, had begun by keeping the ruffians away from
the Rue Plumet, and had then conducted Marius thither, and that,
after many days spent in ecstasy before that gate, Marius, drawn on
by that force which draws the iron to the magnet and a lover towards
the stones of which is built the house of her whom he loves,
had finally entered Cosette's garden as Romeo entered the garden
of Juliet.  This had even proved easier for him than for Romeo;
Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, Marius had only to use a little
force on one of the bars of the decrepit gate which vacillated
in its rusty recess, after the fashion of old people's teeth. 
Marius was slender and readily passed through.

As there was never any one in the street, and as Marius never
entered the garden except at night, he ran no risk of being seen.

Beginning with that blessed and holy hour when a kiss betrothed
these two souls, Marius was there every evening.  If, at that period
of her existence, Cosette had fallen in love with a man in the least
unscrupulous or debauched, she would have been lost; for there are
generous natures which yield themselves, and Cosette was one of them. 
One of woman's magnanimities is to yield.  Love, at the height where
it is absolute, is complicated with some indescribably celestial
blindness of modesty.  But what dangers you run, O noble souls! 
Often you give the heart, and we take the body.  Your heart remains
with you, you gaze upon it in the gloom with a shudder.  Love has
no middle course; it either ruins or it saves.  All human destiny
lies in this dilemma.  This dilemma, ruin, or safety, is set forth
no more inexorably by any fatality than by love.  Love is life,
if it is not death.  Cradle; also coffin.  The same sentiment says
"yes" and "no" in the human heart.  Of all the things that God
has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light,
alas! and the most darkness.

God willed that Cosette's love should encounter one of the loves
which save.

Throughout the whole of the month of May of that year 1832,
there were there, in every night, in that poor, neglected garden,
beneath that thicket which grew thicker and more fragrant day by day,
two beings composed of all chastity, all innocence, overflowing with
all the felicity of heaven, nearer to the archangels than to mankind,
pure, honest, intoxicated, radiant, who shone for each other amid
the shadows.  It seemed to Cosette that Marius had a crown, and to
Marius that Cosette had a nimbus.  They touched each other, they gazed
at each other, they clasped each other's hands, they pressed close
to each other; but there was a distance which they did not pass. 
Not that they respected it; they did not know of its existence. 
Marius was conscious of a barrier, Cosette's innocence; and Cosette
of a support, Marius' loyalty.  The first kiss had also been
the last.  Marius, since that time, had not gone further than to touch
Cosette's hand, or her kerchief, or a lock of her hair, with his lips. 
For him, Cosette was a perfume and not a woman.  He inhaled her. 
She refused nothing, and he asked nothing.  Cosette was happy,
and Marius was satisfied.  They lived in this ecstatic state which
can be described as the dazzling of one soul by another soul. 
It was the ineffable first embrace of two maiden souls in the ideal. 
Two swans meeting on the Jungfrau.

At that hour of love, an hour when voluptuousness is absolutely mute,
beneath the omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, the pure and seraphic Marius,
would rather have gone to a woman of the town than have raised
Cosette's robe to the height of her ankle.  Once, in the moonlight,
Cosette stooped to pick up something on the ground, her bodice fell
apart and permitted a glimpse of the beginning of her throat. 
Marius turned away his eyes.

What took place between these two beings?  Nothing.  They adored
each other.

At night, when they were there, that garden seemed a living and a
sacred spot.  All flowers unfolded around them and sent them incense;
and they opened their souls and scattered them over the flowers. 
The wanton and vigorous vegetation quivered, full of strength
and intoxication, around these two innocents, and they uttered words
of love which set the trees to trembling.

What words were these?  Breaths.  Nothing more.  These breaths
sufficed to trouble and to touch all nature round about. 
Magic power which we should find it difficult to understand were we
to read in a book these conversations which are made to be borne away
and dispersed like smoke wreaths by the breeze beneath the leaves. 
Take from those murmurs of two lovers that melody which proceeds
from the soul and which accompanies them like a lyre, and what
remains is nothing more than a shade; you say:  "What! is that all!"
eh! yes, childish prattle, repetitions, laughter at nothing,
nonsense, everything that is deepest and most sublime in the world! 
The only things which are worth the trouble of saying and hearing!

The man who has never heard, the man who has never uttered
these absurdities, these paltry remarks, is an imbecile
and a malicious fellow.  Cosette said to Marius:--

"Dost thou know?--"

[In all this and athwart this celestial maidenliness, and without
either of them being able to say how it had come about, they had
begun to call each other thou.]

"Dost thou know?  My name is Euphrasie."

"Euphrasie?  Why, no, thy name is Cosette."

"Oh!  Cosette is a very ugly name that was given to me when I
was a little thing.  But my real name is Euphrasie.  Dost thou
like that name--Euphrasie?"

"Yes.  But Cosette is not ugly."

"Do you like it better than Euphrasie?"

"Why, yes."

"Then I like it better too.  Truly, it is pretty, Cosette. 
Call me Cosette."

And the smile that she added made of this dialogue an idyl worthy
of a grove situated in heaven.  On another occasion she gazed
intently at him and exclaimed:--

"Monsieur, you are handsome, you are good-looking, you are witty,
you are not at all stupid, you are much more learned than I am,
but I bid you defiance with this word:  I love you!"

And Marius, in the very heavens, thought he heard a strain sung
by a star.

Or she bestowed on him a gentle tap because he coughed, and she
said to him:--

"Don't cough, sir; I will not have people cough on my domain without
my permission.  It's very naughty to cough and to disturb me. 
I want you to be well, because, in the first place, if you were
not well, I should be very unhappy.  What should I do then?"

And this was simply divine.

Once Marius said to Cosette:--

"Just imagine, I thought at one time that your name was Ursule."

This made both of them laugh the whole evening.

In the middle of another conversation, he chanced to exclaim:--

"Oh!  One day, at the Luxembourg, I had a good mind to finish
breaking up a veteran!"  But he stopped short, and went no further. 
He would have been obliged to speak to Cosette of her garter,
and that was impossible.  This bordered on a strange theme, the flesh,
before which that immense and innocent love recoiled with a sort
of sacred fright.

Marius pictured life with Cosette to himself like this,
without anything else; to come every evening to the Rue Plumet,
to displace the old and accommodating bar of the chief-justice's gate,
to sit elbow to elbow on that bench, to gaze through the trees at
the scintillation of the on-coming night, to fit a fold of the knee
of his trousers into the ample fall of Cosette's gown, to caress
her thumb-nail, to call her thou, to smell of the same flower,
one after the other, forever, indefinitely.  During this time,
clouds passed above their heads.  Every time that the wind blows it
bears with it more of the dreams of men than of the clouds of heaven.

This chaste, almost shy love was not devoid of gallantry,
by any means.  To pay compliments to the woman whom a man loves
is the first method of bestowing caresses, and he is half audacious
who tries it.  A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil. 
Voluptuousness mingles there with its sweet tiny point, while it
hides itself.  The heart draws back before voluptuousness only to
love the more.  Marius' blandishments, all saturated with fancy,
were, so to speak, of azure hue.  The birds when they fly up yonder,
in the direction of the angels, must hear such words.  There were
mingled with them, nevertheless, life, humanity, all the positiveness
of which Marius was capable.  It was what is said in the bower,
a prelude to what will be said in the chamber; a lyrical effusion,
strophe and sonnet intermingled, pleasing hyperboles of cooing,
all the refinements of adoration arranged in a bouquet and exhaling
a celestial perfume, an ineffable twitter of heart to heart.

"Oh!" murmured Marius, "how beautiful you are!  I dare not look at you. 
It is all over with me when I contemplate you.  You are a grace. 
I know not what is the matter with me.  The hem of your gown,
when the tip of your shoe peeps from beneath, upsets me.  And then,
what an enchanted gleam when you open your thought even but a little! 
You talk astonishingly good sense.  It seems to me at times
that you are a dream.  Speak, I listen, I admire.  Oh Cosette!
how strange it is and how charming!  I am really beside myself. 
You are adorable, Mademoiselle.  I study your feet with the microscope
and your soul with the telescope."

And Cosette answered:--

"I have been loving a little more all the time that has passed
since this morning."

Questions and replies took care of themselves in this dialogue,
which always turned with mutual consent upon love, as the little
pith figures always turn on their peg.

Cosette's whole person was ingenuousness, ingenuity, transparency,
whiteness, candor, radiance.  It might have been said of Cosette
that she was clear.  She produced on those who saw her the
sensation of April and dawn.  There was dew in her eyes. 
Cosette was a condensation of the auroral light in the form of a woman.

It was quite simple that Marius should admire her, since he adored her. 
But the truth is, that this little school-girl, fresh from the convent,
talked with exquisite penetration and uttered, at times, all sorts
of true and delicate sayings.  Her prattle was conversation. 
She never made a mistake about anything, and she saw things justly. 
The woman feels and speaks with the tender instinct of the heart,
which is infallible.

No one understands so well as a woman, how to say things that are,
at once, both sweet and deep.  Sweetness and depth, they are the whole
of woman; in them lies the whole of heaven.

In this full felicity, tears welled up to their eyes every instant. 
A crushed lady-bug, a feather fallen from a nest, a branch of
hawthorn broken, aroused their pity, and their ecstasy, sweetly mingled
with melancholy, seemed to ask nothing better than to weep. 
The most sovereign symptom of love is a tenderness that is, at times,
almost unbearable.

And, in addition to this,--all these contradictions are the lightning
play of love,--they were fond of laughing, they laughed readily
and with a delicious freedom, and so familiarly that they sometimes
presented the air of two boys.

Still, though unknown to hearts intoxicated with purity, nature is always
present and will not be forgotten.  She is there with her brutal and
sublime object; and however great may be the innocence of souls, one feels
in the most modest private interview, the adorable and mysterious
shade which separates a couple of lovers from a pair of friends.

They idolized each other.

The permanent and the immutable are persistent.  People live,
they smile, they laugh, they make little grimaces with the tips of
their lips, they interlace their fingers, they call each other thou,
and that does not prevent eternity.

Two lovers hide themselves in the evening, in the twilight,
in the invisible, with the birds, with the roses; they fascinate
each other in the darkness with their hearts which they throw
into their eyes, they murmur, they whisper, and in the meantime,
immense librations of the planets fill the infinite universe.



CHAPTER II

THE BEWILDERMENT OF PERFECT HAPPINESS


They existed vaguely, frightened at their happiness.  They did not notice
the cholera which decimated Paris precisely during that very month. 
They had confided in each other as far as possible, but this
had not extended much further than their names.  Marius had told
Cosette that he was an orphan, that his name was Marius Pontmercy,
that he was a lawyer, that he lived by writing things for publishers,
that his father had been a colonel, that the latter had been a hero,
and that he, Marius, was on bad terms with his grandfather who
was rich.  He had also hinted at being a baron, but this had produced
no effect on Cosette.  She did not know the meaning of the word. 
Marius was Marius.  On her side, she had confided to him that she
had been brought up at the Petit-Picpus convent, that her mother,
like his own, was dead, that her father's name was M. Fauchelevent,
that he was very good, that he gave a great deal to the poor,
but that he was poor himself, and that he denied himself everything
though he denied her nothing.

Strange to say, in the sort of symphony which Marius had lived
since he had been in the habit of seeing Cosette, the past,
even the most recent past, had become so confused and distant
to him, that what Cosette told him satisfied him completely. 
It did not even occur to him to tell her about the nocturnal
adventure in the hovel, about Thenardier, about the burn,
and about the strange attitude and singular flight of her father. 
Marius had momentarily forgotten all this; in the evening he did
not even know that there had been a morning, what he had done,
where he had breakfasted, nor who had spoken to him; he had songs
in his ears which rendered him deaf to every other thought;
he only existed at the hours when he saw Cosette.  Then, as he
was in heaven, it was quite natural that he should forget earth. 
Both bore languidly the indefinable burden of immaterial pleasures. 
Thus lived these somnambulists who are called lovers.

Alas!  Who is there who has not felt all these things?  Why does
there come an hour when one emerges from this azure, and why does
life go on afterwards?

Loving almost takes the place of thinking.  Love is an ardent
forgetfulness of all the rest.  Then ask logic of passion if you will. 
There is no more absolute logical sequence in the human heart than
there is a perfect geometrical figure in the celestial mechanism. 
For Cosette and Marius nothing existed except Marius and Cosette. 
The universe around them had fallen into a hole.  They lived in a
golden minute.  There was nothing before them, nothing behind. 
It hardly occurred to Marius that Cosette had a father.  His brain
was dazzled and obliterated.  Of what did these lovers talk then? 
We have seen, of the flowers, and the swallows, the setting sun and
the rising moon, and all sorts of important things.  They had told
each other everything except everything.  The everything of lovers
is nothing.  But the father, the realities, that lair, the ruffians,
that adventure, to what purpose?  And was he very sure that this
nightmare had actually existed?  They were two, and they adored
each other, and beyond that there was nothing.  Nothing else existed. 
It is probable that this vanishing of hell in our rear is inherent
to the arrival of paradise.  Have we beheld demons?  Are there any? 
Have we trembled?  Have we suffered?  We no longer know.  A rosy cloud
hangs over it.

So these two beings lived in this manner, high aloft, with all
that improbability which is in nature; neither at the nadir nor at
the zenith, between man and seraphim, above the mire, below the ether,
in the clouds; hardly flesh and blood, soul and ecstasy from head
to foot; already too sublime to walk the earth, still too heavily
charged with humanity to disappear in the blue, suspended like atoms
which are waiting to be precipitated; apparently beyond the bounds
of destiny; ignorant of that rut; yesterday, to-day, to-morrow;
amazed, rapturous, floating, soaring; at times so light that they
could take their flight out into the infinite; almost prepared to soar
away to all eternity.  They slept wide-awake, thus sweetly lulled. 
Oh! splendid lethargy of the real overwhelmed by the ideal.

Sometimes, beautiful as Cosette was, Marius shut his eyes in
her presence.  The best way to look at the soul is through closed eyes.

Marius and Cosette never asked themselves whither this was to lead them. 
They considered that they had already arrived.  It is a strange
claim on man's part to wish that love should lead to something.



CHAPTER III

THE BEGINNING OF SHADOW


Jean Valjean suspected nothing.

Cosette, who was rather less dreamy than Marius, was gay,
and that sufficed for Jean Valjean's happiness.  The thoughts which
Cosette cherished, her tender preoccupations, Marius' image which
filled her heart, took away nothing from the incomparable purity
of her beautiful, chaste, and smiling brow.  She was at the age when
the virgin bears her love as the angel his lily.  So Jean Valjean
was at ease.  And then, when two lovers have come to an understanding,
things always go well; the third party who might disturb their love
is kept in a state of perfect blindness by a restricted number
of precautions which are always the same in the case of all lovers. 
Thus, Cosette never objected to any of Jean Valjean's proposals. 
Did she want to take a walk?  "Yes, dear little father."  Did she
want to stay at home?  Very good.  Did he wish to pass the evening
with Cosette?  She was delighted.  As he always went to bed at ten
o'clock, Marius did not come to the garden on such occasions until
after that hour, when, from the street, he heard Cosette open the
long glass door on the veranda.  Of course, no one ever met Marius
in the daytime.  Jean Valjean never even dreamed any longer that
Marius was in existence.  Only once, one morning, he chanced to say
to Cosette:  "Why, you have whitewash on your back!"  On the previous
evening, Marius, in a transport, had pushed Cosette against the wall.

Old Toussaint, who retired early, thought of nothing but her sleep,
and was as ignorant of the whole matter as Jean Valjean.

Marius never set foot in the house.  When he was with Cosette,
they hid themselves in a recess near the steps, in order that they
might neither be seen nor heard from the street, and there they sat,
frequently contenting themselves, by way of conversation,
with pressing each other's hands twenty times a minute as they
gazed at the branches of the trees.  At such times, a thunderbolt
might have fallen thirty paces from them, and they would not have
noticed it, so deeply was the revery of the one absorbed and sunk
in the revery of the other.

Limpid purity.  Hours wholly white; almost all alike.  This sort
of love is a recollection of lily petals and the plumage of the dove.

The whole extent of the garden lay between them and the street. 
Every time that Marius entered and left, he carefully adjusted the bar
of the gate in such a manner that no displacement was visible.

He usually went away about midnight, and returned
to Courfeyrac's lodgings.  Courfeyrac said to Bahorel:--

"Would you believe it?  Marius comes home nowadays at one o'clock
in the morning."

Bahorel replied:--

"What do you expect?  There's always a petard in a seminary fellow."

At times, Courfeyrac folded his arms, assumed a serious air,
and said to Marius:--

"You are getting irregular in your habits, young man."

Courfeyrac, being a practical man, did not take in good part
this reflection of an invisible paradise upon Marius; he was not
much in the habit of concealed passions; it made him impatient,
and now and then he called upon Marius to come back to reality.

One morning, he threw him this admonition:--

"My dear fellow, you produce upon me the effect of being located
in the moon, the realm of dreams, the province of illusions,
capital, soap-bubble. Come, be a good boy, what's her name?"

But nothing could induce Marius "to talk."  They might have torn
out his nails before one of the two sacred syllables of which that
ineffable name, Cosette, was composed.  True love is as luminous
as the dawn and as silent as the tomb.  Only, Courfeyrac saw this
change in Marius, that his taciturnity was of the beaming order.

During this sweet month of May, Marius and Cosette learned to know
these immense delights.  To dispute and to say you for thou,
simply that they might say thou the better afterwards.  To talk at
great length with very minute details, of persons in whom they took
not the slightest interest in the world; another proof that in that
ravishing opera called love, the libretto counts for almost nothing;

For Marius, to listen to Cosette discussing finery;

For Cosette, to listen to Marius talk in politics;

To listen, knee pressed to knee, to the carriages rolling along
the Rue de Babylone;

To gaze upon the same planet in space, or at the same glowworm
gleaming in the grass;

To hold their peace together; a still greater delight than conversation;

Etc., etc.

In the meantime, divers complications were approaching.

One evening, Marius was on his way to the rendezvous, by way of the
Boulevard des Invalides.  He habitually walked with drooping head. 
As he was on the point of turning the corner of the Rue Plumet,
he heard some one quite close to him say:--

"Good evening, Monsieur Marius."

He raised his head and recognized Eponine.

This produced a singular effect upon him.  He had not thought
of that girl a single time since the day when she had conducted
him to the Rue Plumet, he had not seen her again, and she had
gone completely out of his mind.  He had no reasons for anything
but gratitude towards her, he owed her his happiness, and yet,
it was embarrassing to him to meet her.

It is an error to think that passion, when it is pure and happy,
leads man to a state of perfection; it simply leads him, as we
have noted, to a state of oblivion.  In this situation, man forgets
to be bad, but he also forgets to be good.  Gratitude, duty,
matters essential and important to be remembered, vanish.  At any
other time, Marius would have behaved quite differently to Eponine. 
Absorbed in Cosette, he had not even clearly put it to himself
that this Eponine was named Eponine Thenardier, and that she bore
the name inscribed in his father's will, that name, for which,
but a few months before, he would have so ardently sacrificed himself. 
We show Marius as he was.  His father himself was fading out of his
soul to some extent, under the splendor of his love.

He replied with some embarrassment:--

"Ah! so it's you, Eponine?"

"Why do you call me you?  Have I done anything to you?"

"No," he answered.

Certainly, he had nothing against her.  Far from it.  Only, he felt
that he could not do otherwise, now that he used thou to Cosette,
than say you to Eponine.

As he remained silent, she exclaimed:--

"Say--"

Then she paused.  It seemed as though words failed that creature
formerly so heedless and so bold.  She tried to smile and could not. 
Then she resumed:--

"Well?"

Then she paused again, and remained with downcast eyes.

"Good evening, Mr. Marius," said she suddenly and abruptly;
and away she went.



CHAPTER IV

A CAB RUNS IN ENGLISH AND BARKS IN SLANG


The following day was the 3d of June, 1832, a date which it
is necessary to indicate on account of the grave events
which at that epoch hung on the horizon of Paris in the state
of lightning-charged clouds.  Marius, at nightfall, was pursuing
the same road as on the preceding evening, with the same thoughts
of delight in his heart, when he caught sight of Eponine approaching,
through the trees of the boulevard.  Two days in succession--
this was too much.  He turned hastily aside, quitted the boulevard,
changed his course and went to the Rue Plumet through the Rue Monsieur.

This caused Eponine to follow him to the Rue Plumet, a thing
which she had not yet done.  Up to that time, she had contented
herself with watching him on his passage along the boulevard
without ever seeking to encounter him.  It was only on the evening
before that she had attempted to address him.

So Eponine followed him, without his suspecting the fact. 
She saw him displace the bar and slip into the garden.

She approached the railing, felt of the bars one after the other,
and readily recognized the one which Marius had moved.

She murmured in a low voice and in gloomy accents:--

"None of that, Lisette!"

She seated herself on the underpinning of the railing, close beside
the bar, as though she were guarding it.  It was precisely
at the point where the railing touched the neighboring wall. 
There was a dim nook there, in which Eponine was entirely concealed.

She remained thus for more than an hour, without stirring
and without breathing, a prey to her thoughts.

Towards ten o'clock in the evening, one of the two or three persons
who passed through the Rue Plumet, an old, belated bourgeois who
was making haste to escape from this deserted spot of evil repute,
as he skirted the garden railings and reached the angle which it
made with the wall, heard a dull and threatening voice saying:--

"I'm no longer surprised that he comes here every evening."

The passer-by cast a glance around him, saw no one, dared not peer
into the black niche, and was greatly alarmed.  He redoubled his pace.

This passer-by had reason to make haste, for a very few
instants later, six men, who were marching separately
and at some distance from each other, along the wall,
and who might have been taken for a gray patrol, entered the Rue Plumet.

The first to arrive at the garden railing halted, and waited
for the others; a second later, all six were reunited.

These men began to talk in a low voice.

"This is the place," said one of them.

"Is there a cab [dog] in the garden?" asked another.

"I don't know.  In any case, I have fetched a ball that we'll make
him eat."

"Have you some putty to break the pane with?"

"Yes."

"The railing is old," interpolated a fifth, who had the voice
of a ventriloquist.

"So much the better," said the second who had spoken.  "It won't
screech under the saw, and it won't be hard to cut."

The sixth, who had not yet opened his lips, now began to inspect
the gate, as Eponine had done an hour earlier, grasping each bar
in succession, and shaking them cautiously.

Thus he came to the bar which Marius had loosened.  As he was on the
point of grasping this bar, a hand emerged abruptly from the darkness,
fell upon his arm; he felt himself vigorously thrust aside by a
push in the middle of his breast, and a hoarse voice said to him,
but not loudly:--

"There's a dog."

At the same moment, he perceived a pale girl standing before him.

The man underwent that shock which the unexpected always brings. 
He bristled up in hideous wise; nothing is so formidable to behold as
ferocious beasts who are uneasy; their terrified air evokes terror.

He recoiled and stammered:--

"What jade is this?"

"Your daughter."

It was, in fact, Eponine, who had addressed Thenardier.

At the apparition of Eponine, the other five, that is to say,
Claquesous, Guelemer, Babet, Brujon, and Montparnasse had noiselessly
drawn near, without precipitation, without uttering a word,
with the sinister slowness peculiar to these men of the night.

Some indescribable but hideous tools were visible in their hands. 
Guelemer held one of those pairs of curved pincers which prowlers
call fanchons.

"Ah, see here, what are you about there?  What do you want with us? 
Are you crazy?" exclaimed Thenardier, as loudly as one can exclaim
and still speak low; "what have you come here to hinder our work for?"

Eponine burst out laughing, and threw herself on his neck.

"I am here, little father, because I am here.  Isn't a person
allowed to sit on the stones nowadays?  It's you who ought not
to be here.  What have you come here for, since it's a biscuit? 
I told Magnon so.  There's nothing to be done here.  But embrace me,
my good little father!  It's a long time since I've seen you! 
So you're out?"

Thenardier tried to disentangle himself from Eponine's arms,
and grumbled:--

"That's good.  You've embraced me.  Yes, I'm out.  I'm not in. 
Now, get away with you."

But Eponine did not release her hold, and redoubled her caresses.

"But how did you manage it, little pa?  You must have been very
clever to get out of that.  Tell me about it!  And my mother? 
Where is mother?  Tell me about mamma."

Thenardier replied:--

"She's well.  I don't know, let me alone, and be off, I tell you."

"I won't go, so there now," pouted Eponine like a spoiled child;
"you send me off, and it's four months since I saw you, and I've
hardly had time to kiss you."

And she caught her father round the neck again.

"Come, now, this is stupid!" said Babet.

"Make haste!" said Guelemer, "the cops may pass."

The ventriloquist's voice repeated his distich:--


"Nous n' sommes pas le jour de l'an, "This isn't New Year's day
      A becoter papa, maman."                 To peck at pa and ma."


Eponine turned to the five ruffians.

"Why, it's Monsieur Brujon.  Good day, Monsieur Babet.  Good day,
Monsieur Claquesous.  Don't you know me, Monsieur Guelemer? 
How goes it, Montparnasse?"

"Yes, they know you!" ejaculated Thenardier.  "But good day,
good evening, sheer off! leave us alone!"

"It's the hour for foxes, not for chickens," said Montparnasse.

"You see the job we have on hand here," added Babet.

Eponine caught Montparnasse's hand.

"Take care," said he, "you'll cut yourself, I've a knife open."

"My little Montparnasse," responded Eponine very gently, "you must
have confidence in people.  I am the daughter of my father, perhaps. 
Monsieur Babet, Monsieur Guelemer, I'm the person who was charged
to investigate this matter."

It is remarkable that Eponine did not talk slang.  That frightful
tongue had become impossible to her since she had known Marius.

She pressed in her hand, small, bony, and feeble as that of a skeleton,
Guelemer's huge, coarse fingers, and continued:--

"You know well that I'm no fool.  Ordinarily, I am believed. 
I have rendered you service on various occasions.  Well, I have
made inquiries; you will expose yourselves to no purpose, you see. 
I swear to you that there is nothing in this house."

"There are lone women," said Guelemer.

"No, the persons have moved away."

"The candles haven't, anyway!" ejaculated Babet.

And he pointed out to Eponine, across the tops of the trees, a light
which was wandering about in the mansard roof of the pavilion. 
It was Toussaint, who had stayed up to spread out some linen
to dry.

Eponine made a final effort.

"Well," said she, "they're very poor folks, and it's a hovel
where there isn't a sou."

"Go to the devil!" cried Thenardier.  "When we've turned the house
upside down and put the cellar at the top and the attic below,
we'll tell you what there is inside, and whether it's francs or sous
or half-farthings."

And he pushed her aside with the intention of entering.

"My good friend, Mr. Montparnasse," said Eponine, "I entreat you,
you are a good fellow, don't enter."

"Take care, you'll cut yourself," replied Montparnasse.

Thenardier resumed in his decided tone:--

"Decamp, my girl, and leave men to their own affairs!"

Eponine released Montparnasse's hand, which she had grasped again,
and said:--

"So you mean to enter this house?"

"Rather!" grinned the ventriloquist.

Then she set her back against the gate, faced the six ruffians
who were armed to the teeth, and to whom the night lent the visages
of demons, and said in a firm, low voice:--

"Well, I don't mean that you shall."

They halted in amazement.  The ventriloquist, however, finished his grin. 
She went on:--

"Friends!  Listen well.  This is not what you want.  Now I'm talking. 
In the first place, if you enter this garden, if you lay a hand on
this gate, I'll scream, I'll beat on the door, I'll rouse everybody,
I'll have the whole six of you seized, I'll call the police."

"She'd do it, too," said Thenardier in a low tone to Brujon
and the ventriloquist.

She shook her head and added:--

"Beginning with my father!"

Thenardier stepped nearer.

"Not so close, my good man!" said she.

He retreated, growling between his teeth:--

"Why, what's the matter with her?"

And he added:--

"Bitch!"

She began to laugh in a terrible way:--

"As you like, but you shall not enter here.  I'm not the daughter
of a dog, since I'm the daughter of a wolf.  There are six of you,
what matters that to me?  You are men.  Well, I'm a woman. 
You don't frighten me.  I tell you that you shan't enter this house,
because it doesn't suit me.  If you approach, I'll bark.  I told you,
I'm the dog, and I don't care a straw for you.  Go your way,
you bore me!  Go where you please, but don't come here, I forbid it! 
You can use your knives.  I'll use kicks; it's all the same to me,
come on!"

She advanced a pace nearer the ruffians, she was terrible, she burst
out laughing:--

"Pardine!  I'm not afraid.  I shall be hungry this summer, and I shall
be cold this winter.  Aren't they ridiculous, these ninnies of men,
to think they can scare a girl!  What!  Scare?  Oh, yes, much! 
Because you have finical poppets of mistresses who hide under the bed
when you put on a big voice, forsooth!  I ain't afraid of anything,
that I ain't!"

She fastened her intent gaze upon Thenardier and said:--

"Not even of you, father!"

Then she continued, as she cast her blood-shot, spectre-like eyes
upon the ruffians in turn:--

"What do I care if I'm picked up to-morrow morning on the pavement
of the Rue Plumet, killed by the blows of my father's club,
or whether I'm found a year from now in the nets at Saint-Cloud
or the Isle of Swans in the midst of rotten old corks and drowned dogs?"

She was forced to pause; she was seized by a dry cough, her breath
came from her weak and narrow chest like the death-rattle.

She resumed:--

"I have only to cry out, and people will come, and then slap, bang! 
There are six of you; I represent the whole world."

Thenardier made a movement towards her.

"Don't approach!" she cried.

He halted, and said gently:--

"Well, no; I won't approach, but don't speak so loud.  So you intend
to hinder us in our work, my daughter?  But we must earn our living
all the same.  Have you no longer any kind feeling for your father?"

"You bother me," said Eponine.

"But we must live, we must eat--"

"Burst!"

So saying, she seated herself on the underpinning of the fence
and hummed:--

       "Mon bras si dodu,            "My arm so plump,
        Ma jambe bien faite           My leg well formed,
        Et le temps perdu."           And time wasted."


She had set her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand,
and she swung her foot with an air of indifference.  Her tattered
gown permitted a view of her thin shoulder-blades. The neighboring
street lantern illuminated her profile and her attitude. 
Nothing more resolute and more surprising could be seen.

The six rascals, speechless and gloomy at being held in check
by a girl, retreated beneath the shadow cast by the lantern,
and held counsel with furious and humiliated shrugs.

In the meantime she stared at them with a stern but peaceful air.

"There's something the matter with her," said Babet.  "A reason. 
Is she in love with the dog?  It's a shame to miss this, anyway. 
Two women, an old fellow who lodges in the back-yard, and curtains
that ain't so bad at the windows.  The old cove must be a Jew. 
I think the job's a good one."

"Well, go in, then, the rest of you," exclaimed Montparnasse. 
"Do the job.  I'll stay here with the girl, and if she fails us--"

He flashed the knife, which he held open in his hand, in the light
of the lantern.

Thenardier said not a word, and seemed ready for whatever
the rest pleased.

Brujon, who was somewhat of an oracle, and who had, as the reader knows,
"put up the job," had not as yet spoken.  He seemed thoughtful. 
He had the reputation of not sticking at anything, and it was
known that he had plundered a police post simply out of bravado. 
Besides this he made verses and songs, which gave him great authority.

Babet interrogated him:--

"You say nothing, Brujon?"

Brujon remained silent an instant longer, then he shook his head
in various ways, and finally concluded to speak:--

"See here; this morning I came across two sparrows fighting,
this evening I jostled a woman who was quarrelling.  All that's bad. 
Let's quit."

They went away.

As they went, Montparnasse muttered:--

"Never mind! if they had wanted, I'd have cut her throat."

Babet responded

"I wouldn't. I don't hit a lady."

At the corner of the street they halted and exchanged the following
enigmatical dialogue in a low tone:--

"Where shall we go to sleep to-night?"

"Under Pantin [Paris]."

"Have you the key to the gate, Thenardier?"

"Pardi."

Eponine, who never took her eyes off of them, saw them retreat
by the road by which they had come.  She rose and began to creep
after them along the walls and the houses.  She followed them thus
as far as the boulevard.

There they parted, and she saw these six men plunge into the gloom,
where they appeared to melt away.



CHAPTER V

THINGS OF THE NIGHT


After the departure of the ruffians, the Rue Plumet resumed its tranquil,
nocturnal aspect.  That which had just taken place in this street
would not have astonished a forest.  The lofty trees, the copses,
the heaths, the branches rudely interlaced, the tall grass,
exist in a sombre manner; the savage swarming there catches glimpses
of sudden apparitions of the invisible; that which is below
man distinguishes, through the mists, that which is beyond man;
and the things of which we living beings are ignorant there
meet face to face in the night.  Nature, bristling and wild,
takes alarm at certain approaches in which she fancies that she
feels the supernatural.  The forces of the gloom know each other,
and are strangely balanced by each other.  Teeth and claws fear what
they cannot grasp.  Blood-drinking bestiality, voracious appetites,
hunger in search of prey, the armed instincts of nails and jaws
which have for source and aim the belly, glare and smell out
uneasily the impassive spectral forms straying beneath a shroud,
erect in its vague and shuddering robe, and which seem to them
to live with a dead and terrible life.  These brutalities,
which are only matter, entertain a confused fear of having to deal
with the immense obscurity condensed into an unknown being. 
A black figure barring the way stops the wild beast short. 
That which emerges from the cemetery intimidates and disconcerts
that which emerges from the cave; the ferocious fear the sinister;
wolves recoil when they encounter a ghoul.



CHAPTER VI

MARIUS BECOMES PRACTICAL ONCE MORE TO THE EXTENT OF GIVING COSETTE
HIS ADDRESS


While this sort of a dog with a human face was mounting guard
over the gate, and while the six ruffians were yielding to a girl,
Marius was by Cosette's side.

Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming,
the trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating;
never had the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise;
never had all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more
thoroughly to the inward music of love; never had Marius been
more captivated, more happy, more ecstatic.

But he had found Cosette sad; Cosette had been weeping.  Her eyes
were red.

This was the first cloud in that wonderful dream.

Marius' first word had been:  "What is the matter?"

And she had replied:  "This."

Then she had seated herself on the bench near the steps, and while
he tremblingly took his place beside her, she had continued:--

"My father told me this morning to hold myself in readiness,
because he has business, and we may go away from here."

Marius shivered from head to foot.

When one is at the end of one's life, to die means to go away;
when one is at the beginning of it, to go away means to die.

For the last six weeks, Marius had little by little, slowly, by degrees,
taken possession of Cosette each day.  As we have already explained,
in the case of first love, the soul is taken long before the body;
later on, one takes the body long before the soul; sometimes one
does not take the soul at all; the Faublas and the Prudhommes add: 
"Because there is none"; but the sarcasm is, fortunately, a blasphemy. 
So Marius possessed Cosette, as spirits possess, but he enveloped her
with all his soul, and seized her jealously with incredible conviction. 
He possessed her smile, her breath, her perfume, the profound radiance
of her blue eyes, the sweetness of her skin when he touched her hand,
the charming mark which she had on her neck, all her thoughts. 
Therefore, he possessed all Cosette's dreams.

He incessantly gazed at, and he sometimes touched lightly with
his breath, the short locks on the nape of her neck, and he declared
to himself that there was not one of those short hairs which did
not belong to him, Marius.  He gazed upon and adored the things
that she wore, her knot of ribbon, her gloves, her sleeves,
her shoes, her cuffs, as sacred objects of which he was the master. 
He dreamed that he was the lord of those pretty shell combs which
she wore in her hair, and he even said to himself, in confused
and suppressed stammerings of voluptuousness which did not make
their way to the light, that there was not a ribbon of her gown,
not a mesh in her stockings, not a fold in her bodice, which was
not his.  Beside Cosette he felt himself beside his own property,
his own thing, his own despot and his slave.  It seemed as though they
had so intermingled their souls, that it would have been impossible
to tell them apart had they wished to take them back again.--"This
is mine."  "No, it is mine."  "I assure you that you are mistaken. 
This is my property."  "What you are taking as your own is myself."--
Marius was something that made a part of Cosette, and Cosette
was something which made a part of Marius.  Marius felt Cosette
within him.  To have Cosette, to possess Cosette, this, to him,
was not to be distinguished from breathing.  It was in the midst
of this faith, of this intoxication, of this virgin possession,
unprecedented and absolute, of this sovereignty, that these words: 
"We are going away," fell suddenly, at a blow, and that the harsh voice
of reality cried to him:  "Cosette is not yours!"

Marius awoke.  For six weeks Marius had been living, as we have said,
outside of life; those words, going away! caused him to re-enter
it harshly.

He found not a word to say.  Cosette merely felt that his hand
was very cold.  She said to him in her turn:  "What is the matter?"

He replied in so low a tone that Cosette hardly heard him:--

"I did not understand what you said."

She began again:--

"This morning my father told me to settle all my little affairs
and to hold myself in readiness, that he would give me his linen
to put in a trunk, that he was obliged to go on a journey, that we
were to go away, that it is necessary to have a large trunk for me
and a small one for him, and that all is to be ready in a week
from now, and that we might go to England."

"But this is outrageous!" exclaimed Marius.

It is certain, that, at that moment, no abuse of power, no violence,
not one of the abominations of the worst tyrants, no action of Busiris,
of Tiberius, or of Henry VIII., could have equalled this in atrocity,
in the opinion of Marius; M. Fauchelevent taking his daughter off
to England because he had business there.

He demanded in a weak voice:--

"And when do you start?"

"He did not say when."

"And when shall you return?"

"He did not say when."

Marius rose and said coldly:--

"Cosette, shall you go?"

Cosette turned toward him her beautiful eyes, all filled with anguish,
and replied in a sort of bewilderment:--

"Where?"

"To England.  Shall you go?"

"Why do you say you to me?"

"I ask you whether you will go?"

"What do you expect me to do?" she said, clasping her hands.

"So, you will go?"

"If my father goes."

"So, you will go?"

Cosette took Marius' hand, and pressed it without replying.

"Very well," said Marius, "then I will go elsewhere."

Cosette felt rather than understood the meaning of these words. 
She turned so pale that her face shone white through the gloom. 
She stammered:--

"What do you mean?"

Marius looked at her, then raised his eyes to heaven,
and answered:  "Nothing."

When his eyes fell again, he saw Cosette smiling at him. 
The smile of a woman whom one loves possesses a visible radiance,
even at night.

"How silly we are!  Marius, I have an idea."

"What is it?"

"If we go away, do you go too!  I will tell you where!  Come and
join me wherever I am."

Marius was now a thoroughly roused man.  He had fallen back
into reality.  He cried to Cosette:--

"Go away with you!  Are you mad?  Why, I should have to have money,
and I have none!  Go to England?  But I am in debt now, I owe,
I don't know how much, more than ten louis to Courfeyrac, one of
my friends with whom you are not acquainted!  I have an old hat
which is not worth three francs, I have a coat which lacks buttons
in front, my shirt is all ragged, my elbows are torn, my boots let
in the water; for the last six weeks I have not thought about it,
and I have not told you about it.  You only see me at night,
and you give me your love; if you were to see me in the daytime,
you would give me a sou!  Go to England!  Eh!  I haven't enough to pay
for a passport!"

He threw himself against a tree which was close at hand, erect,
his brow pressed close to the bark, feeling neither the wood which
flayed his skin, nor the fever which was throbbing in his temples,
and there he stood motionless, on the point of falling, like the
statue of despair.

He remained a long time thus.  One could remain for eternity
in such abysses.  At last he turned round.  He heard behind him
a faint stifled noise, which was sweet yet sad.

It was Cosette sobbing.

She had been weeping for more than two hours beside Marius
as he meditated.

He came to her, fell at her knees, and slowly prostrating himself,
he took the tip of her foot which peeped out from beneath her robe,
and kissed it.

She let him have his way in silence.  There are moments when a
woman accepts, like a sombre and resigned goddess, the religion
of love.

"Do not weep," he said.

She murmured:--

"Not when I may be going away, and you cannot come!"

He went on:--

"Do you love me?"

She replied, sobbing, by that word from paradise which is never
more charming than amid tears:--

"I adore you!"

He continued in a tone which was an indescribable caress:--

"Do not weep.  Tell me, will you do this for me, and cease to weep?"

"Do you love me?" said she.

He took her hand.

"Cosette, I have never given my word of honor to any one,
because my word of honor terrifies me.  I feel that my father
is by my side.  Well, I give you my most sacred word of honor,
that if you go away I shall die."

In the tone with which he uttered these words there lay a melancholy
so solemn and so tranquil, that Cosette trembled.  She felt that
chill which is produced by a true and gloomy thing as it passes by. 
The shock made her cease weeping.

"Now, listen," said he, "do not expect me to-morrow."

"Why?"

"Do not expect me until the day after to-morrow."

"Oh!  Why?"

"You will see."

"A day without seeing you!  But that is impossible!"

"Let us sacrifice one day in order to gain our whole lives, perhaps."

And Marius added in a low tone and in an aside:--

"He is a man who never changes his habits, and he has never received
any one except in the evening."

"Of what man are you speaking?" asked Cosette.

"I?  I said nothing."

"What do you hope, then?"

"Wait until the day after to-morrow."

"You wish it?"

"Yes, Cosette."

She took his head in both her hands, raising herself on tiptoe
in order to be on a level with him, and tried to read his hope
in his eyes.

Marius resumed:--

"Now that I think of it, you ought to know my address: 
something might happen, one never knows; I live with that friend
named Courfeyrac, Rue de la Verrerie, No. 16."

He searched in his pocket, pulled out his penknife, and with the
blade he wrote on the plaster of the wall:--

"16 Rue de la Verrerie."

In the meantime, Cosette had begun to gaze into his eyes once more.

"Tell me your thought, Marius; you have some idea.  Tell it to me. 
Oh! tell me, so that I may pass a pleasant night."

"This is my idea:  that it is impossible that God should mean
to part us.  Wait; expect me the day after to-morrow."

"What shall I do until then?" said Cosette. 
"You are outside, you go, and come!  How happy men are! 
I shall remain entirely alone!  Oh!  How sad I shall
be!  What is it that you are going to do to-morrow evening? tell me."

"I am going to try something."

"Then I will pray to God and I will think of you here, so that you
may be successful.  I will question you no further, since you
do not wish it.  You are my master.  I shall pass the evening
to-morrow in singing that music from Euryanthe that you love,
and that you came one evening to listen to, outside my shutters. 
But day after to-morrow you will come early.  I shall expect
you at dusk, at nine o'clock precisely, I warn you.  Mon Dieu!
how sad it is that the days are so long!  On the stroke of nine,
do you understand, I shall be in the garden."

"And I also."

And without having uttered it, moved by the same thought,
impelled by those electric currents which place lovers in
continual communication, both being intoxicated with delight
even in their sorrow, they fell into each other's arms,
without perceiving that their lips met while their uplifted
eyes, overflowing with rapture and full of tears, gazed upon the stars.

When Marius went forth, the street was deserted.  This was the
moment when Eponine was following the ruffians to the boulevard.

While Marius had been dreaming with his head pressed to the tree,
an idea had crossed his mind; an idea, alas! that he himself judged
to be senseless and impossible.  He had come to a desperate decision.



CHAPTER VII

THE OLD HEART AND THE YOUNG HEART IN THE PRESENCE OF EACH OTHER


At that epoch, Father Gillenormand was well past his ninety-first
birthday.  He still lived with Mademoiselle Gillenormand in the Rue
des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the old house which he owned. 
He was, as the reader will remember, one of those antique old men
who await death perfectly erect, whom age bears down without bending,
and whom even sorrow cannot curve.

Still, his daughter had been saying for some time:  "My father
is sinking."  He no longer boxed the maids' ears; he no longer thumped
the landing-place so vigorously with his cane when Basque was slow
in opening the door.  The Revolution of July had exasperated him
for the space of barely six months.  He had viewed, almost tranquilly,
that coupling of words, in the Moniteur:  M. Humblot-Conte, peer
of France.  The fact is, that the old man was deeply dejected. 
He did not bend, he did not yield; this was no more a characteristic
of his physical than of his moral nature, but he felt himself giving
way internally.  For four years he had been waiting for Marius,
with his foot firmly planted, that is the exact word, in the conviction
that that good-for-nothing young scamp would ring at his door
some day or other; now he had reached the point, where, at certain
gloomy hours, he said to himself, that if Marius made him wait
much longer--It was not death that was insupportable to him;
it was the idea that perhaps he should never see Marius again. 
The idea of never seeing Marius again had never entered his
brain until that day; now the thought began to recur to him,
and it chilled him.  Absence, as is always the case in genuine
and natural sentiments, had only served to augment the grandfather's
love for the ungrateful child, who had gone off like a flash. 
It is during December nights, when the cold stands at ten degrees,
that one thinks oftenest of the son.

M. Gillenormand was, or thought himself, above all things,
incapable of taking a single step, he--the grandfather,
towards his grandson; "I would die rather," he said to himself. 
He did not consider himself as the least to blame; but he thought
of Marius only with profound tenderness, and the mute despair
of an elderly, kindly old man who is about to vanish in the dark.

He began to lose his teeth, which added to his sadness.

M. Gillenormand, without however acknowledging it to himself,
for it would have rendered him furious and ashamed, had never loved
a mistress as he loved Marius.

He had had placed in his chamber, opposite the head of his bed,
so that it should be the first thing on which his eyes fell on waking,
an old portrait of his other daughter, who was dead, Madame Pontmercy,
a portrait which had been taken when she was eighteen.  He gazed
incessantly at that portrait.  One day, he happened to say, as he
gazed upon it:--

"I think the likeness is strong."

"To my sister?" inquired Mademoiselle Gillenormand.  "Yes, certainly."

"The old man added:--

"And to him also."

Once as he sat with his knees pressed together, and his eyes
almost closed, in a despondent attitude, his daughter ventured
to say to him:--

"Father, are you as angry with him as ever?"

She paused, not daring to proceed further.

"With whom?" he demanded.

"With that poor Marius."

He raised his aged head, laid his withered and emaciated fist on
the table, and exclaimed in his most irritated and vibrating tone:--

"Poor Marius, do you say!  That gentleman is a knave, a wretched
scoundrel, a vain little ingrate, a heartless, soulless, haughty,
and wicked man!"

And he turned away so that his daughter might not see the tear
that stood in his eye.

Three days later he broke a silence which had lasted four hours,
to say to his daughter point-blank:--

"I had the honor to ask Mademoiselle Gillenormand never to mention
him to me."

Aunt Gillenormand renounced every effort, and pronounced this
acute diagnosis:  "My father never cared very much for my sister
after her folly.  It is clear that he detests Marius."

"After her folly" meant:  "after she had married the colonel."

However, as the reader has been able to conjecture, Mademoiselle
Gillenormand had failed in her attempt to substitute her favorite,
the officer of lancers, for Marius.  The substitute, Theodule,
had not been a success.  M. Gillenormand had not accepted the quid
pro quo.  A vacancy in the heart does not accommodate itself to a
stop-gap. Theodule, on his side, though he scented the inheritance,
was disgusted at the task of pleasing.  The goodman bored the lancer;
and the lancer shocked the goodman.  Lieutenant Theodule was gay,
no doubt, but a chatter-box, frivolous, but vulgar; a high liver,
but a frequenter of bad company; he had mistresses, it is true,
and he had a great deal to say about them, it is true also;
but he talked badly.  All his good qualities had a defect. 
M. Gillenormand was worn out with hearing him tell about the love
affairs that he had in the vicinity of the barracks in the Rue
de Babylone.  And then, Lieutenant Gillenormand sometimes came
in his uniform, with the tricolored cockade.  This rendered him
downright intolerable.  Finally, Father Gillenormand had said to
his daughter:  "I've had enough of that Theodule.  I haven't much
taste for warriors in time of peace.  Receive him if you choose. 
I don't know but I prefer slashers to fellows that drag their swords. 
The clash of blades in battle is less dismal, after all, than the
clank of the scabbard on the pavement.  And then, throwing out your
chest like a bully and lacing yourself like a girl, with stays under
your cuirass, is doubly ridiculous.  When one is a veritable man,
one holds equally aloof from swagger and from affected airs.  He is
neither a blusterer nor a finnicky-hearted man.  Keep your Theodule
for yourself."

It was in vain that his daughter said to him:  "But he is your
grandnephew, nevertheless,"--it turned out that M. Gillenormand, who was
a grandfather to the very finger-tips, was not in the least a grand-uncle.

In fact, as he had good sense, and as he had compared the two,
Theodule had only served to make him regret Marius all the more.

One evening,--it was the 24th of June, which did not prevent
Father Gillenormand having a rousing fire on the hearth,--he had
dismissed his daughter, who was sewing in a neighboring apartment. 
He was alone in his chamber, amid its pastoral scenes, with his
feet propped on the andirons, half enveloped in his huge screen of
coromandel lacquer, with its nine leaves, with his elbow resting on
a table where burned two candles under a green shade, engulfed in his
tapestry armchair, and in his hand a book which he was not reading. 
He was dressed, according to his wont, like an incroyable,
and resembled an antique portrait by Garat.  This would have made
people run after him in the street, had not his daughter covered
him up, whenever he went out, in a vast bishop's wadded cloak,
which concealed his attire.  At home, he never wore a dressing gown,
except when he rose and retired.  "It gives one a look of age,"
said he.

Father Gillenormand was thinking of Marius lovingly and bitterly;
and, as usual, bitterness predominated.  His tenderness once
soured always ended by boiling and turning to indignation. 
He had reached the point where a man tries to make up his mind and
to accept that which rends his heart.  He was explaining to himself
that there was no longer any reason why Marius should return,
that if he intended to return, he should have done it long ago,
that he must renounce the idea.  He was trying to accustom himself
to the thought that all was over, and that he should die without
having beheld "that gentleman" again.  But his whole nature revolted;
his aged paternity would not consent to this.  "Well!" said he,--
this was his doleful refrain,--"he will not return!"  His bald head
had fallen upon his breast, and he fixed a melancholy and irritated
gaze upon the ashes on his hearth.

In the very midst of his revery, his old servant Basque entered,
and inquired:--

"Can Monsieur receive M. Marius?"

The old man sat up erect, pallid, and like a corpse which rises
under the influence of a galvanic shock.  All his blood had retreated
to his heart.  He stammered:--

"M. Marius what?"

"I don't know," replied Basque, intimidated and put out of countenance
by his master's air; "I have not seen him.  Nicolette came in and
said to me:  `There's a young man here; say that it is M. Marius.'"

Father Gillenormand stammered in a low voice:--

"Show him in."

And he remained in the same attitude, with shaking head, and his eyes
fixed on the door.  It opened once more.  A young man entered. 
It was Marius.

Marius halted at the door, as though waiting to be bidden to enter.

His almost squalid attire was not perceptible in the obscurity
caused by the shade.  Nothing could be seen but his calm, grave,
but strangely sad face.

It was several minutes before Father Gillenormand, dulled with amazement
and joy, could see anything except a brightness as when one is in
the presence of an apparition.  He was on the point of swooning;
he saw Marius through a dazzling light.  It certainly was he,
it certainly was Marius.

At last!  After the lapse of four years!  He grasped him entire,
so to speak, in a single glance.  He found him noble, handsome,
distinguished, well-grown, a complete man, with a suitable
mien and a charming air.  He felt a desire to open his arms,
to call him, to fling himself forward; his heart melted with rapture,
affectionate words swelled and overflowed his breast; at length
all his tenderness came to the light and reached his lips, and,
by a contrast which constituted the very foundation of his nature,
what came forth was harshness.  He said abruptly:--

"What have you come here for?"

Marius replied with embarrassment:--

"Monsieur--"

M. Gillenormand would have liked to have Marius throw himself
into his arms.  He was displeased with Marius and with himself. 
He was conscious that he was brusque, and that Marius was cold. 
It caused the goodman unendurable and irritating anxiety to feel
so tender and forlorn within, and only to be able to be hard outside. 
Bitterness returned.  He interrupted Marius in a peevish tone:--

"Then why did you come?"

That "then" signified:  If you do not come to embrace me. 
Marius looked at his grandfather, whose pallor gave him a face
of marble.

"Monsieur--"

"Have you come to beg my pardon?  Do you acknowledge your faults?"

He thought he was putting Marius on the right road, and that "the child"
would yield.  Marius shivered; it was the denial of his father
that was required of him; he dropped his eyes and replied:--

"No, sir."

"Then," exclaimed the old man impetuously, with a grief that was
poignant and full of wrath, "what do you want of me?"

Marius clasped his hands, advanced a step, and said in a feeble
and trembling voice:--

"Sir, have pity on me."

These words touched M. Gillenormand; uttered a little sooner,
they would have rendered him tender, but they came too late. 
The grandfather rose; he supported himself with both hands on his cane;
his lips were white, his brow wavered, but his lofty form towered
above Marius as he bowed.

"Pity on you, sir!  It is youth demanding pity of the old man
of ninety-one! You are entering into life, I am leaving it;
you go to the play, to balls, to the cafe, to the billiard-hall;
you have wit, you please the women, you are a handsome fellow;
as for me, I spit on my brands in the heart of summer; you are rich
with the only riches that are really such, I possess all the poverty
of age; infirmity, isolation!  You have your thirty-two teeth,
a good digestion, bright eyes, strength, appetite, health, gayety,
a forest of black hair; I have no longer even white hair,
I have lost my teeth, I am losing my legs, I am losing my memory;
there are three names of streets that I confound incessantly,
the Rue Charlot, the Rue du Chaume, and the Rue Saint-Claude,
that is what I have come to; you have before you the whole future,
full of sunshine, and I am beginning to lose my sight, so far am
I advancing into the night; you are in love, that is a matter
of course, I am beloved by no one in all the world; and you ask pity
of me!  Parbleu!  Moliere forgot that.  If that is the way you jest
at the courthouse, Messieurs the lawyers, I sincerely compliment you. 
You are droll."

And the octogenarian went on in a grave and angry voice:--

"Come, now, what do you want of me?"

"Sir," said Marius, "I know that my presence is displeasing to you,
but I have come merely to ask one thing of you, and then I shall go
away immediately."

"You are a fool!" said the old man.  "Who said that you were
to go away?"

This was the translation of the tender words which lay at the bottom
of his heart:--

"Ask my pardon!  Throw yourself on my neck!"

M. Gillenormand felt that Marius would leave him in a few moments,
that his harsh reception had repelled the lad, that his hardness was
driving him away; he said all this to himself, and it augmented his grief;
and as his grief was straightway converted into wrath, it increased
his harshness.  He would have liked to have Marius understand,
and Marius did not understand, which made the goodman furious.

He began again:--

"What! you deserted me, your grandfather, you left my house to go
no one knows whither, you drove your aunt to despair, you went off,
it is easily guessed, to lead a bachelor life; it's more convenient,
to play the dandy, to come in at all hours, to amuse yourself;
you have given me no signs of life, you have contracted debts without
even telling me to pay them, you have become a smasher of windows
and a blusterer, and, at the end of four years, you come to me,
and that is all you have to say to me!"

This violent fashion of driving a grandson to tenderness was
productive only of silence on the part of Marius.  M. Gillenormand
folded his arms; a gesture which with him was peculiarly imperious,
and apostrophized Marius bitterly:--

"Let us make an end of this.  You have come to ask something of me,
you say?  Well, what?  What is it?  Speak!"

"Sir," said Marius, with the look of a man who feels that he is falling
over a precipice, "I have come to ask your permission to marry."

M. Gillenormand rang the bell.  Basque opened the door half-way.

"Call my daughter."

A second later, the door was opened once more, Mademoiselle Gillenormand
did not enter, but showed herself; Marius was standing, mute, with
pendant arms and the face of a criminal; M. Gillenormand was pacing
back and forth in the room.  He turned to his daughter and said to her:--

"Nothing.  It is Monsieur Marius.  Say good day to him. 
Monsieur wishes to marry.  That's all.  Go away."

The curt, hoarse sound of the old man's voice announced a strange
degree of excitement.  The aunt gazed at Marius with a frightened air,
hardly appeared to recognize him, did not allow a gesture or a
syllable to escape her, and disappeared at her father's breath
more swiftly than a straw before the hurricane.

In the meantime, Father Gillenormand had returned and placed his
back against the chimney-piece once more.

"You marry!  At one and twenty!  You have arranged that!  You have
only a permission to ask! a formality.  Sit down, sir.  Well, you
have had a revolution since I had the honor to see you last. 
The Jacobins got the upper hand.  You must have been delighted. 
Are you not a Republican since you are a Baron?  You can make
that agree.  The Republic makes a good sauce for the barony. 
Are you one of those decorated by July?  Have you taken the Louvre
at all, sir?  Quite near here, in the Rue Saint-Antoine, opposite
the Rue des Nonamdieres, there is a cannon-ball incrusted in
the wall of the third story of a house with this inscription: 
`July 28th, 1830.'  Go take a look at that.  It produces a good effect. 
Ah! those friends of yours do pretty things.  By the way, aren't they
erecting a fountain in the place of the monument of M. le Duc de Berry? 
So you want to marry?  Whom?  Can one inquire without indiscretion?"

He paused, and, before Marius had time to answer, he added violently:--

"Come now, you have a profession?  A fortune made?  How much do you
earn at your trade of lawyer?"

"Nothing," said Marius, with a sort of firmness and resolution
that was almost fierce.

"Nothing?  Then all that you have to live upon is the twelve hundred
livres that I allow you?"

Marius did not reply.  M. Gillenormand continued:--

"Then I understand the girl is rich?"

"As rich as I am."

"What!  No dowry?"

"No."

"Expectations?"

"I think not."

"Utterly naked!  What's the father?"

"I don't know."

"And what's her name?"

"Mademoiselle Fauchelevent."

"Fauchewhat?"

"Fauchelevent."

"Pttt!" ejaculated the old gentleman.

"Sir!" exclaimed Marius.

M. Gillenormand interrupted him with the tone of a man who is
speaking to himself:--

"That's right, one and twenty years of age, no profession,
twelve hundred livres a year, Madame la Baronne de Pontmercy will go
and purchase a couple of sous' worth of parsley from the fruiterer."

"Sir," repeated Marius, in the despair at the last hope,
which was vanishing, "I entreat you!  I conjure you in the name
of Heaven, with clasped hands, sir, I throw myself at your feet,
permit me to marry her!"

The old man burst into a shout of strident and mournful laughter,
coughing and laughing at the same time.

"Ah! ah! ah!  You said to yourself:  `Pardine! I'll go hunt up
that old blockhead, that absurd numskull!  What a shame that I'm
not twenty-five! How I'd treat him to a nice respectful summons! 
How nicely I'd get along without him!  It's nothing to me,
I'd say to him:  "You're only too happy to see me, you old idiot,
I want to marry, I desire to wed Mamselle No-matter-whom, daughter
of Monsieur No-matter-what, I have no shoes, she has no chemise,
that just suits; I want to throw my career, my future, my youth,
my life to the dogs; I wish to take a plunge into wretchedness with
a woman around my neck, that's an idea, and you must consent to it!"
and the old fossil will consent.'  Go, my lad, do as you like,
attach your paving-stone, marry your Pousselevent, your Coupelevent--
Never, sir, never!"

"Father--"

"Never!"

At the tone in which that "never" was uttered, Marius lost all hope. 
He traversed the chamber with slow steps, with bowed head, tottering and
more like a dying man than like one merely taking his departure. 
M. Gillenormand followed him with his eyes, and at the moment
when the door opened, and Marius was on the point of going out,
he advanced four paces, with the senile vivacity of impetuous and
spoiled old gentlemen, seized Marius by the collar, brought him back
energetically into the room, flung him into an armchair and said
to him:--

"Tell me all about it!"

"It was that single word "father" which had effected this revolution.

Marius stared at him in bewilderment.  M. Gillenormand's mobile
face was no longer expressive of anything but rough and ineffable
good-nature. The grandsire had given way before the grandfather.

"Come, see here, speak, tell me about your love affairs, jabber,
tell me everything!  Sapristi! how stupid young folks are!"

"Father--" repeated Marius.

The old man's entire countenance lighted up with indescribable radiance.

"Yes, that's right, call me father, and you'll see!"

There was now something so kind, so gentle, so openhearted,
and so paternal in this brusqueness, that Marius, in the sudden
transition from discouragement to hope, was stunned and intoxicated
by it, as it were.  He was seated near the table, the light
from the candles brought out the dilapidation of his costume,
which Father Gillenormand regarded with amazement.

"Well, father--" said Marius.

"Ah, by the way," interrupted M. Gillenormand, "you really have
not a penny then?  You are dressed like a pickpocket."

He rummaged in a drawer, drew forth a purse, which he laid
on the table:  "Here are a hundred louis, buy yourself a hat."

"Father," pursued Marius, "my good father, if you only knew!  I love her. 
You cannot imagine it; the first time I saw her was at the Luxembourg,
she came there; in the beginning, I did not pay much heed to her,
and then, I don't know how it came about, I fell in love with her. 
Oh! how unhappy that made me!  Now, at last, I see her every day,
at her own home, her father does not know it, just fancy, they are
going away, it is in the garden that we meet, in the evening,
her father means to take her to England, then I said to myself: 
`I'll go and see my grandfather and tell him all about the affair. 
I should go mad first, I should die, I should fall ill, I should
throw myself into the water.  I absolutely must marry her,
since I should go mad otherwise.'  This is the whole truth, and I
do not think that I have omitted anything.  She lives in a garden
with an iron fence, in the Rue Plumet.  It is in the neighborhood of
the Invalides."

Father Gillenormand had seated himself, with a beaming countenance,
beside Marius.  As he listened to him and drank in the sound of
his voice, he enjoyed at the same time a protracted pinch of snuff. 
At the words "Rue Plumet" he interrupted his inhalation and allowed
the remainder of his snuff to fall upon his knees.

"The Rue Plumet, the Rue Plumet, did you say?--Let us see!--Are there
not barracks in that vicinity?--Why, yes, that's it.  Your cousin
Theodule has spoken to me about it.  The lancer, the officer. 
A gay girl, my good friend, a gay girl!--Pardieu, yes, the Rue Plumet. 
It is what used to be called the Rue Blomet.--It all comes back
to me now.  I have heard of that little girl of the iron railing
in the Rue Plumet.  In a garden, a Pamela.  Your taste is not bad. 
She is said to be a very tidy creature.  Between ourselves,
I think that simpleton of a lancer has been courting her a bit. 
I don't know where he did it.  However, that's not to the purpose. 
Besides, he is not to be believed.  He brags, Marius!  I think
it quite proper that a young man like you should be in love. 
It's the right thing at your age.  I like you better as a lover
than as a Jacobin.  I like you better in love with a petticoat,
sapristi! with twenty petticoats, than with M. de Robespierre. 
For my part, I will do myself the justice to say, that in the line
of sans-culottes, I have never loved any one but women.  Pretty girls
are pretty girls, the deuce!  There's no objection to that.  As for
the little one, she receives you without her father's knowledge. 
That's in the established order of things.  I have had adventures of
that same sort myself.  More than one.  Do you know what is done then? 
One does not take the matter ferociously; one does not precipitate
himself into the tragic; one does not make one's mind to marriage
and M. le Maire with his scarf.  One simply behaves like a fellow
of spirit.  One shows good sense.  Slip along, mortals; don't marry. 
You come and look up your grandfather, who is a good-natured fellow
at bottom, and who always has a few rolls of louis in an old drawer;
you say to him:  `See here, grandfather.'  And the grandfather says: 
`That's a simple matter.  Youth must amuse itself, and old age
must wear out.  I have been young, you will be old.  Come, my boy,
you shall pass it on to your grandson.  Here are two hundred pistoles. 
Amuse yourself, deuce take it!'  Nothing better!  That's the way the
affair should be treated.  You don't marry, but that does no harm. 
You understand me?"

Marius, petrified and incapable of uttering a syllable, made a sign
with his head that he did not.

The old man burst out laughing, winked his aged eye, gave him
a slap on the knee, stared him full in the face with a mysterious
and beaming air, and said to him, with the tenderest of shrugs
of the shoulder:--

"Booby! make her your mistress."

Marius turned pale.  He had understood nothing of what his grandfather
had just said.  This twaddle about the Rue Blomet, Pamela, the barracks,
the lancer, had passed before Marius like a dissolving view. 
Nothing of all that could bear any reference to Cosette, who was
a lily.  The good man was wandering in his mind.  But this wandering
terminated in words which Marius did understand, and which were
a mortal insult to Cosette.  Those words, "make her your mistress,"
entered the heart of the strict young man like a sword.

He rose, picked up his hat which lay on the floor, and walked
to the door with a firm, assured step.  There he turned round,
bowed deeply to his grandfather, raised his head erect again,
and said:--

"Five years ago you insulted my father; to-day you have insulted
my wife.  I ask nothing more of you, sir.  Farewell."

Father Gillenormand, utterly confounded, opened his mouth,
extended his arms, tried to rise, and before he could utter a word,
the door closed once more, and Marius had disappeared.

The old man remained for several minutes motionless and as though
struck by lightning, without the power to speak or breathe, as though
a clenched fist grasped his throat.  At last he tore himself from his
arm-chair, ran, so far as a man can run at ninety-one, to the door,
opened it, and cried:--

"Help!  Help!"

His daughter made her appearance, then the domestics.  He began again,
with a pitiful rattle:  "Run after him!  Bring him back!  What have I
done to him?  He is mad!  He is going away!  Ah! my God!  Ah! my God! 
This time he will not come back!"

He went to the window which looked out on the street, threw it open
with his aged and palsied hands, leaned out more than half-way,
while Basque and Nicolette held him behind, and shouted:--

"Marius!  Marius!  Marius!  Marius!"

But Marius could no longer hear him, for at that moment he was
turning the corner of the Rue Saint-Louis.

The octogenarian raised his hands to his temples two or three times
with an expression of anguish, recoiled tottering, and fell back
into an arm-chair, pulseless, voiceless, tearless, with quivering
head and lips which moved with a stupid air, with nothing in his eyes
and nothing any longer in his heart except a gloomy and profound
something which resembled night.



BOOK NINTH.--WHITHER ARE THEY GOING?



CHAPTER I

JEAN VALJEAN


That same day, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, Jean Valjean
was sitting alone on the back side of one of the most solitary
slopes in the Champ-de-Mars. Either from prudence, or from a desire
to meditate, or simply in consequence of one of those insensible
changes of habit which gradually introduce themselves into the
existence of every one, he now rarely went out with Cosette. 
He had on his workman's waistcoat, and trousers of gray linen;
and his long-visored cap concealed his countenance.

He was calm and happy now beside Cosette; that which had, for a time,
alarmed and troubled him had been dissipated; but for the last
week or two, anxieties of another nature had come up.  One day,
while walking on the boulevard, he had caught sight of Thenardier;
thanks to his disguise, Thenardier had not recognized him; but since
that day, Jean Valjean had seen him repeatedly, and he was now certain
that Thenardier was prowling about in their neighborhood.

This had been sufficient to make him come to a decision.

Moreover, Paris was not tranquil:  political troubles presented this
inconvenient feature, for any one who had anything to conceal in
his life, that the police had grown very uneasy and very suspicious,
and that while seeking to ferret out a man like Pepin or Morey,
they might very readily discover a man like Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean had made up his mind to quit Paris, and even France,
and go over to England.

He had warned Cosette.  He wished to set out before the end of the week.

He had seated himself on the slope in the Champ-de-Mars, turning
over all sorts of thoughts in his mind,--Thenardier, the police,
the journey, and the difficulty of procuring a passport.

He was troubled from all these points of view.

Last of all, an inexplicable circumstance which had just attracted
his attention, and from which he had not yet recovered, had added
to his state of alarm.

On the morning of that very day, when he alone of the household
was stirring, while strolling in the garden before Cosette's
shutters were open, he had suddenly perceived on the wall,
the following line, engraved, probably with a nail:--

16 Rue de la Verrerie.

This was perfectly fresh, the grooves in the ancient black mortar
were white, a tuft of nettles at the foot of the wall was powdered
with the fine, fresh plaster.

This had probably been written on the preceding night.

What was this?  A signal for others?  A warning for himself?

In any case, it was evident that the garden had been violated,
and that strangers had made their way into it.

He recalled the odd incidents which had already alarmed the household.

His mind was now filling in this canvas.

He took good care not to speak to Cosette of the line written
on the wall, for fear of alarming her.

In the midst of his preoccupations, he perceived, from a shadow
cast by the sun, that some one had halted on the crest of the slope
immediately behind him.

He was on the point of turning round, when a paper folded in four
fell upon his knees as though a hand had dropped it over his head.

He took the paper, unfolded it, and read these words written
in large characters, with a pencil:--

"MOVE AWAY FROM YOUR HOUSE."

Jean Valjean sprang hastily to his feet; there was no one on the slope;
he gazed all around him and perceived a creature larger than
a child, not so large as a man, clad in a gray blouse and trousers
of dust-colored cotton velvet, who was jumping over the parapet
and who slipped into the moat of the Champde-Mars.

Jean Valjean returned home at once, in a very thoughtful mood.



CHAPTER II

MARIUS


Marius had left M. Gillenormand in despair.  He had entered the
house with very little hope, and quitted it with immense despair.

However, and those who have observed the depths of the human
heart will understand this, the officer, the lancer, the ninny,
Cousin Theodule, had left no trace in his mind.  Not the slightest. 
The dramatic poet might, apparently, expect some complications from
this revelation made point-blank by the grandfather to the grandson. 
But what the drama would gain thereby, truth would lose. 
Marius was at an age when one believes nothing in the line of evil;
later on comes the age when one believes everything.  Suspicions are
nothing else than wrinkles.  Early youth has none of them. 
That which overwhelmed Othello glides innocuous over Candide. 
Suspect Cosette!  There are hosts of crimes which Marius could sooner
have committed.

He began to wander about the streets, the resource of those who suffer. 
He thought of nothing, so far as he could afterwards remember. 
At two o'clock in the morning he returned to Courfeyrac's quarters
and flung himself, without undressing, on his mattress.  The sun
was shining brightly when he sank into that frightful leaden slumber
which permits ideas to go and come in the brain.  When he awoke,
he saw Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Feuilly, and Combeferre standing in the
room with their hats on and all ready to go out.

Courfeyrac said to him:--

"Are you coming to General Lamarque's funeral?"

It seemed to him that Courfeyrac was speaking Chinese.

He went out some time after them.  He put in his pocket the pistols
which Javert had given him at the time of the adventure on the 3d
of February, and which had remained in his hands.  These pistols
were still loaded.  It would be difficult to say what vague thought
he had in his mind when he took them with him.

All day long he prowled about, without knowing where he was going;
it rained at times, he did not perceive it; for his dinner, he purchased
a penny roll at a baker's, put it in his pocket and forgot it. 
It appears that he took a bath in the Seine without being aware of it. 
There are moments when a man has a furnace within his skull. 
Marius was passing through one of those moments.  He no longer hoped
for anything; this step he had taken since the preceding evening. 
He waited for night with feverish impatience, he had but one idea
clearly before his mind;--this was, that at nine o'clock he should
see Cosette.  This last happiness now constituted his whole future;
after that, gloom.  At intervals, as he roamed through the most deserted
boulevards, it seemed to him that he heard strange noises in Paris. 
He thrust his head out of his revery and said:  "Is there fighting
on hand?"

At nightfall, at nine o'clock precisely, as he had promised Cosette,
he was in the Rue Plumet.  When he approached the grating he
forgot everything.  It was forty-eight hours since he had seen Cosette;
he was about to behold her once more; every other thought was effaced,
and he felt only a profound and unheard-of joy.  Those minutes in which
one lives centuries always have this sovereign and wonderful property,
that at the moment when they are passing they fill the heart completely.

Marius displaced the bar, and rushed headlong into the garden. 
Cosette was not at the spot where she ordinarily waited for him. 
He traversed the thicket, and approached the recess near the flight
of steps:  "She is waiting for me there," said he.  Cosette was
not there.  He raised his eyes, and saw that the shutters of the house
were closed.  He made the tour of the garden, the garden was deserted. 
Then he returned to the house, and, rendered senseless by love,
intoxicated, terrified, exasperated with grief and uneasiness,
like a master who returns home at an evil hour, he tapped on
the shutters.  He knocked and knocked again, at the risk of seeing
the window open, and her father's gloomy face make its appearance,
and demand:  "What do you want?"  This was nothing in comparison
with what he dimly caught a glimpse of.  When he had rapped,
he lifted up his voice and called Cosette.--"Cosette!" he cried;
"Cosette!" he repeated imperiously.  There was no reply.  All was over. 
No one in the garden; no one in the house.

Marius fixed his despairing eyes on that dismal house, which was as black
and as silent as a tomb and far more empty.  He gazed at the stone
seat on which he had passed so many adorable hours with Cosette. 
Then he seated himself on the flight of steps, his heart filled
with sweetness and resolution, he blessed his love in the depths
of his thought, and he said to himself that, since Cosette was gone,
all that there was left for him was to die.

All at once he heard a voice which seemed to proceed from the street,
and which was calling to him through the trees:--

"Mr. Marius!"

He started to his feet.

"Hey?" said he.

"Mr. Marius, are you there?"

"Yes."

"Mr. Marius," went on the voice, "your friends are waiting for you
at the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie."

This voice was not wholly unfamiliar to him.  It resembled the hoarse,
rough voice of Eponine.  Marius hastened to the gate, thrust aside
the movable bar, passed his head through the aperture, and saw
some one who appeared to him to be a young man, disappearing at
a run into the gloom.



CHAPTER III

M. MABEUF


Jean Valjean's purse was of no use to M. Mabeuf.  M. Mabeuf,
in his venerable, infantile austerity, had not accepted the gift
of the stars; he had not admitted that a star could coin itself
into louis d'or. He had not divined that what had fallen from heaven
had come from Gavroche.  He had taken the purse to the police
commissioner of the quarter, as a lost article placed by the finder
at the disposal of claimants.  The purse was actually lost. 
It is unnecessary to say that no one claimed it, and that it did
not succor M. Mabeuf.

Moreover, M. Mabeuf had continued his downward course.

His experiments on indigo had been no more successful in the
Jardin des Plantes than in his garden at Austerlitz.  The year
before he had owed his housekeeper's wages; now, as we have seen,
he owed three quarters of his rent.  The pawnshop had sold the
plates of his Flora after the expiration of thirteen months. 
Some coppersmith had made stewpans of them.  His copper plates gone,
and being unable to complete even the incomplete copies of his
Flora which were in his possession, he had disposed of the text,
at a miserable price, as waste paper, to a second-hand bookseller. 
Nothing now remained to him of his life's work.  He set to work
to eat up the money for these copies.  When he saw that this
wretched resource was becoming exhausted, he gave up his garden
and allowed it to run to waste.  Before this, a long time before,
he had given up his two eggs and the morsel of beef which he ate
from time to time.  He dined on bread and potatoes.  He had sold
the last of his furniture, then all duplicates of his bedding,
his clothing and his blankets, then his herbariums and prints;
but he still retained his most precious books, many of which were
of the greatest rarity, among others, Les Quadrins Historiques de
la Bible, edition of 1560; La Concordance des Bibles, by Pierre
de Besse; Les Marguerites de la Marguerite, of Jean de La Haye,
with a dedication to the Queen of Navarre; the book de la Charge
et Dignite de l'Ambassadeur, by the Sieur de Villiers Hotman;
a Florilegium Rabbinicum of 1644; a Tibullus of 1567, with this
magnificent inscription:  Venetiis, in aedibus Manutianis; and lastly,
a Diogenes Laertius, printed at Lyons in 1644, which contained
the famous variant of the manuscript 411, thirteenth century,
of the Vatican, and those of the two manuscripts of Venice,
393 and 394, consulted with such fruitful results by Henri Estienne,
and all the passages in Doric dialect which are only found
in the celebrated manuscript of the twelfth century belonging to
the Naples Library.  M. Mabeuf never had any fire in his chamber,
and went to bed at sundown, in order not to consume any candles. 
It seemed as though he had no longer any neighbors:  people avoided
him when he went out; he perceived the fact.  The wretchedness of a
child interests a mother, the wretchedness of a young man interests
a young girl, the wretchedness of an old man interests no one. 
It is, of all distresses, the coldest.  Still, Father Mabeuf had
not entirely lost his childlike serenity.  His eyes acquired some
vivacity when they rested on his books, and he smiled when he gazed
at the Diogenes Laertius, which was a unique copy.  His bookcase
with glass doors was the only piece of furniture which he had kept
beyond what was strictly indispensable.

One day, Mother Plutarque said to him:--

"I have no money to buy any dinner."

What she called dinner was a loaf of bread and four or five potatoes.

"On credit?" suggested M. Mabeuf.

"You know well that people refuse me."

M. Mabeuf opened his bookcase, took a long look at all his books,
one after another, as a father obliged to decimate his children would
gaze upon them before making a choice, then seized one hastily,
put it in under his arm and went out.  He returned two hours later,
without anything under his arm, laid thirty sous on the table,
and said:--

"You will get something for dinner."

From that moment forth, Mother Plutarque saw a sombre veil,
which was never more lifted, descend over the old man's candid face.

On the following day, on the day after, and on the day after that,
it had to be done again.

M. Mabeuf went out with a book and returned with a coin. 
As the second-hand dealers perceived that he was forced to sell,
they purchased of him for twenty sous that for which he had paid
twenty francs, sometimes at those very shops.  Volume by volume,
the whole library went the same road.  He said at times:  "But I
am eighty;" as though he cherished some secret hope that he should
arrive at the end of his days before reaching the end of his books. 
His melancholy increased.  Once, however, he had a pleasure. 
He had gone out with a Robert Estienne, which he had sold for
thirty-five sous under the Quai Malaquais, and he returned with an
Aldus which he had bought for forty sous in the Rue des Gres.--"I
owe five sous," he said, beaming on Mother Plutarque.  That day he
had no dinner.

He belonged to the Horticultural Society.  His destitution became
known there.  The president of the society came to see him,
promised to speak to the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce
about him, and did so.--"Why, what!" exclaimed the Minister,
"I should think so!  An old savant! a botanist! an inoffensive man! 
Something must be done for him!"  On the following day, M. Mabeuf
received an invitation to dine with the Minister.  Trembling with joy,
he showed the letter to Mother Plutarque.  "We are saved!" said he. 
On the day appointed, he went to the Minister's house.  He perceived
that his ragged cravat, his long, square coat, and his waxed shoes
astonished the ushers.  No one spoke to him, not even the Minister. 
About ten o'clock in the evening, while he was still waiting
for a word, he heard the Minister's wife, a beautiful woman in a
low-necked gown whom he had not ventured to approach, inquire: 
"Who is that old gentleman?"  He returned home on foot at midnight,
in a driving rain-storm. He had sold an Elzevir to pay for a carriage
in which to go thither.

He had acquired the habit of reading a few pages in his Diogenes
Laertius every night, before he went to bed.  He knew enough
Greek to enjoy the peculiarities of the text which he owned. 
He had now no other enjoyment.  Several weeks passed.  All at once,
Mother Plutarque fell ill.  There is one thing sadder than having
no money with which to buy bread at the baker's and that is having
no money to purchase drugs at the apothecary's. One evening,
the doctor had ordered a very expensive potion.  And the malady was
growing worse; a nurse was required.  M. Mabeuf opened his bookcase;
there was nothing there.  The last volume had taken its departure. 
All that was left to him was Diogenes Laertius.  He put this unique
copy under his arm, and went out.  It was the 4th of June, 1832;
he went to the Porte Saint-Jacques, to Royal's successor, and returned
with one hundred francs.  He laid the pile of five-franc pieces
on the old serving-woman's nightstand, and returned to his chamber
without saying a word.

On the following morning, at dawn, he seated himself on the overturned
post in his garden, and he could be seen over the top of the hedge,
sitting the whole morning motionless, with drooping head, his eyes
vaguely fixed on the withered flower-beds. It rained at intervals;
the old man did not seem to perceive the fact.

In the afternoon, extraordinary noises broke out in Paris. 
They resembled shots and the clamors of a multitude.

Father Mabeuf raised his head.  He saw a gardener passing,
and inquired:--

"What is it?"

The gardener, spade on back, replied in the most unconcerned tone:--

"It is the riots."

"What riots?"

"Yes, they are fighting."

"Why are they fighting?"

"Ah, good Heavens!" ejaculated the gardener.

"In what direction?" went on M. Mabeuf.

"In the neighborhood of the Arsenal."

Father Mabeuf went to his room, took his hat, mechanically sought
for a book to place under his arm, found none, said:  "Ah! truly!"
and went off with a bewildered air.



BOOK TENTH.--THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832



CHAPTER I

THE SURFACE OF THE QUESTION


Of what is revolt composed?  Of nothing and of everything. 
Of an electricity disengaged, little by little, of a flame suddenly
darting forth, of a wandering force, of a passing breath. 
This breath encounters heads which speak, brains which dream,
souls which suffer, passions which burn, wretchedness which howls,
and bears them away.

Whither?

At random.  Athwart the state, the laws, athwart prosperity
and the insolence of others.

Irritated convictions, embittered enthusiasms, agitated indignations,
instincts of war which have been repressed, youthful courage which has
been exalted, generous blindness; curiosity, the taste for change,
the thirst for the unexpected, the sentiment which causes one to
take pleasure in reading the posters for the new play, and love,
the prompter's whistle, at the theatre; the vague hatreds,
rancors, disappointments, every vanity which thinks that destiny
has bankrupted it; discomfort, empty dreams, ambitious that are
hedged about, whoever hopes for a downfall, some outcome, in short,
at the very bottom, the rabble, that mud which catches fire,--
such are the elements of revolt.  That which is grandest and that
which is basest; the beings who prowl outside of all bounds,
awaiting an occasion, bohemians, vagrants, vagabonds of the
cross-roads, those who sleep at night in a desert of houses with no
other roof than the cold clouds of heaven, those who, each day,
demand their bread from chance and not from toil, the unknown
of poverty and nothingness, the bare-armed, the bare-footed, belong
to revolt.  Whoever cherishes in his soul a secret revolt against
any deed whatever on the part of the state, of life or of fate,
is ripe for riot, and, as soon as it makes its appearance,
he begins to quiver, and to feel himself borne away with the whirlwind.

Revolt is a sort of waterspout in the social atmosphere which
forms suddenly in certain conditions of temperature, and which,
as it eddies about, mounts, descends, thunders, tears, razes,
crushes, demolishes, uproots, bearing with it great natures
and small, the strong man and the feeble mind, the tree
trunk and the stalk of straw.  Woe to him whom it bears away
as well as to him whom it strikes!  It breaks the one against the other.

It communicates to those whom it seizes an indescribable
and extraordinary power.  It fills the first-comer with the
force of events; it converts everything into projectiles. 
It makes a cannon-ball of a rough stone, and a general of a porter.

If we are to believe certain oracles of crafty political views,
a little revolt is desirable from the point of view of power.  System: 
revolt strengthens those governments which it does not overthrow. 
It puts the army to the test; it consecrates the bourgeoisie,
it draws out the muscles of the police; it demonstrates the force
of the social framework.  It is an exercise in gymnastics;
it is almost hygiene.  Power is in better health after a revolt,
as a man is after a good rubbing down.

Revolt, thirty years ago, was regarded from still other points
of view.

There is for everything a theory, which proclaims itself "good sense";
Philintus against Alcestis; mediation offered between the false and
the true; explanation, admonition, rather haughty extenuation which,
because it is mingled with blame and excuse, thinks itself wisdom,
and is often only pedantry.  A whole political school called "the
golden mean" has been the outcome of this.  As between cold water
and hot water, it is the lukewarm water party.  This school with its
false depth, all on the surface, which dissects effects without going
back to first causes, chides from its height of a demi-science,
the agitation of the public square.

If we listen to this school, "The riots which complicated the affair of
1830 deprived that great event of a portion of its purity.  The Revolution
of July had been a fine popular gale, abruptly followed by blue sky. 
They made the cloudy sky reappear.  They caused that revolution,
at first so remarkable for its unanimity, to degenerate into a quarrel. 
In the Revolution of July, as in all progress accomplished by fits
and starts, there had been secret fractures; these riots rendered
them perceptible.  It might have been said:  `Ah! this is broken.' 
After the Revolution of July, one was sensible only of deliverance;
after the riots, one was conscious of a catastrophe.

"All revolt closes the shops, depresses the funds, throws the
Exchange into consternation, suspends commerce, clogs business,
precipitates failures; no more money, private fortunes rendered uneasy,
public credit shaken, industry disconcerted, capital withdrawing,
work at a discount, fear everywhere; counter-shocks in every town. 
Hence gulfs.  It has been calculated that the first day of a riot
costs France twenty millions, the second day forty, the third sixty,
a three days' uprising costs one hundred and twenty millions, that is
to say, if only the financial result be taken into consideration,
it is equivalent to a disaster, a shipwreck or a lost battle,
which should annihilate a fleet of sixty ships of the line.

"No doubt, historically, uprisings have their beauty; the war of the
pavements is no less grandiose, and no less pathetic, than the war
of thickets:  in the one there is the soul of forests, in the other
the heart of cities; the one has Jean Chouan, the other has a Jeanne. 
Revolts have illuminated with a red glare all the most original points
of the Parisian character, generosity, devotion, stormy gayety,
students proving that bravery forms part of intelligence,
the National Guard invincible, bivouacs of shopkeepers, fortresses of
street urchins, contempt of death on the part of passers-by. Schools
and legions clashed together.  After all, between the combatants,
there was only a difference of age; the race is the same; it is
the same stoical men who died at the age of twenty for their ideas,
at forty for their families.  The army, always a sad thing in
civil wars, opposed prudence to audacity.  Uprisings, while proving
popular intrepidity, also educated the courage of the bourgeois.

"This is well.  But is all this worth the bloodshed?  And to
the bloodshed add the future darkness, progress compromised,
uneasiness among the best men, honest liberals in despair,
foreign absolutism happy in these wounds dealt to revolution
by its own hand, the vanquished of 1830 triumphing and saying: 
`We told you so!'  Add Paris enlarged, possibly, but France most
assuredly diminished.  Add, for all must needs be told, the massacres
which have too often dishonored the victory of order grown ferocious
over liberty gone mad.  To sum up all, uprisings have been disastrous."

Thus speaks that approximation to wisdom with which the bourgeoisie,
that approximation to the people, so willingly contents itself.

For our parts, we reject this word uprisings as too large,
and consequently as too convenient.  We make a distinction
between one popular movement and another popular movement. 
We do not inquire whether an uprising costs as much as a battle. 
Why a battle, in the first place?  Here the question of war comes up. 
Is war less of a scourge than an uprising is of a calamity?  And then,
are all uprisings calamities?  And what if the revolt of July did
cost a hundred and twenty millions?  The establishment of Philip
V. in Spain cost France two milliards.  Even at the same price,
we should prefer the 14th of July.  However, we reject these figures,
which appear to be reasons and which are only words.  An uprising
being given, we examine it by itself.  In all that is said by the
doctrinarian objection above presented, there is no question of
anything but effect, we seek the cause.

We will be explicit.



CHAPTER II

THE ROOT OF THE MATTER


There is such a thing as an uprising, and there is such a thing
as insurrection; these are two separate phases of wrath; one is
in the wrong, the other is in the right.  In democratic states,
the only ones which are founded on justice, it sometimes happens
that the fraction usurps; then the whole rises and the necessary claim
of its rights may proceed as far as resort to arms.  In all questions
which result from collective sovereignty, the war of the whole
against the fraction is insurrection; the attack of the fraction
against the whole is revolt; according as the Tuileries contain
a king or the Convention, they are justly or unjustly attacked. 
The same cannon, pointed against the populace, is wrong on the 10th
of August, and right on the 14th of Vendemiaire.  Alike in appearance,
fundamentally different in reality; the Swiss defend the false,
Bonaparte defends the true.  That which universal suffrage has effected
in its liberty and in its sovereignty cannot be undone by the street. 
It is the same in things pertaining purely to civilization;
the instinct of the masses, clear-sighted to-day, may be troubled
to-morrow. The same fury legitimate when directed against Terray
and absurd when directed against Turgot.  The destruction of machines,
the pillage of warehouses, the breaking of rails, the demolition
of docks, the false routes of multitudes, the refusal by the people
of justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by students, Rousseau driven
out of Switzerland and stoned,--that is revolt.  Israel against Moses,
Athens against Phocian, Rome against Cicero,--that is an uprising;
Paris against the Bastille,--that is insurrection.  The soldiers
against Alexander, the sailors against Christopher Columbus,--
this is the same revolt; impious revolt; why?  Because Alexander
is doing for Asia with the sword that which Christopher Columbus
is doing for America with the compass; Alexander like Columbus,
is finding a world.  These gifts of a world to civilization are such
augmentations of light, that all resistance in that case is culpable. 
Sometimes the populace counterfeits fidelity to itself.  The masses
are traitors to the people.  Is there, for example, anything stranger
than that long and bloody protest of dealers in contraband salt,
a legitimate chronic revolt, which, at the decisive moment,
on the day of salvation, at the very hour of popular victory,
espouses the throne, turns into chouannerie, and, from having been
an insurrection against, becomes an uprising for, sombre masterpieces
of ignorance!  The contraband salt dealer escapes the royal gibbets,
and with a rope's end round his neck, mounts the white cockade. 
"Death to the salt duties," brings forth, "Long live the King!" 
The assassins of Saint-Barthelemy, the cut-throats of September,
the manslaughterers of Avignon, the assassins of Coligny, the assassins
of Madam Lamballe, the assassins of Brune, Miquelets, Verdets,
Cadenettes, the companions of Jehu, the chevaliers of Brassard,--
behold an uprising.  La Vendee is a grand, catholic uprising. 
The sound of right in movement is recognizable, it does not always
proceed from the trembling of excited masses; there are mad rages,
there are cracked bells, all tocsins do not give out the sound
of bronze.  The brawl of passions and ignorances is quite another
thing from the shock of progress.  Show me in what direction you
are going.  Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may grow great. 
There is no insurrection except in a forward direction.  Any other sort
of rising is bad; every violent step towards the rear is a revolt;
to retreat is to commit a deed of violence against the human race. 
Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part of truth; the pavements
which the uprising disturbs give forth the spark of right. 
These pavements bequeath to the uprising only their mud. 
Danton against Louis XIV.  is insurrection; Hebert against Danton is
revolt.

Hence it results that if insurrection in given cases may be,
as Lafayette says, the most holy of duties, an uprising may be
the most fatal of crimes.

There is also a difference in the intensity of heat; insurrection is
often a volcano, revolt is often only a fire of straw.

Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in power. 
Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the governing powers.

Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.

The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely
modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact being,
for the space of four thousand years, filled with violated right,
and the suffering of peoples, each epoch of history brings
with it that protest of which it is capable.  Under the Caesars,
there was no insurrection, but there was Juvenal.

The facit indignatio replaces the Gracchi.

Under the Caesars, there is the exile to Syene; there is also
the man of the Annales.  We do not speak of the immense exile
of Patmos who, on his part also, overwhelms the real world with a
protest in the name of the ideal world, who makes of his vision
an enormous satire and casts on Rome-Nineveh, on Rome-Babylon,
on Rome-Sodom, the flaming reflection of the Apocalypse.  John on
his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we may understand him,
he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who writes the Annales
is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a Roman.

As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted to match. 
The work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale; there must be
poured into the channel a concentrated prose which bites.

Despots count for something in the question of philosophers. 
A word that is chained is a terrible word.  The writer doubles and
trebles his style when silence is imposed on a nation by its master. 
From this silence there arises a certain mysterious plenitude
which filters into thought and there congeals into bronze. 
The compression of history produces conciseness in the historian. 
The granite solidity of such and such a celebrated prose is nothing
but the accumulation effected by the tyrant.

Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are
augmentations of force.  The Ciceronian period, which hardly
sufficed for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula.  The less
spread of sail in the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. 
Tacitus thinks with all his might.

The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth,
overwhelms as with lightning.

Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically
superposed upon Caesar.  The Tiberii were reserved for him. 
Caesar and Tacitus are two successive phenomena, a meeting between
whom seems to be mysteriously avoided, by the One who, when He sets
the centuries on the stage, regulates the entrances and the exits. 
Caesar is great, Tacitus is great; God spares these two greatnesses
by not allowing them to clash with one another.  The guardian
of justice, in striking Caesar, might strike too hard and be unjust. 
God does not will it.  The great wars of Africa and Spain,
the pirates of Sicily destroyed, civilization introduced into Gaul,
into Britanny, into Germany,--all this glory covers the Rubicon. 
There is here a sort of delicacy of the divine justice, hesitating to
let loose upon the illustrious usurper the formidable historian,
sparing Caesar Tacitus, and according extenuating circumstances
to genius.

Certainly, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot
of genius.  There is corruption under all illustrious tyrants,
but the moral pest is still more hideous under infamous tyrants. 
In such reigns, nothing veils the shame; and those who make examples,
Tacitus as well as Juvenal, slap this ignominy which cannot reply,
in the face, more usefully in the presence of all humanity.

Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla.  Under Claudius
and under Domitian, there is a deformity of baseness corresponding
to the repulsiveness of the tyrant.  The villainy of slaves is a
direct product of the despot; a miasma exhales from these cowering
consciences wherein the master is reflected; public powers are unclean;
hearts are small; consciences are dull, souls are like vermin;
thus it is under Caracalla, thus it is under Commodus, thus it
is under Heliogabalus, while, from the Roman Senate, under Caesar,
there comes nothing but the odor of the dung which is peculiar
to the eyries of the eagles.

Hence the advent, apparently tardy, of the Tacituses and the Juvenals;
it is in the hour for evidence, that the demonstrator makes
his appearance.

But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in Biblical times, like Dante
in the Middle Ages, is man; riot and insurrection are the multitude,
which is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

In the majority of cases, riot proceeds from a material fact;
insurrection is always a moral phenomenon.  Riot is Masaniello;
insurrection, Spartacus.  Insurrection borders on mind, riot on
the stomach; Gaster grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not
always in the wrong.  In questions of famine, riot, Buzancais,
for example, holds a true, pathetic, and just point of departure. 
Nevertheless, it remains a riot.  Why?  It is because, right at bottom,
it was wrong in form.  Shy although in the right, violent although
strong, it struck at random; it walked like a blind elephant;
it left behind it the corpses of old men, of women, and of children;
it wished the blood of inoffensive and innocent persons without
knowing why.  The nourishment of the people is a good object;
to massacre them is a bad means.

All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of the 10th
of August, even that of July 14th, begin with the same troubles. 
Before the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult. 
In the beginning, the insurrection is a riot, just as a river
is a torrent.  Ordinarily it ends in that ocean:  revolution. 
Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty mountains which dominate
the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right, formed of the
pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock,
after having reflected the sky in its transparency and increased
by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph, insurrection
is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a swamp.

All this is of the past, the future is another thing. 
Universal suffrage has this admirable property, that it dissolves
riot in its inception, and, by giving the vote to insurrection,
it deprives it of its arms.  The disappearance of wars,
of street wars as well as of wars on the frontiers, such is the
inevitable progression.  Whatever To-day may be, To-morrow will be peace.

However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between
the former and the latter,--the bourgeois, properly speaking,
knows nothing of such shades.  In his mind, all is sedition,
rebellion pure and simple, the revolt of the dog against his master,
an attempt to bite whom must be punished by the chain and the
kennel, barking, snapping, until such day as the head of the dog,
suddenly enlarged, is outlined vaguely in the gloom face to face
with the lion.

Then the bourgeois shouts:  "Long live the people!"

This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832, signify,
so far as history is concerned?  Is it a revolt?  Is it an insurrection?

It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage,
to say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts,
and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the form,
and insurrection, the foundation.

This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its
melancholy extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see in it
only an uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with respect. 
For them, it is like a relic of 1830.  Excited imaginations, say they,
are not to be calmed in a day.  A revolution cannot be cut off short. 
It must needs undergo some undulations before it returns to a state
of rest, like a mountain sinking into the plain.  There are no Alps
without their Jura, nor Pyrenees without the Asturias.

This pathetic crisis of contemporary history which the memory
of Parisians calls "the epoch of the riots," is certainly
a characteristic hour amid the stormy hours of this century. 
A last word, before we enter on the recital.

The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic
and living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects
for lack of time and space.  There, nevertheless, we insist
upon it, is life, palpitation, human tremor.  Petty details,
as we think we have already said, are, so to speak, the foliage
of great events, and are lost in the distance of history.  The epoch,
surnamed "of the riots," abounds in details of this nature. 
Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and perhaps have not sounded
the depths, for another reason than history.  We shall therefore
bring to light, among the known and published peculiarities,
things which have not heretofore been known, about facts over which
have passed the forgetfulness of some, and the death of others. 
The majority of the actors in these gigantic scenes have disappeared;
beginning with the very next day they held their peace; but of what
we shall relate, we shall be able to say:  "We have seen this." 
We alter a few names, for history relates and does not inform against,
but the deed which we shall paint will be genuine.  In accordance
with the conditions of the book which we are now writing, we shall
show only one side and one episode, and certainly, the least known
at that, of the two days, the 5th and the 6th of June, 1832, but we
shall do it in such wise that the reader may catch a glimpse,
beneath the gloomy veil which we are about to lift, of the real form
of this frightful public adventure.



CHAPTER III

A BURIAL; AN OCCASION TO BE BORN AGAIN


In the spring of 1832, although the cholera had been chilling all
minds for the last three months and had cast over their agitation
an indescribable and gloomy pacification, Paris had already long
been ripe for commotion.  As we have said, the great city resembles
a piece of artillery; when it is loaded, it suffices for a spark
to fall, and the shot is discharged.  In June, 1832, the spark
was the death of General Lamarque.

Lamarque was a man of renown and of action.  He had had in succession,
under the Empire and under the Restoration, the sorts of bravery
requisite for the two epochs, the bravery of the battle-field
and the bravery of the tribune.  He was as eloquent as he had
been valiant; a sword was discernible in his speech.  Like Foy,
his predecessor, after upholding the command, he upheld liberty;
he sat between the left and the extreme left, beloved of the people
because he accepted the chances of the future, beloved of the
populace because he had served the Emperor well; he was, in company
with Comtes Gerard and Drouet, one of Napoleon's marshals in petto. 
The treaties of 1815 removed him as a personal offence.  He hated
Wellington with a downright hatred which pleased the multitude;
and, for seventeen years, he majestically preserved the sadness
of Waterloo, paying hardly any attention to intervening events. 
In his death agony, at his last hour, he clasped to his breast a sword
which had been presented to him by the officers of the Hundred Days. 
Napoleon had died uttering the word army, Lamarque uttering the
word country.

His death, which was expected, was dreaded by the people as a loss,
and by the government as an occasion.  This death was an affliction. 
Like everything that is bitter, affliction may turn to revolt. 
This is what took place.

On the preceding evening, and on the morning of the 5th of June,
the day appointed for Lamarque's burial, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine,
which the procession was to touch at, assumed a formidable aspect. 
This tumultuous network of streets was filled with rumors. 
They armed themselves as best they might.  Joiners carried off
door-weights of their establishment "to break down doors."  One of them
had made himself a dagger of a stocking-weaver's hook by breaking
off the hook and sharpening the stump.  Another, who was in a fever
"to attack," slept wholly dressed for three days.  A carpenter named
Lombier met a comrade, who asked him:  "Whither are you going?" 
"Eh! well, I have no weapons."  "What then?"  "I'm going to my
timber-yard to get my compasses."  "What for?"  "I don't know,"
said Lombier.  A certain Jacqueline, an expeditious man, accosted some
passing artisans:  "Come here, you!"  He treated them to ten sous'
worth of wine and said:  "Have you work?"  "No." "Go to Filspierre,
between the Barriere Charonne and the Barriere Montreuil, and you
will find work."  At Filspierre's they found cartridges and arms. 
Certain well-known leaders were going the rounds, that is to say,
running from one house to another, to collect their men. 
At Barthelemy's, near the Barriere du Trone, at Capel's, near the
Petit-Chapeau, the drinkers accosted each other with a grave air. 
They were heard to say:  "Have you your pistol?"  "Under my blouse." 
"And you?"  "Under my shirt."  In the Rue Traversiere, in front
of the Bland workshop, and in the yard of the Maison-Brulee,
in front of tool-maker Bernier's, groups whispered together. 
Among them was observed a certain Mavot, who never remained more than
a week in one shop, as the masters always discharged him "because
they were obliged to dispute with him every day."  Mavot was killed
on the following day at the barricade of the Rue Menilmontant. 
Pretot, who was destined to perish also in the struggle,
seconded Mavot, and to the question:  "What is your object?"
he replied:  "Insurrection."  Workmen assembled at the corner of
the Rue de Bercy, waited for a certain Lemarin, the revolutionary
agent for the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Watchwords were exchanged
almost publicly.

On the 5th of June, accordingly, a day of mingled rain and sun,
General Lamarque's funeral procession traversed Paris with official
military pomp, somewhat augmented through precaution.  Two battalions,
with draped drums and reversed arms, ten thousand National Guards,
with their swords at their sides, escorted the coffin. 
The hearse was drawn by young men.  The officers of the Invalides
came immediately behind it, bearing laurel branches.  Then came
an innumerable, strange, agitated multitude, the sectionaries of the
Friends of the People, the Law School, the Medical School, refugees of
all nationalities, and Spanish, Italian, German, and Polish flags,
tricolored horizontal banners, every possible sort of banner,
children waving green boughs, stone-cutters and carpenters who were
on strike at the moment, printers who were recognizable by their
paper caps, marching two by two, three by three, uttering cries,
nearly all of them brandishing sticks, some brandishing sabres,
without order and yet with a single soul, now a tumultuous rout,
again a column.  Squads chose themselves leaders; a man armed
with a pair of pistols in full view, seemed to pass the host
in review, and the files separated before him.  On the side alleys
of the boulevards, in the branches of the trees, on balconies,
in windows, on the roofs, swarmed the heads of men, women, and children;
all eyes were filled with anxiety.  An armed throng was passing,
and a terrified throng looked on.

The Government, on its side, was taking observations.  It observed
with its hand on its sword.  Four squadrons of carabineers could
be seen in the Place Louis XV.  in their saddles, with their
trumpets at their head, cartridge-boxes filled and muskets loaded,
all in readiness to march; in the Latin country and at the Jardin
des Plantes, the Municipal Guard echelonned from street to street;
at the Halle-aux-Vins, a squadron of dragoons; at the Greve half
of the 12th Light Infantry, the other half being at the Bastille;
the 6th Dragoons at the Celestins; and the courtyard of the Louvre
full of artillery.  The remainder of the troops were confined
to their barracks, without reckoning the regiments of the environs
of Paris.  Power being uneasy, held suspended over the menacing
multitude twenty-four thousand soldiers in the city and thirty
thousand in the banlieue.

Divers reports were in circulation in the cortege.  Legitimist tricks
were hinted at; they spoke of the Duc de Reichstadt, whom God had marked
out for death at that very moment when the populace were designating
him for the Empire.  One personage, whose name has remained unknown,
announced that at a given hour two overseers who had been won over,
would throw open the doors of a factory of arms to the people. 
That which predominated on the uncovered brows of the majority
of those present was enthusiasm mingled with dejection. 
Here and there, also, in that multitude given over to such violent
but noble emotions, there were visible genuine visages of criminals
and ignoble mouths which said:  "Let us plunder!"  There are certain
agitations which stir up the bottoms of marshes and make clouds
of mud rise through the water.  A phenomenon to which "well drilled"
policemen are no strangers.

The procession proceeded, with feverish slowness, from the house
of the deceased, by way of the boulevards as far as the Bastille. 
It rained from time to time; the rain mattered nothing to that throng. 
Many incidents, the coffin borne round the Vendome column,
stones thrown at the Duc de Fitz-James, who was seen on a balcony
with his hat on his head, the Gallic cock torn from a popular flag
and dragged in the mire, a policeman wounded with a blow from a sword
at the Porte Saint-Martin, an officer of the 12th Light Infantry
saying aloud:  "I am a Republican," the Polytechnic School coming
up unexpectedly against orders to remain at home, the shouts of: 
"Long live the Polytechnique!  Long live the Republic!" marked the
passage of the funeral train.  At the Bastille, long files of curious
and formidable people who descended from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine,
effected a junction with the procession, and a certain terrible
seething began to agitate the throng.

One man was heard to say to another:  "Do you see that fellow with a
red beard, he's the one who will give the word when we are to fire." 
It appears that this red beard was present, at another riot,
the Quenisset affair, entrusted with this same function.

The hearse passed the Bastille, traversed the small bridge, and reached
the esplanade of the bridge of Austerlitz.  There it halted. 
The crowd, surveyed at that moment with a bird'seye view, would have
presented the aspect of a comet whose head was on the esplanade and
whose tail spread out over the Quai Bourdon, covered the Bastille,
and was prolonged on the boulevard as far as the Porte Saint-Martin. A
circle was traced around the hearse.  The vast rout held their peace. 
Lafayette spoke and bade Lamarque farewell.  This was a touching
and august instant, all heads uncovered, all hearts beat high.

All at once, a man on horseback, clad in black, made his appearance
in the middle of the group with a red flag, others say, with a pike
surmounted with a red liberty-cap. Lafayette turned aside his head. 
Exelmans quitted the procession.

This red flag raised a storm, and disappeared in the midst of it. 
From the Boulevard Bourdon to the bridge of Austerlitz one of
those clamors which resemble billows stirred the multitude. 
Two prodigious shouts went up:  "Lamarque to the Pantheon!--
Lafayette to the Town-hall!" Some young men, amid the declamations
of the throng, harnessed themselves and began to drag Lamarque
in the hearse across the bridge of Austerlitz and Lafayette in a
hackney-coach along the Quai Morland.

In the crowd which surrounded and cheered Lafayette, it was
noticed that a German showed himself named Ludwig Snyder, who died
a centenarian afterwards, who had also been in the war of 1776,
and who had fought at Trenton under Washington, and at Brandywine
under Lafayette.

In the meantime, the municipal cavalry on the left bank had been set
in motion, and came to bar the bridge, on the right bank the dragoons
emerged from the Celestins and deployed along the Quai Morland. 
The men who were dragging Lafayette suddenly caught sight of
them at the corner of the quay and shouted:  "The dragoons!" 
The dragoons advanced at a walk, in silence, with their pistols
in their holsters, their swords in their scabbards, their guns slung
in their leather sockets, with an air of gloomy expectation.

They halted two hundred paces from the little bridge.  The carriage
in which sat Lafayette advanced to them, their ranks opened and
allowed it to pass, and then closed behind it.  At that moment
the dragoons and the crowd touched.  The women fled in terror. 
What took place during that fatal minute?  No one can say. 
It is the dark moment when two clouds come together.  Some declare
that a blast of trumpets sounding the charge was heard in the direction
of the Arsenal others that a blow from a dagger was given by a child
to a dragoon.  The fact is, that three shots were suddenly discharged: 
the first killed Cholet, chief of the squadron, the second killed
an old deaf woman who was in the act of closing her window,
the third singed the shoulder of an officer; a woman screamed: 
"They are beginning too soon!" and all at once, a squadron
of dragoons which had remained in the barracks up to this time,
was seen to debouch at a gallop with bared swords, through the Rue
Bassompierre and the Boulevard Bourdon, sweeping all before them.

Then all is said, the tempest is loosed, stones rain down,
a fusillade breaks forth, many precipitate themselves to the bottom
of the bank, and pass the small arm of the Seine, now filled in,
the timber-yards of the Isle Louviers, that vast citadel ready to hand,
bristle with combatants, stakes are torn up, pistol-shots fired,
a barricade begun, the young men who are thrust back pass the
Austerlitz bridge with the hearse at a run, and the municipal guard,
the carabineers rush up, the dragoons ply their swords, the crowd
disperses in all directions, a rumor of war flies to all four
quarters of Paris, men shout:  "To arms!" they run, tumble down,
flee, resist.  Wrath spreads abroad the riot as wind spreads a fire.



CHAPTER IV

THE EBULLITIONS OF FORMER DAYS


Nothing is more extraordinary than the first breaking out of a riot. 
Everything bursts forth everywhere at once.  Was it foreseen? 
Yes.  Was it prepared?  No. Whence comes it?  From the pavements. 
Whence falls it?  From the clouds.  Here insurrection assumes the
character of a plot; there of an improvisation.  The first comer
seizes a current of the throng and leads it whither he wills. 
A beginning full of terror, in which is mingled a sort of
formidable gayety.  First come clamors, the shops are closed,
the displays of the merchants disappear; then come isolated shots;
people flee; blows from gun-stocks beat against portes cocheres,
servants can be heard laughing in the courtyards of houses and saying: 
"There's going to be a row!"

A quarter of an hour had not elapsed when this is what was taking
place at twenty different spots in Paris at once.

In the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, twenty young men,
bearded and with long hair, entered a dram-shop and emerged
a moment later, carrying a horizontal tricolored flag covered
with crape, and having at their head three men armed, one with
a sword, one with a gun, and the third with a pike.

In the Rue des Nonaindieres, a very well-dressed bourgeois, who had
a prominent belly, a sonorous voice, a bald head, a lofty brow,
a black beard, and one of these stiff mustaches which will not
lie flat, offered cartridges publicly to passers-by.

In the Rue Saint-Pierre-Montmartre, men with bare arms carried about
a black flag, on which could be read in white letters this inscription: 
"Republic or Death!"  In the Rue des Jeuneurs, Rue du Cadran,
Rue Montorgueil, Rue Mandar, groups appeared waving flags on which could
be distinguished in gold letters, the word section with a number. 
One of these flags was red and blue with an almost imperceptible
stripe of white between.

They pillaged a factory of small-arms on the Boulevard Saint-Martin,
and three armorers' shops, the first in the Rue Beaubourg, the second
in the Rue Michel-le-Comte, the other in the Rue du Temple. 
In a few minutes, the thousand hands of the crowd had seized and
carried off two hundred and thirty guns, nearly all double-barrelled,
sixty-four swords, and eighty-three pistols.  In order to provide
more arms, one man took the gun, the other the bayonet.

Opposite the Quai de la Greve, young men armed with muskets installed
themselves in the houses of some women for the purpose of firing. 
One of them had a flint-lock. They rang, entered, and set about
making cartridges.  One of these women relates:  "I did not know
what cartridges were; it was my husband who told me."

One cluster broke into a curiosity shop
in the Rue des Vielles Haudriettes, and seized yataghans and Turkish arms.

The body of a mason who had been killed by a gun-shot lay in the Rue
de la Perle.

And then on the right bank, the left bank, on the quays,
on the boulevards, in the Latin country, in the quarter of the Halles,
panting men, artisans, students, members of sections read proclamations
and shouted:  "To arms!" broke street lanterns, unharnessed carriages,
unpaved the streets, broke in the doors of houses, uprooted trees,
rummaged cellars, rolled out hogsheads, heaped up paving-stones,
rough slabs, furniture and planks, and made barricades.

They forced the bourgeois to assist them in this.  They entered the
dwellings of women, they forced them to hand over the swords and guns
of their absent husbands, and they wrote on the door, with whiting: 
"The arms have been delivered"; some signed "their names" to receipts
for the guns and swords and said:  "Send for them to-morrow at
the Mayor's office."  They disarmed isolated sentinels and National
Guardsmen in the streets on their way to the Townhall.  They tore
the epaulets from officers.  In the Rue du Cimitiere-Saint-Nicholas,
an officer of the National Guard, on being pursued by a crowd armed
with clubs and foils, took refuge with difficulty in a house,
whence he was only able to emerge at nightfall and in disguise.

In the Quartier Saint-Jacques, the students swarmed out of their
hotels and ascended the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe to the Cafe du Progress,
or descended to the Cafe des Sept-Billards, in the Rue des Mathurins. 
There, in front of the door, young men mounted on the stone
corner-posts, distributed arms.  They plundered the timber-yard
in the Rue Transnonain in order to obtain material for barricades. 
On a single point the inhabitants resisted, at the corner
of the Rue Sainte-Avoye and the Rue Simon-Le-Franc, where they
destroyed the barricade with their own hands.  At a single point
the insurgents yielded; they abandoned a barricade begun in the Rue
de Temple after having fired on a detachment of the National Guard,
and fled through the Rue de la Corderie.  The detachment picked up
in the barricade a red flag, a package of cartridges, and three
hundred pistol-balls. The National Guardsmen tore up the flag,
and carried off its tattered remains on the points of their bayonets.

All that we are here relating slowly and successively took place
simultaneously at all points of the city in the midst of a vast tumult,
like a mass of tongues of lightning in one clap of thunder. 
In less than an hour, twenty-seven barricades sprang out of the
earth in the quarter of the Halles alone.  In the centre was that
famous house No. 50, which was the fortress of Jeanne and her six
hundred companions, and which, flanked on the one hand by a barricade
at Saint-Merry, and on the other by a barricade of the Rue Maubuee,
commanded three streets, the Rue des Arcis, the Rue Saint-Martin,
and the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, which it faced.  The barricades
at right angles fell back, the one of the Rue Montorgueil on the
Grande-Truanderie, the other of the Rue Geoffroy-Langevin on the Rue
Sainte-Avoye. Without reckoning innumerable barricades in twenty
other quarters of Paris, in the Marais, at Mont-Sainte-Genevieve;
one in the Rue Menilmontant, where was visible a porte cochere torn
from its hinges; another near the little bridge of the Hotel-Dieu
made with an "ecossais," which had been unharnessed and overthrown,
three hundred paces from the Prefecture of Police.

At the barricade of the Rue des Menetriers, a well-dressed man
distributed money to the workmen.  At the barricade of the Rue Grenetat,
a horseman made his appearance and handed to the one who seemed
to be the commander of the barricade what had the appearance
of a roll of silver.  "Here," said he, "this is to pay expenses,
wine, et caetera."  A light-haired young man, without a cravat,
went from barricade to barricade, carrying pass-words. Another,
with a naked sword, a blue police cap on his head, placed sentinels. 
In the interior, beyond the barricades, the wine-shops and porters'
lodges were converted into guard-houses. Otherwise the riot
was conducted after the most scientific military tactics. 
The narrow, uneven, sinuous streets, full of angles and turns,
were admirably chosen; the neighborhood of the Halles, in particular,
a network of streets more intricate than a forest.  The Society
of the Friends of the People had, it was said, undertaken to direct
the insurrection in the Quartier Sainte-Avoye. A man killed in the Rue
du Ponceau who was searched had on his person a plan of Paris.

That which had really undertaken the direction of the uprising
was a sort of strange impetuosity which was in the air. 
The insurrection had abruptly built barricades with one hand,
and with the other seized nearly all the posts of the garrison. 
In less than three hours, like a train of powder catching fire,
the insurgents had invaded and occupied, on the right bank,
the Arsenal, the Mayoralty of the Place Royale, the whole
of the Marais, the Popincourt arms manufactory, la Galiote,
the Chateau-d'Eau, and all the streets near the Halles; on the left bank,
the barracks of the Veterans, Sainte-Pelagie, the Place Maubert,
the powder magazine of the Deux-Moulins, and all the barriers. 
At five o'clock in the evening, they were masters of the Bastille,
of the Lingerie, of the Blancs-Manteaux; their scouts had reached the
Place des Victoires, and menaced the Bank, the Petits-Peres barracks,
and the Post-Office. A third of Paris was in the hands of the rioters.

The conflict had been begun on a gigantic scale at all points;
and, as a result of the disarming domiciliary visits, and armorers'
shops hastily invaded, was, that the combat which had begun with
the throwing of stones was continued with gun-shots.

About six o'clock in the evening, the Passage du Saumon became
the field of battle.  The uprising was at one end, the troops were
at the other.  They fired from one gate to the other.  An observer,
a dreamer, the author of this book, who had gone to get a near view
of this volcano, found himself in the passage between the two fires. 
All that he had to protect him from the bullets was the swell of
the two half-columns which separate the shops; he remained in this
delicate situation for nearly half an hour.

Meanwhile the call to arms was beaten, the National Guard armed
in haste, the legions emerged from the Mayoralities, the regiments
from their barracks.  Opposite the passage de l'Ancre a drummer
received a blow from a dagger.  Another, in the Rue du Cygne,
was assailed by thirty young men who broke his instrument, and took
away his sword.  Another was killed in the Rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare.
In the Rue-Michelle-Comte, three officers fell dead one after
the other.  Many of the Municipal Guards, on being wounded,
in the Rue des Lombards, retreated.

In front of the Cour-Batave, a detachment of National Guards found
a red flag bearing the following inscription:  Republican revolution,
No. 127.  Was this a revolution, in fact?

The insurrection had made of the centre of Paris a sort
of inextricable, tortuous, colossal citadel.

There was the hearth; there, evidently, was the question. 
All the rest was nothing but skirmishes.  The proof that all would
be decided there lay in the fact that there was no fighting going
on there as yet.

In some regiments, the soldiers were uncertain, which added to
the fearful uncertainty of the crisis.  They recalled the popular
ovation which had greeted the neutrality of the 53d of the Line
in July, 1830.  Two intrepid men, tried in great wars, the Marshal
Lobau and General Bugeaud, were in command, Bugeaud under Lobau. 
Enormous patrols, composed of battalions of the Line, enclosed in
entire companies of the National Guard, and preceded by a commissary
of police wearing his scarf of office, went to reconnoitre the streets
in rebellion.  The insurgents, on their side, placed videttes
at the corners of all open spaces, and audaciously sent their
patrols outside the barricades.  Each side was watching the other. 
The Government, with an army in its hand, hesitated; the night
was almost upon them, and the Saint-Merry tocsin began to make
itself heard.  The Minister of War at that time, Marshal Soult,
who had seen Austerlitz, regarded this with a gloomy air.

These old sailors, accustomed to correct manoeuvres and having
as resource and guide only tactics, that compass of battles,
are utterly disconcerted in the presence of that immense foam
which is called public wrath.

The National Guards of the suburbs rushed up in haste and disorder. 
A battalion of the 12th Light came at a run from Saint-Denis,
the 14th of the Line arrived from Courbevoie, the batteries of
the Military School had taken up their position on the Carrousel;
cannons were descending from Vincennes.

Solitude was formed around the Tuileries.  Louis Philippe was
perfectly serene.



CHAPTER V

ORIGINALITY OF PARIS


During the last two years, as we have said, Paris had witnessed
more than one insurrection.  Nothing is, generally, more singularly
calm than the physiognomy of Paris during an uprising beyond the
bounds of the rebellious quarters.  Paris very speedily accustoms
herself to anything,--it is only a riot,--and Paris has so many
affairs on hand, that she does not put herself out for so small
a matter.  These colossal cities alone can offer such spectacles. 
These immense enclosures alone can contain at the same time civil
war and an odd and indescribable tranquillity.  Ordinarily, when an
insurrection commences, when the shop-keeper hears the drum, the call
to arms, the general alarm, he contents himself with the remark:--

"There appears to be a squabble in the Rue Saint-Martin."

Or:--

"In the Faubourg Saint-Antoine."

Often he adds carelessly:--

"Or somewhere in that direction."

Later on, when the heart-rending and mournful hubbub of musketry
and firing by platoons becomes audible, the shopkeeper says:--

"It's getting hot!  Hullo, it's getting hot!"

A moment later, the riot approaches and gains in force, he shuts up
his shop precipitately, hastily dons his uniform, that is to say,
he places his merchandise in safety and risks his own person.

Men fire in a square, in a passage, in a blind alley; they take
and re-take the barricade; blood flows, the grape-shot riddles
the fronts of the houses, the balls kill people in their beds,
corpses encumber the streets.  A few streets away, the shock
of billiard-balls can be heard in the cafes.

The theatres open their doors and present vaudevilles; the curious
laugh and chat a couple of paces distant from these streets filled
with war.  Hackney-carriages go their way; passers-by are going
to a dinner somewhere in town.  Sometimes in the very quarter
where the fighting is going on.

In 1831, a fusillade was stopped to allow a wedding party to pass.

At the time of the insurrection of 1839, in the Rue Saint-Martin a little,
infirm old man, pushing a hand-cart surmounted by a tricolored rag,
in which he had carafes filled with some sort of liquid, went and
came from barricade to troops and from troops to the barricade,
offering his glasses of cocoa impartially,--now to the Government,
now to anarchy.

Nothing can be stranger; and this is the peculiar character of
uprisings in Paris, which cannot be found in any other capital. 
To this end, two things are requisite, the size of Paris and its gayety. 
The city of Voltaire and Napoleon is necessary.

On this occasion, however, in the resort to arms of June 25th, 1832,
the great city felt something which was, perhaps, stronger than itself. 
It was afraid.

Closed doors, windows, and shutters were to be seen everywhere,
in the most distant and most "disinterested" quarters.  The courageous
took to arms, the poltroons hid.  The busy and heedless passer-by
disappeared.  Many streets were empty at four o'clock in the morning.

Alarming details were hawked about, fatal news was disseminated,--
that they were masters of the Bank;--that there were six hundred
of them in the Cloister of Saint-Merry alone, entrenched and embattled
in the church; that the line was not to be depended on; that Armand
Carrel had been to see Marshal Clausel and that the Marshal had said: 
"Get a regiment first"; that Lafayette was ill, but that he had
said to them, nevertheless:  "I am with you.  I will follow you
wherever there is room for a chair"; that one must be on one's guard;
that at night there would be people pillaging isolated dwellings
in the deserted corners of Paris (there the imagination of the police,
that Anne Radcliffe mixed up with the Government was recognizable);
that a battery had been established in the Rue Aubry le Boucher;
that Lobau and Bugeaud were putting their heads together, and that,
at midnight, or at daybreak at latest, four columns would march
simultaneously on the centre of the uprising, the first coming from
the Bastille, the second from the Porte Saint-Martin, the third
from the Greve, the fourth from the Halles; that perhaps, also,
the troops would evacuate Paris and withdraw to the Champ-de-Mars;
that no one knew what would happen, but that this time, it certainly
was serious.

People busied themselves over Marshal Soult's hesitations.  Why did
not he attack at once?  It is certain that he was profoundly absorbed. 
The old lion seemed to scent an unknown monster in that gloom.

Evening came, the theatres did not open; the patrols circulated with
an air of irritation; passers-by were searched; suspicious persons
were arrested.  By nine o'clock, more than eight hundred persons
had been arrested, the Prefecture of Police was encumbered with them,
so was the Conciergerie, so was La Force.

At the Conciergerie in particular, the long vault which is
called the Rue de Paris was littered with trusses of straw upon
which lay a heap of prisoners, whom the man of Lyons, Lagrange,
harangued valiantly.  All that straw rustled by all these men,
produced the sound of a heavy shower.  Elsewhere prisoners
slept in the open air in the meadows, piled on top of each other.

Anxiety reigned everywhere, and a certain tremor which was not
habitual with Paris.

People barricaded themselves in their houses; wives and mothers
were uneasy; nothing was to be heard but this:  "Ah! my God! 
He has not come home!"  There was hardly even the distant rumble
of a vehicle to be heard.

People listened on their thresholds, to the rumors, the shouts,
the tumult, the dull and indistinct sounds, to the things that
were said:  "It is cavalry," or:  "Those are the caissons galloping,"
to the trumpets, the drums, the firing, and, above all, to that
lamentable alarm peal from Saint-Merry.

They waited for the first cannon-shot. Men sprang up at the corners
of the streets and disappeared, shouting:  "Go home!"  And people made
haste to bolt their doors.  They said:  "How will all this end?" 
From moment to moment, in proportion as the darkness descended,
Paris seemed to take on a more mournful hue from the formidable
flaming of the revolt.



BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE



CHAPTER I

SOME EXPLANATIONS WITH REGARD TO THE ORIGIN OF GAVROCHE'S POETRY. 
THE INFLUENCE OF AN ACADEMICIAN ON THIS POETRY


At the instant when the insurrection, arising from the shock
of the populace and the military in front of the Arsenal,
started a movement in advance and towards the rear in the multitude
which was following the hearse and which, through the whole
length of the boulevards, weighed, so to speak, on the head of
the procession, there arose a frightful ebb.  The rout was shaken,
their ranks were broken, all ran, fled, made their escape,
some with shouts of attack, others with the pallor of flight. 
The great river which covered the boulevards divided in a twinkling,
overflowed to right and left, and spread in torrents over two
hundred streets at once with the roar of a sewer that has broken loose.

At that moment, a ragged child who was coming down through the
Rue Menilmontant, holding in his hand a branch of blossoming laburnum
which he had just plucked on the heights of Belleville, caught sight of
an old holster-pistol in the show-window of a bric-a-brac merchant's shop.

"Mother What's-your-name, I'm going to borrow your machine."

And off he ran with the pistol.

Two minutes later, a flood of frightened bourgeois who were fleeing
through the Rue Amelot and the Rue Basse, encountered the lad
brandishing his pistol and singing:--

               La nuit on ne voit rien,
               Le jour on voit tres bien,
               D'un ecrit apocrypha
               Le bourgeois s'ebouriffe,
               Pratiquez la vertu,
               Tutu, chapeau pointu![44]


[44] At night one sees nothing, by day one sees very well;
the bourgeois gets flurried over an apocryphal scrawl,
practice virtue, tutu, pointed hat!


It was little Gavroche on his way to the wars.

On the boulevard he noticed that the pistol had no trigger.

Who was the author of that couplet which served to punctuate his march,
and of all the other songs which he was fond of singing on occasion? 
We know not.  Who does know?  Himself, perhaps.  However, Gavroche was
well up in all the popular tunes in circulation, and he mingled with
them his own chirpings.  An observing urchin and a rogue, he made a
potpourri of the voices of nature and the voices of Paris.  He combined
the repertory of the birds with the repertory of the workshops. 
He was acquainted with thieves, a tribe contiguous to his own. 
He had, it appears, been for three months apprenticed to a printer. 
He had one day executed a commission for M. Baour-Lormian, one of
the Forty.  Gavroche was a gamin of letters.

Moreover, Gavroche had no suspicion of the fact that when he
had offered the hospitality of his elephant to two brats on that
villainously rainy night, it was to his own brothers that he
had played the part of Providence.  His brothers in the evening,
his father in the morning; that is what his night had been like. 
On quitting the Rue des Ballets at daybreak, he had returned in haste
to the elephant, had artistically extracted from it the two brats,
had shared with them some sort of breakfast which he had invented,
and had then gone away, confiding them to that good mother,
the street, who had brought him up, almost entirely.  On leaving them,
he had appointed to meet them at the same spot in the evening,
and had left them this discourse by way of a farewell:  "I break a cane,
otherwise expressed, I cut my stick, or, as they say at the court,
I file off.  If you don't find papa and mamma, young 'uns, come back
here this evening.  I'll scramble you up some supper, and I'll give
you a shakedown."  The two children, picked up by some policeman
and placed in the refuge, or stolen by some mountebank, or having
simply strayed off in that immense Chinese puzzle of a Paris,
did not return.  The lowest depths of the actual social world
are full of these lost traces.  Gavroche did not see them again. 
Ten or twelve weeks had elapsed since that night.  More than once he
had scratched the back of his head and said:  "Where the devil are my
two children?"

In the meantime, he had arrived, pistol in hand, in the Rue du
Pont-aux-Choux. He noticed that there was but one shop open
in that street, and, a matter worthy of reflection, that was
a pastry-cook's shop.  This presented a providential occasion
to eat another apple-turnover before entering the unknown. 
Gavroche halted, fumbled in his fob, turned his pocket inside out,
found nothing, not even a sou, and began to shout:  "Help!"

It is hard to miss the last cake.

Nevertheless, Gavroche pursued his way.

Two minutes later he was in the Rue Saint-Louis. While traversing
the Rue du Parc-Royal, he felt called upon to make good the loss
of the apple-turnover which had been impossible, and he indulged
himself in the immense delight of tearing down the theatre posters
in broad daylight.

A little further on, on catching sight of a group
of comfortable-looking persons, who seemed to be
landed proprietors, he shrugged his shoulders and spit out
at random before him this mouthful of philosophical bile as they passed:

"How fat those moneyed men are!  They're drunk!  They just
wallow in good dinners.  Ask 'em what they do with their money. 
They don't know.  They eat it, that's what they do!  As much
as their bellies will hold."



CHAPTER II

GAVROCHE ON THE MARCH


The brandishing of a triggerless pistol, grasped in one's hand
in the open street, is so much of a public function that Gavroche
felt his fervor increasing with every moment.  Amid the scraps
of the Marseillaise which he was singing, he shouted:--

"All goes well.  I suffer a great deal in my left paw, I'm all broken
up with rheumatism, but I'm satisfied, citizens.  All that the
bourgeois have to do is to bear themselves well, I'll sneeze them
out subversive couplets.  What are the police spies?  Dogs.  And I'd
just like to have one of them at the end of my pistol.  I'm just from
the boulevard, my friends.  It's getting hot there, it's getting
into a little boil, it's simmering.  It's time to skim the pot. 
Forward march, men!  Let an impure blood inundate the furrows! 
I give my days to my country, I shall never see my concubine more,
Nini, finished, yes, Nini?  But never mind!  Long live joy! 
Let's fight, crebleu!  I've had enough of despotism."

At that moment, the horse of a lancer of the National Guard
having fallen, Gavroche laid his pistol on the pavement, and picked
up the man, then he assisted in raising the horse.  After which he
picked up his pistol and resumed his way.  In the Rue de Thorigny,
all was peace and silence.  This apathy, peculiar to the Marais,
presented a contrast with the vast surrounding uproar.  Four gossips
were chatting in a doorway.

Scotland has trios of witches, Paris has quartettes of old gossiping hags;
and the "Thou shalt be King" could be quite as mournfully hurled
at Bonaparte in the Carrefour Baudoyer as at Macbeth on the heath
of Armuyr.  The croak would be almost identical.

The gossips of the Rue de Thorigny busied themselves only with
their own concerns.  Three of them were portresses, and the fourth
was a rag-picker with her basket on her back.

All four of them seemed to be standing at the four corners of old age,
which are decrepitude, decay, ruin, and sadness.

The rag-picker was humble.  In this open-air society, it is
the rag-picker who salutes and the portress who patronizes. 
This is caused by the corner for refuse, which is fat or lean,
according to the will of the portresses, and after the fancy
of the one who makes the heap.  There may be kindness in the broom.

This rag-picker was a grateful creature, and she smiled, with what
a smile! on the three portresses.  Things of this nature were said:--

"Ah, by the way, is your cat still cross?"

"Good gracious, cats are naturally the enemies of dogs, you know. 
It's the dogs who complain."

"And people also."

"But the fleas from a cat don't go after people."

"That's not the trouble, dogs are dangerous.  I remember one year
when there were so many dogs that it was necessary to put it in
the newspapers.  That was at the time when there were at the Tuileries
great sheep that drew the little carriage of the King of Rome. 
Do you remember the King of Rome?"

"I liked the Duc de Bordeau better."

"I knew Louis XVIII.  I prefer Louis XVIII."

"Meat is awfully dear, isn't it, Mother Patagon?"

"Ah! don't mention it, the butcher's shop is a horror. 
A horrible horror--one can't afford anything but the poor cuts nowadays."

Here the rag-picker interposed:--

"Ladies, business is dull.  The refuse heaps are miserable. 
No one throws anything away any more.  They eat everything."

"There are poorer people than you, la Vargouleme."

"Ah, that's true," replied the rag-picker, with deference,
"I have a profession."

A pause succeeded, and the rag-picker, yielding to that necessity
for boasting which lies at the bottom of man, added:--

"In the morning, on my return home, I pick over my basket, I sort
my things.  This makes heaps in my room.  I put the rags in a basket,
the cores and stalks in a bucket, the linen in my cupboard,
the woollen stuff in my commode, the old papers in the corner
of the window, the things that are good to eat in my bowl,
the bits of glass in my fireplace, the old shoes behind my door,
and the bones under my bed."

Gavroche had stopped behind her and was listening.

"Old ladies," said he, "what do you mean by talking politics?"

He was assailed by a broadside, composed of a quadruple howl.

"Here's another rascal."

"What's that he's got in his paddle?  A pistol?"

"Well, I'd like to know what sort of a beggar's brat this is?"

"That sort of animal is never easy unless he's overturning
the authorities."

Gavroche disdainfully contented himself, by way of reprisal,
with elevating the tip of his nose with his thumb and opening his
hand wide.

The rag-picker cried:--

"You malicious, bare-pawed little wretch!"

The one who answered to the name of Patagon clapped her hands
together in horror.

"There's going to be evil doings, that's certain.  The errand-boy
next door has a little pointed beard, I have seen him pass every day
with a young person in a pink bonnet on his arm; to-day I saw him pass,
and he had a gun on his arm.  Mame Bacheux says, that last week
there was a revolution at--at--at--where's the calf!--at Pontoise. 
And then, there you see him, that horrid scamp, with his pistol! 
It seems that the Celestins are full of pistols.  What do you suppose
the Government can do with good-for-nothings who don't know how to do
anything but contrive ways of upsetting the world, when we had just begun
to get a little quiet after all the misfortunes that have happened,
good Lord! to that poor queen whom I saw pass in the tumbril! 
And all this is going to make tobacco dearer.  It's infamous! 
And I shall certainly go to see him beheaded on the guillotine,
the wretch!"

"You've got the sniffles, old lady," said Gavroche. 
"Blow your promontory."

And he passed on.  When he was in the Rue Pavee, the rag-picker
occurred to his mind, and he indulged in this soliloquy:--

"You're in the wrong to insult the revolutionists,
Mother Dust-Heap-Corner. This pistol is in your interests. 
It's so that you may have more good things to eat in your basket."

All at once, he heard a shout behind him; it was the portress
Patagon who had followed him, and who was shaking her fist at him
in the distance and crying:--

"You're nothing but a bastard."

"Oh!  Come now," said Gavroche, "I don't care a brass farthing
for that!"

Shortly afterwards, he passed the Hotel Lamoignon.  There he uttered
this appeal:--

"Forward march to the battle!"

And he was seized with a fit of melancholy.  He gazed at his pistol
with an air of reproach which seemed an attempt to appease it:--

"I'm going off," said he, "but you won't go off!"

One dog may distract the attention from another dog.[45] A very gaunt
poodle came along at the moment.  Gavroche felt compassion for him.


[45] Chien, dog, trigger.


"My poor doggy," said he, "you must have gone and swallowed a cask,
for all the hoops are visible."

Then he directed his course towards l'Orme-Saint-Gervais.



CHAPTER III

JUST INDIGNATION OF A HAIR-DRESSER


The worthy hair-dresser who had chased from his shop the two
little fellows to whom Gavroche had opened the paternal interior
of the elephant was at that moment in his shop engaged in shaving
an old soldier of the legion who had served under the Empire. 
They were talking.  The hair-dresser had, naturally, spoken to the
veteran of the riot, then of General Lamarque, and from Lamarque
they had passed to the Emperor.  Thence sprang up a conversation
between barber and soldier which Prudhomme, had he been present,
would have enriched with arabesques, and which he would have entitled: 
"Dialogue between the razor and the sword."

"How did the Emperor ride, sir?" said the barber.

"Badly.  He did not know how to fall--so he never fell."

"Did he have fine horses?  He must have had fine horses!"

"On the day when he gave me my cross, I noticed his beast. 
It was a racing mare, perfectly white.  Her ears were very wide apart,
her saddle deep, a fine head marked with a black star, a very long neck,
strongly articulated knees, prominent ribs, oblique shoulders and
a powerful crupper.  A little more than fifteen hands in height."

"A pretty horse," remarked the hair-dresser.

"It was His Majesty's beast."

The hair-dresser felt, that after this observation, a short silence
would be fitting, so he conformed himself to it, and then went on:--

"The Emperor was never wounded but once, was he, sir?"

The old soldier replied with the calm and sovereign tone of a man
who had been there:--

"In the heel.  At Ratisbon.  I never saw him so well dressed as on
that day.  He was as neat as a new sou."

"And you, Mr. Veteran, you must have been often wounded?"

"I?" said the soldier, "ah! not to amount to anything.  At Marengo,
I received two sabre-blows on the back of my neck, a bullet
in the right arm at Austerlitz, another in the left hip at Jena. 
At Friedland, a thrust from a bayonet, there,--at the Moskowa seven
or eight lance-thrusts, no matter where, at Lutzen a splinter
of a shell crushed one of my fingers.  Ah! and then at Waterloo,
a ball from a biscaien in the thigh, that's all."

"How fine that is!" exclaimed the hair-dresser, in Pindaric accents,
"to die on the field of battle!  On my word of honor, rather than
die in bed, of an illness, slowly, a bit by bit each day,
with drugs, cataplasms, syringes, medicines, I should prefer
to receive a cannon-ball in my belly!"

"You're not over fastidious," said the soldier.

He had hardly spoken when a fearful crash shook the shop. 
The show-window had suddenly been fractured.

The wig-maker turned pale.

"Ah, good God!" he exclaimed, "it's one of them!"

"What?"

"A cannon-ball."

"Here it is," said the soldier.

And he picked up something that was rolling about the floor. 
It was a pebble.

The hair-dresser ran to the broken window and beheld Gavroche fleeing
at the full speed, towards the Marche Saint-Jean. As he passed the
hair-dresser's shop Gavroche, who had the two brats still in his mind,
had not been able to resist the impulse to say good day to him,
and had flung a stone through his panes.

"You see!" shrieked the hair-dresser, who from white had turned blue,
"that fellow returns and does mischief for the pure pleasure of it. 
What has any one done to that gamin?"



CHAPTER IV

THE CHILD IS AMAZED AT THE OLD MAN


In the meantime, in the Marche Saint-Jean, where the post had
already been disarmed, Gavroche had just "effected a junction"
with a band led by Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Feuilly. 
They were armed after a fashion.  Bahorel and Jean Prouvaire had found
them and swelled the group.  Enjolras had a double-barrelled hunting-gun,
Combeferre the gun of a National Guard bearing the number of his legion,
and in his belt, two pistols which his unbuttoned coat allowed
to be seen, Jean Prouvaire an old cavalry musket, Bahorel a rifle;
Courfeyrac was brandishing an unsheathed sword-cane. Feuilly,
with a naked sword in his hand, marched at their head shouting: 
"Long live Poland!"

They reached the Quai Morland.  Cravatless, hatless, breathless,
soaked by the rain, with lightning in their eyes.  Gavroche accosted
them calmly:--

"Where are we going?"

"Come along," said Courfeyrac.

Behind Feuilly marched, or rather bounded, Bahorel, who was
like a fish in water in a riot.  He wore a scarlet waistcoat,
and indulged in the sort of words which break everything. 
His waistcoat astounded a passer-by, who cried in bewilderment:--

"Here are the reds!"

"The reds, the reds!" retorted Bahorel.  "A queer kind
of fear, bourgeois.  For my part I don't tremble before a poppy,
the little red hat inspires me with no alarm.  Take my advice,
bourgeois, let's leave fear of the red to horned cattle."

He caught sight of a corner of the wall on which was placarded the
most peaceable sheet of paper in the world, a permission to eat eggs,
a Lenten admonition addressed by the Archbishop of Paris to his "flock."

Bahorel exclaimed:--

"`Flock'; a polite way of saying geese."

And he tore the charge from the nail.  This conquered Gavroche. 
From that instant Gavroche set himself to study Bahorel.

"Bahorel," observed Enjolras, "you are wrong.  You should have let
that charge alone, he is not the person with whom we have to deal,
you are wasting your wrath to no purpose.  Take care of your supply. 
One does not fire out of the ranks with the soul any more than with
a gun."

"Each one in his own fashion, Enjolras," retorted Bahorel. 
"This bishop's prose shocks me; I want to eat eggs without
being permitted.  Your style is the hot and cold; I am amusing
myself.  Besides, I'm not wasting myself, I'm getting a start;
and if I tore down that charge, Hercle! 'twas only to whet my appetite."

This word, Hercle, struck Gavroche.  He sought all occasions
for learning, and that tearer-down of posters possessed his esteem. 
He inquired of him:--

"What does Hercle mean?"

Bahorel answered:--

"It means cursed name of a dog, in Latin."

Here Bahorel recognized at a window a pale young man with a black
beard who was watching them as they passed, probably a Friend
of the A B C. He shouted to him:--

"Quick, cartridges, para bellum."

"A fine man! that's true," said Gavroche, who now understood Latin.

A tumultuous retinue accompanied them,--students, artists, young men
affiliated to the Cougourde of Aix, artisans, longshoremen,
armed with clubs and bayonets; some, like Combeferre, with pistols
thrust into their trousers.

An old man, who appeared to be extremely aged, was walking in the band.

He had no arms, and he made great haste, so that he might not be
left behind, although he had a thoughtful air.

Gavroche caught sight of him:--

"Keksekca?" said he to Courfeyrac.

"He's an old duffer."

It was M. Mabeuf.



CHAPTER V

THE OLD MAN


Let us recount what had taken place.

Enjolras and his friends had been on the Boulevard Bourdon,
near the public storehouses, at the moment when the dragoons had made
their charge.  Enjolras, Courfeyrac, and Combeferre were among those
who had taken to the Rue Bassompierre, shouting:  "To the barricades!" 
In the Rue Lesdiguieres they had met an old man walking along. 
What had attracted their attention was that the goodman was walking
in a zig-zag, as though he were intoxicated.  Moreover, he had his
hat in his hand, although it had been raining all the morning,
and was raining pretty briskly at the very time.  Courfeyrac had
recognized Father Mabeuf.  He knew him through having many times
accompanied Marius as far as his door.  As he was acquainted with the
peaceful and more than timid habits of the old beadle-book-collector,
and was amazed at the sight of him in the midst of that uproar,
a couple of paces from the cavalry charges, almost in the midst
of a fusillade, hatless in the rain, and strolling about among
the bullets, he had accosted him, and the following dialogue
had been exchanged between the rioter of fire and the octogenarian:--

"M. Mabeuf, go to your home."

"Why?"

"There's going to be a row."

"That's well."

"Thrusts with the sword and firing, M. Mabeuf."

"That is well."

"Firing from cannon."

"That is good.  Where are the rest of you going?"

"We are going to fling the government to the earth."

"That is good."

And he had set out to follow them.  From that moment forth he
had not uttered a word.  His step had suddenly become firm;
artisans had offered him their arms; he had refused with a sign
of the head.  He advanced nearly to the front rank of the column,
with the movement of a man who is marching and the countenance
of a man who is sleeping.

"What a fierce old fellow!" muttered the students.  The rumor spread
through the troop that he was a former member of the Convention,--
an old regicide.  The mob had turned in through the Rue de la Verrerie.

Little Gavroche marched in front with that deafening song which made
of him a sort of trumpet.

He sang:
       "Voici la lune qui paratt,
        Quand irons-nous dans la foret?
        Demandait Charlot a Charlotte.

             Tou tou tou
             Pour Chatou.
        Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.

        "Pour avoir bu de grand matin
         La rosee a meme le thym,
         Deux moineaux etaient en ribotte.

             Zi zi zi
             Pour Passy.
        Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.

       "Et ces deux pauvres petits loups,
        Comme deux grives estaient souls;
        Une tigre en riait dans sa grotte.

             Don don don
             Pour Meudon.
        Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.

       "L'un jurait et l'autre sacrait. 
        Quand irons nous dans la foret?
        Demandait Charlot a Charlotte.

             Tin tin tin
             Pour Pantin.
         Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte."[46]

They directed their course towards Saint-Merry.


[46] Here is the morn appearing.  When shall we go to the forest,
Charlot asked Charlotte.  Tou, tou, tou, for Chatou, I have but one God,
one King, one half-farthing, and one boot.  And these two poor little
wolves were as tipsy as sparrows from having drunk dew and thyme very
early in the morning.  And these two poor little things were as drunk
as thrushes in a vineyard; a tiger laughed at them in his cave. 
The one cursed, the other swore.  When shall we go to the forest? 
Charlot asked Charlotte.



CHAPTER VI

RECRUITS


The band augmented every moment.  Near the Rue des Billettes,
a man of lofty stature, whose hair was turning gray, and whose bold
and daring mien was remarked by Courfeyrac, Enjolras, and Combeferre,
but whom none of them knew, joined them.  Gavroche, who was occupied
in singing, whistling, humming, running on ahead and pounding on
the shutters of the shops with the butt of his triggerless pistol;
paid no attention to this man.

It chanced that in the Rue de la Verrerie, they passed in front
of Courfeyrac's door.

"This happens just right," said Courfeyrac, "I have forgotten my purse,
and I have lost my hat."

He quitted the mob and ran up to his quarters at full speed. 
He seized an old hat and his purse.

He also seized a large square coffer, of the dimensions
of a large valise, which was concealed under his soiled linen.

As he descended again at a run, the portress hailed him:--

"Monsieur de Courfeyrac!"

"What's your name, portress?"

The portress stood bewildered.

"Why, you know perfectly well, I'm the concierge; my name
is Mother Veuvain."

"Well, if you call me Monsieur de Courfeyrac again, I shall call you
Mother de Veuvain.  Now speak, what's the matter?  What do you want?"

"There is some one who wants to speak with you."

"Who is it?"

"I don't know."

"Where is he?"

"In my lodge."

"The devil!" ejaculated Courfeyrac.

"But the person has been waiting your return for over an hour,"
said the portress.

At the same time, a sort of pale, thin, small, freckled, and
youthful artisan, clad in a tattered blouse and patched trousers
of ribbed velvet, and who had rather the air of a girl accoutred
as a man than of a man, emerged from the lodge and said to Courfeyrac
in a voice which was not the least in the world like a woman's voice:--

"Monsieur Marius, if you please."

"He is not here."

"Will he return this evening?"

"I know nothing about it."

And Courfeyrac added:--

"For my part, I shall not return."

The young man gazed steadily at him and said:--

"Why not?"

"Because."

"Where are you going, then?"

"What business is that of yours?"

"Would you like to have me carry your coffer for you?"

"I am going to the barricades."

"Would you like to have me go with you?"

"If you like!" replied Courfeyrac.  "The street is free, the pavements
belong to every one."

And he made his escape at a run to join his friends.  When he
had rejoined them, he gave the coffer to one of them to carry. 
It was only a quarter of an hour after this that he saw the young man,
who had actually followed them.

A mob does not go precisely where it intends.  We have explained
that a gust of wind carries it away.  They overshot Saint-Merry
and found themselves, without precisely knowing how, in the Rue
Saint-Denis.



BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE



CHAPTER I

HISTORY OF CORINTHE FROM ITS FOUNDATION


The Parisians who nowadays on entering on the Rue Rambuteau at the end
near the Halles, notice on their right, opposite the Rue Mondetour,
a basket-maker's shop having for its sign a basket in the form
of Napoleon the Great with this inscription:--

                    NAPOLEON IS MADE
                    WHOLLY OF WILLOW,

have no suspicion of the terrible scenes which this very spot
witnessed hardly thirty years ago.

It was there that lay the Rue de la Chanvrerie, which ancient deeds
spell Chanverrerie, and the celebrated public-house called Corinthe.

The reader will remember all that has been said about the
barricade effected at this point, and eclipsed, by the way,
by the barricade Saint-Merry. It was on this famous barricade
of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, now fallen into profound obscurity,
that we are about to shed a little light.

May we be permitted to recur, for the sake of clearness in the recital,
to the simple means which we have already employed in the case
of Waterloo.  Persons who wish to picture to themselves in a
tolerably exact manner the constitution of the houses which stood
at that epoch near the Pointe Saint-Eustache, at the northeast
angle of the Halles of Paris, where to-day lies the embouchure
of the Rue Rambuteau, have only to imagine an N touching the Rue
Saint-Denis with its summit and the Halles with its base, and whose
two vertical bars should form the Rue de la Grande-Truanderie,
and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and whose transverse bar should be
formed by the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The old Rue Mondetour
cut the three strokes of the N at the most crooked angles. 
So that the labyrinthine confusion of these four streets sufficed
to form, on a space three fathoms square, between the Halles and
the Rue Saint-Denis on the one hand, and between the Rue du Cygne
and the Rue des Precheurs on the other, seven islands of houses,
oddly cut up, of varying sizes, placed crosswise and hap-hazard, and
barely separated, like the blocks of stone in a dock, by narrow crannies.

We say narrow crannies, and we can give no more just idea of those dark,
contracted, many-angled alleys, lined with eight-story buildings. 
These buildings were so decrepit that, in the Rue de la Chanvrerie
and the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie, the fronts were shored up
with beams running from one house to another.  The street was narrow
and the gutter broad, the pedestrian there walked on a pavement
that was always wet, skirting little stalls resembling cellars,
big posts encircled with iron hoops, excessive heaps of refuse,
and gates armed with enormous, century-old gratings.  The Rue
Rambuteau has devastated all that.

The name of Mondetour paints marvellously well the sinuosities of
that whole set of streets.  A little further on, they are found still
better expressed by the Rue Pirouette, which ran into the Rue Mondetour.

The passer-by who got entangled from the Rue Saint-Denis in the Rue
de la Chanvrerie beheld it gradually close in before him as though
he had entered an elongated funnel.  At the end of this street,
which was very short, he found further passage barred in the direction
of the Halles by a tall row of houses, and he would have thought
himself in a blind alley, had he not perceived on the right and left
two dark cuts through which he could make his escape.  This was
the Rue Mondetour, which on one side ran into the Rue de Precheurs,
and on the other into the Rue du Cygne and the Petite-Truanderie. At
the bottom of this sort of cul-de-sac, at the angle of the cutting
on the right, there was to be seen a house which was not so tall
as the rest, and which formed a sort of cape in the street. 
It is in this house, of two stories only, that an illustrious
wine-shop had been merrily installed three hundred years before. 
This tavern created a joyous noise in the very spot which old
Theophilus described in the following couplet:--

               La branle le squelette horrible
               D'un pauvre amant qui se pendit.[47]


[47] There swings the horrible skeleton of a poor lover who hung himself.


The situation was good, and tavern-keepers succeeded each other there,
from father to son.

In the time of Mathurin Regnier, this cabaret was called the
Pot-aux-Roses, and as the rebus was then in fashion, it had for its
sign-board, a post (poteau) painted rose-color. In the last century,
the worthy Natoire, one of the fantastic masters nowadays despised
by the stiff school, having got drunk many times in this wine-shop
at the very table where Regnier had drunk his fill, had painted,
by way of gratitude, a bunch of Corinth grapes on the pink post. 
The keeper of the cabaret, in his joy, had changed his device and had
caused to be placed in gilt letters beneath the bunch these words: 
"At the Bunch of Corinth Grapes" ("Au Raisin de Corinthe"). Hence the name
of Corinthe.  Nothing is more natural to drunken men than ellipses. 
The ellipsis is the zig-zag of the phrase.  Corinthe gradually
dethroned the Pot-aux-Roses. The last proprietor of the dynasty,
Father Hucheloup, no longer acquainted even with the tradition,
had the post painted blue.

A room on the ground floor, where the bar was situated, one on the
first floor containing a billiard-table, a wooden spiral staircase
piercing the ceiling, wine on the tables, smoke on the walls,
candles in broad daylight,--this was the style of this cabaret. 
A staircase with a trap-door in the lower room led to the cellar. 
On the second floor were the lodgings of the Hucheloup family. 
They were reached by a staircase which was a ladder rather than
a staircase, and had for their entrance only a private door in the
large room on the first floor.  Under the roof, in two mansard attics,
were the nests for the servants.  The kitchen shared the ground-floor
with the tap-room.

Father Hucheloup had, possibly, been born a chemist, but the fact
is that he was a cook; people did not confine themselves to drinking
alone in his wine-shop, they also ate there.  Hucheloup had invented
a capital thing which could be eaten nowhere but in his house,
stuffed carps, which he called carpes au gras.  These were eaten by
the light of a tallow candle or of a lamp of the time of Louis XVI.,
on tables to which were nailed waxed cloths in lieu of table-cloths.
People came thither from a distance.  Hucheloup, one fine morning,
had seen fit to notify passers-by of this "specialty"; he had dipped
a brush in a pot of black paint, and as he was an orthographer
on his own account, as well as a cook after his own fashion,
he had improvised on his wall this remarkable inscription:--

                    CARPES HO GRAS.


One winter, the rain-storms and the showers had taken a fancy
to obliterate the S which terminated the first word, and the G
which began the third; this is what remained:--

                      CARPE HO RAS.


Time and rain assisting, a humble gastronomical announcement had
become a profound piece of advice.

In this way it came about, that though he knew no French, Father Hucheloup
understood Latin, that he had evoked philosophy from his kitchen,
and that, desirous simply of effacing Lent, he had equalled Horace. 
And the striking thing about it was, that that also meant: 
"Enter my wine-shop."

Nothing of all this is in existence now.  The Mondetour labyrinth
was disembowelled and widely opened in 1847, and probably no longer
exists at the present moment.  The Rue de la Chanvrerie and Corinthe
have disappeared beneath the pavement of the Rue Rambuteau.

As we have already said, Corinthe was the meeting-place if not the
rallying-point, of Courfeyrac and his friends.  It was Grantaire
who had discovered Corinthe.  He had entered it on account of the
Carpe horas, and had returned thither on account of the Carpes
au gras.  There they drank, there they ate, there they shouted;
they did not pay much, they paid badly, they did not pay at all,
but they were always welcome.  Father Hucheloup was a jovial host.

Hucheloup, that amiable man, as was just said, was a wine-shop-keeper
with a mustache; an amusing variety.  He always had an ill-tempered air,
seemed to wish to intimidate his customers, grumbled at the people
who entered his establishment, and had rather the mien of seeking
a quarrel with them than of serving them with soup.  And yet,
we insist upon the word, people were always welcome there.  This oddity
had attracted customers to his shop, and brought him young men,
who said to each other:  "Come hear Father Hucheloup growl."  He had
been a fencing-master. All of a sudden, he would burst out laughing. 
A big voice, a good fellow.  He had a comic foundation under
a tragic exterior, he asked nothing better than to frighten you,
very much like those snuff-boxes which are in the shape of a pistol. 
The detonation makes one sneeze.

Mother Hucheloup, his wife, was a bearded and a very homely creature.

About 1830, Father Hucheloup died.  With him disappeared the secret
of stuffed carps.  His inconsolable widow continued to keep the
wine-shop. But the cooking deteriorated, and became execrable;
the wine, which had always been bad, became fearfully bad. 
Nevertheless, Courfeyrac and his friends continued to go to Corinthe,--
out of pity, as Bossuet said.

The Widow Hucheloup was breathless and misshapen and given
to rustic recollections.  She deprived them of their flatness
by her pronunciation.  She had a way of her own of saying things,
which spiced her reminiscences of the village and of her springtime. 
It had formerly been her delight, so she affirmed, to hear
the loups-de-gorge (rouges-gorges) chanter dans les ogrepines
(aubepines)--to hear the redbreasts sing in the hawthorn-trees.

The hall on the first floor, where "the restaurant" was situated,
was a large and long apartment encumbered with stools, chairs, benches,
and tables, and with a crippled, lame, old billiard-table. It
was reached by a spiral staircase which terminated in the corner
of the room at a square hole like the hatchway of a ship.

This room, lighted by a single narrow window, and by a lamp that
was always burning, had the air of a garret.  All the four-footed
furniture comported itself as though it had but three legs--
the whitewashed walls had for their only ornament the following
quatrain in honor of Mame Hucheloup:--

          Elle etonne a dix pas, elle epouvente a deux,
          Une verrue habite en son nez hasardeux;
          On tremble a chaque instant qu'elle ne vous la mouche
          Et qu'un beau jour son nez ne tombe dans sa bouche.[48]


[48] She astounds at ten paces, she frightens at two, a wart inhabits
her hazardous nose; you tremble every instant lest she should blow it
at you, and lest, some fine day, her nose should tumble into her mouth.


This was scrawled in charcoal on the wall.

Mame Hucheloup, a good likeness, went and came from morning till
night before this quatrain with the most perfect tranquillity. 
Two serving-maids, named Matelote and Gibelotte,[49] and who had
never been known by any other names, helped Mame Hucheloup to set
on the tables the jugs of poor wine, and the various broths
which were served to the hungry patrons in earthenware bowls. 
Matelote, large, plump, redhaired, and noisy, the favorite
ex-sultana of the defunct Hucheloup, was homelier than any
mythological monster, be it what it may; still, as it becomes the
servant to always keep in the rear of the mistress, she was less
homely than Mame Hucheloup.  Gibelotte, tall, delicate, white with
a lymphatic pallor, with circles round her eyes, and drooping lids,
always languid and weary, afflicted with what may be called
chronic lassitude, the first up in the house and the last in bed,
waited on every one, even the other maid, silently and gently,
smiling through her fatigue with a vague and sleepy smile.


[49] Matelote:  a culinary preparation of various fishes. 
Gibelotte:  stewed rabbits.


Before entering the restaurant room, the visitor read on the door
the following line written there in chalk by Courfeyrac:--

          Regale si tu peux et mange si tu l'oses.[50]


[50] Treat if you can, and eat if you dare.



CHAPTER II

PRELIMINARY GAYETIES


Laigle de Meaux, as the reader knows, lived more with Joly
than elsewhere.  He had a lodging, as a bird has one on a branch. 
The two friends lived together, ate together, slept together. 
They had everything in common, even Musichetta, to some extent. 
They were, what the subordinate monks who accompany monks
are called, bini.  On the morning of the 5th of June, they went to
Corinthe to breakfast.  Joly, who was all stuffed up, had a catarrh
which Laigle was beginning to share.  Laigle's coat was threadbare,
but Joly was well dressed.

It was about nine o'clock in the morning, when they opened the door
of Corinthe.

They ascended to the first floor.

Matelote and Gibelotte received them.

"Oysters, cheese, and ham," said Laigle.

And they seated themselves at a table.

The wine-shop was empty; there was no one there but themselves.

Gibelotte, knowing Joly and Laigle, set a bottle of wine on the table.

While they were busy with their first oysters, a head appeared
at the hatchway of the staircase, and a voice said:--

"I am passing by.  I smell from the street a delicious odor
of Brie cheese.  I enter."  It was Grantaire.

Grantaire took a stool and drew up to the table.

At the sight of Grantaire, Gibelotte placed two bottles of wine
on the table.

That made three.

"Are you going to drink those two bottles?"  Laigle inquired
of Grantaire.

Grantaire replied:--

"All are ingenious, thou alone art ingenuous.  Two bottles never
yet astonished a man."

The others had begun by eating, Grantaire began by drinking. 
Half a bottle was rapidly gulped down.

"So you have a hole in your stomach?" began Laigle again.

"You have one in your elbow," said Grantaire.

And after having emptied his glass, he added:--

"Ah, by the way, Laigle of the funeral oration, your coat is old."

"I should hope so," retorted Laigle.  "That's why we get on
well together, my coat and I. It has acquired all my folds,
it does not bind me anywhere, it is moulded on my deformities,
it falls in with all my movements, I am only conscious of it
because it keeps me warm.  Old coats are just like old friends."

"That's true," ejaculated Joly, striking into the dialogue,
"an old goat is an old abi" (ami, friend).

"Especially in the mouth of a man whose head is stuffed up,"
said Grantaire.

"Grantaire," demanded Laigle, "have you just come from the boulevard?"

"No."

"We have just seen the head of the procession pass, Joly and I."

"It's a marvellous sight," said Joly.

"How quiet this street is!" exclaimed Laigle.  "Who would suspect
that Paris was turned upside down?  How plainly it is to be seen
that in former days there were nothing but convents here! 
In this neighborhood!  Du Breul and Sauval give a list of them,
and so does the Abbe Lebeuf.  They were all round here, they fairly
swarmed, booted and barefooted, shaven, bearded, gray, black, white,
Franciscans, Minims, Capuchins, Carmelites, Little Augustines,
Great Augustines, old Augustines--there was no end of them."

"Don't let's talk of monks," interrupted Grantaire, "it makes
one want to scratch one's self."

Then he exclaimed:--

"Bouh!  I've just swallowed a bad oyster.  Now hypochondria is taking
possession of me again.  The oysters are spoiled, the servants are ugly. 
I hate the human race.  I just passed through the Rue Richelieu,
in front of the big public library.  That pile of oyster-shells which
is called a library is disgusting even to think of.  What paper! 
What ink!  What scrawling!  And all that has been written!  What rascal
was it who said that man was a featherless biped?[51] And then, I met
a pretty girl of my acquaintance, who is as beautiful as the spring,
worthy to be called Floreal, and who is delighted, enraptured,
as happy as the angels, because a wretch yesterday, a frightful
banker all spotted with small-pox, deigned to take a fancy to her! 
Alas! woman keeps on the watch for a protector as much as for a lover;
cats chase mice as well as birds.  Two months ago that young woman
was virtuous in an attic, she adjusted little brass rings in the
eyelet-holes of corsets, what do you call it?  She sewed, she had
a camp bed, she dwelt beside a pot of flowers, she was contented. 
Now here she is a bankeress.  This transformation took place last night. 
I met the victim this morning in high spirits.  The hideous point
about it is, that the jade is as pretty to-day as she was yesterday. 
Her financier did not show in her face.  Roses have this advantage
or disadvantage over women, that the traces left upon them by
caterpillars are visible.  Ah! there is no morality on earth. 
I call to witness the myrtle, the symbol of love, the laurel,
the symbol of air, the olive, that ninny, the symbol of peace,
the apple-tree which came nearest rangling Adam with its pips,
and the fig-tree, the grandfather of petticoats.  As for right, do you
know what right is?  The Gauls covet Clusium, Rome protects Clusium,
and demands what wrong Clusium has done to them.  Brennus answers: 
`The wrong that Alba did to you, the wrong that Fidenae did to you,
the wrong that the Eques, the Volsci, and the Sabines have done
to you.  They were your neighbors.  The Clusians are ours. 
We understand neighborliness just as you do.  You have stolen Alba,
we shall take Clusium.'  Rome said:  `You shall not take Clusium.' 
Brennus took Rome.  Then he cried:  `Vae victis!'  That is what right is. 
Ah! what beasts of prey there are in this world!  What eagles! 
It makes my flesh creep."


[51] Bipede sans plume:  biped without feathers--pen.


He held out his glass to Joly, who filled it, then he drank and
went on, having hardly been interrupted by this glass of wine,
of which no one, not even himself, had taken any notice:--

"Brennus, who takes Rome, is an eagle; the banker who takes
the grisette is an eagle.  There is no more modesty in the one
case than in the other.  So we believe in nothing.  There is but
one reality:  drink.  Whatever your opinion may be in favor of the
lean cock, like the Canton of Uri, or in favor of the fat cock,
like the Canton of Glaris, it matters little, drink.  You talk to me
of the boulevard, of that procession, et caetera, et caetera. 
Come now, is there going to be another revolution?  This poverty
of means on the part of the good God astounds me.  He has to keep
greasing the groove of events every moment.  There is a hitch,
it won't work.  Quick, a revolution!  The good God has his hands
perpetually black with that cart-grease. If I were in his place,
I'd be perfectly simple about it, I would not wind up my mechanism
every minute, I'd lead the human race in a straightforward way,
I'd weave matters mesh by mesh, without breaking the thread, I would
have no provisional arrangements, I would have no extraordinary
repertory.  What the rest of you call progress advances by means
of two motors, men and events.  But, sad to say, from time to time,
the exceptional becomes necessary.  The ordinary troupe suffices
neither for event nor for men:  among men geniuses are required,
among events revolutions.  Great accidents are the law; the order
of things cannot do without them; and, judging from the apparition
of comets, one would be tempted to think that Heaven itself finds
actors needed for its performance.  At the moment when one expects
it the least, God placards a meteor on the wall of the firmament. 
Some queer star turns up, underlined by an enormous tail. 
And that causes the death of Caesar.  Brutus deals him a blow
with a knife, and God a blow with a comet.  Crac, and behold
an aurora borealis, behold a revolution, behold a great man;
'93 in big letters, Napoleon on guard, the comet of 1811 at the head
of the poster.  Ah! what a beautiful blue theatre all studded
with unexpected flashes!  Boum!  Boum! extraordinary show! 
Raise your eyes, boobies.  Everything is in disorder, the star
as well as the drama.  Good God, it is too much and not enough. 
These resources, gathered from exception, seem magnificence and poverty. 
My friends, Providence has come down to expedients.  What does
a revolution prove?  That God is in a quandry.  He effects a coup
d'etat because he, God, has not been able to make both ends meet. 
In fact, this confirms me in my conjectures as to Jehovah's fortune;
and when I see so much distress in heaven and on earth, from the bird
who has not a grain of millet to myself without a hundred thousand
livres of income, when I see human destiny, which is very badly worn,
and even royal destiny, which is threadbare, witness the Prince de
Conde hung, when I see winter, which is nothing but a rent in the
zenith through which the wind blows, when I see so many rags even
in the perfectly new purple of the morning on the crests of hills,
when I see the drops of dew, those mock pearls, when I see the frost,
that paste, when I see humanity ripped apart and events patched up,
and so many spots on the sun and so many holes in the moon, when I
see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. 
The appearance exists, it is true, but I feel that he is hard up. 
He gives a revolution as a tradesman whose money-box is empty
gives a ball.  God must not be judged from appearances. 
Beneath the gilding of heaven I perceive a poverty-stricken universe. 
Creation is bankrupt.  That is why I am discontented.  Here it
is the 4th of June, it is almost night; ever since this morning
I have been waiting for daylight to come; it has not come, and I
bet that it won't come all day.  This is the inexactness of an
ill-paid clerk.  Yes, everything is badly arranged, nothing fits
anything else, this old world is all warped, I take my stand on
the opposition, everything goes awry; the universe is a tease. 
It's like children, those who want them have none, and those who don't
want them have them.  Total:  I'm vexed.  Besides, Laigle de Meaux,
that bald-head, offends my sight.  It humiliates me to think that I
am of the same age as that baldy.  However, I criticise, but I
do not insult.  The universe is what it is.  I speak here without
evil intent and to ease my conscience.  Receive, Eternal Father,
the assurance of my distinguished consideration.  Ah! by all
the saints of Olympus and by all the gods of paradise, I was not
intended to be a Parisian, that is to say, to rebound forever,
like a shuttlecock between two battledores, from the group of the
loungers to the group of the roysterers.  I was made to be a Turk,
watching oriental houris all day long, executing those exquisite
Egyptian dances, as sensuous as the dream of a chaste man, or a
Beauceron peasant, or a Venetian gentleman surrounded by gentlewoman,
or a petty German prince, furnishing the half of a foot-soldier
to the Germanic confederation, and occupying his leisure with
drying his breeches on his hedge, that is to say, his frontier. 
Those are the positions for which I was born!  Yes, I have said
a Turk, and I will not retract.  I do not understand how people can
habitually take Turks in bad part; Mohammed had his good points;
respect for the inventor of seraglios with houris and paradises
with odalisques!  Let us not insult Mohammedanism, the only religion
which is ornamented with a hen-roost! Now, I insist on a drink. 
The earth is a great piece of stupidity.  And it appears that they
are going to fight, all those imbeciles, and to break each other's
profiles and to massacre each other in the heart of summer, in the
month of June, when they might go off with a creature on their arm,
to breathe the immense heaps of new-mown hay in the meadows! 
Really, people do commit altogether too many follies.  An old broken
lantern which I have just seen at a bric-a-brac merchant's suggests
a reflection to my mind; it is time to enlighten the human race. 
Yes, behold me sad again.  That's what comes of swallowing an
oyster and a revolution the wrong way!  I am growing melancholy
once more.  Oh! frightful old world.  People strive, turn each
other out, prostitute themselves, kill each other, and get used
to it!"

And Grantaire, after this fit of eloquence, had a fit of coughing,
which was well earned.

"A propos of revolution," said Joly, "it is decidedly abberent
that Barius is in lub."

"Does any one know with whom?" demanded Laigle.

"Do."

"No?"

"Do!  I tell you."

"Marius' love affairs!" exclaimed Grantaire.  "I can imagine it. 
Marius is a fog, and he must have found a vapor.  Marius is of the race
of poets.  He who says poet, says fool, madman, Tymbraeus Apollo. 
Marius and his Marie, or his Marion, or his Maria, or his Mariette. 
They must make a queer pair of lovers.  I know just what it is like. 
Ecstasies in which they forget to kiss.  Pure on earth, but joined
in heaven.  They are souls possessed of senses.  They lie among
the stars."

Grantaire was attacking his second bottle and, possibly, his second
harangue, when a new personage emerged from the square aperture
of the stairs.  It was a boy less than ten years of age, ragged,
very small, yellow, with an odd phiz, a vivacious eye, an enormous
amount of hair drenched with rain, and wearing a contented air.

The child unhesitatingly making his choice among the three,
addressed himself to Laigle de Meaux.

"Are you Monsieur Bossuet?"

"That is my nickname," replied Laigle.  "What do you want with me?"

"This.  A tall blonde fellow on the boulevard said to me: 
`Do you know Mother Hucheloup?'  I said:  `Yes, Rue Chanvrerie,
the old man's widow;' he said to me:  `Go there.  There you will find
M. Bossuet.  Tell him from me:  "A B C".' It's a joke that they're
playing on you, isn't it.  He gave me ten sous."

"Joly, lend me ten sous," said Laigle; and, turning to Grantaire: 
"Grantaire, lend me ten sous."

This made twenty sous, which Laigle handed to the lad.

"Thank you, sir," said the urchin.

"What is your name?" inquired Laigle.

"Navet, Gavroche's friend."

"Stay with us," said Laigle.

"Breakfast with us," said Grantaire,

The child replied:--

"I can't, I belong in the procession, I'm the one to shout `Down
with Polignac!'"

And executing a prolonged scrape of his foot behind him, which is
the most respectful of all possible salutes, he took his departure.

The child gone, Grantaire took the word:--

"That is the pure-bred gamin.  There are a great many varieties
of the gamin species.  The notary's gamin is called Skip-the-Gutter,
the cook's gamin is called a scullion, the baker's gamin is called
a mitron, the lackey's gamin is called a groom, the marine gamin is
called the cabin-boy, the soldier's gamin is called the drummer-boy,
the painter's gamin is called paint-grinder, the tradesman's gamin
is called an errand-boy, the courtesan gamin is called the minion,
the kingly gamin is called the dauphin, the god gamin is called
the bambino."

In the meantime, Laigle was engaged in reflection; he said half aloud:--

"A B C, that is to say:  the burial of Lamarque."

"The tall blonde," remarked Grantaire, "is Enjolras, who is sending
you a warning."

"Shall we go?" ejaculated Bossuet.

"It's raiding," said Joly.  "I have sworn to go through fire,
but not through water.  I don't wand to ged a gold."

"I shall stay here," said Grantaire.  "I prefer a breakfast
to a hearse."

"Conclusion:  we remain," said Laigle.  "Well, then, let us drink. 
Besides, we might miss the funeral without missing the riot."

"Ah! the riot, I am with you!" cried Joly.

Laigle rubbed his hands.

"Now we're going to touch up the revolution of 1830.  As a matter
of fact, it does hurt the people along the seams."

"I don't think much of your revolution," said Grantaire.  "I don't
execrate this Government.  It is the crown tempered by the cotton
night-cap. It is a sceptre ending in an umbrella.  In fact, I think
that to-day, with the present weather, Louis Philippe might utilize
his royalty in two directions, he might extend the tip of the sceptre
end against the people, and open the umbrella end against heaven."

The room was dark, large clouds had just finished the extinction
of daylight.  There was no one in the wine-shop, or in the street,
every one having gone off "to watch events."

"Is it mid-day or midnight?" cried Bossuet.  "You can't see your
hand before your face.  Gibelotte, fetch a light."

Grantaire was drinking in a melancholy way.

"Enjolras disdains me," he muttered.  "Enjolras said:  `Joly is ill,
Grantaire is drunk.'  It was to Bossuet that he sent Navet. 
If he had come for me, I would have followed him.  So much the worse
for Enjolras!  I won't go to his funeral."

This resolution once arrived at, Bossuet, Joly, and Grantaire did
not stir from the wine-shop. By two o'clock in the afternoon,
the table at which they sat was covered with empty bottles. 
Two candles were burning on it, one in a flat copper candlestick
which was perfectly green, the other in the neck of a cracked carafe. 
Grantaire had seduced Joly and Bossuet to wine; Bossuet and Joly had
conducted Grantaire back towards cheerfulness.

As for Grantaire, he had got beyond wine, that merely moderate inspirer
of dreams, ever since mid-day. Wine enjoys only a conventional
popularity with serious drinkers.  There is, in fact, in the matter
of inebriety, white magic and black magic; wine is only white magic. 
Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams.  The blackness of a terrible
fit of drunkenness yawning before him, far from arresting him,
attracted him.  He had abandoned the bottle and taken to the beerglass. 
The beer-glass is the abyss.  Having neither opium nor hashish
on hand, and being desirous of filling his brain with twilight,
he had had recourse to that fearful mixture of brandy, stout, absinthe,
which produces the most terrible of lethargies.  It is of these
three vapors, beer, brandy, and absinthe, that the lead of the soul
is composed.  They are three grooms; the celestial butterfly is
drowned in them; and there are formed there in a membranous smoke,
vaguely condensed into the wing of the bat, three mute furies,
Nightmare, Night, and Death, which hover about the slumbering Psyche.

Grantaire had not yet reached that lamentable phase; far from it. 
He was tremendously gay, and Bossuet and Joly retorted. 
They clinked glasses.  Grantaire added to the eccentric accentuation
of words and ideas, a peculiarity of gesture; he rested his left
fist on his knee with dignity, his arm forming a right angle, and,
with cravat untied, seated astride a stool, his full glass in his
right hand, he hurled solemn words at the big maid-servant Matelote:--

"Let the doors of the palace be thrown open!  Let every one be a member
of the French Academy and have the right to embrace Madame Hucheloup. 
Let us drink."

And turning to Madame Hucheloup, he added:--

"Woman ancient and consecrated by use, draw near that I may
contemplate thee!"

And Joly exclaimed:--

"Matelote and Gibelotte, dod't gib Grantaire anything more to drink. 
He has already devoured, since this bording, in wild prodigality,
two francs and ninety-five centibes."

And Grantaire began again:--

"Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting
them on the table in the guise of candles?"

Bossuet, though very drunk, preserved his equanimity.

He was seated on the sill of the open window, wetting his back
in the falling rain, and gazing at his two friends.

All at once, he heard a tumult behind him, hurried footsteps,
cries of "To arms!"  He turned round and saw in the Rue Saint-Denis,
at the end of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, Enjolras passing,
gun in hand, and Gavroche with his pistol, Feuilly with his sword,
Courfeyrac with his sword, and Jean Prouvaire with his blunderbuss,
Combeferre with his gun, Bahorel with his gun, and the whole armed
and stormy rabble which was following them.

The Rue de la Chanvrerie was not more than a gunshot long. 
Bossuet improvised a speaking-trumpet from his two hands placed
around his mouth, and shouted:--

"Courfeyrac!  Courfeyrac!  Hohee!"

Courfeyrac heard the shout, caught sight of Bossuet, and advanced a few
paces into the Rue de la Chanvrerie, shouting:  "What do you want?"
which crossed a "Where are you going?"

"To make a barricade," replied Courfeyrac.

"Well, here!  This is a good place!  Make it here!"

"That's true, Aigle," said Courfeyrac.

And at a signal from Courfeyrac, the mob flung themselves into
the Rue de la Chanvrerie.



CHAPTER III

NIGHT BEGINS TO DESCEND UPON GRANTAIRE


The spot was, in fact, admirably adapted, the entrance to the street
widened out, the other extremity narrowed together into a pocket
without exit.  Corinthe created an obstacle, the Rue Mondetour was
easily barricaded on the right and the left, no attack was possible
except from the Rue Saint-Denis, that is to say, in front, and in
full sight.  Bossuet had the comprehensive glance of a fasting Hannibal.

Terror had seized on the whole street at the irruption of the mob. 
There was not a passer-by who did not get out of sight.  In the
space of a flash of lightning, in the rear, to right and left,
shops, stables, area-doors, windows, blinds, attic skylights,
shutters of every description were closed, from the ground floor
to the roof.  A terrified old woman fixed a mattress in front
of her window on two clothes-poles for drying linen, in order to
deaden the effect of musketry.  The wine-shop alone remained open;
and that for a very good reason, that the mob had rushed into
it.--"Ah my God!  Ah my God!" sighed Mame Hucheloup.

Bossuet had gone down to meet Courfeyrac.

Joly, who had placed himself at the window, exclaimed:--

"Courfeyrac, you ought to have brought an umbrella.  You will
gatch gold."

In the meantime, in the space of a few minutes, twenty iron bars
had been wrenched from the grated front of the wine-shop, ten fathoms
of street had been unpaved; Gavroche and Bahorel had seized in
its passage, and overturned, the dray of a lime-dealer named Anceau;
this dray contained three barrels of lime, which they placed beneath
the piles of paving-stones: Enjolras raised the cellar trap,
and all the widow Hucheloup's empty casks were used to flank
the barrels of lime; Feuilly, with his fingers skilled in painting
the delicate sticks of fans, had backed up the barrels and the dray
with two massive heaps of blocks of rough stone.  Blocks which
were improvised like the rest and procured no one knows where. 
The beams which served as props were torn from the neighboring
house-fronts and laid on the casks.  When Bossuet and Courfeyrac
turned round, half the street was already barred with a rampart
higher than a man.  There is nothing like the hand of the populace
for building everything that is built by demolishing.

Matelote and Gibelotte had mingled with the workers.  Gibelotte went
and came loaded with rubbish.  Her lassitude helped on the barricade. 
She served the barricade as she would have served wine, with a
sleepy air.

An omnibus with two white horses passed the end of the street.

Bossuet strode over the paving-stones, ran to it, stopped the driver,
made the passengers alight, offered his hand to "the ladies,"
dismissed the conductor, and returned, leading the vehicle and the
horses by the bridle.

"Omnibuses," said he, "do not pass the Corinthe.  Non licet omnibus
adire Corinthum."

An instant later, the horses were unharnessed and went off at
their will, through the Rue Mondetour, and the omnibus lying
on its side completed the bar across the street.

Mame Hucheloup, quite upset, had taken refuge in the first story.

Her eyes were vague, and stared without seeing anything, and she
cried in a low tone.  Her terrified shrieks did not dare to emerge
from her throat.

"The end of the world has come," she muttered.

Joly deposited a kiss on Mame Hucheloup's fat, red, wrinkled neck,
and said to Grantaire:  "My dear fellow, I have always regarded
a woman's neck as an infinitely delicate thing."

But Grantaire attained to the highest regions of dithryamb. 
Matelote had mounted to the first floor once more, Grantaire seized
her round her waist, and gave vent to long bursts of laughter at
the window.

"Matelote is homely!" he cried:  "Matelote is of a dream of ugliness! 
Matelote is a chimaera.  This is the secret of her birth: 
a Gothic Pygmalion, who was making gargoyles for cathedrals,
fell in love with one of them, the most horrible, one fine morning. 
He besought Love to give it life, and this produced Matelote. 
Look at her, citizens!  She has chromate-of-lead-colored hair,
like Titian's mistress, and she is a good girl.  I guarantee that
she will fight well.  Every good girl contains a hero.  As for
Mother Hucheloup, she's an old warrior.  Look at her moustaches! 
She inherited them from her husband.  A hussar indeed!  She will
fight too.  These two alone will strike terror to the heart of
the banlieue.  Comrades, we shall overthrow the government as true
as there are fifteen intermediary acids between margaric acid
and formic acid; however, that is a matter of perfect indifference
to me.  Gentlemen, my father always detested me because I could
not understand mathematics.  I understand only love and liberty. 
I am Grantaire, the good fellow.  Having never had any money,
I never acquired the habit of it, and the result is that I have
never lacked it; but, if I had been rich, there would have been
no more poor people!  You would have seen!  Oh, if the kind hearts
only had fat purses, how much better things would go!  I picture
myself Jesus Christ with Rothschild's fortune!  How much good he
would do!  Matelote, embrace me!  You are voluptuous and timid! 
You have cheeks which invite the kiss of a sister, and lips which claim
the kiss of a lover."

"Hold your tongue, you cask!" said Courfeyrac.

Grantaire retorted:--

"I am the capitoul[52] and the master of the floral games!"


[52] Municipal officer of Toulouse.


Enjolras, who was standing on the crest of the barricade, gun in hand,
raised his beautiful, austere face.  Enjolras, as the reader knows,
had something of the Spartan and of the Puritan in his composition. 
He would have perished at Thermopylae with Leonidas, and burned at
Drogheda with Cromwell.

"Grantaire," he shouted, "go get rid of the fumes of your wine
somewhere else than here.  This is the place for enthusiasm,
not for drunkenness.  Don't disgrace the barricade!"

This angry speech produced a singular effect on Grantaire.  One would
have said that he had had a glass of cold water flung in his face. 
He seemed to be rendered suddenly sober.

He sat down, put his elbows on a table near the window, looked at
Enjolras with indescribable gentleness, and said to him:--

"Let me sleep here."

"Go and sleep somewhere else," cried Enjolras.

But Grantaire, still keeping his tender and troubled eyes fixed
on him, replied:--

"Let me sleep here,--until I die."

Enjolras regarded him with disdainful eyes:--

"Grantaire, you are incapable of believing, of thinking, of willing,
of living, and of dying."

Grantaire replied in a grave tone:--

"You will see."

He stammered a few more unintelligible words, then his head fell
heavily on the table, and, as is the usual effect of the second
period of inebriety, into which Enjolras had roughly and abruptly
thrust him, an instant later he had fallen asleep.



CHAPTER IV

AN ATTEMPT TO CONSOLE THE WIDOW HUCHELOUP


Bahorel, in ecstasies over the barricade, shouted:--

"Here's the street in its low-necked dress!  How well it looks!"

Courfeyrac, as he demolished the wine-shop to some extent,
sought to console the widowed proprietress.

"Mother Hucheloup, weren't you complaining the other day because
you had had a notice served on you for infringing the law,
because Gibelotte shook a counterpane out of your window?"

"Yes, my good Monsieur Courfeyrac.  Ah! good Heavens, are you
going to put that table of mine in your horror, too?  And it was
for the counterpane, and also for a pot of flowers which fell from
the attic window into the street, that the government collected
a fine of a hundred francs.  If that isn't an abomination, what is!"

"Well, Mother Hucheloup, we are avenging you."

Mother Hucheloup did not appear to understand very clearly
the benefit which she was to derive from these reprisals made
on her account.  She was satisfied after the manner of that
Arab woman, who, having received a box on the ear from her husband,
went to complain to her father, and cried for vengeance, saying: 
"Father, you owe my husband affront for affront."  The father asked: 
"On which cheek did you receive the blow?"  "On the left cheek." 
The father slapped her right cheek and said:  "Now you are satisfied. 
Go tell your husband that he boxed my daughter's ears, and that I
have accordingly boxed his wife's."

The rain had ceased.  Recruits had arrived.  Workmen had brought
under their blouses a barrel of powder, a basket containing
bottles of vitriol, two or three carnival torches, and a basket
filled with fire-pots, "left over from the King's festival." 
This festival was very recent, having taken place on the 1st of May. 
It was said that these munitions came from a grocer in the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine named Pepin.  They smashed the only street lantern
in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the lantern corresponding to one in the
Rue Saint-Denis, and all the lanterns in the surrounding streets,
de Mondetour, du Cygne, des Precheurs, and de la Grande and de la
Petite-Truanderie.

Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac directed everything.  Two barricades
were now in process of construction at once, both of them resting
on the Corinthe house and forming a right angle; the larger shut
off the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the other closed the Rue Mondetour,
on the side of the Rue de Cygne.  This last barricade, which was
very narrow, was constructed only of casks and paving-stones. There
were about fifty workers on it; thirty were armed with guns; for,
on their way, they had effected a wholesale loan from an armorer's shop.

Nothing could be more bizarre and at the same time more motley
than this troop.  One had a round-jacket, a cavalry sabre, and two
holster-pistols, another was in his shirt-sleeves, with a round hat,
and a powder-horn slung at his side, a third wore a plastron
of nine sheets of gray paper and was armed with a saddler's awl. 
There was one who was shouting:  "Let us exterminate them to the last
man and die at the point of our bayonet."  This man had no bayonet. 
Another spread out over his coat the cross-belt and cartridge-box
of a National Guardsman, the cover of the cartridge-box being
ornamented with this inscription in red worsted:  Public Order. 
There were a great many guns bearing the numbers of the legions,
few hats, no cravats, many bare arms, some pikes.  Add to this,
all ages, all sorts of faces, small, pale young men, and bronzed
longshoremen.  All were in haste; and as they helped each other,
they discussed the possible chances.  That they would receive
succor about three o'clock in the morning--that they were sure
of one regiment, that Paris would rise.  Terrible sayings with
which was mingled a sort of cordial joviality.  One would have
pronounced them brothers, but they did not know each other's names. 
Great perils have this fine characteristic, that they bring to light
the fraternity of strangers.  A fire had been lighted in the kitchen,
and there they were engaged in moulding into bullets, pewter mugs,
spoons, forks, and all the brass table-ware of the establishment. 
In the midst of it all, they drank.  Caps and buckshot were mixed
pell-mell on the tables with glasses of wine.  In the billiard-hall,
Mame Hucheloup, Matelote, and Gibelotte, variously modified by terror,
which had stupefied one, rendered another breathless, and roused
the third, were tearing up old dish-cloths and making lint;
three insurgents were assisting them, three bushy-haired, jolly
blades with beards and moustaches, who plucked away at the linen
with the fingers of seamstresses and who made them tremble.

The man of lofty stature whom Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Enjolras
had observed at the moment when he joined the mob at the corner
of the Rue des Billettes, was at work on the smaller barricade
and was making himself useful there.  Gavroche was working on
the larger one.  As for the young man who had been waiting for
Courfeyrac at his lodgings, and who had inquired for M. Marius,
he had disappeared at about the time when the omnibus had been overturned.

Gavroche, completely carried away and radiant, had undertaken
to get everything in readiness.  He went, came, mounted, descended,
re-mounted, whistled, and sparkled.  He seemed to be there for
the encouragement of all.  Had he any incentive?  Yes, certainly,
his poverty; had he wings? yes, certainly, his joy.  Gavroche was
a whirlwind.  He was constantly visible, he was incessantly audible. 
He filled the air, as he was everywhere at once.  He was a sort
of almost irritating ubiquity; no halt was possible with him. 
The enormous barricade felt him on its haunches.  He troubled
the loungers, he excited the idle, he reanimated the weary,
he grew impatient over the thoughtful, he inspired gayety in some,
and breath in others, wrath in others, movement in all, now pricking
a student, now biting an artisan; he alighted, paused, flew off again,
hovered over the tumult, and the effort, sprang from one party
to another, murmuring and humming, and harassed the whole company;
a fly on the immense revolutionary coach.

Perpetual motion was in his little arms and perpetual clamor
in his little lungs.

"Courage! more paving-stones! more casks! more machines! 
Where are you now?  A hod of plaster for me to stop this hole with! 
Your barricade is very small.  It must be carried up.  Put everything
on it, fling everything there, stick it all in.  Break down the house. 
A barricade is Mother Gibou's tea.  Hullo, here's a glass door."

This elicited an exclamation from the workers.

"A glass door? what do you expect us to do with a glass door, tubercle?"

"Hercules yourselves!" retorted Gavroche.  "A glass door is an
excellent thing in a barricade.  It does not prevent an attack,
but it prevents the enemy taking it.  So you've never prigged apples
over a wall where there were broken bottles?  A glass door cuts the
corns of the National Guard when they try to mount on the barricade. 
Pardi! glass is a treacherous thing.  Well, you haven't a very
wildly lively imagination, comrades."

However, he was furious over his triggerless pistol.  He went
from one to another, demanding:  "A gun, I want a gun!  Why don't
you give me a gun?"

"Give you a gun!" said Combeferre.

"Come now!" said Gavroche, "why not?  I had one in 1830 when we
had a dispute with Charles X."

Enjolras shrugged his shoulders.

"When there are enough for the men, we will give some to the children."

Gavroche wheeled round haughtily, and answered:--

"If you are killed before me, I shall take yours."

"Gamin!" said Enjolras.

"Greenhorn!" said Gavroche.

A dandy who had lost his way and who lounged past the end of the
street created a diversion!  Gavroche shouted to him:--

"Come with us, young fellow! well now, don't we do anything for this
old country of ours?"

The dandy fled.


CHAPTER V

PREPARATIONS


The journals of the day which said that that nearly impregnable structure,
of the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, as they call it,
reached to the level of the first floor, were mistaken.  The fact is,
that it did not exceed an average height of six or seven feet. 
It was built in such a manner that the combatants could, at their will,
either disappear behind it or dominate the barrier and even scale
its crest by means of a quadruple row of paving-stones placed on top
of each other and arranged as steps in the interior.  On the outside,
the front of the barricade, composed of piles of paving-stones
and casks bound together by beams and planks, which were entangled
in the wheels of Anceau's dray and of the overturned omnibus,
had a bristling and inextricable aspect.

An aperture large enough to allow a man to pass through had been
made between the wall of the houses and the extremity of the
barricade which was furthest from the wine-shop, so that an exit
was possible at this point.  The pole of the omnibus was placed
upright and held up with ropes, and a red flag, fastened to this pole,
floated over the barricade.

The little Mondetour barricade, hidden behind the wine-shop building,
was not visible.  The two barricades united formed a veritable redoubt. 
Enjolras and Courfeyrac had not thought fit to barricade the other
fragment of the Rue Mondetour which opens through the Rue des
Precheurs an issue into the Halles, wishing, no doubt, to preserve
a possible communication with the outside, and not entertaining
much fear of an attack through the dangerous and difficult street
of the Rue des Precheurs.

With the exception of this issue which was left free, and which
constituted what Folard in his strategical style would have termed
a branch and taking into account, also, the narrow cutting arranged
on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the interior of the barricade, where the
wine-shop formed a salient angle, presented an irregular square,
closed on all sides.  There existed an interval of twenty paces
between the grand barrier and the lofty houses which formed the
background of the street, so that one might say that the barricade
rested on these houses, all inhabited, but closed from top to bottom.

All this work was performed without any hindrance, in less than
an hour, and without this handful of bold men seeing a single
bear-skin cap or a single bayonet make their appearance. 
The very bourgeois who still ventured at this hour of riot to enter
the Rue Saint-Denis cast a glance at the Rue de la Chanvrerie,
caught sight of the barricade, and redoubled their pace.

The two barricades being finished, and the flag run up, a table was
dragged out of the wine-shop; and Courfeyrac mounted on the table. 
Enjolras brought the square coffer, and Courfeyrac opened it. 
This coffer was filled with cartridges.  When the mob saw the cartridges,
a tremor ran through the bravest, and a momentary silence ensued.

Courfeyrac distributed them with a smile.

Each one received thirty cartridges.  Many had powder, and set
about making others with the bullets which they had run. 
As for the barrel of powder, it stood on a table on one side,
near the door, and was held in reserve.

The alarm beat which ran through all Paris, did not cease, but it
had finally come to be nothing more than a monotonous noise to which
they no longer paid any attention.  This noise retreated at times,
and again drew near, with melancholy undulations.

They loaded the guns and carbines, all together, without haste,
with solemn gravity.  Enjolras went and stationed three sentinels
outside the barricades, one in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the second
in the Rue des Precheurs, the third at the corner of the Rue de la
Petite Truanderie.

Then, the barricades having been built, the posts assigned,
the guns loaded, the sentinels stationed, they waited, alone in
those redoubtable streets through which no one passed any longer,
surrounded by those dumb houses which seemed dead and in which no human
movement palpitated, enveloped in the deepening shades of twilight
which was drawing on, in the midst of that silence through which
something could be felt advancing, and which had about it something
tragic and terrifying, isolated, armed, determined, and tranquil.



CHAPTER VI

WAITING


During those hours of waiting, what did they do?

We must needs tell, since this is a matter of history.

While the men made bullets and the women lint, while a large saucepan
of melted brass and lead, destined to the bullet-mould smoked over
a glowing brazier, while the sentinels watched, weapon in hand,
on the barricade, while Enjolras, whom it was impossible to divert,
kept an eye on the sentinels, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire,
Feuilly, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and some others, sought each other
out and united as in the most peaceful days of their conversations
in their student life, and, in one corner of this wine-shop which
had been converted into a casement, a couple of paces distant
from the redoubt which they had built, with their carbines loaded
and primed resting against the backs of their chairs, these fine
young fellows, so close to a supreme hour, began to recite love verses.

What verses?  These:--

               Vous rappelez-vous notre douce vie,
                 Lorsque nous etions si jeunes tous deux,
               Et que nous n'avions au coeur d'autre envie
                 Que d'etre bien mis et d'etre amoureux,

               Lorsqu'en ajoutant votre age a mon age,
                 Nous ne comptions pas a deux quarante ans,
               Et que, dans notre humble et petit menage,
                 Tout, meme l'hiver, nous etait printemps?

               Beaux jours! Manuel etait fier et sage,
                 Paris s'asseyait a de saints banquets,
               Foy lancait la foudre, et votre corsage
                 Avait une epingle ou je me piquais.

               Tout vous contemplait. Avocat sans causes,
                 Quand je vous menais au Prado diner,
               Vous etiez jolie au point que les roses
                 Me faisaient l'effet de se retourner.

               Je les entendais dire: Est elle belle!
                 Comme elle sent bon!  Quels cheveux a flots!
               Sous son mantelet elle cache une aile,
                 Son bonnet charmant est a peine eclos.

               J'errais avec toi, pressant ton bras souple.
                 Les passants crovaient que l'amour charme
               Avait marie, dans notre heureux couple,
                 Le doux mois d'avril au beau mois de mai.

               Nous vivions caches, contents, porte close,
                 Devorant l'amour, bon fruit defendu,
               Ma bouche n'avait pas dit une chose
                 Que deja ton coeur avait repondu.

               La Sorbonne etait l'endroit bucolique
                 Ou je t'adorais du soir au matin.
               C'est ainsi qu'une ame amoureuse applique
                 La carte du Tendre au pays Latin.

               O place Maubert! o place Dauphine!
                 Quand, dans le taudis frais et printanier,
               Tu tirais ton bas sur ton jambe fine,
                 Je voyais un astre au fond du grenier.

               J'ai fort lu Platon, mais rien ne m'en reste;
                 Mieux que Malebranche et que Lamennais,
               Tu me demontrais la bonte celeste
                 Avec une fleur que tu me donnais.

               Je t'obeissais, tu m' etais soumise;
                 O grenier dore! te lacer! te voir
               Aller et venir des l'aube en chemise,
                 Mirant ton jeune front a ton vieux miroir.

               Et qui done pourrait perde la memoire
                 De ces temps d'aurore et de firmament,
               De rubans, de fleurs, de gaze et de moire,
                 Ou l'amour begaye un argot charmant?

               Nos jardins etaient un pot de tulipe;
                 Tu masquais la vitre avec un jupon;
               Je prenais le bol de terre de pipe,
                 Et je te donnais le tasse en japon.

               Et ces grands malheurs qui nous faisaient rire!
                 Ton manchon brule, ton boa perdu!
               Et ce cher portrait du divin Shakespeare
                 Qu'un soir pour souper nons avons vendu!

               J'etais mendiant et toi charitable.
                 Je baisais au vol tes bras frais et ronds.
               Dante in folio nous servait de table
                 Pour manger gaiment un cent de marrons.

               La premiere fois qu'en mon joyeux bouge
                 Je pris un baiser a ton levre en feu,
               Quand tu t'en allais decoiffee et rouge,
                 Je restai tout pale et je crus en Dieu!

               Te rappelles-tu nos bonheurs sans nombre,
                 Et tous ces fichus changes en chiffons?
               Oh que de soupirs, de nos coeurs pleins d'ombre,
                 Se sont envoles dans les cieux profonds![53]


[53] Do you remember our sweet life, when we were both so young,
and when we had no other desire in our hearts than to be well
dressed and in love?  When, by adding your age to my age,
we could not count forty years between us, and when, in our humble
and tiny household, everything was spring to us even in winter. 
Fair days!  Manuel was proud and wise, Paris sat at sacred banquets,
Foy launched thunderbolts, and your corsage had a pin on which I
pricked myself.  Everything gazed upon you.  A briefless lawyer,
when I took you to the Prado to dine, you were so beautiful
that the roses seemed to me to turn round, and I heard them say: 
Is she not beautiful!  How good she smells!  What billowing hair! 
Beneath her mantle she hides a wing.  Her charming bonnet is
hardly unfolded.  I wandered with thee, pressing thy supple arm. 
The passers-by thought that love bewitched had wedded, in our
happy couple, the gentle month of April to the fair month of May. 
We lived concealed, content, with closed doors, devouring love,
that sweet forbidden fruit.  My mouth had not uttered a thing
when thy heart had already responded.  The Sorbonne was the bucolic
spot where I adored thee from eve till morn.  'Tis thus that an
amorous soul applies the chart of the Tender to the Latin country. 
O Place Maubert!  O Place Dauphine!  When in the fresh spring-like
hut thou didst draw thy stocking on thy delicate leg, I saw a star
in the depths of the garret.  I have read a great deal of Plato,
but nothing of it remains by me; better than Malebranche and then
Lamennais thou didst demonstrate to me celestial goodness with a flower
which thou gavest to me, I obeyed thee, thou didst submit to me;
oh gilded garret! to lace thee! to behold thee going and coming from
dawn in thy chemise, gazing at thy young brow in thine ancient mirror! 
And who, then, would forego the memory of those days of aurora
and the firmament, of flowers, of gauze and of moire, when love
stammers a charming slang?  Our gardens consisted of a pot of tulips;
thou didst mask the window with thy petticoat; I took the earthenware
bowl and I gave thee the Japanese cup.  And those great misfortunes
which made us laugh!  Thy cuff scorched, thy boa lost!  And that
dear portrait of the divine Shakespeare which we sold one evening
that we might sup!  I was a beggar and thou wert charitable. 
I kissed thy fresh round arms in haste.  A folio Dante served us
as a table on which to eat merrily a centime's worth of chestnuts. 
The first time that, in my joyous den, I snatched a kiss from thy
fiery lip, when thou wentest forth, dishevelled and blushing,
I turned deathly pale and I believed in God.  Dost thou recall our
innumerable joys, and all those fichus changed to rags?  Oh! what
sighs from our hearts full of gloom fluttered forth to the heavenly
depths!


The hour, the spot, these souvenirs of youth recalled, a few stars
which began to twinkle in the sky, the funeral repose of those
deserted streets, the imminence of the inexorable adventure,
which was in preparation, gave a pathetic charm to these verses
murmured in a low tone in the dusk by Jean Prouvaire, who, as we
have said, was a gentle poet.

In the meantime, a lamp had been lighted in the small barricade,
and in the large one, one of those wax torches such as are to be
met with on Shrove-Tuesday in front of vehicles loaded with masks,
on their way to la Courtille.  These torches, as the reader has seen,
came from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

The torch had been placed in a sort of cage of paving-stones closed
on three sides to shelter it from the wind, and disposed in such
a fashion that all the light fell on the flag.  The street and the
barricade remained sunk in gloom, and nothing was to be seen except
the red flag formidably illuminated as by an enormous dark-lantern.

This light enhanced the scarlet of the flag, with an indescribable
and terrible purple.



CHAPTER VII

THE MAN RECRUITED IN THE RUE DES BILLETTES


Night was fully come, nothing made its appearance.  All that they heard
was confused noises, and at intervals, fusillades; but these were rare,
badly sustained and distant.  This respite, which was thus prolonged,
was a sign that the Government was taking its time, and collecting
its forces.  These fifty men were waiting for sixty thousand.

Enjolras felt attacked by that impatience which seizes on strong souls
on the threshold of redoubtable events.  He went in search of Gavroche,
who had set to making cartridges in the tap-room, by the dubious
light of two candles placed on the counter by way of precaution,
on account of the powder which was scattered on the tables. 
These two candles cast no gleam outside.  The insurgents had,
moreover, taken pains not to have any light in the upper stories.

Gavroche was deeply preoccupied at that moment, but not precisely
with his cartridges.  The man of the Rue des Billettes had just
entered the tap-room and had seated himself at the table which was
the least lighted.  A musket of large model had fallen to his share,
and he held it between his legs.  Gavroche, who had been,
up to that moment, distracted by a hundred "amusing" things,
had not even seen this man.

When he entered, Gavroche followed him mechanically with his eyes,
admiring his gun; then, all at once, when the man was seated,
the street urchin sprang to his feet.  Any one who had spied upon
that man up to that moment, would have seen that he was observing
everything in the barricade and in the band of insurgents,
with singular attention; but, from the moment when he had entered
this room, he had fallen into a sort of brown study, and no longer
seemed to see anything that was going on.  The gamin approached
this pensive personage, and began to step around him on tiptoe,
as one walks in the vicinity of a person whom one is afraid of waking. 
At the same time, over his childish countenance which was, at once
so impudent and so serious, so giddy and so profound, so gay and so
heart-breaking, passed all those grimaces of an old man which signify: 
Ah bah! impossible!  My sight is bad!  I am dreaming! can this be? no,
it is not! but yes! why, no! etc.  Gavroche balanced on his heels,
clenched both fists in his pockets, moved his neck around like a bird,
expended in a gigantic pout all the sagacity of his lower lip. 
He was astounded, uncertain, incredulous, convinced, dazzled. 
He had the mien of the chief of the eunuchs in the slave mart,
discovering a Venus among the blowsy females, and the air of an
amateur recognizing a Raphael in a heap of daubs.  His whole being
was at work, the instinct which scents out, and the intelligence
which combines.  It was evident that a great event had happened in
Gavroche's life.

It was at the most intense point of this preoccupation that Enjolras
accosted him.

"You are small," said Enjolras, "you will not be seen.  Go out
of the barricade, slip along close to the houses, skirmish about
a bit in the streets, and come back and tell me what is going on."

Gavroche raised himself on his haunches.

"So the little chaps are good for something! that's very lucky! 
I'll go!  In the meanwhile, trust to the little fellows, and distrust
the big ones."  And Gavroche, raising his head and lowering
his voice, added, as he indicated the man of the Rue des Billettes: 
"Do you see that big fellow there?"

"Well?"

"He's a police spy."

"Are you sure of it?"

"It isn't two weeks since he pulled me off the cornice of the
Port Royal, where I was taking the air, by my ear."

Enjolras hastily quitted the urchin and murmured a few words
in a very low tone to a longshoreman from the winedocks who
chanced to be at hand.  The man left the room, and returned
almost immediately, accompanied by three others.  The four men,
four porters with broad shoulders, went and placed themselves
without doing anything to attract his attention, behind the table on
which the man of the Rue des Billettes was leaning with his elbows. 
They were evidently ready to hurl themselves upon him.

Then Enjolras approached the man and demanded of him:--

"Who are you?"

At this abrupt query, the man started.  He plunged his gaze deep
into Enjolras' clear eyes and appeared to grasp the latter's meaning. 
He smiled with a smile than which nothing more disdainful,
more energetic, and more resolute could be seen in the world,
and replied with haughty gravity:--

"I see what it is.  Well, yes!"

"You are a police spy?"

"I am an agent of the authorities."

"And your name?"

"Javert."

Enjolras made a sign to the four men.  In the twinkling of an eye,
before Javert had time to turn round, he was collared, thrown down,
pinioned and searched.

They found on him a little round card pasted between two pieces of glass,
and bearing on one side the arms of France, engraved, and with
this motto:  Supervision and vigilance, and on the other this note: 
"JAVERT, inspector of police, aged fifty-two," and the signature
of the Prefect of Police of that day, M. Gisquet.

Besides this, he had his watch and his purse, which contained several
gold pieces.  They left him his purse and his watch.  Under the watch,
at the bottom of his fob, they felt and seized a paper in an envelope,
which Enjolras unfolded, and on which he read these five lines,
written in the very hand of the Prefect of Police:--

"As soon as his political mission is accomplished, Inspector Javert
will make sure, by special supervision, whether it is true that the
malefactors have instituted intrigues on the right bank of the Seine,
near the Jena bridge."

The search ended, they lifted Javert to his feet, bound his arms
behind his back, and fastened him to that celebrated post in the
middle of the room which had formerly given the wine-shop its name.

Gavroche, who had looked on at the whole of this scene and had
approved of everything with a silent toss of his head, stepped up
to Javert and said to him:--

"It's the mouse who has caught the cat."

All this was so rapidly executed, that it was all over when those
about the wine-shop noticed it.

Javert had not uttered a single cry.

At the sight of Javert bound to the post, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly,
Combeferre, and the men scattered over the two barricades came running up.

Javert, with his back to the post, and so surrounded with ropes
that he could not make a movement, raised his head with the intrepid
serenity of the man who has never lied.

"He is a police spy," said Enjolras.

And turning to Javert:  "You will be shot ten minutes before
the barricade is taken."

Javert replied in his most imperious tone:--

"Why not at once?"

"We are saving our powder."

"Then finish the business with a blow from a knife."

"Spy," said the handsome Enjolras, "we are judges and not assassins."

Then he called Gavroche:--

"Here you! go about your business!  Do what I told you!"

"I'm going!" cried Gavroche.

And halting as he was on the point of setting out:--

"By the way, you will give me his gun!" and he added:  "I leave
you the musician, but I want the clarionet."

The gamin made the military salute and passed gayly through
the opening in the large barricade.



CHAPTER VIII

MANY INTERROGATION POINTS WITH REGARD TO A CERTAIN LE CABUC WHOSE
NAME MAY NOT HAVE BEEN LE CABUC


The tragic picture which we have undertaken would not be complete,
the reader would not see those grand moments of social birth-pangs
in a revolutionary birth, which contain convulsion mingled with effort,
in their exact and real relief, were we to omit, in the sketch
here outlined, an incident full of epic and savage horror which
occurred almost immediately after Gavroche's departure.

Mobs, as the reader knows, are like a snowball, and collect
as they roll along, a throng of tumultuous men.  These men do not
ask each other whence they come.  Among the passers-by who had
joined the rabble led by Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac,
there had been a person wearing the jacket of a street porter,
which was very threadbare on the shoulders, who gesticulated
and vociferated, and who had the look of a drunken savage.  This man,
whose name or nickname was Le Cabuc, and who was, moreover, an utter
stranger to those who pretended to know him, was very drunk,
or assumed the appearance of being so, and had seated himself
with several others at a table which they had dragged outside
of the wine-shop. This Cabuc, while making those who vied with him
drunk seemed to be examining with a thoughtful air the large house
at the extremity of the barricade, whose five stories commanded
the whole street and faced the Rue Saint-Denis. All at once he exclaimed:--

"Do you know, comrades, it is from that house yonder that we must fire. 
When we are at the windows, the deuce is in it if any one can
advance into the street!"

"Yes, but the house is closed," said one of the drinkers.

"Let us knock!"

"They will not open."

"Let us break in the door!"

Le Cabuc runs to the door, which had a very massive knocker, and knocks. 
The door opens not.  He strikes a second blow.  No one answers. 
A third stroke.  The same silence.

"Is there any one here?" shouts Cabuc.

Nothing stirs.

Then he seizes a gun and begins to batter the door with the butt end.

It was an ancient alley door, low, vaulted, narrow, solid, entirely
of oak, lined on the inside with a sheet of iron and iron stays,
a genuine prison postern.  The blows from the butt end of the gun
made the house tremble, but did not shake the door.

Nevertheless, it is probable that the inhabitants were disturbed,
for a tiny, square window was finally seen to open on the third story,
and at this aperture appeared the reverend and terrified face of a
gray-haired old man, who was the porter, and who held a candle.

The man who was knocking paused.

"Gentlemen," said the porter, "what do you want?"

"Open!" said Cabuc.

"That cannot be, gentlemen."

"Open, nevertheless."

"Impossible, gentlemen."

Le Cabuc took his gun and aimed at the porter; but as he was below,
and as it was very dark, the porter did not see him.

"Will you open, yes or no?"

"No, gentlemen."

"Do you say no?"

"I say no, my goo--"

The porter did not finish.  The shot was fired; the ball entered
under his chin and came out at the nape of his neck, after traversing
the jugular vein.

The old man fell back without a sigh.  The candle fell
and was extinguished, and nothing more was to be seen except
a motionless head lying on the sill of the small window,
and a little whitish smoke which floated off towards the roof.

"There!" said Le Cabuc, dropping the butt end of his gun to the pavement.

He had hardly uttered this word, when he felt a hand laid on his
shoulder with the weight of an eagle's talon, and he heard a voice
saying to him:--

"On your knees."

The murderer turned round and saw before him Enjolras' cold, white face.

Enjolras held a pistol in his hand.

He had hastened up at the sound of the discharge.

He had seized Cabuc's collar, blouse, shirt, and suspender with
his left hand.

"On your knees!" he repeated.

And, with an imperious motion, the frail young man of twenty years
bent the thickset and sturdy porter like a reed, and brought him
to his knees in the mire.

Le Cabuc attempted to resist, but he seemed to have been seized
by a superhuman hand.

Enjolras, pale, with bare neck and dishevelled hair, and his woman's face,
had about him at that moment something of the antique Themis. 
His dilated nostrils, his downcast eyes, gave to his implacable Greek
profile that expression of wrath and that expression of Chastity which,
as the ancient world viewed the matter, befit Justice.

The whole barricade hastened up, then all ranged themselves in
a circle at a distance, feeling that it was impossible to utter
a word in the presence of the thing which they were about to behold.

Le Cabuc, vanquished, no longer tried to struggle, and trembled
in every limb.

Enjolras released him and drew out his watch.

"Collect yourself," said he.  "Think or pray.  You have one minute."

"Mercy!" murmured the murderer; then he dropped his head
and stammered a few inarticulate oaths.

Enjolras never took his eyes off of him:  he allowed a minute to pass,
then he replaced his watch in his fob.  That done, he grasped Le
Cabuc by the hair, as the latter coiled himself into a ball at his
knees and shrieked, and placed the muzzle of the pistol to his ear. 
Many of those intrepid men, who had so tranquilly entered upon the
most terrible of adventures, turned aside their heads.

An explosion was heard, the assassin fell to the pavement face downwards.

Enjolras straightened himself up, and cast a convinced and severe
glance around him.  Then he spurned the corpse with his foot and said:--

"Throw that outside."

Three men raised the body of the unhappy wretch, which was still
agitated by the last mechanical convulsions of the life that had fled,
and flung it over the little barricade into the Rue Mondetour.

Enjolras was thoughtful.  It is impossible to say what grandiose
shadows slowly spread over his redoubtable serenity.  All at once
he raised his voice.

A silence fell upon them.

"Citizens," said Enjolras, "what that man did is frightful,
what I have done is horrible.  He killed, therefore I killed him. 
I had to do it, because insurrection must have its discipline. 
Assassination is even more of a crime here than elsewhere; we are under
the eyes of the Revolution, we are the priests of the Republic, we are
the victims of duty, and must not be possible to slander our combat. 
I have, therefore, tried that man, and condemned him to death. 
As for myself, constrained as I am to do what I have done, and yet
abhorring it, I have judged myself also, and you shall soon see to
what I have condemned myself."

Those who listened to him shuddered.

"We will share thy fate," cried Combeferre.

"So be it," replied Enjolras.  "One word more.  In executing
this man, I have obeyed necessity; but necessity is a monster
of the old world, necessity's name is Fatality.  Now, the law
of progress is, that monsters shall disappear before the angels,
and that Fatality shall vanish before Fraternity.  It is a bad
moment to pronounce the word love.  No matter, I do pronounce it. 
And I glorify it.  Love, the future is thine.  Death, I make use
of thee, but I hate thee.  Citizens, in the future there will be
neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance,
nor bloody retaliation.  As there will be no more Satan, there will
be no more Michael.  In the future no one will kill any one else,
the earth will beam with radiance, the human race will love. 
The day will come, citizens, when all will be concord, harmony, light,
joy and life; it will come, and it is in order that it may come
that we are about to die."

Enjolras ceased.  His virgin lips closed; and he remained for some time
standing on the spot where he had shed blood, in marble immobility. 
His staring eye caused those about him to speak in low tones.

Jean Prouvaire and Combeferre pressed each other's hands silently,
and, leaning against each other in an angle of the barricade,
they watched with an admiration in which there was some compassion,
that grave young man, executioner and priest, composed of light,
like crystal, and also of rock.

Let us say at once that later on, after the action, when the bodies
were taken to the morgue and searched, a police agent's card was found
on Le Cabuc.  The author of this book had in his hands, in 1848,
the special report on this subject made to the Prefect of Police
in 1832.

We will add, that if we are to believe a tradition of the police,
which is strange but probably well founded, Le Cabuc was Claquesous. 
The fact is, that dating from the death of Le Cabuc, there was no
longer any question of Claquesous.  Claquesous had nowhere left
any trace of his disappearance; he would seem to have amalgamated
himself with the invisible.  His life had been all shadows, his end
was night.

The whole insurgent group was still under the influence of the
emotion of that tragic case which had been so quickly tried and so
quickly terminated, when Courfeyrac again beheld on the barricade,
the small young man who had inquired of him that morning for Marius.

This lad, who had a bold and reckless air, had come by night to join
the insurgents.



BOOK THIRTEENTH.--MARIUS ENTERS THE SHADOW



CHAPTER I

FROM THE RUE PLUMET TO THE QUARTIER SAINT-DENIS


The voice which had summoned Marius through the twilight to the
barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, had produced on him the
effect of the voice of destiny.  He wished to die; the opportunity
presented itself; he knocked at the door of the tomb, a hand
in the darkness offered him the key.  These melancholy openings
which take place in the gloom before despair, are tempting. 
Marius thrust aside the bar which had so often allowed him to pass,
emerged from the garden, and said:  "I will go."

Mad with grief, no longer conscious of anything fixed or solid
in his brain, incapable of accepting anything thenceforth of fate
after those two months passed in the intoxication of youth and love,
overwhelmed at once by all the reveries of despair, he had but one
desire remaining, to make a speedy end of all.

He set out at rapid pace.  He found himself most opportunely armed,
as he had Javert's pistols with him.

The young man of whom he thought that he had caught a glimpse,
had vanished from his sight in the street.

Marius, who had emerged from the Rue Plumet by the boulevard,
traversed the Esplanade and the bridge of the Invalides, the Champs
Elysees, the Place Louis XV., and reached the Rue de Rivoli. 
The shops were open there, the gas was burning under the arcades,
women were making their purchases in the stalls, people were eating
ices in the Cafe Laiter, and nibbling small cakes at the English
pastry-cook's shop.  Only a few posting-chaises were setting out
at a gallop from the Hotel des Princes and the Hotel Meurice.

Marius entered the Rue Saint-Honore through the Passage Delorme. 
There the shops were closed, the merchants were chatting in front
of their half-open doors, people were walking about, the street
lanterns were lighted, beginning with the first floor, all the
windows were lighted as usual.  There was cavalry on the Place du
Palais-Royal.

Marius followed the Rue Saint-Honore. In proportion as he left
the Palais-Royal behind him, there were fewer lighted windows,
the shops were fast shut, no one was chatting on the thresholds,
the street grew sombre, and, at the same time, the crowd increased
in density.  For the passers-by now amounted to a crowd.  No one could
be seen to speak in this throng, and yet there arose from it a dull,
deep murmur.

Near the fountain of the Arbre-Sec, there were "assemblages",
motionless and gloomy groups which were to those who went and came
as stones in the midst of running water.

At the entrance to the Rue des Prouvaires, the crowd no longer walked. 
It formed a resisting, massive, solid, compact, almost impenetrable
block of people who were huddled together, and conversing in
low tones.  There were hardly any black coats or round hats now,
but smock frocks, blouses, caps, and bristling and cadaverous heads. 
This multitude undulated confusedly in the nocturnal gloom. 
Its whisperings had the hoarse accent of a vibration.  Although not
one of them was walking, a dull trampling was audible in the mire. 
Beyond this dense portion of the throng, in the Rue du Roule, in the
Rue des Prouvaires, and in the extension of the Rue Saint-Honore,
there was no longer a single window in which a candle was burning. 
Only the solitary and diminishing rows of lanterns could be seen
vanishing into the street in the distance.  The lanterns of that
date resembled large red stars, hanging to ropes, and shed upon
the pavement a shadow which had the form of a huge spider. 
These streets were not deserted.  There could be descried piles of guns,
moving bayonets, and troops bivouacking.  No curious observer passed
that limit.  There circulation ceased.  There the rabble ended and
the army began.

Marius willed with the will of a man who hopes no more.  He had
been summoned, he must go.  He found a means to traverse the throng
and to pass the bivouac of the troops, he shunned the patrols,
he avoided the sentinels.  He made a circuit, reached the Rue
de Bethisy, and directed his course towards the Halles.  At the
corner of the Rue des Bourdonnais, there were no longer any lanterns.

After having passed the zone of the crowd, he had passed the limits
of the troops; he found himself in something startling.  There was
no longer a passer-by, no longer a soldier, no longer a light,
there was no one; solitude, silence, night, I know not what chill
which seized hold upon one.  Entering a street was like entering
a cellar.

He continued to advance.

He took a few steps.  Some one passed close to him at a run.  Was it
a man?  Or a woman?  Were there many of them? he could not have told. 
It had passed and vanished.

Proceeding from circuit to circuit, he reached a lane which he
judged to be the Rue de la Poterie; near the middle of this street,
he came in contact with an obstacle.  He extended his hands. 
It was an overturned wagon; his foot recognized pools
of water, gullies, and paving-stones scattered and piled up. 
A barricade had been begun there and abandoned.  He climbed over
the stones and found himself on the other side of the barrier. 
He walked very near the street-posts, and guided himself along
the walls of the houses.  A little beyond the barricade, it seemed
to him that he could make out something white in front of him. 
He approached, it took on a form.  It was two white horses;
the horses of the omnibus harnessed by Bossuet in the morning,
who had been straying at random all day from street to street,
and had finally halted there, with the weary patience of brutes
who no more understand the actions of men, than man understands the
actions of Providence.

Marius left the horses behind him.  As he was approaching
a street which seemed to him to be the Rue du Contrat-Social,
a shot coming no one knows whence, and traversing the darkness
at random, whistled close by him, and the bullet pierced a brass
shaving-dish suspended above his head over a hairdresser's shop. 
This pierced shaving-dish was still to be seen in 1848, in the
Rue du Contrat-Social, at the corner of the pillars of the market.

This shot still betokened life.  From that instant forth he
encountered nothing more.

The whole of this itinerary resembled a descent of black steps.

Nevertheless, Marius pressed forward.



CHAPTER II

AN OWL'S VIEW OF PARIS


A being who could have hovered over Paris that night with the wing
of the bat or the owl would have had beneath his eyes a gloomy spectacle.

All that old quarter of the Halles, which is like a city within
a city, through which run the Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin,
where a thousand lanes cross, and of which the insurgents had made
their redoubt and their stronghold, would have appeared to him like
a dark and enormous cavity hollowed out in the centre of Paris. 
There the glance fell into an abyss.  Thanks to the broken lanterns,
thanks to the closed windows, there all radiance, all life,
all sound, all movement ceased.  The invisible police of the
insurrection were on the watch everywhere, and maintained order,
that is to say, night.  The necessary tactics of insurrection
are to drown small numbers in a vast obscurity, to multiply every
combatant by the possibilities which that obscurity contains. 
At dusk, every window where a candle was burning received a shot. 
The light was extinguished, sometimes the inhabitant was killed. 
Hence nothing was stirring.  There was nothing but fright, mourning,
stupor in the houses; and in the streets, a sort of sacred horror. 
Not even the long rows of windows and stores, the indentations
of the chimneys, and the roofs, and the vague reflections which
are cast back by the wet and muddy pavements, were visible. 
An eye cast upward at that mass of shadows might, perhaps,
have caught a glimpse here and there, at intervals, of indistinct
gleams which brought out broken and eccentric lines, and profiles
of singular buildings, something like the lights which go and come
in ruins; it was at such points that the barricades were situated. 
The rest was a lake of obscurity, foggy, heavy, and funereal,
above which, in motionless and melancholy outlines, rose the tower
of Saint-Jacques, the church of Saint-Merry, and two or three more
of those grand edifices of which man makes giants and the night
makes phantoms.

All around this deserted and disquieting labyrinth, in the
quarters where the Parisian circulation had not been annihilated,
and where a few street lanterns still burned, the aerial observer
might have distinguished the metallic gleam of swords and bayonets,
the dull rumble of artillery, and the swarming of silent battalions
whose ranks were swelling from minute to minute; a formidable
girdle which was slowly drawing in and around the insurrection.

The invested quarter was no longer anything more than a monstrous cavern;
everything there appeared to be asleep or motionless, and, as we
have just seen, any street which one might come to offered nothing
but darkness.

A wild darkness, full of traps, full of unseen and formidable shocks,
into which it was alarming to penetrate, and in which it was terrible
to remain, where those who entered shivered before those whom they
awaited, where those who waited shuddered before those who were coming. 
Invisible combatants were entrenched at every corner of the street;
snares of the sepulchre concealed in the density of night. 
All was over.  No more light was to be hoped for, henceforth,
except the lightning of guns, no further encounter except the abrupt
and rapid apparition of death.  Where?  How?  When?  No one knew,
but it was certain and inevitable.  In this place which had been
marked out for the struggle, the Government and the insurrection,
the National Guard, and popular societies, the bourgeois and
the uprising, groping their way, were about to come into contact. 
The necessity was the same for both.  The only possible issue
thenceforth was to emerge thence killed or conquerors.  A situation
so extreme, an obscurity so powerful, that the most timid felt
themselves seized with resolution, and the most daring with terror.

Moreover, on both sides, the fury, the rage, and the determination
were equal.  For the one party, to advance meant death, and no
one dreamed of retreating; for the other, to remain meant death,
and no one dreamed of flight.

It was indispensable that all should be ended on the following day,
that triumph should rest either here or there, that the insurrection
should prove itself a revolution or a skirmish.  The Government understood
this as well as the parties; the most insignificant bourgeois felt it. 
Hence a thought of anguish which mingled with the impenetrable
gloom of this quarter where all was at the point of being decided;
hence a redoubled anxiety around that silence whence a catastrophe
was on the point of emerging.  Here only one sound was audible, a sound
as heart-rending as the death rattle, as menacing as a malediction,
the tocsin of Saint-Merry. Nothing could be more blood-curdling than
the clamor of that wild and desperate bell, wailing amid the shadows.

As it often happens, nature seemed to have fallen into accord
with what men were about to do.  Nothing disturbed the harmony
of the whole effect.  The stars had disappeared, heavy clouds
filled the horizon with their melancholy folds.  A black sky
rested on these dead streets, as though an immense winding-sheet
were being outspread over this immense tomb.

While a battle that was still wholly political was in preparation
in the same locality which had already witnessed so many
revolutionary events, while youth, the secret associations,
the schools, in the name of principles, and the middle classes,
in the name of interests, were approaching preparatory to dashing
themselves together, clasping and throwing each other, while each
one hastened and invited the last and decisive hour of the crisis,
far away and quite outside of this fatal quarter, in the most profound
depths of the unfathomable cavities of that wretched old Paris which
disappears under the splendor of happy and opulent Paris, the sombre
voice of the people could be heard giving utterance to a dull roar.

A fearful and sacred voice which is composed of the roar of the brute
and of the word of God, which terrifies the weak and which warns
the wise, which comes both from below like the voice of the lion,
and from on high like the voice of the thunder.



CHAPTER III

THE EXTREME EDGE


Marius had reached the Halles.

There everything was still calmer, more obscure and more motionless
than in the neighboring streets.  One would have said that the
glacial peace of the sepulchre had sprung forth from the earth
and had spread over the heavens.

Nevertheless, a red glow brought out against this black background
the lofty roofs of the houses which barred the Rue de la Chanvrerie
on the Saint-Eustache side.  It was the reflection of the torch which
was burning in the Corinthe barricade.  Marius directed his steps
towards that red light.  It had drawn him to the Marche-aux-Poirees,
and he caught a glimpse of the dark mouth of the Rue des Precheurs. 
He entered it.  The insurgents' sentinel, who was guarding
the other end, did not see him.  He felt that he was very close
to that which he had come in search of, and he walked on tiptoe. 
In this manner he reached the elbow of that short section of the
Rue Mondetour which was, as the reader will remember, the only
communication which Enjolras had preserved with the outside world. 
At the corner of the last house, on his left, he thrust his
head forward, and looked into the fragment of the Rue Mondetour.

A little beyond the angle of the lane and the Rue de la Chanvrerie
which cast a broad curtain of shadow, in which he was himself engulfed,
he perceived some light on the pavement, a bit of the wine-shop,
and beyond, a flickering lamp within a sort of shapeless wall,
and men crouching down with guns on their knees.  All this was ten
fathoms distant from him.  It was the interior of the barricade.

The houses which bordered the lane on the right concealed the rest
of the wine-shop, the large barricade, and the flag from him.

Marius had but a step more to take.

Then the unhappy young man seated himself on a post, folded his arms,
and fell to thinking about his father.

He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy, who had been so proud
a soldier, who had guarded the frontier of France under the Republic,
and had touched the frontier of Asia under Napoleon, who had beheld Genoa,
Alexandria, Milan, Turin, Madrid, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Moscow,
who had left on all the victorious battle-fields of Europe drops
of that same blood, which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had
grown gray before his time in discipline and command, who had lived
with his sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast,
his cockade blackened with powder, his brow furrowed with his helmet,
in barracks, in camp, in the bivouac, in ambulances, and who,
at the expiration of twenty years, had returned from the great wars
with a scarred cheek, a smiling countenance, tranquil, admirable, pure
as a child, having done everything for France and nothing against her.

He said to himself that his day had also come now, that his hour
had struck, that following his father, he too was about to show himself
brave, intrepid, bold, to run to meet the bullets, to offer his breast
to bayonets, to shed his blood, to seek the enemy, to seek death, that he
was about to wage war in his turn and descend to the field of battle,
and that the field of battle upon which he was to descend was the
street, and that the war in which he was about to engage was civil war!

He beheld civil war laid open like a gulf before him, and into this
he was about to fall.  Then he shuddered.

He thought of his father's sword, which his grandfather had sold
to a second-hand dealer, and which he had so mournfully regretted. 
He said to himself that that chaste and valiant sword had done
well to escape from him, and to depart in wrath into the gloom;
that if it had thus fled, it was because it was intelligent and
because it had foreseen the future; that it had had a presentiment
of this rebellion, the war of the gutters, the war of the pavements,
fusillades through cellar-windows, blows given and received in the rear;
it was because, coming from Marengo and Friedland, it did not wish
to go to the Rue de la Chanvrerie; it was because, after what it
had done with the father, it did not wish to do this for the son! 
He told himself that if that sword were there, if after taking
possession of it at his father's pillow, he had dared to take it
and carry it off for this combat of darkness between Frenchmen
in the streets, it would assuredly have scorched his hands and
burst out aflame before his eyes, like the sword of the angel! 
He told himself that it was fortunate that it was not there and
that it had disappeared, that that was well, that that was just,
that his grandfather had been the true guardian of his father's glory,
and that it was far better that the colonel's sword should be sold
at auction, sold to the old-clothes man, thrown among the old junk,
than that it should, to-day, wound the side of his country.

And then he fell to weeping bitterly.

This was horrible.  But what was he to do?  Live without Cosette he
could not.  Since she was gone, he must needs die.  Had he not given
her his word of honor that he would die?  She had gone knowing that;
this meant that it pleased her that Marius should die.  And then,
it was clear that she no longer loved him, since she had departed thus
without warning, without a word, without a letter, although she knew
his address!  What was the good of living, and why should he live now? 
And then, what! should he retreat after going so far? should he
flee from danger after having approached it? should he slip away
after having come and peeped into the barricade? slip away, all in
a tremble, saying:  "After all, I have had enough of it as it is. 
I have seen it, that suffices, this is civil war, and I shall take
my leave!"  Should he abandon his friends who were expecting him? 
Who were in need of him possibly! who were a mere handful against
an army!  Should he be untrue at once to his love, to country,
to his word?  Should he give to his cowardice the pretext of patriotism? 
But this was impossible, and if the phantom of his father was there
in the gloom, and beheld him retreating, he would beat him on the
loins with the flat of his sword, and shout to him:  "March on,
you poltroon!"

Thus a prey to the conflicting movements of his thoughts, he dropped
his head.

All at once he raised it.  A sort of splendid rectification
had just been effected in his mind.  There is a widening of the
sphere of thought which is peculiar to the vicinity of the grave;
it makes one see clearly to be near death.  The vision of the action
into which he felt that he was, perhaps, on the point of entering,
appeared to him no more as lamentable, but as superb.  The war
of the street was suddenly transfigured by some unfathomable
inward working of his soul, before the eye of his thought. 
All the tumultuous interrogation points of revery recurred to him
in throngs, but without troubling him.  He left none of them unanswered.

Let us see, why should his father be indignant?  Are there
not cases where insurrection rises to the dignity of duty? 
What was there that was degrading for the son of Colonel Pontmercy
in the combat which was about to begin?  It is no longer Montmirail
nor Champaubert; it is something quite different.  The question
is no longer one of sacred territory,--but of a holy idea. 
The country wails, that may be, but humanity applauds.  But is it
true that the country does wail?  France bleeds, but liberty smiles;
and in the presence of liberty's smile, France forgets her wound. 
And then if we look at things from a still more lofty point of view,
why do we speak of civil war?

Civil war--what does that mean?  Is there a foreign war? 
Is not all war between men war between brothers?  War is qualified
only by its object.  There is no such thing as foreign or civil war;
there is only just and unjust war.  Until that day when the grand
human agreement is concluded, war, that at least which is the effort
of the future, which is hastening on against the past, which is
lagging in the rear, may be necessary.  What have we to reproach
that war with?  War does not become a disgrace, the sword does
not become a disgrace, except when it is used for assassinating
the right, progress, reason, civilization, truth.  Then war,
whether foreign or civil, is iniquitous; it is called crime. 
Outside the pale of that holy thing, justice, by what right does
one form of man despise another?  By what right should the sword
of Washington disown the pike of Camille Desmoulins?  Leonidas against
the stranger, Timoleon against the tyrant, which is the greater?
the one is the defender, the other the liberator.  Shall we brand
every appeal to arms within a city's limits without taking the object
into a consideration?  Then note the infamy of Brutus, Marcel,
Arnould von Blankenheim, Coligny, Hedgerow war?  War of the streets? 
Why not?  That was the war of Ambiorix, of Artevelde, of Marnix,
of Pelagius.  But Ambiorix fought against Rome, Artevelde against France,
Marnix against Spain, Pelagius against the Moors; all against
the foreigner.  Well, the monarchy is a foreigner; oppression is
a stranger; the right divine is a stranger.  Despotism violates
the moral frontier, an invasion violates the geographical frontier. 
Driving out the tyrant or driving out the English, in both cases,
regaining possession of one's own territory.  There comes an hour when
protestation no longer suffices; after philosophy, action is required;
live force finishes what the idea has sketched out; Prometheus chained
begins, Arostogeiton ends; the encyclopedia enlightens souls,
the 10th of August electrifies them.  After AEschylus, Thrasybulus;
after Diderot, Danton.  Multitudes have a tendency to accept the master. 
Their mass bears witness to apathy.  A crowd is easily led as a whole
to obedience.  Men must be stirred up, pushed on, treated roughly
by the very benefit of their deliverance, their eyes must be wounded
by the true, light must be hurled at them in terrible handfuls. 
They must be a little thunderstruck themselves at their own well-being;
this dazzling awakens them.  Hence the necessity of tocsins and wars. 
Great combatants must rise, must enlighten nations with audacity,
and shake up that sad humanity which is covered with gloom by the
right divine, Caesarian glory, force, fanaticism, irresponsible power,
and absolute majesty; a rabble stupidly occupied in the contemplation,
in their twilight splendor, of these sombre triumphs of the night. 
Down with the tyrant!  Of whom are you speaking?  Do you call
Louis Philippe the tyrant?  No; no more than Louis XVI. 
Both of them are what history is in the habit of calling good kings;
but principles are not to be parcelled out, the logic of the true
is rectilinear, the peculiarity of truth is that it lacks complaisance;
no concessions, then; all encroachments on man should be repressed. 
There is a divine right in Louis XVI., there is because a Bourbon
in Louis Philippe; both represent in a certain measure the confiscation
of right, and, in order to clear away universal insurrection, they must
be combated; it must be done, France being always the one to begin. 
When the master falls in France, he falls everywhere.  In short,
what cause is more just, and consequently, what war is greater, than that
which re-establishes social truth, restores her throne to liberty,
restores the people to the people, restores sovereignty to man,
replaces the purple on the head of France, restores equity and reason
in their plenitude, suppresses every germ of antagonism by restoring
each one to himself, annihilates the obstacle which royalty presents
to the whole immense universal concord, and places the human race
once more on a level with the right?  These wars build up peace. 
An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges, superstitions,
lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and darkness
still stands erect in this world, with its towers of hatred. 
It must be cast down.  This monstrous mass must be made to crumble. 
To conquer at Austerlitz is grand; to take the Bastille is immense.

There is no one who has not noticed it in his own case--the soul,--
and therein lies the marvel of its unity complicated with ubiquity,
has a strange aptitude for reasoning almost coldly in the most
violent extremities, and it often happens that heartbroken passion
and profound despair in the very agony of their blackest monologues,
treat subjects and discuss theses.  Logic is mingled with convulsion,
and the thread of the syllogism floats, without breaking, in the
mournful storm of thought.  This was the situation of Marius' mind.

As he meditated thus, dejected but resolute, hesitating in
every direction, and, in short, shuddering at what he was about
to do, his glance strayed to the interior of the barricade. 
The insurgents were here conversing in a low voice, without moving,
and there was perceptible that quasi-silence which marks the last
stage of expectation.  Overhead, at the small window in the third
story Marius descried a sort of spectator who appeared to him to
be singularly attentive.  This was the porter who had been killed
by Le Cabuc.  Below, by the lights of the torch, which was thrust
between the paving-stones, this head could be vaguely distinguished. 
Nothing could be stranger, in that sombre and uncertain gleam,
than that livid, motionless, astonished face, with its bristling hair,
its eyes fixed and staring, and its yawning mouth, bent over
the street in an attitude of curiosity.  One would have said that
the man who was dead was surveying those who were about to die. 
A long trail of blood which had flowed from that head, descended in
reddish threads from the window to the height of the first floor,
where it stopped.



BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR



CHAPTER I

THE FLAG:  ACT FIRST


As yet, nothing had come.  Ten o'clock had sounded from Saint-Merry.
Enjolras and Combeferre had gone and seated themselves,
carbines in hand, near the outlet of the grand barricade. 
They no longer addressed each other, they listened,
seeking to catch even the faintest and most distant sound of marching.

Suddenly, in the midst of the dismal calm, a clear, gay, young voice,
which seemed to come from the Rue Saint-Denis, rose and began to
sing distinctly, to the old popular air of "By the Light of the Moon,"
this bit of poetry, terminated by a cry like the crow of a cock:--

               Mon nez est en larmes,
               Mon ami Bugeaud,
               Prete moi tes gendarmes
               Pour leur dire un mot.

                  En capote bleue,
                  La poule au shako,
                  Voici la banlieue!
                  Co-cocorico![54]


[54] My nose is in tears, my friend Bugeaud, lend me thy gendarmes
that I may say a word to them.  With a blue capote and a chicken
in his shako, here's the banlieue, co-cocorico.


They pressed each other's hands.

"That is Gavroche," said Enjolras.

"He is warning us," said Combeferre.

A hasty rush troubled the deserted street; they beheld a being
more agile than a clown climb over the omnibus, and Gavroche
bounded into the barricade, all breathless, saying:--

"My gun!  Here they are!"

An electric quiver shot through the whole barricade, and the sound
of hands seeking their guns became audible.

"Would you like my carbine?" said Enjolras to the lad.

"I want a big gun," replied Gavroche.

And he seized Javert's gun.

Two sentinels had fallen back, and had come in almost at the
same moment as Gavroche.  They were the sentinels from the end
of the street, and the vidette of the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie.
The vidette of the Lane des Precheurs had remained at his post,
which indicated that nothing was approaching from the direction
of the bridges and Halles.

The Rue de la Chanvrerie, of which a few paving-stones alone were
dimly visible in the reflection of the light projected on the flag,
offered to the insurgents the aspect of a vast black door vaguely
opened into a smoke.

Each man had taken up his position for the conflict.

Forty-three insurgents, among whom were Enjolras, Combeferre,
Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and Gavroche, were kneeling inside
the large barricade, with their heads on a level with the crest
of the barrier, the barrels of their guns and carbines aimed on the
stones as though at loop-holes, attentive, mute, ready to fire.  Six,
commanded by Feuilly, had installed themselves, with their guns levelled
at their shoulders, at the windows of the two stories of Corinthe.

Several minutes passed thus, then a sound of footsteps,
measured, heavy, and numerous, became distinctly audible in the
direction of Saint-Leu. This sound, faint at first, then precise,
then heavy and sonorous, approached slowly, without halt,
without intermission, with a tranquil and terrible continuity. 
Nothing was to be heard but this.  It was that combined silence
and sound, of the statue of the commander, but this stony step had
something indescribably enormous and multiple about it which awakened
the idea of a throng, and, at the same time, the idea of a spectre. 
One thought one heard the terrible statue Legion marching onward. 
This tread drew near; it drew still nearer, and stopped.  It seemed
as though the breathing of many men could be heard at the end
of the street.  Nothing was to be seen, however, but at the bottom
of that dense obscurity there could be distinguished a multitude
of metallic threads, as fine as needles and almost imperceptible,
which moved about like those indescribable phosphoric networks which one
sees beneath one's closed eyelids, in the first mists of slumber at
the moment when one is dropping off to sleep.  These were bayonets and
gun-barrels confusedly illuminated by the distant reflection of the torch.

A pause ensued, as though both sides were waiting.  All at once,
from the depths of this darkness, a voice, which was all the
more sinister, since no one was visible, and which appeared
to be the gloom itself speaking, shouted:--

"Who goes there?"

At the same time, the click of guns, as they were lowered into position,
was heard.

Enjolras replied in a haughty and vibrating tone:--

"The French Revolution!"

"Fire!" shouted the voice.

A flash empurpled all the facades in the street as though the door
of a furnace had been flung open, and hastily closed again.

A fearful detonation burst forth on the barricade.  The red flag fell. 
The discharge had been so violent and so dense that it had cut
the staff, that is to say, the very tip of the omnibus pole.

Bullets which had rebounded from the cornices of the houses
penetrated the barricade and wounded several men.

The impression produced by this first discharge was freezing. 
The attack had been rough, and of a nature to inspire reflection
in the boldest.  It was evident that they had to deal with an entire
regiment at the very least.

"Comrades!" shouted Courfeyrac, "let us not waste our powder. 
Let us wait until they are in the street before replying."

"And, above all," said Enjolras, "let us raise the flag again."

He picked up the flag, which had fallen precisely at his feet.

Outside, the clatter of the ramrods in the guns could be heard;
the troops were re-loading their arms.

Enjolras went on:--

"Who is there here with a bold heart?  Who will plant the flag
on the barricade again?"

Not a man responded.  To mount on the barricade at the very
moment when, without any doubt, it was again the object of
their aim, was simply death.  The bravest hesitated to pronounce
his own condemnation.  Enjolras himself felt a thrill.  He repeated:--

"Does no one volunteer?"



CHAPTER II

THE FLAG:  ACT SECOND


Since they had arrived at Corinthe, and had begun the construction
of the barricade, no attention had been paid to Father Mabeuf. 
M. Mabeuf had not quitted the mob, however; he had entered
the ground-floor of the wine-shop and had seated himself behind
the counter.  There he had, so to speak, retreated into himself. 
He no longer seemed to look or to think.  Courfeyrac and others
had accosted him two or three times, warning him of his peril,
beseeching him to withdraw, but he did not hear them.  When they
were not speaking to him, his mouth moved as though he were replying
to some one, and as soon as he was addressed, his lips became
motionless and his eyes no longer had the appearance of being alive.

Several hours before the barricade was attacked, he had assumed an
attitude which he did not afterwards abandon, with both fists planted
on his knees and his head thrust forward as though he were gazing over
a precipice.  Nothing had been able to move him from this attitude;
it did not seem as though his mind were in the barricade. 
When each had gone to take up his position for the combat,
there remained in the tap-room where Javert was bound to the post,
only a single insurgent with a naked sword, watching over Javert,
and himself, Mabeuf.  At the moment of the attack, at the detonation,
the physical shock had reached him and had, as it were, awakened him;
he started up abruptly, crossed the room, and at the instant when
Enjolras repeated his appeal:  "Does no one volunteer?" the old man
was seen to make his appearance on the threshold of the wine-shop.
His presence produced a sort of commotion in the different groups. 
A shout went up:--

"It is the voter!  It is the member of the Convention! 
It is the representative of the people!"

It is probable that he did not hear them.

He strode straight up to Enjolras, the insurgents withdrawing
before him with a religious fear; he tore the flag from Enjolras,
who recoiled in amazement and then, since no one dared to stop or to
assist him, this old man of eighty, with shaking head but firm foot,
began slowly to ascend the staircase of paving-stones arranged in
the barricade.  This was so melancholy and so grand that all around
him cried:  "Off with your hats!"  At every step that he mounted,
it was a frightful spectacle; his white locks, his decrepit face,
his lofty, bald, and wrinkled brow, his amazed and open mouth,
his aged arm upholding the red banner, rose through the gloom and
were enlarged in the bloody light of the torch, and the bystanders
thought that they beheld the spectre of '93 emerging from the earth,
with the flag of terror in his hand.

When he had reached the last step, when this trembling and
terrible phantom, erect on that pile of rubbish in the presence
of twelve hundred invisible guns, drew himself up in the face
of death and as though he were more powerful than it, the whole
barricade assumed amid the darkness, a supernatural and colossal form.

There ensued one of those silences which occur only in the presence
of prodigies.  In the midst of this silence, the old man waved
the red flag and shouted:--

"Long live the Revolution!  Long live the Republic!  Fraternity! 
Equality! and Death!"

Those in the barricade heard a low and rapid whisper, like the
murmur of a priest who is despatching a prayer in haste. 
It was probably the commissary of police who was making the legal
summons at the other end of the street.

Then the same piercing voice which had shouted:  "Who goes there?"
shouted:--

"Retire!"

M. Mabeuf, pale, haggard, his eyes lighted up with the mournful
flame of aberration, raised the flag above his head and repeated:--

"Long live the Republic!"

"Fire!" said the voice.

A second discharge, similar to the first, rained down upon the barricade.

The old man fell on his knees, then rose again, dropped the flag
and fell backwards on the pavement, like a log, at full length,
with outstretched arms.

Rivulets of blood flowed beneath him.  His aged head, pale and sad,
seemed to be gazing at the sky.

One of those emotions which are superior to man, which make
him forget even to defend himself, seized upon the insurgents,
and they approached the body with respectful awe.

"What men these regicides were!" said Enjolras.

Courfeyrac bent down to Enjolras' ear:--

"This is for yourself alone, I do not wish to dampen the enthusiasm. 
But this man was anything rather than a regicide.  I knew him. 
His name was Father Mabeuf.  I do not know what was the matter
with him to-day. But he was a brave blockhead.  Just look at
his head."

"The head of a blockhead and the heart of a Brutus," replied Enjolras.

Then he raised his voice:--

"Citizens!  This is the example which the old give to the young. 
We hesitated, he came!  We were drawing back, he advanced!  This is
what those who are trembling with age teach to those who tremble
with fear!  This aged man is august in the eyes of his country. 
He has had a long life and a magnificent death!  Now, let us place
the body under cover, that each one of us may defend this old man
dead as he would his father living, and may his presence in our midst
render the barricade impregnable!"

A murmur of gloomy and energetic assent followed these words.

Enjolras bent down, raised the old man's head, and fierce as he was,
he kissed him on the brow, then, throwing wide his arms, and handling
this dead man with tender precaution, as though he feared to hurt it,
he removed his coat, showed the bloody holes in it to all,
and said:--

"This is our flag now."



CHAPTER III

GAVROCHE WOULD HAVE DONE BETTER TO ACCEPT ENJOLRAS' CARBINE


They threw a long black shawl of Widow Hucheloup's over Father Mabeuf. 
Six men made a litter of their guns; on this they laid the body,
and bore it, with bared heads, with solemn slowness, to the large
table in the tap-room.

These men, wholly absorbed in the grave and sacred task in which
they were engaged, thought no more of the perilous situation
in which they stood.

When the corpse passed near Javert, who was still impassive,
Enjolras said to the spy:--

"It will be your turn presently!"

During all this time, Little Gavroche, who alone had not quitted
his post, but had remained on guard, thought he espied some men
stealthily approaching the barricade.  All at once he shouted:--

"Look out!"

Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre, Joly, Bahorel, Bossuet,
and all the rest ran tumultuously from the wine-shop. It was almost
too late.  They saw a glistening density of bayonets undulating
above the barricade.  Municipal guards of lofty stature were making
their way in, some striding over the omnibus, others through the cut,
thrusting before them the urchin, who retreated, but did not flee.

The moment was critical.  It was that first, redoubtable moment
of inundation, when the stream rises to the level of the levee
and when the water begins to filter through the fissures of dike. 
A second more and the barricade would have been taken.

Bahorel dashed upon the first municipal guard who was entering,
and killed him on the spot with a blow from his gun; the second
killed Bahorel with a blow from his bayonet.  Another had already
overthrown Courfeyrac, who was shouting:  "Follow me!"  The largest
of all, a sort of colossus, marched on Gavroche with his bayonet fixed. 
The urchin took in his arms Javert's immense gun, levelled it
resolutely at the giant, and fired.  No discharge followed. 
Javert's gun was not loaded.  The municipal guard burst into a laugh
and raised his bayonet at the child.

Before the bayonet had touched Gavroche, the gun slipped from
the soldier's grasp, a bullet had struck the municipal guardsman
in the centre of the forehead, and he fell over on his back. 
A second bullet struck the other guard, who had assaulted Courfeyrac
in the breast, and laid him low on the pavement.

This was the work of Marius, who had just entered the barricade.



CHAPTER IV

THE BARREL OF POWDER


Marius, still concealed in the turn of the Rue Mondetour, had witnessed,
shuddering and irresolute, the first phase of the combat.  But he
had not long been able to resist that mysterious and sovereign vertigo
which may be designated as the call of the abyss.  In the presence
of the imminence of the peril, in the presence of the death of
M. Mabeuf, that melancholy enigma, in the presence of Bahorel killed,
and Courfeyrac shouting:  "Follow me!" of that child threatened,
of his friends to succor or to avenge, all hesitation had vanished,
and he had flung himself into the conflict, his two pistols in hand. 
With his first shot he had saved Gavroche, and with the second
delivered Courfeyrac.

Amid the sound of the shots, amid the cries of the assaulted guards,
the assailants had climbed the entrenchment, on whose summit
Municipal Guards, soldiers of the line and National Guards from
the suburbs could now be seen, gun in hand, rearing themselves
to more than half the height of their bodies.

They already covered more than two-thirds of the barrier, but they
did not leap into the enclosure, as though wavering in the fear of
some trap.  They gazed into the dark barricade as one would gaze into
a lion's den.  The light of the torch illuminated only their bayonets,
their bear-skin caps, and the upper part of their uneasy and angry faces.

Marius had no longer any weapons; he had flung away his discharged
pistols after firing them; but he had caught sight of the barrel
of powder in the tap-room, near the door.

As he turned half round, gazing in that direction, a soldier took
aim at him.  At the moment when the soldier was sighting Marius,
a hand was laid on the muzzle of the gun and obstructed it. 
This was done by some one who had darted forward,--the young workman
in velvet trousers.  The shot sped, traversed the hand and possibly,
also, the workman, since he fell, but the ball did not strike Marius. 
All this, which was rather to be apprehended than seen through
the smoke, Marius, who was entering the tap-room, hardly noticed. 
Still, he had, in a confused way, perceived that gun-barrel aimed at him,
and the hand which had blocked it, and he had heard the discharge. 
But in moments like this, the things which one sees vacillate and
are precipitated, and one pauses for nothing.  One feels obscurely
impelled towards more darkness still, and all is cloud.

The insurgents, surprised but not terrified, had rallied. 
Enjolras had shouted:  "Wait!  Don't fire at random!" 
In the first confusion, they might, in fact, wound each other. 
The majority of them had ascended to the window on the first story
and to the attic windows, whence they commanded the assailants.

The most determined, with Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire,
and Combeferre, had proudly placed themselves with their backs
against the houses at the rear, unsheltered and facing the ranks
of soldiers and guards who crowned the barricade.

All this was accomplished without haste, with that strange and
threatening gravity which precedes engagements.  They took aim,
point blank, on both sides:  they were so close that they could
talk together without raising their voices.

When they had reached this point where the spark is on the brink
of darting forth, an officer in a gorget extended his sword and said:--

"Lay down your arms!"

"Fire!" replied Enjolras.

The two discharges took place at the same moment, and all disappeared
in smoke.

An acrid and stifling smoke in which dying and wounded lay with weak, dull
groans.  When the smoke cleared away, the combatants on both sides could
be seen to be thinned out, but still in the same positions, reloading
in silence.  All at once, a thundering voice was heard, shouting:--

"Be off with you, or I'll blow up the barricade!"

All turned in the direction whence the voice proceeded.

Marius had entered the tap-room, and had seized the barrel of powder,
then he had taken advantage of the smoke, and the sort of obscure mist
which filled the entrenched enclosure, to glide along the barricade
as far as that cage of paving-stones where the torch was fixed. 
To tear it from the torch, to replace it by the barrel of powder,
to thrust the pile of stones under the barrel, which was instantly
staved in, with a sort of horrible obedience,--all this had cost
Marius but the time necessary to stoop and rise again; and now all,
National Guards, Municipal Guards, officers, soldiers, huddled at
the other extremity of the barricade, gazed stupidly at him,
as he stood with his foot on the stones, his torch in his hand,
his haughty face illuminated by a fatal resolution, drooping the
flame of the torch towards that redoubtable pile where they could
make out the broken barrel of powder, and giving vent to that
startling cry:--

"Be off with you, or I'll blow up the barricade!"

Marius on that barricade after the octogenarian was the vision
of the young revolution after the apparition of the old.

"Blow up the barricade!" said a sergeant, "and yourself with it!"

Marius retorted:  "And myself also."

And he dropped the torch towards the barrel of powder.

But there was no longer any one on the barrier.  The assailants,
abandoning their dead and wounded, flowed back pell-mell and in
disorder towards the extremity of the street, and there were again
lost in the night.  It was a headlong flight.

The barricade was free.



CHAPTER V

END OF THE VERSES OF JEAN PROUVAIRE


All flocked around Marius.  Courfeyrac flung himself on his neck.

"Here you are!"

"What luck!" said Combeferre.

"You came in opportunely!" ejaculated Bossuet.

"If it had not been for you, I should have been dead!"
began Courfeyrac again.

"If it had not been for you, I should have been gobbled up!"
added Gavroche.

Marius asked:--

"Where is the chief?"

"You are he!" said Enjolras.

Marius had had a furnace in his brain all day long; now it was
a whirlwind.  This whirlwind which was within him, produced on
him the effect of being outside of him and of bearing him away. 
It seemed to him that he was already at an immense distance from life. 
His two luminous months of joy and love, ending abruptly at that frightful
precipice, Cosette lost to him, that barricade, M. Mabeuf getting
himself killed for the Republic, himself the leader of the insurgents,--
all these things appeared to him like a tremendous nightmare. 
He was obliged to make a mental effort to recall the fact that all
that surrounded him was real.  Marius had already seen too much of
life not to know that nothing is more imminent than the impossible,
and that what it is always necessary to foresee is the unforeseen.  He
had looked on at his own drama as a piece which one does not understand.

In the mists which enveloped his thoughts, he did not recognize
Javert, who, bound to his post, had not so much as moved his head
during the whole of the attack on the barricade, and who had
gazed on the revolt seething around him with the resignation
of a martyr and the majesty of a judge.  Marius had not even seen him.

In the meanwhile, the assailants did not stir, they could be heard
marching and swarming through at the end of the street but they
did not venture into it, either because they were awaiting orders
or because they were awaiting reinforcements before hurling
themselves afresh on this impregnable redoubt.  The insurgents
had posted sentinels, and some of them, who were medical students,
set about caring for the wounded.

They had thrown the tables out of the wine-shop, with the exception
of the two tables reserved for lint and cartridges, and of the one
on which lay Father Mabeuf; they had added them to the barricade,
and had replaced them in the tap-room with mattresses from the bed
of the widow Hucheloup and her servants.  On these mattresses
they had laid the wounded.  As for the three poor creatures
who inhabited Corinthe, no one knew what had become of them. 
They were finally found, however, hidden in the cellar.

A poignant emotion clouded the joy of the disencumbered barricade.

The roll was called.  One of the insurgents was missing.  And who was it? 
One of the dearest.  One of the most valiant.  Jean Prouvaire. 
He was sought among the wounded, he was not there.  He was sought
among the dead, he was not there.  He was evidently a prisoner. 
Combeferre said to Enjolras:--

"They have our friend; we have their agent.  Are you set
on the death of that spy?"

"Yes," replied Enjolras; "but less so than on the life of Jean Prouvaire."

This took place in the tap-room near Javert's post.

"Well," resumed Combeferre, "I am going to fasten my handkerchief
to my cane, and go as a flag of truce, to offer to exchange our man
for theirs."

"Listen," said Enjolras, laying his hand on Combeferre's arm.

At the end of the street there was a significant clash of arms.

They heard a manly voice shout:--

"Vive la France!  Long live France!  Long live the future!"

They recognized the voice of Prouvaire.

A flash passed, a report rang out.

Silence fell again.

"They have killed him," exclaimed Combeferre.

Enjolras glanced at Javert, and said to him:--

"Your friends have just shot you."



CHAPTER VI

THE AGONY OF DEATH AFTER THE AGONY OF LIFE


A peculiarity of this species of war is, that the attack of the
barricades is almost always made from the front, and that the assailants
generally abstain from turning the position, either because they
fear ambushes, or because they are afraid of getting entangled in the
tortuous streets.  The insurgents' whole attention had been directed,
therefore, to the grand barricade, which was, evidently, the spot
always menaced, and there the struggle would infallibly recommence. 
But Marius thought of the little barricade, and went thither. 
It was deserted and guarded only by the fire-pot which trembled between
the paving-stones. Moreover, the Mondetour alley, and the branches of
the Rue de la Petite Truanderie and the Rue du Cygne were profoundly calm.

As Marius was withdrawing, after concluding his inspection,
he heard his name pronounced feebly in the darkness.

"Monsieur Marius!"

He started, for he recognized the voice which had called to him
two hours before through the gate in the Rue Plumet.

Only, the voice now seemed to be nothing more than a breath.

He looked about him, but saw no one.

Marius thought he had been mistaken, that it was an illusion added
by his mind to the extraordinary realities which were clashing
around him.  He advanced a step, in order to quit the distant
recess where the barricade lay.

"Monsieur Marius!" repeated the voice.

This time he could not doubt that he had heard it distinctly;
he looked and saw nothing.

"At your feet," said the voice.

He bent down, and saw in the darkness a form which was dragging
itself towards him.

It was crawling along the pavement.  It was this that had spoken
to him.

The fire-pot allowed him to distinguish a blouse, torn trousers
of coarse velvet, bare feet, and something which resembled a pool
of blood.  Marius indistinctly made out a pale head which was lifted
towards him and which was saying to him:--

"You do not recognize me?"

"No."

"Eponine."

Marius bent hastily down.  It was, in fact, that unhappy child. 
She was dressed in men's clothes.

"How come you here?  What are you doing here?"

"I am dying," said she.

There are words and incidents which arouse dejected beings. 
Marius cried out with a start:--

"You are wounded!  Wait, I will carry you into the room!  They will
attend to you there.  Is it serious?  How must I take hold of you
in order not to hurt you?  Where do you suffer?  Help!  My God! 
But why did you come hither?"

And he tried to pass his arm under her, in order to raise her.

She uttered a feeble cry.

"Have I hurt you?" asked Marius.

"A little."

"But I only touched your hand."

She raised her hand to Marius, and in the middle of that hand
Marius saw a black hole.

"What is the matter with your hand?" said he.

"It is pierced."

"Pierced?"

"Yes."

"What with?"

"A bullet."

"How?"

"Did you see a gun aimed at you?"

"Yes, and a hand stopping it."

"It was mine."

Marius was seized with a shudder.

"What madness!  Poor child!  But so much the better, if that is all,
it is nothing, let me carry you to a bed.  They will dress your wound;
one does not die of a pierced hand."

She murmured:--

"The bullet traversed my hand, but it came out through my back. 
It is useless to remove me from this spot.  I will tell you how you
can care for me better than any surgeon.  Sit down near me on
this stone."

He obeyed; she laid her head on Marius' knees, and, without looking
at him, she said:--

"Oh!  How good this is!  How comfortable this is!  There; I no
longer suffer."

She remained silent for a moment, then she turned her face with
an effort, and looked at Marius.

"Do you know what, Monsieur Marius?  It puzzled me because you
entered that garden; it was stupid, because it was I who showed you
that house; and then, I ought to have said to myself that a young
man like you--"

She paused, and overstepping the sombre transitions that undoubtedly
existed in her mind, she resumed with a heartrending smile:--

"You thought me ugly, didn't you?"

She continued:--

"You see, you are lost!  Now, no one can get out of the barricade. 
It was I who led you here, by the way!  You are going to die,
I count upon that.  And yet, when I saw them taking aim at you,
I put my hand on the muzzle of the gun.  How queer it is!  But it
was because I wanted to die before you.  When I received that bullet,
I dragged myself here, no one saw me, no one picked me up,
I was waiting for you, I said:  `So he is not coming!'  Oh, if you
only knew.  I bit my blouse, I suffered so!  Now I am well. 
Do you remember the day I entered your chamber and when I looked
at myself in your mirror, and the day when I came to you on the
boulevard near the washerwomen?  How the birds sang!  That was
a long time ago.  You gave me a hundred sous, and I said to you: 
`I don't want your money.'  I hope you picked up your coin? 
You are not rich.  I did not think to tell you to pick it up. 
The sun was shining bright, and it was not cold.  Do you remember,
Monsieur Marius?  Oh!  How happy I am!  Every one is going
to die."

She had a mad, grave, and heart-breaking air.  Her torn blouse
disclosed her bare throat.

As she talked, she pressed her pierced hand to her breast, where there
was another hole, and whence there spurted from moment to moment
a stream of blood, like a jet of wine from an open bung-hole.

Marius gazed at this unfortunate creature with profound compassion.

"Oh!" she resumed, "it is coming again, I am stifling!"

She caught up her blouse and bit it, and her limbs stiffened
on the pavement.

At that moment the young cock's crow executed by little Gavroche
resounded through the barricade.

The child had mounted a table to load his gun, and was singing
gayly the song then so popular:--


"En voyant Lafayette, "On beholding Lafayette,
 Le gendarme repete:--             The gendarme repeats:--
 Sauvons nous! sauvons nous!       Let us flee! let us flee!
       sauvons nous!"                     let us flee!


Eponine raised herself and listened; then she murmured:--

"It is he."

And turning to Marius:--

"My brother is here.  He must not see me.  He would scold me."

"Your brother?" inquired Marius, who was meditating in the most bitter
and sorrowful depths of his heart on the duties to the Thenardiers
which his father had bequeathed to him; "who is your brother?"

"That little fellow."

"The one who is singing?"

"Yes."

Marius made a movement.

"Oh! don't go away," said she, "it will not be long now."

She was sitting almost upright, but her voice was very low
and broken by hiccoughs.

At intervals, the death rattle interrupted her.  She put her face
as near that of Marius as possible.  She added with a strange expression:--

"Listen, I do not wish to play you a trick.  I have a letter in my
pocket for you.  I was told to put it in the post.  I kept it. 
I did not want to have it reach you.  But perhaps you will be angry
with me for it when we meet again presently?  Take your letter."

She grasped Marius' hand convulsively with her pierced hand,
but she no longer seemed to feel her sufferings.  She put Marius'
hand in the pocket of her blouse.  There, in fact, Marius felt
a paper.

"Take it," said she.

Marius took the letter.

She made a sign of satisfaction and contentment.

"Now, for my trouble, promise me--"

And she stopped.

"What?" asked Marius.

"Promise me!"

"I promise."

"Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead.--I shall
feel it."

She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. 
He thought the poor soul had departed.  Eponine remained motionless. 
All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever,
she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity
of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already
to proceed from another world:--

"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little
bit in love with you."

She tried to smile once more and expired.



CHAPTER VII

GAVROCHE AS A PROFOUND CALCULATOR OF DISTANCES


Marius kept his promise.  He dropped a kiss on that livid brow,
where the icy perspiration stood in beads.

This was no infidelity to Cosette; it was a gentle and pensive
farewell to an unhappy soul.

It was not without a tremor that he had taken the letter
which Eponine had given him.  He had immediately felt that
it was an event of weight.  He was impatient to read it. 
The heart of man is so constituted that the unhappy child had
hardly closed her eyes when Marius began to think of unfolding this paper.

He laid her gently on the ground, and went away.  Something told him
that he could not peruse that letter in the presence of that body.

He drew near to a candle in the tap-room. It was a small note,
folded and sealed with a woman's elegant care.  The address was
in a woman's hand and ran:--

"To Monsieur, Monsieur Marius Pontmercy, at M. Courfeyrac's, Rue
de la Verrerie, No. 16."

He broke the seal and read:--

"My dearest, alas! my father insists on our setting out immediately. 
We shall be this evening in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7. 
In a week we shall be in England.  COSETTE.  June 4th."

Such was the innocence of their love that Marius was not even
acquainted with Cosette's handwriting.

What had taken place may be related in a few words.  Eponine had
been the cause of everything.  After the evening of the 3d
of June she had cherished a double idea, to defeat the projects
of her father and the ruffians on the house of the Rue Plumet,
and to separate Marius and Cosette.  She had exchanged rags with
the first young scamp she came across who had thought it amusing
to dress like a woman, while Eponine disguised herself like a man. 
It was she who had conveyed to Jean Valjean in the Champ de Mars
the expressive warning:  "Leave your house."  Jean Valjean had,
in fact, returned home, and had said to Cosette:  "We set out this
evening and we go to the Rue de l'Homme Arme with Toussaint. 
Next week, we shall be in London."  Cosette, utterly overwhelmed
by this unexpected blow, had hastily penned a couple of lines
to Marius.  But how was she to get the letter to the post? 
She never went out alone, and Toussaint, surprised at such
a commission, would certainly show the letter to M. Fauchelevent. 
In this dilemma, Cosette had caught sight through the fence of Eponine
in man's clothes, who now prowled incessantly around the garden. 
Cosette had called to "this young workman" and had handed him five
francs and the letter, saying:  "Carry this letter immediately to
its address."  Eponine had put the letter in her pocket.  The next day,
on the 5th of June, she went to Courfeyrac's quarters to inquire
for Marius, not for the purpose of delivering the letter, but,--a thing
which every jealous and loving soul will comprehend,--"to see." 
There she had waited for Marius, or at least for Courfeyrac,
still for the purpose of seeing.  When Courfeyrac had told her: 
"We are going to the barricades," an idea flashed through her mind,
to fling herself into that death, as she would have done into any other,
and to thrust Marius into it also.  She had followed Courfeyrac,
had made sure of the locality where the barricade was in process
of construction; and, quite certain, since Marius had received
no warning, and since she had intercepted the letter, that he
would go at dusk to his trysting place for every evening, she had
betaken herself to the Rue Plumet, had there awaited Marius,
and had sent him, in the name of his friends, the appeal which would,
she thought, lead him to the barricade.  She reckoned on Marius'
despair when he should fail to find Cosette; she was not mistaken. 
She had returned to the Rue de la Chanvrerie herself.  What she did
there the reader has just seen.  She died with the tragic joy of jealous
hearts who drag the beloved being into their own death, and who say: 
"No one shall have him!"

Marius covered Cosette's letter with kisses.  So she loved him! 
For one moment the idea occurred to him that he ought not to die now. 
Then he said to himself:  "She is going away.  Her father is taking
her to England, and my grandfather refuses his consent to the marriage. 
Nothing is changed in our fates."  Dreamers like Marius are subject
to supreme attacks of dejection, and desperate resolves are the result. 
The fatigue of living is insupportable; death is sooner over with. 
Then he reflected that he had still two duties to fulfil:  to inform
Cosette of his death and send her a final farewell, and to save from
the impending catastrophe which was in preparation, that poor child,
Eponine's brother and Thenardier's son.

He had a pocket-book about him; the same one which had contained
the note-book in which he had inscribed so many thoughts of love
for Cosette.  He tore out a leaf and wrote on it a few lines
in pencil:--

"Our marriage was impossible.  I asked my grandfather, he refused;
I have no fortune, neither hast thou.  I hastened to thee, thou wert
no longer there.  Thou knowest the promise that I gave thee,
I shall keep it.  I die.  I love thee.  When thou readest this,
my soul will be near thee, and thou wilt smile."

Having nothing wherewith to seal this letter, he contented himself
with folding the paper in four, and added the address:--

"To Mademoiselle Cosette Fauchelevent, at M. Fauchelevent's, Rue
de l'Homme Arme, No. 7."

Having folded the letter, he stood in thought for a moment, drew out
his pocket-book again, opened it, and wrote, with the same pencil,
these four lines on the first page:--

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

He put his pocketbook back in his pocket, then he called Gavroche.

The gamin, at the sound of Marius' voice, ran up to him with his
merry and devoted air.

"Will you do something for me?"

"Anything," said Gavroche.  "Good God! if it had not been for you,
I should have been done for."

"Do you see this letter?"

"Yes."

"Take it.  Leave the barricade instantly" (Gavroche began to scratch
his ear uneasily) "and to-morrow morning, you will deliver it
at its address to Mademoiselle Cosette, at M. Fauchelevent's,
Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7."

The heroic child replied

"Well, but! in the meanwhile the barricade will be taken, and I
shall not be there."

"The barricade will not be attacked until daybreak, according to
all appearances, and will not be taken before to-morrow noon."

The fresh respite which the assailants were granting to the
barricade had, in fact, been prolonged.  It was one of those
intermissions which frequently occur in nocturnal combats,
which are always followed by an increase of rage.

"Well," said Gavroche, "what if I were to go and carry your
letter to-morrow?"

"It will be too late.  The barricade will probably be blockaded,
all the streets will be guarded, and you will not be able to get out. 
Go at once."

Gavroche could think of no reply to this, and stood there in indecision,
scratching his ear sadly.

All at once, he took the letter with one of those birdlike movements
which were common with him.

"All right," said he.

And he started off at a run through Mondetour lane.

An idea had occurred to Gavroche which had brought him to a decision,
but he had not mentioned it for fear that Marius might offer some
objection to it.

This was the idea:--

"It is barely midnight, the Rue de l'Homme Arme is not far off;
I will go and deliver the letter at once, and I shall get back
in time."



BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARME



CHAPTER I

A DRINKER IS A BABBLER


What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections
of the soul?  Man is a depth still greater than the people. 
Jean Valjean at that very moment was the prey of a terrible upheaval. 
Every sort of gulf had opened again within him.  He also was trembling,
like Paris, on the brink of an obscure and formidable revolution. 
A few hours had sufficed to bring this about.  His destiny and his
conscience had suddenly been covered with gloom.  Of him also,
as well as of Paris, it might have been said:  "Two principles are
face to face.  The white angel and the black angel are about to seize
each other on the bridge of the abyss.  Which of the two will hurl
the other over?  Who will carry the day?"

On the evening preceding this same 5th of June, Jean Valjean,
accompanied by Cosette and Toussaint had installed himself in the Rue
de l'Homme Arme.  A change awaited him there.

Cosette had not quitted the Rue Plumet without making an effort
at resistance.  For the first time since they had lived side by side,
Cosette's will and the will of Jean Valjean had proved to be distinct,
and had been in opposition, at least, if they had not clashed. 
There had been objections on one side and inflexibility on the other. 
The abrupt advice:  "Leave your house," hurled at Jean Valjean by
a stranger, had alarmed him to the extent of rendering him peremptory. 
He thought that he had been traced and followed.  Cosette had been
obliged to give way.

Both had arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme without opening their lips,
and without uttering a word, each being absorbed in his own personal
preoccupation; Jean Valjean so uneasy that he did not notice Cosette's
sadness, Cosette so sad that she did not notice Jean Valjean's uneasiness.

Jean Valjean had taken Toussaint with him, a thing which he had
never done in his previous absences.  He perceived the possibility
of not returning to the Rue Plumet, and he could neither leave
Toussaint behind nor confide his secret to her.  Besides, he felt
that she was devoted and trustworthy.  Treachery between master
and servant begins in curiosity.  Now Toussaint, as though she
had been destined to be Jean Valjean's servant, was not curious. 
She stammered in her peasant dialect of Barneville:  "I am made so;
I do my work; the rest is no affair of mine."

In this departure from the Rue Plumet, which had been almost
a flight, Jean Valjean had carried away nothing but the little
embalmed valise, baptized by Cosette "the inseparable." 
Full trunks would have required porters, and porters are witnesses. 
A fiacre had been summoned to the door on the Rue de Babylone,
and they had taken their departure.

It was with difficulty that Toussaint had obtained permission
to pack up a little linen and clothes and a few toilet articles. 
Cosette had taken only her portfolio and her blotting-book.

Jean Valjean, with a view to augmenting the solitude and the mystery
of this departure, had arranged to quit the pavilion of the Rue Plumet
only at dusk, which had allowed Cosette time to write her note to Marius. 
They had arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme after night had fully fallen.

They had gone to bed in silence.

The lodgings in the Rue de l'Homme Arme were situated on a back court,
on the second floor, and were composed of two sleeping-rooms, a
dining-room and a kitchen adjoining the dining-room, with a garret
where there was a folding-bed, and which fell to Toussaint's share. 
The dining-room was an antechamber as well, and separated the
two bedrooms.  The apartment was provided with all necessary utensils.

People re-acquire confidence as foolishly as they lose it; human nature
is so constituted.  Hardly had Jean Valjean reached the Rue de l'Homme
Arme when his anxiety was lightened and by degrees dissipated. 
There are soothing spots which act in some sort mechanically on
the mind.  An obscure street, peaceable inhabitants.  Jean Valjean
experienced an indescribable contagion of tranquillity in that alley
of ancient Paris, which is so narrow that it is barred against carriages
by a transverse beam placed on two posts, which is deaf and dumb
in the midst of the clamorous city, dimly lighted at mid-day, and is,
so to speak, incapable of emotions between two rows of lofty houses
centuries old, which hold their peace like ancients as they are. 
There was a touch of stagnant oblivion in that street.  Jean Valjean
drew his breath once more there.  How could he be found there?

His first care was to place the inseparable beside him.

He slept well.  Night brings wisdom; we may add, night soothes. 
On the following morning he awoke in a mood that was almost gay. 
He thought the dining-room charming, though it was hideous,
furnished with an old round table, a long sideboard surmounted
by a slanting mirror, a dilapidated arm-chair, and several plain
chairs which were encumbered with Toussaint's packages.  In one of
these packages Jean Valjean's uniform of a National Guard was visible
through a rent.

As for Cosette, she had had Toussaint take some broth to her room,
and did not make her appearance until evening.

About five o'clock, Toussaint, who was going and coming and busying
herself with the tiny establishment, set on the table a cold chicken,
which Cosette, out of deference to her father, consented to glance at.

That done, Cosette, under the pretext of an obstinate sick headache,
had bade Jean Valjean good night and had shut herself up in her chamber. 
Jean Valjean had eaten a wing of the chicken with a good appetite,
and with his elbows on the table, having gradually recovered
his serenity, had regained possession of his sense of security.

While he was discussing this modest dinner, he had, twice or thrice,
noticed in a confused way, Toussaint's stammering words as she said
to him:  "Monsieur, there is something going on, they are fighting
in Paris."  But absorbed in a throng of inward calculations,
he had paid no heed to it.  To tell the truth, he had not heard her. 
He rose and began to pace from the door to the window and from the
window to the door, growing ever more serene.

With this calm, Cosette, his sole anxiety, recurred to his thoughts. 
Not that he was troubled by this headache, a little nervous crisis,
a young girl's fit of sulks, the cloud of a moment, there would be
nothing left of it in a day or two; but he meditated on the future,
and, as was his habit, he thought of it with pleasure.  After all,
he saw no obstacle to their happy life resuming its course. 
At certain hours, everything seems impossible, at others everything
appears easy; Jean Valjean was in the midst of one of these good hours. 
They generally succeed the bad ones, as day follows night, by virtue
of that law of succession and of contrast which lies at the very
foundation of nature, and which superficial minds call antithesis. 
In this peaceful street where he had taken refuge, Jean Valjean
got rid of all that had been troubling him for some time past. 
This very fact, that he had seen many shadows, made him begin
to perceive a little azure.  To have quitted the Rue Plumet without
complications or incidents was one good step already accomplished. 
Perhaps it would be wise to go abroad, if only for a few months,
and to set out for London.  Well, they would go.  What difference did
it make to him whether he was in France or in England, provided he
had Cosette beside him?  Cosette was his nation.  Cosette sufficed
for his happiness; the idea that he, perhaps, did not suffice for
Cosette's happiness, that idea which had formerly been the cause of his
fever and sleeplessness, did not even present itself to his mind. 
He was in a state of collapse from all his past sufferings, and he
was fully entered on optimism.  Cosette was by his side, she seemed
to be his; an optical illusion which every one has experienced. 
He arranged in his own mind, with all sorts of felicitous devices,
his departure for England with Cosette, and he beheld his felicity
reconstituted wherever he pleased, in the perspective of his revery.

As he paced to and fro with long strides, his glance suddenly
encountered something strange.

In the inclined mirror facing him which surmounted the sideboard,
he saw the four lines which follow:--

"My dearest, alas! my father insists on our setting out immediately. 
We shall be this evening in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7. 
In a week we shall be in England.  COSETTE.  June 4th."

Jean Valjean halted, perfectly haggard.

Cosette on her arrival had placed her blotting-book on the sideboard
in front of the mirror, and, utterly absorbed in her agony of grief,
had forgotten it and left it there, without even observing that she
had left it wide open, and open at precisely the page on which she
had laid to dry the four lines which she had penned, and which she
had given in charge of the young workman in the Rue Plumet. 
The writing had been printed off on the blotter.

The mirror reflected the writing.

The result was, what is called in geometry, the symmetrical image;
so that the writing, reversed on the blotter, was righted in the
mirror and presented its natural appearance; and Jean Valjean
had beneath his eyes the letter written by Cosette to Marius
on the preceding evening.

It was simple and withering.

Jean Valjean stepped up to the mirror.  He read the four lines again,
but he did not believe them.  They produced on him the effect
of appearing in a flash of lightning.  It was a hallucination,
it was impossible.  It was not so.

Little by little, his perceptions became more precise; he looked
at Cosette's blotting-book, and the consciousness of the reality
returned to him.  He caught up the blotter and said:  "It comes
from there."  He feverishly examined the four lines imprinted
on the blotter, the reversal of the letters converted into an
odd scrawl, and he saw no sense in it.  Then he said to himself: 
"But this signifies nothing; there is nothing written here." 
And he drew a long breath with inexpressible relief.  Who has not
experienced those foolish joys in horrible instants?  The soul does
not surrender to despair until it has exhausted all illusions.

He held the blotter in his hand and contemplated it in stupid delight,
almost ready to laugh at the hallucination of which he had been
the dupe.  All at once his eyes fell upon the mirror again,
and again he beheld the vision.  There were the four lines
outlined with inexorable clearness.  This time it was no mirage. 
The recurrence of a vision is a reality; it was palpable, it was
the writing restored in the mirror.  He understood.

Jean Valjean tottered, dropped the blotter, and fell into the old
arm-chair beside the buffet, with drooping head, and glassy eyes,
in utter bewilderment.  He told himself that it was plain, that the
light of the world had been eclipsed forever, and that Cosette
had written that to some one.  Then he heard his soul, which had
become terrible once more, give vent to a dull roar in the gloom. 
Try then the effect of taking from the lion the dog which he has
in his cage!

Strange and sad to say, at that very moment, Marius had not yet
received Cosette's letter; chance had treacherously carried it
to Jean Valjean before delivering it to Marius.  Up to that day,
Jean Valjean had not been vanquished by trial.  He had been subjected
to fearful proofs; no violence of bad fortune had been spared him;
the ferocity of fate, armed with all vindictiveness and all
social scorn, had taken him for her prey and had raged against him. 
He had accepted every extremity when it had been necessary;
he had sacrificed his inviolability as a reformed man, had yielded up
his liberty, risked his head, lost everything, suffered everything,
and he had remained disinterested and stoical to such a point that he
might have been thought to be absent from himself like a martyr. 
His conscience inured to every assault of destiny, might have
appeared to be forever impregnable.  Well, any one who had beheld
his spiritual self would have been obliged to concede that it weakened
at that moment.  It was because, of all the tortures which he had
undergone in the course of this long inquisition to which destiny
had doomed him, this was the most terrible.  Never had such pincers
seized him hitherto.  He felt the mysterious stirring of all his
latent sensibilities.  He felt the plucking at the strange chord. 
Alas! the supreme trial, let us say rather, the only trial,
is the loss of the beloved being.

Poor old Jean Valjean certainly did not love Cosette otherwise than as
a father; but we have already remarked, above, that into this paternity
the widowhood of his life had introduced all the shades of love;
he loved Cosette as his daughter, and he loved her as his mother,
and he loved her as his sister; and, as he had never had either
a woman to love or a wife, as nature is a creditor who accepts
no protest, that sentiment also, the most impossible to lose,
was mingled with the rest, vague, ignorant, pure with the purity
of blindness, unconscious, celestial, angelic, divine; less like
a sentiment than like an instinct, less like an instinct than
like an imperceptible and invisible but real attraction; and love,
properly speaking, was, in his immense tenderness for Cosette,
like the thread of gold in the mountain, concealed and virgin.

Let the reader recall the situation of heart which we have
already indicated.  No marriage was possible between them;
not even that of souls; and yet, it is certain that their destinies
were wedded.  With the exception of Cosette, that is to say,
with the exception of a childhood, Jean Valjean had never, in the
whole of his long life, known anything of that which may be loved. 
The passions and loves which succeed each other had not produced
in him those successive green growths, tender green or dark green,
which can be seen in foliage which passes through the winter and in men
who pass fifty.  In short, and we have insisted on it more than once,
all this interior fusion, all this whole, of which the sum total was
a lofty virtue, ended in rendering Jean Valjean a father to Cosette. 
A strange father, forged from the grandfather, the son, the brother,
and the husband, that existed in Jean Valjean; a father in whom
there was included even a mother; a father who loved Cosette
and adored her, and who held that child as his light, his home,
his family, his country, his paradise.

Thus when he saw that the end had absolutely come, that she was
escaping from him, that she was slipping from his hands, that she
was gliding from him, like a cloud, like water, when he had before
his eyes this crushing proof:  "another is the goal of her heart,
another is the wish of her life; there is a dearest one, I am no
longer anything but her father, I no longer exist"; when he could no
longer doubt, when he said to himself:  "She is going away from me!"
the grief which he felt surpassed the bounds of possibility. 
To have done all that he had done for the purpose of ending like this! 
And the very idea of being nothing!  Then, as we have just said,
a quiver of revolt ran through him from head to foot.  He felt,
even in the very roots of his hair, the immense reawakening of egotism,
and the _I_ in this man's abyss howled.

There is such a thing as the sudden giving way of the inward subsoil. 
A despairing certainty does not make its way into a man without
thrusting aside and breaking certain profound elements which,
in some cases, are the very man himself.  Grief, when it attains
this shape, is a headlong flight of all the forces of the conscience. 
These are fatal crises.  Few among us emerge from them still
like ourselves and firm in duty.  When the limit of endurance
is overstepped, the most imperturbable virtue is disconcerted. 
Jean Valjean took the blotter again, and convinced himself afresh;
he remained bowed and as though petrified and with staring eyes,
over those four unobjectionable lines; and there arose within him such
a cloud that one might have thought that everything in this soul was
crumbling away.

He examined this revelation, athwart the exaggerations of revery,
with an apparent and terrifying calmness, for it is a fearful thing
when a man's calmness reaches the coldness of the statue.

He measured the terrible step which his destiny had taken without
his having a suspicion of the fact; he recalled his fears of the
preceding summer, so foolishly dissipated; he recognized the precipice,
it was still the same; only, Jean Valjean was no longer on the brink,
he was at the bottom of it.

The unprecedented and heart-rending thing about it was that he had
fallen without perceiving it.  All the light of his life had departed,
while he still fancied that he beheld the sun.

His instinct did not hesitate.  He put together certain circumstances,
certain dates, certain blushes and certain pallors on Cosette's part,
and he said to himself:  "It is he."

The divination of despair is a sort of mysterious bow which never
misses its aim.  He struck Marius with his first conjecture. 
He did not know the name, but he found the man instantly. 
He distinctly perceived, in the background of the implacable
conjuration of his memories, the unknown prowler of the Luxembourg,
that wretched seeker of love adventures, that idler of romance,
that idiot, that coward, for it is cowardly to come and make eyes at
young girls who have beside them a father who loves them.

After he had thoroughly verified the fact that this young man
was at the bottom of this situation, and that everything proceeded
from that quarter, he, Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man
who had so labored over his soul, the man who had made so many efforts
to resolve all life, all misery, and all unhappiness into love,
looked into his own breast and there beheld a spectre, Hate.

Great griefs contain something of dejection.  They discourage one
with existence.  The man into whom they enter feels something within
him withdraw from him.  In his youth, their visits are lugubrious;
later on they are sinister.  Alas, if despair is a fearful thing
when the blood is hot, when the hair is black, when the head is erect
on the body like the flame on the torch, when the roll of destiny still
retains its full thickness, when the heart, full of desirable love,
still possesses beats which can be returned to it, when one has time
for redress, when all women and all smiles and all the future and
all the horizon are before one, when the force of life is complete,
what is it in old age, when the years hasten on, growing ever paler,
to that twilight hour when one begins to behold the stars of the tomb?

While he was meditating, Toussaint entered.  Jean Valjean rose
and asked her:--

"In what quarter is it?  Do you know?"

Toussaint was struck dumb, and could only answer him:--

"What is it, sir?"

Jean Valjean began again:  "Did you not tell me that just now
that there is fighting going on?"

"Ah! yes, sir," replied Toussaint.  "It is in the direction
of Saint-Merry."

There is a mechanical movement which comes to us, unconsciously,
from the most profound depths of our thought.  It was, no doubt,
under the impulse of a movement of this sort, and of which he
was hardly conscious, that Jean Valjean, five minutes later,
found himself in the street.

Bareheaded, he sat upon the stone post at the door of his house. 
He seemed to be listening.

Night had come.



CHAPTER II

THE STREET URCHIN AN ENEMY OF LIGHT


How long did he remain thus?  What was the ebb and flow of this
tragic meditation?  Did he straighten up?  Did he remain bowed? 
Had he been bent to breaking?  Could he still rise and regain his
footing in his conscience upon something solid?  He probably would
not have been able to tell himself.

The street was deserted.  A few uneasy bourgeois, who were rapidly
returning home, hardly saw him.  Each one for himself in times
of peril.  The lamp-lighter came as usual to light the lantern
which was situated precisely opposite the door of No. 7,
and then went away.  Jean Valjean would not have appeared like
a living man to any one who had examined him in that shadow. 
He sat there on the post of his door, motionless as a form of ice. 
There is congealment in despair.  The alarm bells and a vague and
stormy uproar were audible.  In the midst of all these convulsions
of the bell mingled with the revolt, the clock of Saint-Paul
struck eleven, gravely and without haste; for the tocsin is man;
the hour is God.  The passage of the hour produced no effect on
Jean Valjean; Jean Valjean did not stir.  Still, at about that moment,
a brusque report burst forth in the direction of the Halles,
a second yet more violent followed; it was probably that attack
on the barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie which we have just
seen repulsed by Marius.  At this double discharge, whose fury
seemed augmented by the stupor of the night, Jean Valjean started;
he rose, turning towards the quarter whence the noise proceeded;
then he fell back upon the post again, folded his arms, and his head
slowly sank on his bosom again.

He resumed his gloomy dialogue with himself.

All at once, he raised his eyes; some one was walking in the street,
he heard steps near him.  He looked, and by the light of the lanterns,
in the direction of the street which ran into the Rue-aux-Archives,
he perceived a young, livid, and beaming face.

Gavroche had just arrived in the Rue l'Homme Arme.

Gavroche was staring into the air, apparently in search of something. 
He saw Jean Valjean perfectly well but he took no notice of him.

Gavroche after staring into the air, stared below; he raised himself
on tiptoe, and felt of the doors and windows of the ground floor;
they were all shut, bolted, and padlocked.  After having authenticated
the fronts of five or six barricaded houses in this manner, the urchin
shrugged his shoulders, and took himself to task in these terms:--

"Pardi!"

Then he began to stare into the air again.

Jean Valjean, who, an instant previously, in his then state of mind,
would not have spoken to or even answered any one, felt irresistibly
impelled to accost that child.

"What is the matter with you, my little fellow?" he said.

"The matter with me is that I am hungry," replied Gavroche frankly. 
And he added:  "Little fellow yourself."

Jean Valjean fumbled in his fob and pulled out a five-franc piece.

But Gavroche, who was of the wagtail species, and who skipped
vivaciously from one gesture to another, had just picked up a stone. 
He had caught sight of the lantern.

"See here," said he, "you still have your lanterns here. 
You are disobeying the regulations, my friend.  This is disorderly. 
Smash that for me."

And he flung the stone at the lantern, whose broken glass fell with
such a clatter that the bourgeois in hiding behind their curtains
in the opposite house cried:  "There is `Ninety-three' come again."

The lantern oscillated violently, and went out.  The street had
suddenly become black.

"That's right, old street," ejaculated Gavroche, "put on your night-cap."

And turning to Jean Valjean:--

"What do you call that gigantic monument that you have there at the
end of the street?  It's the Archives, isn't it?  I must crumble up
those big stupids of pillars a bit and make a nice barricade out of them."

Jean Valjean stepped up to Gavroche.

"Poor creature," he said in a low tone, and speaking to himself,
"he is hungry."

And he laid the hundred-sou piece in his hand.

Gavroche raised his face, astonished at the size of this sou;
he stared at it in the darkness, and the whiteness of the big sou
dazzled him.  He knew five-franc pieces by hearsay; their reputation
was agreeable to him; he was delighted to see one close to. 
He said:--

"Let us contemplate the tiger."

He gazed at it for several minutes in ecstasy; then, turning to
Jean Valjean, he held out the coin to him, and said majestically
to him:--

"Bourgeois, I prefer to smash lanterns.  Take back your ferocious beast. 
You can't bribe me.  That has got five claws; but it doesn't scratch me."

"Have you a mother?" asked Jean Valjean.

Gavroche replied:--

"More than you have, perhaps."

"Well," returned Jean Valjean, "keep the money for your mother!"

Gavroche was touched.  Moreover, he had just noticed that the man
who was addressing him had no hat, and this inspired him with confidence.

"Truly," said he, "so it wasn't to keep me from breaking the lanterns?"

"Break whatever you please."

"You're a fine man," said Gavroche.

And he put the five-franc piece into one of his pockets.

His confidence having increased, he added:--

"Do you belong in this street?"

"Yes, why?"

"Can you tell me where No. 7 is?"

"What do you want with No. 7?"

Here the child paused, he feared that he had said too much;
he thrust his nails energetically into his hair and contented
himself with replying:--

"Ah!  Here it is."

An idea flashed through Jean Valjean's mind.  Anguish does have
these gleams.  He said to the lad:--

"Are you the person who is bringing a letter that I am expecting?"

"You?" said Gavroche.  "You are not a woman."

"The letter is for Mademoiselle Cosette, is it not?"

"Cosette," muttered Gavroche.  "Yes, I believe that is the queer name."

"Well," resumed Jean Valjean, "I am the person to whom you are
to deliver the letter.  Give it here."

"In that case, you must know that I was sent from the barricade."

"Of course," said Jean Valjean.

Gavroche engulfed his hand in another of his pockets and drew
out a paper folded in four.

Then he made the military salute.

"Respect
for despatches," said he.  "It comes from the Provisional Government."

"Give it to me," said Jean Valjean.

Gavroche held the paper elevated above his head.

"Don't go and fancy it's a love letter.  It is for a woman,
but it's for the people.  We men fight and we respect the fair sex. 
We are not as they are in fine society, where there are lions who send
chickens[55] to camels."


[55] Love letters.


"Give it to me."

"After all," continued Gavroche, "you have the air of an honest man."

"Give it to me quick."

"Catch hold of it."

And he handed the paper to Jean Valjean.

"And make haste, Monsieur What's-your-name, for Mamselle Cosette
is waiting."

Gavroche was satisfied with himself for having produced this remark.

Jean Valjean began again:--

"Is it to Saint-Merry that the answer is to be sent?"

"There you are making some of those bits of pastry vulgarly called
brioches [blunders]. This letter comes from the barricade of the Rue
de la Chanvrerie, and I'm going back there.  Good evening, citizen."

That said, Gavroche took himself off, or, to describe it more exactly,
fluttered away in the direction whence he had come with a flight
like that of an escaped bird.  He plunged back into the gloom as
though he made a hole in it, with the rigid rapidity of a projectile;
the alley of l'Homme Arme became silent and solitary once more;
in a twinkling, that strange child, who had about him something
of the shadow and of the dream, had buried himself in the mists of
the rows of black houses, and was lost there, like smoke in the dark;
and one might have thought that he had dissipated and vanished,
had there not taken place, a few minutes after his disappearance,
a startling shiver of glass, and had not the magnificent crash of a
lantern rattling down on the pavement once more abruptly awakened
the indignant bourgeois.  It was Gavroche upon his way through the Rue
du Chaume.



CHAPTER III

WHILE COSETTE AND TOUSSAINT ARE ASLEEP


Jean Valjean went into the house with Marius' letter.

He groped his way up the stairs, as pleased with the darkness
as an owl who grips his prey, opened and shut his door softly,
listened to see whether he could hear any noise,--made sure that,
to all appearances, Cosette and Toussaint were asleep, and plunged
three or four matches into the bottle of the Fumade lighter
before he could evoke a spark, so greatly did his hand tremble. 
What he had just done smacked of theft.  At last the candle
was lighted; he leaned his elbows on the table, unfolded the paper,
and read.

In violent emotions, one does not read, one flings to the earth,
so to speak, the paper which one holds, one clutches it like a victim,
one crushes it, one digs into it the nails of one's wrath,
or of one's joy; one hastens to the end, one leaps to the beginning;
attention is at fever heat; it takes up in the gross, as it were,
the essential points; it seizes on one point, and the rest disappears. 
In Marius' note to Cosette, Jean Valjean saw only these words:--

"I die.  When thou readest this, my soul will be near thee."

In the presence of these two lines, he was horribly dazzled;
he remained for a moment, crushed, as it were, by the change
of emotion which was taking place within him, he stared at Marius'
note with a sort of intoxicated amazement, he had before his eyes
that splendor, the death of a hated individual.

He uttered a frightful cry of inward joy.  So it was all over. 
The catastrophe had arrived sooner than he had dared to hope. 
The being who obstructed his destiny was disappearing.  That man
had taken himself off of his own accord, freely, willingly.  This man
was going to his death, and he, Jean Valjean, had had no hand
in the matter, and it was through no fault of his.  Perhaps, even,
he is already dead.  Here his fever entered into calculations. 
No, he is not dead yet.  The letter had evidently been intended
for Cosette to read on the following morning; after the two
discharges that were heard between eleven o'clock and midnight,
nothing more has taken place; the barricade will not be attacked
seriously until daybreak; but that makes no difference, from the
moment when "that man" is concerned in this war, he is lost;
he is caught in the gearing.  Jean Valjean felt himself delivered. 
So he was about to find himself alone with Cosette once more. 
The rivalry would cease; the future was beginning again.  He had
but to keep this note in his pocket.  Cosette would never know
what had become of that man.  All that there requires to be done
is to let things take their own course.  This man cannot escape. 
If he is not already dead, it is certain that he is about to die. 
What good fortune!

Having said all this to himself, he became gloomy.

Then he went down stairs and woke up the porter.

About an hour later, Jean Valjean went out in the complete costume
of a National Guard, and with his arms.  The porter had easily found
in the neighborhood the wherewithal to complete his equipment. 
He had a loaded gun and a cartridge-box filled with cartridges.

He strode off in the direction of the markets.



CHAPTER IV

GAVROCHE'S EXCESS OF ZEAL


In the meantime, Gavroche had had an adventure.

Gavroche, after having conscientiously stoned the lantern in the Rue
du Chaume, entered the Rue des Vielles-Haudriettes, and not seeing
"even a cat" there, he thought the opportunity a good one to strike
up all the song of which he was capable.  His march, far from being
retarded by his singing, was accelerated by it.  He began to sow
along the sleeping or terrified houses these incendiary couplets:--

               "L'oiseau medit dans les charmilles,
               Et pretend qu'hier Atala
               Avec un Russe s'en alla.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Mon ami Pierrot, tu babilles,
               Parce que l'autre jour Mila
               Cogna sa vitre et m'appela,
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Les drolesses sont fort gentilles,
               Leur poison qui m'ensorcela
               Griserait Monsieur Orfila.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "J'aime l'amour et les bisbilles,
               J'aime Agnes, j'aime Pamela,
               Lisa en m'allumant se brula.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Jadis, quand je vis les mantilles
               De Suzette et de Zeila,
               Mon ame aleurs plis se mela,
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Amour, quand dans l'ombre ou tu brilles,
                Tu coiffes de roses Lola,
               Je me damnerais pour cela.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Jeanne a ton miroir tu t'habilles!
               Mon coeur un beau jour s'envola.
               Je crois que c'est Jeanne qui l'a.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Le soir, en sortant des quadrilles,
               Je montre aux etoiles Stella,
               Et je leur dis: 'Regardez-la.'
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la."[56]


            [56]"The bird slanders in the elms,
                And pretends that yesterday, Atala
                Went off with a Russian,
                    Where fair maids go.
                         Lon la.


My friend Pierrot, thou pratest, because Mila knocked at her
pane the other day and called me.  The jades are very charming,
their poison which bewitched me would intoxicate Monsieur Orfila. 
I'm fond of love and its bickerings, I love Agnes, I love Pamela,
Lise burned herself in setting me aflame.  In former days when I
saw the mantillas of Suzette and of Zeila, my soul mingled with
their folds.  Love, when thou gleamest in the dark thou crownest
Lola with roses, I would lose my soul for that.  Jeanne, at thy
mirror thou deckest thyself!  One fine day, my heart flew forth. 
I think that it is Jeanne who has it.  At night, when I come from
the quadrilles, I show Stella to the stars, and I say to them: 
"Behold her."  Where fair maids go, lon la.


Gavroche, as he sang, was lavish of his pantomime.  Gesture is the strong
point of the refrain.  His face, an inexhaustible repertory of masks,
produced grimaces more convulsing and more fantastic than the rents
of a cloth torn in a high gale.  Unfortunately, as he was alone,
and as it was night, this was neither seen nor even visible. 
Such wastes of riches do occur.

All at once, he stopped short.

"Let us interrupt the romance," said he.

His feline eye had just descried, in the recess of a carriage door,
what is called in painting, an ensemble, that is to say, a person
and a thing; the thing was a hand-cart, the person was a man from
Auvergene who was sleeping therein.

The shafts of the cart rested on the pavement, and the Auvergnat's
head was supported against the front of the cart.  His body was
coiled up on this inclined plane and his feet touched the ground.

Gavroche, with his experience of the things of this world,
recognized a drunken man.  He was some corner errand-man who had
drunk too much and was sleeping too much.

"There now," thought Gavroche, "that's what the summer nights
are good for.  We'll take the cart for the Republic, and leave
the Auvergnat for the Monarchy."

His mind had just been illuminated by this flash of light:--

"How bully that cart would look on our barricade!"

The Auvergnat was snoring.

Gavroche gently tugged at the cart from behind, and at the Auvergnat
from the front, that is to say, by the feet, and at the expiration
of another minute the imperturbable Auvergnat was reposing flat
on the pavement.

The cart was free.

Gavroche, habituated to facing the unexpected in all quarters,
had everything about him.  He fumbled in one of his pockets,
and pulled from it a scrap of paper and a bit of red pencil filched
from some carpenter.

He wrote:--

                         "French Republic."


"Received thy cart."

And he signed it:  "GAVROCHE."

That done, he put the paper in the pocket of the still snoring
Auvergnat's velvet vest, seized the cart shafts in both hands,
and set off in the direction of the Halles, pushing the cart before
him at a hard gallop with a glorious and triumphant uproar.

This was perilous.  There was a post at the Royal Printing Establishment. 
Gavroche did not think of this.  This post was occupied by the
National Guards of the suburbs.  The squad began to wake up,
and heads were raised from camp beds.  Two street lanterns
broken in succession, that ditty sung at the top of the lungs. 
This was a great deal for those cowardly streets, which desire
to go to sleep at sunset, and which put the extinguisher on their
candles at such an early hour.  For the last hour, that boy had been
creating an uproar in that peaceable arrondissement, the uproar
of a fly in a bottle.  The sergeant of the banlieue lent an ear. 
He waited.  He was a prudent man.

The mad rattle of the cart, filled to overflowing the possible
measure of waiting, and decided the sergeant to make a reconnaisance.

"There's a whole band of them there!" said he, "let us proceed gently."

It was clear that the hydra of anarchy had emerged from its box
and that it was stalking abroad through the quarter.

And the sergeant ventured out of the post with cautious tread.

All at once, Gavroche, pushing his cart in front of him,
and at the very moment when he was about to turn into the Rue des
Vielles-Haudriettes, found himself face to face with a uniform,
a shako, a plume, and a gun.

For the second time, he stopped short.

"Hullo," said he, "it's him.  Good day, public order."

Gavroche's amazement was always brief and speedily thawed.

"Where are you going, you rascal?" shouted the sergeant.

"Citizen," retorted Gavroche, "I haven't called you `bourgeois' yet. 
Why do you insult me?"

"Where are you going, you rogue?"

"Monsieur," retorted Gavroche, "perhaps you were a man of wit yesterday,
but you have degenerated this morning."

"I ask you where are you going, you villain?"

Gavroche replied:--

"You speak prettily.  Really, no one would suppose you as old as
you are.  You ought to sell all your hair at a hundred francs apiece. 
That would yield you five hundred francs."

"Where are you going?  Where are you going?  Where are you going, bandit?"

Gavroche retorted again:--

"What villainous words!  You must wipe your mouth better the first
time that they give you suck."

The sergeant lowered his bayonet.

"Will you tell me where you are going, you wretch?"

"General," said Gavroche "I'm on my way to look for a doctor
for my wife who is in labor."

"To arms!" shouted the sergeant.

The master-stroke of strong men consists in saving themselves
by the very means that have ruined them; Gavroche took in the whole
situation at a glance.  It was the cart which had told against him,
it was the cart's place to protect him.

At the moment when the sergeant was on the point of making his descent
on Gavroche, the cart, converted into a projectile and launched
with all the latter's might, rolled down upon him furiously,
and the sergeant, struck full in the stomach, tumbled over backwards
into the gutter while his gun went off in the air.

The men of the post had rushed out pell-mell at the sergeant's shout;
the shot brought on a general random discharge, after which they
reloaded their weapons and began again.

This blind-man's-buff musketry lasted for a quarter of an hour
and killed several panes of glass.

In the meanwhile, Gavroche, who had retraced his steps at full speed,
halted five or six streets distant and seated himself, panting,
on the stone post which forms the corner of the Enfants-Rouges.

He listened.

After panting for a few minutes, he turned in the direction
where the fusillade was raging, lifted his left hand to a level
with his nose and thrust it forward three times, as he slapped
the back of his head with his right hand; an imperious gesture
in which Parisian street-urchindom has condensed French irony,
and which is evidently efficacious, since it has already lasted
half a century.

This gayety was troubled by one bitter reflection.

"Yes," said he, "I'm splitting with laughter, I'm twisting
with delight, I abound in joy, but I'm losing my way, I shall have
to take a roundabout way.  If I only reach the barricade in season!"

Thereupon he set out again on a run.

And as he ran:--

"Ah, by the way, where was I?" said he.

And he resumed his ditty, as he plunged rapidly through the streets,
and this is what died away in the gloom:--

               "Mais il reste encore des bastilles,
               Et je vais mettre le hola
               Dans l'orde public que voila.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Quelqu'un veut-il jouer aux quilles?
               Tout l'ancien monde s'ecroula
               Quand la grosse boule roula.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Vieux bon peuple, a coups de bequilles,
               Cassons ce Louvre ou s'etala
               La monarchie en falbala.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Nous en avons force les grilles,
               Le roi Charles-Dix ce jour la,
               Tenait mal et se decolla.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la."[57]


[57] But some prisons still remain, and I am going to put a stop
to this sort of public order.  Does any one wish to play at skittles? 
The whole ancient world fell in ruin, when the big ball rolled. 
Good old folks, let us smash with our crutches that Louvre where the
monarchy displayed itself in furbelows.  We have forced its gates. 
On that day, King Charles X. did not stick well and came unglued.


The post's recourse to arms was not without result.  The cart
was conquered, the drunken man was taken prisoner.  The first
was put in the pound, the second was later on somewhat harassed
before the councils of war as an accomplice.  The public ministry
of the day proved its indefatigable zeal in the defence of society,
in this instance.

Gavroche's adventure, which has lingered as a tradition in the quarters
of the Temple, is one of the most terrible souvenirs of the elderly
bourgeois of the Marais, and is entitled in their memories: 
"The nocturnal attack by the post of the Royal Printing Establishment."


[The end of Volume IV.  "Saint Denis"]



VOLUME V



JEAN VALJEAN


BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER I

THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF THE
FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE

The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social
maladies can name do not belong to the period in which the action
of this work is laid.  These two barricades, both of them symbols,
under two different aspects, of a redoubtable situation, sprang from
the earth at the time of the fatal insurrection of June, 1848,
the greatest war of the streets that history has ever beheld.

It sometimes happens that, even contrary to principles, even contrary
to liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote,
even contrary to the government, by all for all, from the depths
of its anguish, of its discouragements and its destitutions,
of its fevers, of its distresses, of its miasmas, of its ignorances,
of its darkness, that great and despairing body, the rabble,
protests against, and that the populace wages battle against,
the people.

Beggars attack the common right; the ochlocracy rises against demos.

These are melancholy days; for there is always a certain
amount of night even in this madness, there is suicide in
this duel, and those words which are intended to be insults--
beggars, canaille, ochlocracy, populace--exhibit, alas! rather
the fault of those who reign than the fault of those who suffer;
rather the fault of the privileged than the fault of the disinherited.

For our own part, we never pronounce those words without pain
and without respect, for when philosophy fathoms the facts to which
they correspond, it often finds many a grandeur beside these miseries. 
Athens was an ochlocracy; the beggars were the making of Holland;
the populace saved Rome more than once; and the rabble followed
Jesus Christ.

There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the magnificences
of the lower classes.

It was of this rabble that Saint Jerome was thinking, no doubt,
and of all these poor people and all these vagabonds and all
these miserable people whence sprang the apostles and the martyrs,
when he uttered this mysterious saying:  "Fex urbis, lex orbis,"--
the dregs of the city, the law of the earth.

The exasperations of this crowd which suffers and bleeds,
its violences contrary to all sense, directed against the principles
which are its life, its masterful deeds against the right, are its
popular coups d'etat and should be repressed.  The man of probity
sacrifices himself, and out of his very love for this crowd,
he combats it.  But how excusable he feels it even while holding
out against it!  How he venerates it even while resisting it! 
This is one of those rare moments when, while doing that which it
is one's duty to do, one feels something which disconcerts one,
and which would dissuade one from proceeding further; one persists,
it is necessary, but conscience, though satisfied, is sad, and the
accomplishment of duty is complicated with a pain at the heart.

June, 1848, let us hasten to say, was an exceptional fact, and almost
impossible of classification, in the philosophy of history. 
All the words which we have just uttered, must be discarded, when it
becomes a question of this extraordinary revolt, in which one feels
the holy anxiety of toil claiming its rights.  It was necessary
to combat it, and this was a duty, for it attacked the republic. 
But what was June, 1848, at bottom?  A revolt of the people
against itself.

Where the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression;
may we, then, be permitted to arrest the reader's attention for a
moment on the two absolutely unique barricades of which we have
just spoken and which characterized this insurrection.

One blocked the entrance to the Faubourg Saint Antoine; the other
defended the approach to the Faubourg du Temple; those before whom
these two fearful masterpieces of civil war reared themselves
beneath the brilliant blue sky of June, will never forget them.

The Saint-Antoine barricade was tremendous; it was three stories high,
and seven hundred feet wide.  It barred the vast opening of
the faubourg, that is to say, three streets, from angle to angle;
ravined, jagged, cut up, divided, crenelated, with an immense rent,
buttressed with piles that were bastions in themselves throwing out
capes here and there, powerfully backed up by two great promontories
of houses of the faubourg, it reared itself like a cyclopean dike
at the end of the formidable place which had seen the 14th of July. 
Nineteen barricades were ranged, one behind the other, in the depths
of the streets behind this principal barricade.  At the very sight
of it, one felt the agonizing suffering in the immense faubourg,
which had reached that point of extremity when a distress may
become a catastrophe.  Of what was that barricade made?  Of the
ruins of three six-story houses demolished expressly, said some. 
Of the prodigy of all wraths, said others.  It wore the lamentable
aspect of all constructions of hatred, ruin.  It might be asked: 
Who built this?  It might also be said:  Who destroyed this? 
It was the improvisation of the ebullition.  Hold! take this
door! this grating! this penthouse! this chimney-piece! this
broken brazier! this cracked pot!  Give all! cast away all! 
Push this roll, dig, dismantle, overturn, ruin everything! 
It was the collaboration of the pavement, the block of stone,
the beam, the bar of iron, the rag, the scrap, the broken pane,
the unseated chair, the cabbage-stalk, the tatter, the rag,
and the malediction.  It was grand and it was petty.  It was the abyss
parodied on the public place by hubbub.  The mass beside the atom;
the strip of ruined wall and the broken bowl,--threatening fraternization
of every sort of rubbish.  Sisyphus had thrown his rock there
and Job his potsherd.  Terrible, in short.  It was the acropolis
of the barefooted.  Overturned carts broke the uniformity of
the slope; an immense dray was spread out there crossways, its axle
pointing heavenward, and seemed a scar on that tumultuous facade;
an omnibus hoisted gayly, by main force, to the very summit
of the heap, as though the architects of this bit of savagery had
wished to add a touch of the street urchin humor to their terror,
presented its horseless, unharnessed pole to no one knows what
horses of the air.  This gigantic heap, the alluvium of the revolt,
figured to the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all revolutions; '93 on '89,
the 9th of Thermidor on the 10th of August, the 18th of Brumaire
on the 11th of January, Vendemiaire on Prairial, 1848 on 1830. 
The situation deserved the trouble and this barricade was worthy
to figure on the very spot whence the Bastille had disappeared. 
If the ocean made dikes, it is thus that it would build. 
The fury of the flood was stamped upon this shapeless mass. 
What flood?  The crowd.  One thought one beheld hubbub petrified. 
One thought one heard humming above this barricade as though there
had been over their hive, enormous, dark bees of violent progress. 
Was it a thicket?  Was it a bacchanalia?  Was it a fortress? 
Vertigo seemed to have constructed it with blows of its wings. 
There was something of the cess-pool in that redoubt and something
Olympian in that confusion.  One there beheld in a pell-mell
full of despair, the rafters of roofs, bits of garret windows
with their figured paper, window sashes with their glass planted
there in the ruins awaiting the cannon, wrecks of chimneys,
cupboards, tables, benches, howling topsyturveydom, and those
thousand poverty-stricken things, the very refuse of the mendicant,
which contain at the same time fury and nothingness.  One would have
said that it was the tatters of a people, rags of wood, of iron,
of bronze, of stone, and that the Faubourg Saint Antoine had thrust
it there at its door, with a colossal flourish of the broom making
of its misery its barricade.  Blocks resembling headsman's blocks,
dislocated chains, pieces of woodwork with brackets having the
form of gibbets, horizontal wheels projecting from the rubbish,
amalgamated with this edifice of anarchy the sombre figure of the
old tortures endured by the people.  The barricade Saint Antoine
converted everything into a weapon; everything that civil war could
throw at the head of society proceeded thence; it was not combat,
it was a paroxysm; the carbines which defended this redoubt,
among which there were some blunderbusses, sent bits of earthenware
bones, coat-buttons, even the casters from night-stands, dangerous
projectiles on account of the brass.  This barricade was furious;
it hurled to the clouds an inexpressible clamor; at certain moments,
when provoking the army, it was covered with throngs and tempest;
a tumultuous crowd of flaming heads crowned it; a swarm filled it;
it had a thorny crest of guns, of sabres, of cudgels, of axes,
of pikes and of bayonets; a vast red flag flapped in the wind;
shouts of command, songs of attack, the roll of drums, the sobs
of women and bursts of gloomy laughter from the starving were to
be heard there.  It was huge and living, and, like the back of an
electric beast, there proceeded from it little flashes of lightning. 
The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit where
rumbled that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God;
a strange majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish. 
It was a heap of filth and it was Sinai.

As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of
the revolution--what?  The revolution.  It--that barricade,
chance, hazard, disorder, terror, misunderstanding, the unknown--
had facing it the Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty
of the people, universal suffrage, the nation, the republic;
and it was the Carmagnole bidding defiance to the Marseillaise.

Immense but heroic defiance, for the old faubourg is a hero.

The faubourg and its redoubt lent each other assistance.  The faubourg
shouldered the redoubt, the redoubt took its stand under cover
of the faubourg.  The vast barricade spread out like a cliff against
which the strategy of the African generals dashed itself.  Its caverns,
its excrescences, its warts, its gibbosities, grimaced, so to speak,
and grinned beneath the smoke.  The mitraille vanished in shapelessness;
the bombs plunged into it; bullets only succeeded in making holes
in it; what was the use of cannonading chaos? and the regiments,
accustomed to the fiercest visions of war, gazed with uneasy eyes
on that species of redoubt, a wild beast in its boar-like bristling
and a mountain by its enormous size.

A quarter of a league away, from the corner of the Rue du Temple
which debouches on the boulevard near the Chateaud'Eau, if one
thrust one's head bodily beyond the point formed by the front of the
Dallemagne shop, one perceived in the distance, beyond the canal,
in the street which mounts the slopes of Belleville at the culminating
point of the rise, a strange wall reaching to the second story of
the house fronts, a sort of hyphen between the houses on the right
and the houses on the left, as though the street had folded back
on itself its loftiest wall in order to close itself abruptly. 
This wall was built of paving-stones. It was straight, correct, cold,
perpendicular, levelled with the square, laid out by rule and line. 
Cement was lacking, of course, but, as in the case of certain
Roman walls, without interfering with its rigid architecture. 
The entablature was mathematically parallel with the base. 
From distance to distance, one could distinguish on the gray surface,
almost invisible loopholes which resembled black threads. 
These loopholes were separated from each other by equal spaces. 
The street was deserted as far as the eye could reach.  All windows
and doors were closed.  In the background rose this barrier, which made
a blind thoroughfare of the street, a motionless and tranquil wall;
no one was visible, nothing was audible; not a cry, not a sound,
not a breath.  A sepulchre.

The dazzling sun of June inundated this terrible thing with light.

It was the barricade of the Faubourg of the Temple.

As soon as one arrived on the spot, and caught sight of it,
it was impossible, even for the boldest, not to become thoughtful
before this mysterious apparition.  It was adjusted, jointed,
imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical and funereal.  Science and
gloom met there.  One felt that the chief of this barricade
was a geometrician or a spectre.  One looked at it and spoke low.

From time to time, if some soldier, an officer or representative
of the people, chanced to traverse the deserted highway, a faint,
sharp whistle was heard, and the passer-by fell dead or wounded, or,
if he escaped the bullet, sometimes a biscaien was seen to ensconce
itself in some closed shutter, in the interstice between two blocks
of stone, or in the plaster of a wall.  For the men in the barricade
had made themselves two small cannons out of two cast-iron lengths
of gas-pipe, plugged up at one end with tow and fire-clay.
There was no waste of useless powder.  Nearly every shot told. 
There were corpses here and there, and pools of blood on the pavement. 
I remember a white butterfly which went and came in the street. 
Summer does not abdicate.

In the neighborhood, the spaces beneath the portes cocheres were
encumbered with wounded.

One felt oneself aimed at by some person whom one did not see,
and one understood that guns were levelled at the whole length
of the street.

Massed behind the sort of sloping ridge which the vaulted canal
forms at the entrance to the Faubourg du Temple, the soldiers
of the attacking column, gravely and thoughtfully, watched this
dismal redoubt, this immobility, this passivity, whence sprang death. 
Some crawled flat on their faces as far as the crest of the curve
of the bridge, taking care that their shakos did not project beyond it.

The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired this barricade with a
shudder.--"How that is built!" he said to a Representative. 
"Not one paving-stone projects beyond its neighbor.  It is made
of porcelain."--At that moment, a bullet broke the cross on his breast,
and he fell.

"The cowards!" people said.  "Let them show themselves.  Let us
see them!  They dare not!  They are hiding!"

The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men,
attacked by ten thousand, held out for three days.  On the fourth,
they did as at Zaatcha, as at Constantine, they pierced the houses,
they came over the roofs, the barricade was taken.  Not one
of the eighty cowards thought of flight, all were killed there
with the exception of the leader, Barthelemy, of whom we shall
speak presently.

The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders; the barricade
of the Temple was silence.  The difference between these two redoubts
was the difference between the formidable and the sinister. 
One seemed a maw; the other a mask.

Admitting that the gigantic and gloomy insurrection of June was
composed of a wrath and of an enigma, one divined in the first
barricade the dragon, and behind the second the sphinx.

These two fortresses had been erected by two men named,
the one, Cournet, the other, Barthelemy.  Cournet made the
Saint-Antoine barricade; Barthelemy the barricade of the Temple. 
Each was the image of the man who had built it.

Cournet was a man of lofty stature; he had broad shoulders, a red face,
a crushing fist, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible eye. 
Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy; the most cordial of men,
the most formidable of combatants.  War, strife, conflict, were the
very air he breathed and put him in a good humor.  He had been an
officer in the navy, and, from his gestures and his voice, one divined
that he sprang from the ocean, and that he came from the tempest;
he carried the hurricane on into battle.  With the exception
of the genius, there was in Cournet something of Danton, as, with
the exception of the divinity, there was in Danton something of Hercules.

Barthelemy, thin, feeble, pale, taciturn, was a sort of tragic
street urchin, who, having had his ears boxed by a policeman,
lay in wait for him, and killed him, and at seventeen was sent
to the galleys.  He came out and made this barricade.

Later on, fatal circumstance, in London, proscribed by all,
Barthelemy slew Cournet.  It was a funereal duel.  Some time afterwards,
caught in the gearing of one of those mysterious adventures in
which passion plays a part, a catastrophe in which French justice
sees extenuating circumstances, and in which English justice sees
only death, Barthelemy was hanged.  The sombre social construction
is so made that, thanks to material destitution, thanks to
moral obscurity, that unhappy being who possessed an intelligence,
certainly firm, possibly great, began in France with the galleys,
and ended in England with the gallows.  Barthelemy, on occasion,
flew but one flag, the black flag.



CHAPTER II

WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN THE ABYSS IF ONE DOES NOT CONVERSE


Sixteen years count in the subterranean education of insurrection,
and June, 1848, knew a great deal more about it than June, 1832. 
So the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie was only an outline,
and an embryo compared to the two colossal barricades which we have
just sketched; but it was formidable for that epoch.

The insurgents under the eye of Enjolras, for Marius no longer looked
after anything, had made good use of the night.  The barricade had
been not only repaired, but augmented.  They had raised it two feet. 
Bars of iron planted in the pavement resembled lances in rest. 
All sorts of rubbish brought and added from all directions complicated
the external confusion.  The redoubt had been cleverly made over,
into a wall on the inside and a thicket on the outside.

The staircase of paving-stones which permitted one to mount it
like the wall of a citadel had been reconstructed.

The barricade had been put in order, the tap-room disencumbered,
the kitchen appropriated for the ambulance, the dressing of the
wounded completed, the powder scattered on the ground and on the
tables had been gathered up, bullets run, cartridges manufactured,
lint scraped, the fallen weapons re-distributed, the interior
of the redoubt cleaned, the rubbish swept up, corpses removed.

They laid the dead in a heap in the Mondetour lane, of which they were
still the masters.  The pavement was red for a long time at that spot. 
Among the dead there were four National Guardsmen of the suburbs. 
Enjolras had their uniforms laid aside.

Enjolras had advised two hours of sleep.  Advice from Enjolras
was a command.  Still, only three or four took advantage of it.

Feuilly employed these two hours in engraving this inscription
on the wall which faced the tavern:--

                     LONG LIVE THE PEOPLES!

These four words, hollowed out in the rough stone with a nail,
could be still read on the wall in 1848.

The three women had profited by the respite of the night to
vanish definitely; which allowed the insurgents to breathe more freely.

They had found means of taking refuge in some neighboring house.

The greater part of the wounded were able, and wished, to fight still. 
On a litter of mattresses and trusses of straw in the kitchen,
which had been converted into an ambulance, there were five men
gravely wounded, two of whom were municipal guardsmen.  The municipal
guardsmen were attended to first.

In the tap-room there remained only Mabeuf under his black cloth
and Javert bound to his post.

"This is the hall of the dead," said Enjolras.

In the interior of this hall, barely lighted by a candle at one end,
the mortuary table being behind the post like a horizontal bar,
a sort of vast, vague cross resulted from Javert erect and Mabeuf
lying prone.

The pole of the omnibus, although snapped off by the fusillade,
was still sufficiently upright to admit of their fastening the flag
to it.

Enjolras, who possessed that quality of a leader, of always doing
what he said, attached to this staff the bullet-ridden and bloody
coat of the old man's.

No repast had been possible.  There was neither bread nor meat. 
The fifty men in the barricade had speedily exhausted the scanty
provisions of the wine-shop during the sixteen hours which they had
passed there.  At a given moment, every barricade inevitably becomes
the raft of la Meduse.  They were obliged to resign themselves to hunger. 
They had then reached the first hours of that Spartan day of the 6th
of June when, in the barricade Saint-Merry, Jeanne, surrounded by the
insurgents who demanded bread, replied to all combatants crying: 
"Something to eat!" with:  "Why?  It is three o'clock; at four we
shall be dead."

As they could no longer eat, Enjolras forbade them to drink. 
He interdicted wine, and portioned out the brandy.

They had found in the cellar fifteen full bottles hermetically sealed. 
Enjolras and Combeferre examined them.  Combeferre when he
came up again said:--"It's the old stock of Father Hucheloup,
who began business as a grocer."--"It must be real wine,"
observed Bossuet.  "It's lucky that Grantaire is asleep.  If he
were on foot, there would be a good deal of difficulty in saving
those bottles."--Enjolras, in spite of all murmurs, placed his veto
on the fifteen bottles, and, in order that no one might touch them,
he had them placed under the table on which Father Mabeuf was lying.

About two o'clock in the morning, they reckoned up their strength. 
There were still thirty-seven of them.

The day began to dawn.  The torch, which had been replaced in its
cavity in the pavement, had just been extinguished.  The interior
of the barricade, that species of tiny courtyard appropriated from
the street, was bathed in shadows, and resembled, athwart the vague,
twilight horror, the deck of a disabled ship.  The combatants,
as they went and came, moved about there like black forms. 
Above that terrible nesting-place of gloom the stories of the mute
houses were lividly outlined; at the very top, the chimneys
stood palely out.  The sky was of that charming, undecided hue,
which may be white and may be blue.  Birds flew about in it with cries
of joy.  The lofty house which formed the back of the barricade,
being turned to the East, had upon its roof a rosy reflection. 
The morning breeze ruffled the gray hair on the head of the dead man
at the third-story window.

"I am delighted that the torch has been extinguished," said Courfeyrac
to Feuilly.  "That torch flickering in the wind annoyed me. 
It had the appearance of being afraid.  The light of torches resembles
the wisdom of cowards; it gives a bad light because it trembles."

Dawn awakens minds as it does the birds; all began to talk.

Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter, extracted philosophy
from it.

"What is the cat?" he exclaimed.  "It is a corrective.  The good God,
having made the mouse, said:  `Hullo! I have committed a blunder.' 
And so he made the cat.  The cat is the erratum of the mouse. 
The mouse, plus the cat, is the proof of creation revised
and corrected."

Combeferre, surrounded by students and artisans, was speaking
of the dead, of Jean Prouvaire, of Bahorel, of Mabeuf, and even
of Cabuc, and of Enjolras' sad severity.  He said:--

"Harmodius and Aristogiton, Brutus, Chereas, Stephanus, Cromwell,
Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of agony when it
was too late.  Our hearts quiver so, and human life is such a
mystery that, even in the case of a civic murder, even in a murder
for liberation, if there be such a thing, the remorse for having
struck a man surpasses the joy of having served the human race."

And, such are the windings of the exchange of speech, that, a moment
later, by a transition brought about through Jean Prouvaire's verses,
Combeferre was comparing the translators of the Georgics,
Raux with Cournand, Cournand with Delille, pointing out the passages
translated by Malfilatre, particularly the prodigies of Caesar's death;
and at that word, Caesar, the conversation reverted to Brutus.

"Caesar," said Combeferre, "fell justly.  Cicero was severe towards
Caesar, and he was right.  That severity is not diatribe.  When Zoilus
insults Homer, when Maevius insults Virgil, when Vise insults Moliere,
when Pope insults Shakspeare, when Frederic insults Voltaire,
it is an old law of envy and hatred which is being carried out;
genius attracts insult, great men are always more or less barked at. 
But Zoilus and Cicero are two different persons.  Cicero is an arbiter
in thought, just as Brutus is an arbiter by the sword.  For my own part,
I blame that last justice, the blade; but, antiquity admitted it. 
Caesar, the violator of the Rubicon, conferring, as though they
came from him, the dignities which emanated from the people,
not rising at the entrance of the senate, committed the acts
of a king and almost of a tyrant, regia ac pene tyrannica. 
He was a great man; so much the worse, or so much the better;
the lesson is but the more exalted.  His twenty-three wounds
touch me less than the spitting in the face of Jesus Christ. 
Caesar is stabbed by the senators; Christ is cuffed by lackeys. 
One feels the God through the greater outrage."

Bossuet, who towered above the interlocutors from the summit
of a heap of paving-stones, exclaimed, rifle in hand:--

"Oh Cydathenaeum, Oh Myrrhinus, Oh Probalinthus, Oh graces of
the AEantides!  Oh!  Who will grant me to pronounce the verses
of Homer like a Greek of Laurium or of Edapteon?"



CHAPTER III

LIGHT AND SHADOW


Enjolras had been to make a reconnaissance.  He had made his way
out through Mondetour lane, gliding along close to the houses.

The insurgents, we will remark, were full of hope.  The manner in which
they had repulsed the attack of the preceding night had caused them
to almost disdain in advance the attack at dawn.  They waited for it
with a smile.  They had no more doubt as to their success than as to
their cause.  Moreover, succor was, evidently, on the way to them. 
They reckoned on it.  With that facility of triumphant prophecy
which is one of the sources of strength in the French combatant,
they divided the day which was at hand into three distinct phases. 
At six o'clock in the morning a regiment "which had been
labored with," would turn; at noon, the insurrection of all Paris;
at sunset, revolution.

They heard the alarm bell of Saint-Merry, which had not been silent
for an instant since the night before; a proof that the other barricade,
the great one, Jeanne's, still held out.

All these hopes were exchanged between the different groups in a
sort of gay and formidable whisper which resembled the warlike
hum of a hive of bees.

Enjolras reappeared.  He returned from his sombre eagle flight
into outer darkness.  He listened for a moment to all this joy
with folded arms, and one hand on his mouth.  Then, fresh and rosy
in the growing whiteness of the dawn, he said:

"The whole army of Paris is to strike.  A third of the army is bearing
down upon the barricades in which you now are.  There is the National
Guard in addition.  I have picked out the shakos of the fifth of the line,
and the standard-bearers of the sixth legion.  In one hour you will
be attacked.  As for the populace, it was seething yesterday, to-day it
is not stirring.  There is nothing to expect; nothing to hope for. 
Neither from a faubourg nor from a regiment.  You are abandoned."

These words fell upon the buzzing of the groups, and produced on them
the effect caused on a swarm of bees by the first drops of a storm. 
A moment of indescribable silence ensued, in which death might have
been heard flitting by.

This moment was brief.

A voice from the obscurest depths of the groups shouted to Enjolras:

"So be it.  Let us raise the barricade to a height of twenty feet,
and let us all remain in it.  Citizens, let us offer the protests
of corpses.  Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans,
the republicans do not abandon the people."

These words freed the thought of all from the painful cloud of
individual anxieties.  It was hailed with an enthusiastic acclamation.

No one ever has known the name of the man who spoke thus; he was some
unknown blouse-wearer, a stranger, a man forgotten, a passing hero,
that great anonymous, always mingled in human crises and in social
geneses who, at a given moment, utters in a supreme fashion
the decisive word, and who vanishes into the shadows after having
represented for a minute, in a lightning flash, the people and God.

This inexorable resolution so thoroughly impregnated the air
of the 6th of June, 1832, that, almost at the very same hour,
on the barricade Saint-Merry, the insurgents were raising that clamor
which has become a matter of history and which has been consigned
to the documents in the case:--"What matters it whether they come
to our assistance or not?  Let us get ourselves killed here,
to the very last man."

As the reader sees, the two barricades, though materially isolated,
were in communication with each other.



CHAPTER IV

MINUS FIVE, PLUS ONE


After the man who decreed the "protest of corpses" had spoken,
and had given this formula of their common soul, there issued from
all mouths a strangely satisfied and terrible cry, funereal in sense
and triumphant in tone:

"Long live death!  Let us all remain here!"

"Why all?" said Enjolras.

"All!  All!"

Enjolras resumed:

"The position is good; the barricade is fine.  Thirty men are enough. 
Why sacrifice forty?"

They replied:

"Because not one will go away."

"Citizens," cried Enjolras, and there was an almost irritated
vibration in his voice, "this republic is not rich enough in men
to indulge in useless expenditure of them.  Vain-glory is waste. 
If the duty of some is to depart, that duty should be fulfilled
like any other."

Enjolras, the man-principle, had over his co-religionists that sort
of omnipotent power which emanates from the absolute.  Still, great as
was this omnipotence, a murmur arose.  A leader to the very finger-tips,
Enjolras, seeing that they murmured, insisted.  He resumed haughtily:

"Let those who are afraid of not numbering more than thirty say so."

The murmurs redoubled.

"Besides," observed a voice in one group, "it is easy enough to talk
about leaving.  The barricade is hemmed in."

"Not on the side of the Halles," said Enjolras.  "The Rue Mondetour
is free, and through the Rue des Precheurs one can reach the Marche
des Innocents."

"And there," went on another voice, "you would be captured. 
You would fall in with some grand guard of the line or the suburbs;
they will spy a man passing in blouse and cap.  `Whence come you?' 
`Don't you belong to the barricade?'  And they will look at your hands. 
You smell of powder.  Shot."

Enjolras, without making any reply, touched Combeferre's shoulder,
and the two entered the tap-room.

They emerged thence a moment later.  Enjolras held in his
outstretched hands the four uniforms which he had laid aside. 
Combeferre followed, carrying the shoulder-belts and the shakos.

"With this uniform," said Enjolras, "you can mingle with the ranks
and escape; here is enough for four."  And he flung on the ground,
deprived of its pavement, the four uniforms.

No wavering took place in his stoical audience.  Combeferre took
the word.

"Come," said he, "you must have a little pity.  Do you know what the
question is here?  It is a question of women.  See here.  Are there
women or are there not?  Are there children or are there not? 
Are there mothers, yes or no, who rock cradles with their foot
and who have a lot of little ones around them?  Let that man of you
who has never beheld a nurse's breast raise his hand.  Ah! you
want to get yourselves killed, so do I--I, who am speaking to you;
but I do not want to feel the phantoms of women wreathing their
arms around me.  Die, if you will, but don't make others die. 
Suicides like that which is on the brink of accomplishment here
are sublime; but suicide is narrow, and does not admit of extension;
and as soon as it touches your neighbors, suicide is murder. 
Think of the little blond heads; think of the white locks. 
Listen, Enjolras has just told me that he saw at the corner of
the Rue du Cygne a lighted casement, a candle in a poor window,
on the fifth floor, and on the pane the quivering shadow of the head
of an old woman, who had the air of having spent the night in watching. 
Perhaps she is the mother of some one of you.  Well, let that man go,
and make haste, to say to his mother:  `Here I am, mother!'  Let him
feel at ease, the task here will be performed all the same. 
When one supports one's relatives by one's toil, one has not the
right to sacrifice one's self.  That is deserting one's family. 
And those who have daughters! what are you thinking of?  You get
yourselves killed, you are dead, that is well.  And tomorrow?  Young girls
without bread--that is a terrible thing.  Man begs, woman sells. 
Ah! those charming and gracious beings, so gracious and so sweet,
who have bonnets of flowers, who fill the house with purity, who sing
and prattle, who are like a living perfume, who prove the existence
of angels in heaven by the purity of virgins on earth, that Jeanne,
that Lise, that Mimi, those adorable and honest creatures who are your
blessings and your pride, ah! good God, they will suffer hunger! 
What do you want me to say to you?  There is a market for human flesh;
and it is not with your shadowy hands, shuddering around them,
that you will prevent them from entering it!  Think of the street,
think of the pavement covered with passers-by, think of the shops past
which women go and come with necks all bare, and through the mire. 
These women, too, were pure once.  Think of your sisters, those of
you who have them.  Misery, prostitution, the police, Saint-Lazare--
that is what those beautiful, delicate girls, those fragile marvels
of modesty, gentleness and loveliness, fresher than lilacs in the
month of May, will come to.  Ah! you have got yourselves killed! 
You are no longer on hand!  That is well; you have wished to release
the people from Royalty, and you deliver over your daughters to
the police.  Friends, have a care, have mercy.  Women, unhappy women,
we are not in the habit of bestowing much thought on them. 
We trust to the women not having received a man's education,
we prevent their reading, we prevent their thinking, we prevent
their occupying themselves with politics; will you prevent them from
going to the dead-house this evening, and recognizing your bodies? 
Let us see, those who have families must be tractable, and shake hands
with us and take themselves off, and leave us here alone to attend
to this affair.  I know well that courage is required to leave,
that it is hard; but the harder it is, the more meritorious. 
You say:  `I have a gun, I am at the barricade; so much the worse,
I shall remain there.'  So much the worse is easily said.  My friends,
there is a morrow; you will not be here to-morrow, but your families will;
and what sufferings!  See, here is a pretty, healthy child,
with cheeks like an apple, who babbles, prattles, chatters, who laughs,
who smells sweet beneath your kiss,--and do you know what becomes
of him when he is abandoned?  I have seen one, a very small creature,
no taller than that.  His father was dead.  Poor people had taken
him in out of charity, but they had bread only for themselves. 
The child was always hungry.  It was winter.  He did not cry. 
You could see him approach the stove, in which there was never
any fire, and whose pipe, you know, was of mastic and yellow clay. 
His breathing was hoarse, his face livid, his limbs flaccid,
his belly prominent.  He said nothing.  If you spoke to him,
he did not answer.  He is dead.  He was taken to the Necker Hospital,
where I saw him.  I was house-surgeon in that hospital.  Now, if there
are any fathers among you, fathers whose happiness it is to stroll
on Sundays holding their child's tiny hand in their robust hand,
let each one of those fathers imagine that this child is his own. 
That poor brat, I remember, and I seem to see him now, when he lay
nude on the dissecting table, how his ribs stood out on his skin
like the graves beneath the grass in a cemetery.  A sort of mud was
found in his stomach.  There were ashes in his teeth.  Come, let us
examine ourselves conscientiously and take counsel with our heart. 
Statistics show that the mortality among abandoned children is fifty-five
per cent.  I repeat, it is a question of women, it concerns mothers,
it concerns young girls, it concerns little children.  Who is talking
to you of yourselves?  We know well what you are; we know well that
you are all brave, parbleu! we know well that you all have in your
souls the joy and the glory of giving your life for the great cause;
we know well that you feel yourselves elected to die usefully
and magnificently, and that each one of you clings to his share
in the triumph.  Very well.  But you are not alone in this world. 
There are other beings of whom you must think.  You must not be
egoists."

All dropped their heads with a gloomy air.

Strange contradictions of the human heart at its most
sublime moments.  Combeferre, who spoke thus, was not an orphan. 
He recalled the mothers of other men, and forgot his own. 
He was about to get himself killed.  He was "an egoist."

Marius, fasting, fevered, having emerged in succession from all hope,
and having been stranded in grief, the most sombre of shipwrecks,
and saturated with violent emotions and conscious that the end
was near, had plunged deeper and deeper into that visionary stupor
which always precedes the fatal hour voluntarily accepted.

A physiologist might have studied in him the growing symptoms
of that febrile absorption known to, and classified by, science,
and which is to suffering what voluptuousness is to pleasure. 
Despair, also, has its ecstasy.  Marius had reached this point. 
He looked on at everything as from without; as we have said,
things which passed before him seemed far away; he made out the whole,
but did not perceive the details.  He beheld men going and coming
as through a flame.  He heard voices speaking as at the bottom
of an abyss.

But this moved him.  There was in this scene a point which
pierced and roused even him.  He had but one idea now, to die;
and he did not wish to be turned aside from it, but he reflected,
in his gloomy somnambulism, that while destroying himself,
he was not prohibited from saving some one else.

He raised his voice.

"Enjolras and Combeferre are right," said he; "no unnecessary sacrifice. 
I join them, and you must make haste.  Combeferre has said convincing
things to you.  There are some among you who have families,
mothers, sisters, wives, children.  Let such leave the ranks."

No one stirred.

"Married men and the supporters of families, step out of the ranks!"
repeated Marius.

His authority was great.  Enjolras was certainly the head
of the barricade, but Marius was its savior.

"I order it," cried Enjolras.

"I entreat you," said Marius.

Then, touched by Combeferre's words, shaken by Enjolras' order,
touched by Marius' entreaty, these heroic men began to denounce
each other.--"It is true," said one young man to a full grown man,
"you are the father of a family.  Go."--"It is your duty rather,"
retorted the man, "you have two sisters whom you maintain."--
And an unprecedented controversy broke forth.  Each struggled to
determine which should not allow himself to be placed at the door
of the tomb.

"Make haste," said Courfeyrac, "in another quarter of an hour it
will be too late."

"Citizens," pursued Enjolras, "this is the Republic, and universal
suffrage reigns.  Do you yourselves designate those who are to go."

They obeyed.  After the expiration of a few minutes, five were
unanimously selected and stepped out of the ranks.

"There are five of them!" exclaimed Marius.

There were only four uniforms.

"Well," began the five, "one must stay behind."

And then a struggle arose as to who should remain, and who should
find reasons for the others not remaining.  The generous quarrel
began afresh.

"You have a wife who loves you."--"You have your aged mother."--"
You have neither father nor mother, and what is to become of your
three little brothers?"--"You are the father of five children."--"You
have a right to live, you are only seventeen, it is too early
for you to die."

These great revolutionary barricades were assembling points for heroism. 
The improbable was simple there.  These men did not astonish each other.

"Be quick," repeated Courfeyrac.

Men shouted to Marius from the groups:

"Do you designate who is to remain."

"Yes," said the five, "choose.  We will obey you."

Marius did not believe that he was capable of another emotion. 
Still, at this idea, that of choosing a man for death, his blood
rushed back to his heart.  He would have turned pale, had it been
possible for him to become any paler.

He advanced towards the five, who smiled upon him, and each,
with his eyes full of that grand flame which one beholds in the
depths of history hovering over Thermopylae, cried to him:

"Me! me! me!"

And Marius stupidly counted them; there were still five of them! 
Then his glance dropped to the four uniforms.

At that moment, a fifth uniform fell, as if from heaven, upon the
other four.

The fifth man was saved.

Marius raised his eyes and recognized M. Fauchelevent.

Jean Valjean had just entered the barricade.

He had arrived by way of Mondetour lane, whither by dint of
inquiries made, or by instinct, or chance.  Thanks to his dress
of a National Guardsman, he had made his way without difficulty.

The sentinel stationed by the insurgents in the Rue Mondetour
had no occasion to give the alarm for a single National Guardsman,
and he had allowed the latter to entangle himself in the street,
saying to himself:  "Probably it is a reinforcement, in any case it
is a prisoner."  The moment was too grave to admit of the sentinel
abandoning his duty and his post of observation.

At the moment when Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, no one had
noticed him, all eyes being fixed on the five chosen men and the
four uniforms.  Jean Valjean also had seen and heard, and he
had silently removed his coat and flung it on the pile with the rest.

The emotion aroused was indescribable.

"Who is this man?" demanded Bossuet.

"He is a man who saves others," replied Combeferre.

Marius added in a grave voice:

"I know him."

This guarantee satisfied every one.

Enjolras turned to Jean Valjean.

"Welcome, citizen."

And he added:

"You know that we are about to die."

Jean Valjean, without replying, helped the insurgent whom he was
saving to don his uniform.



CHAPTER V

THE HORIZON WHICH ONE BEHOLDS FROM THE SUMMIT OF A BARRICADE


The situation of all in that fatal hour and that pitiless place,
had as result and culminating point Enjolras' supreme melancholy.

Enjolras bore within him the plenitude of the revolution;
he was incomplete, however, so far as the absolute can be so;
he had too much of Saint-Just about him, and not enough of
Anacharsis Cloots; still, his mind, in the society of the Friends
of the A B C, had ended by undergoing a certain polarization from
Combeferre's ideas; for some time past, he had been gradually emerging
from the narrow form of dogma, and had allowed himself to incline
to the broadening influence of progress, and he had come to accept,
as a definitive and magnificent evolution, the transformation
of the great French Republic, into the immense human republic. 
As far as the immediate means were concerned, a violent situation
being given, he wished to be violent; on that point, he never varied;
and he remained of that epic and redoubtable school which is
summed up in the words:  "Eighty-three." Enjolras was standing
erect on the staircase of paving-stones, one elbow resting on
the stock of his gun.  He was engaged in thought; he quivered,
as at the passage of prophetic breaths; places where death is
have these effects of tripods.  A sort of stifled fire darted
from his eyes, which were filled with an inward look.  All at once
he threw back his head, his blond locks fell back like those of
an angel on the sombre quadriga made of stars, they were like
the mane of a startled lion in the flaming of an halo, and Enjolras cried:

"Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves?  The streets
of cities inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds,
nations sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past
loving the present, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on
terms of full equality, for religion heaven, God the direct priest,
human conscience become an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity
of the workshop and the school, for sole penalty and recompense fame,
work for all, right for all, peace over all, no more bloodshed,
no more wars, happy mothers!  To conquer matter is the first step;
to realize the ideal is the second.  Reflect on what progress has
already accomplished.  Formerly, the first human races beheld
with terror the hydra pass before their eyes, breathing on
the waters, the dragon which vomited flame, the griffin who was
the monster of the air, and who flew with the wings of an eagle
and the talons of a tiger; fearful beasts which were above man. 
Man, nevertheless, spread his snares, consecrated by intelligence,
and finally conquered these monsters.  We have vanquished the hydra,
and it is called the locomotive; we are on the point of vanquishing
the griffin, we already grasp it, and it is called the balloon. 
On the day when this Promethean task shall be accomplished,
and when man shall have definitely harnessed to his will the triple
Chimaera of antiquity, the hydra, the dragon and the griffin,
he will be the master of water, fire, and of air, and he will be
for the rest of animated creation that which the ancient gods
formerly were to him.  Courage, and onward!  Citizens, whither are
we going?  To science made government, to the force of things
become the sole public force, to the natural law, having in itself
its sanction and its penalty and promulgating itself by evidence,
to a dawn of truth corresponding to a dawn of day.  We are advancing
to the union of peoples; we are advancing to the unity of man. 
No more fictions; no more parasites.  The real governed by the true,
that is the goal.  Civilization will hold its assizes at the
summit of Europe, and, later on, at the centre of continents,
in a grand parliament of the intelligence.  Something similar
has already been seen.  The amphictyons had two sittings a year,
one at Delphos the seat of the gods, the other at Thermopylae,
the place of heroes.  Europe will have her amphictyons; the globe
will have its amphictyons.  France bears this sublime future
in her breast.  This is the gestation of the nineteenth century. 
That which Greece sketched out is worthy of being finished by France. 
Listen to me, you, Feuilly, valiant artisan, man of the people. 
I revere you.  Yes, you clearly behold the future, yes, you are right. 
You had neither father nor mother, Feuilly; you adopted humanity
for your mother and right for your father.  You are about to die,
that is to say to triumph, here.  Citizens, whatever happens
to-day, through our defeat as well as through our victory, it is
a revolution that we are about to create.  As conflagrations light
up a whole city, so revolutions illuminate the whole human race. 
And what is the revolution that we shall cause?  I have just told you,
the Revolution of the True.  From a political point of view,
there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over himself. 
This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty.  Where two
or three of these sovereignties are combined, the state begins. 
But in that association there is no abdication.  Each sovereignty
concedes a certain quantity of itself, for the purpose of forming
the common right.  This quantity is the same for all of us. 
This identity of concession which each makes to all, is called Equality. 
Common right is nothing else than the protection of all beaming
on the right of each.  This protection of all over each is
called Fraternity.  The point of intersection of all these assembled
sovereignties is called society.  This intersection being a junction,
this point is a knot.  Hence what is called the social bond. 
Some say social contract; which is the same thing, the word
contract being etymologically formed with the idea of a bond. 
Let us come to an understanding about equality; for, if liberty is
the summit, equality is the base.  Equality, citizens, is not wholly
a surface vegetation, a society of great blades of grass and tiny oaks;
a proximity of jealousies which render each other null and void;
legally speaking, it is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity;
politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight;
religiously, it is all consciences possessed of the same right. 
Equality has an organ:  gratuitous and obligatory instruction. 
The right to the alphabet, that is where the beginning must
be made.  The primary school imposed on all, the secondary school
offered to all, that is the law.  From an identical school,
an identical society will spring.  Yes, instruction! light! light!
everything comes from light, and to it everything returns. 
Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century
will be happy.  Then, there will be nothing more like the history
of old, we shall no longer, as to-day, have to fear a conquest,
an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand,
an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings,
on a birth in hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by
a congress, a dismemberment because of the failure of a dynasty,
a combat of two religions meeting face to face, like two bucks
in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we shall no longer have
to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising from distress,
misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the sword,
and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events. 
One might almost say:  There will be no more events.  We shall
be happy.  The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial
globe accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between
the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth,
as the planet around the light.  Friends, the present hour in which I
am addressing you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases
of the future.  A revolution is a toll.  Oh! the human race will
be delivered, raised up, consoled!  We affirm it on this barrier. 
Whence should proceed that cry of love, if not from the heights
of sacrifice?  Oh my brothers, this is the point of junction,
of those who think and of those who suffer; this barricade is
not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of iron;
it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. 
Here misery meets the ideal.  The day embraces the night,
and says to it:  `I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again
with me.'  From the embrace of all desolations faith leaps forth. 
Sufferings bring hither their agony and ideas their immortality. 
This agony and this immortality are about to join and constitute
our death.  Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance
of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the
dawn."

Enjolras paused rather than became silent; his lips continued to
move silently, as though he were talking to himself, which caused
them all to gaze attentively at him, in the endeavor to hear more. 
There was no applause; but they whispered together for a long time. 
Speech being a breath, the rustling of intelligences resembles the
rustling of leaves.



CHAPTER VI

MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC


Let us narrate what was passing in Marius' thoughts.

Let the reader recall the state of his soul.  We have just recalled it,
everything was a vision to him now.  His judgment was disturbed. 
Marius, let us insist on this point, was under the shadow of the great,
dark wings which are spread over those in the death agony. 
He felt that he had entered the tomb, it seemed to him that he
was already on the other side of the wall, and he no longer beheld
the faces of the living except with the eyes of one dead.

How did M. Fauchelevent come there?  Why was he there?  What had
he come there to do?  Marius did not address all these questions
to himself.  Besides, since our despair has this peculiarity,
that it envelops others as well as ourselves, it seemed logical
to him that all the world should come thither to die.

Only, he thought of Cosette with a pang at his heart.

However, M. Fauchelevent did not speak to him, did not look at him,
and had not even the air of hearing him, when Marius raised his voice
to say:  "I know him."

As far as Marius was concerned, this attitude of M. Fauchelevent
was comforting, and, if such a word can be used for such impressions,
we should say that it pleased him.  He had always felt the absolute
impossibility of addressing that enigmatical man, who was,
in his eyes, both equivocal and imposing.  Moreover, it had been
a long time since he had seen him; and this still further augmented
the impossibility for Marius' timid and reserved nature.

The five chosen men left the barricade by way of Mondetour lane;
they bore a perfect resemblance to members of the National Guard. 
One of them wept as he took his leave.  Before setting out,
they embraced those who remained.

When the five men sent back to life had taken their departure,
Enjolras thought of the man who had been condemned to death.

He entered the tap-room. Javert, still bound to the post, was engaged
in meditation.

"Do you want anything?"  Enjolras asked him.

"Javert replied:  "When are you going to kill me?"

"Wait.  We need all our cartridges just at present."

"Then give me a drink," said Javert.

Enjolras himself offered him a glass of water, and, as Javert
was pinioned, he helped him to drink.

"Is that all?" inquired Enjolras.

"I am uncomfortable against this post," replied Javert. 
"You are not tender to have left me to pass the night here. 
Bind me as you please, but you surely might lay me out on a table
like that other man."

And with a motion of the head, he indicated the body of M. Mabeuf.

There was, as the reader will remember, a long, broad table
at the end of the room, on which they had been running bullets
and making cartridges.  All the cartridges having been made,
and all the powder used, this table was free.

At Enjolras' command, four insurgents unbound Javert from the post. 
While they were loosing him, a fifth held a bayonet against his breast.

Leaving his arms tied behind his back, they placed about his feet a
slender but stout whip-cord, as is done to men on the point of mounting
the scaffold, which allowed him to take steps about fifteen inches
in length, and made him walk to the table at the end of the room,
where they laid him down, closely bound about the middle of the body.

By way of further security, and by means of a rope fastened to his neck,
they added to the system of ligatures which rendered every attempt
at escape impossible, that sort of bond which is called in prisons
a martingale, which, starting at the neck, forks on the stomach,
and meets the hands, after passing between the legs.

While they were binding Javert, a man standing on the threshold
was surveying him with singular attention.  The shadow cast by this
man made Javert turn his head.  He raised his eyes, and recognized
Jean Valjean.  He did not even start, but dropped his lids proudly
and confined himself to the remark:  "It is perfectly simple."



CHAPTER VII

THE SITUATION BECOMES AGGRAVATED


The daylight was increasing rapidly.  Not a window was opened,
not a door stood ajar; it was the dawn but not the awaking. 
The end of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, opposite the barricade, had been
evacuated by the troops, as we have stated it seemed to be free,
and presented itself to passers-by with a sinister tranquillity. 
The Rue Saint-Denis was as dumb as the avenue of Sphinxes at Thebes. 
Not a living being in the cross-roads, which gleamed white in the light
of the sun.  Nothing is so mournful as this light in deserted streets. 
Nothing was to be seen, but there was something to be heard. 
A mysterious movement was going on at a certain distance. 
It was evident that the critical moment was approaching.  As on
the previous evening, the sentinels had come in; but this time all
had come.

The barricade was stronger than on the occasion of the first attack. 
Since the departure of the five, they had increased its height
still further.

On the advice of the sentinel who had examined the region of
the Halles, Enjolras, for fear of a surprise in the rear, came to
a serious decision.  He had the small gut of the Mondetour lane,
which had been left open up to that time, barricaded.  For this purpose,
they tore up the pavement for the length of several houses more. 
In this manner, the barricade, walled on three streets, in front
on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, to the left on the Rues du Cygne and de
la Petite Truanderie, to the right on the Rue Mondetour, was really
almost impregnable; it is true that they were fatally hemmed in there. 
It had three fronts, but no exit.--"A fortress but a rat hole too,"
said Courfeyrac with a laugh.

Enjolras had about thirty paving-stones "torn up in excess,"
said Bossuet, piled up near the door of the wine-shop.

The silence was now so profound in the quarter whence the attack must
needs come, that Enjolras had each man resume his post of battle.

An allowance of brandy was doled out to each.

Nothing is more curious than a barricade preparing for an assault. 
Each man selects his place as though at the theatre.  They jostle,
and elbow and crowd each other.  There are some who make stalls
of paving-stones. Here is a corner of the wall which is in the way,
it is removed; here is a redan which may afford protection,
they take shelter behind it.  Left-handed men are precious;
they take the places that are inconvenient to the rest.  Many arrange
to fight in a sitting posture.  They wish to be at ease to kill,
and to die comfortably.  In the sad war of June, 1848, an insurgent
who was a formidable marksman, and who was firing from the top of a
terrace upon a roof, had a reclining-chair brought there for his use;
a charge of grape-shot found him out there.

As soon as the leader has given the order to clear the decks for action,
all disorderly movements cease; there is no more pulling from
one another; there are no more coteries; no more asides, there is
no more holding aloof; everything in their spirits converges in,
and changes into, a waiting for the assailants.  A barricade before
the arrival of danger is chaos; in danger, it is discipline itself. 
Peril produces order.

As soon as Enjolras had seized his double-barrelled rifle,
and had placed himself in a sort of embrasure which he had reserved
for himself, all the rest held their peace.  A series of faint,
sharp noises resounded confusedly along the wall of paving-stones.
It was the men cocking their guns.

Moreover, their attitudes were prouder, more confident than ever;
the excess of sacrifice strengthens; they no longer cherished any hope,
but they had despair, despair,--the last weapon, which sometimes
gives victory; Virgil has said so.  Supreme resources spring from
extreme resolutions.  To embark in death is sometimes the means
of escaping a shipwreck; and the lid of the coffin becomes a plank
of safety.

As on the preceding evening, the attention of all was directed,
we might almost say leaned upon, the end of the street, now lighted
up and visible.

They had not long to wait.  A stir began distinctly in the Saint-Leu
quarter, but it did not resemble the movement of the first attack. 
A clashing of chains, the uneasy jolting of a mass, the click
of brass skipping along the pavement, a sort of solemn uproar,
announced that some sinister construction of iron was approaching. 
There arose a tremor in the bosoms of these peaceful old streets,
pierced and built for the fertile circulation of interests and ideas,
and which are not made for the horrible rumble of the wheels
of war.

The fixity of eye in all the combatants upon the extremity
of the street became ferocious.

A cannon made its appearance.

Artillery-men were pushing the piece; it was in firing trim;
the fore-carriage had been detached; two upheld the gun-carriage,
four were at the wheels; others followed with the caisson. 
They could see the smoke of the burning lint-stock.

"Fire!" shouted Enjolras.

The whole barricade fired, the report was terrible; an avalanche
of smoke covered and effaced both cannon and men; after a few seconds,
the cloud dispersed, and the cannon and men re-appeared; the gun-crew
had just finished rolling it slowly, correctly, without haste,
into position facing the barricade.  Not one of them had been struck. 
Then the captain of the piece, bearing down upon the breech in order
to raise the muzzle, began to point the cannon with the gravity
of an astronomer levelling a telescope.

"Bravo for the cannoneers!" cried Bossuet.

And the whole barricade clapped their hands.

A moment later, squarely planted in the very middle of the street,
astride of the gutter, the piece was ready for action.  A formidable
pair of jaws yawned on the barricade.

"Come, merrily now!" ejaculated Courfeyrac.  "That's the brutal
part of it.  After the fillip on the nose, the blow from the fist. 
The army is reaching out its big paw to us.  The barricade is going
to be severely shaken up.  The fusillade tries, the cannon takes."

"It is a piece of eight, new model, brass," added Combeferre. 
"Those pieces are liable to burst as soon as the proportion of ten
parts of tin to one hundred of brass is exceeded.  The excess
of tin renders them too tender.  Then it comes to pass that they
have caves and chambers when looked at from the vent hole.  In order
to obviate this danger, and to render it possible to force the charge,
it may become necessary to return to the process of the fourteenth
century, hooping, and to encircle the piece on the outside with a
series of unwelded steel bands, from the breech to the trunnions. 
In the meantime, they remedy this defect as best they may;
they manage to discover where the holes are located in the vent
of a cannon, by means of a searcher.  But there is a better method,
with Gribeauval's movable star."

"In the sixteenth century," remarked Bossuet, "they used to rifle cannon."

"Yes," replied Combeferre, "that augments the projectile force,
but diminishes the accuracy of the firing.  In firing at short range,
the trajectory is not as rigid as could be desired, the parabola
is exaggerated, the line of the projectile is no longer sufficiently
rectilinear to allow of its striking intervening objects, which is,
nevertheless, a necessity of battle, the importance of which increases
with the proximity of the enemy and the precipitation of the discharge. 
This defect of the tension of the curve of the projectile in the
rifled cannon of the sixteenth century arose from the smallness
of the charge; small charges for that sort of engine are imposed
by the ballistic necessities, such, for instance, as the preservation
of the gun-carriage. In short, that despot, the cannon, cannot do
all that it desires; force is a great weakness.  A cannon-ball only
travels six hundred leagues an hour; light travels seventy thousand
leagues a second.  Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon."

"Reload your guns," said Enjolras.

How was the casing of the barricade going to behave under the
cannon-balls? Would they effect a breach?  That was the question. 
While the insurgents were reloading their guns, the artillery-men
were loading the cannon.

The anxiety in the redoubt was profound.

The shot sped the report burst forth.

"Present!" shouted a joyous voice.

And Gavroche flung himself into the barricade just as the ball
dashed against it.

He came from the direction of the Rue du Cygne, and he had nimbly
climbed over the auxiliary barricade which fronted on the labyrinth
of the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.

Gavroche produced a greater sensation in the barricade than
the cannon-ball.

The ball buried itself in the mass of rubbish.  At the most there
was an omnibus wheel broken, and the old Anceau cart was demolished. 
On seeing this, the barricade burst into a laugh.

"Go on!" shouted Bossuet to the artillerists.



CHAPTER VIII

THE ARTILLERY-MEN COMPEL PEOPLE TO TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY


They flocked round Gavroche.  But he had no time to tell anything. 
Marius drew him aside with a shudder.

"What are you doing here?"

"Hullo!" said the child, "what are you doing here yourself?"

And he stared at Marius intently with his epic effrontery. 
His eyes grew larger with the proud light within them.

It was with an accent of severity that Marius continued:

"Who told you to come back?  Did you deliver my letter at the address?"

Gavroche was not without some compunctions in the matter of
that letter.  In his haste to return to the barricade, he had got
rid of it rather than delivered it.  He was forced to acknowledge
to himself that he had confided it rather lightly to that stranger
whose face he had not been able to make out.  It is true that
the man was bareheaded, but that was not sufficient.  In short,
he had been administering to himself little inward remonstrances
and he feared Marius' reproaches.  In order to extricate himself
from the predicament, he took the simplest course; he lied abominably.

"Citizen, I delivered the letter to the porter.  The lady was asleep. 
She will have the letter when she wakes up."

Marius had had two objects in sending that letter:  to bid farewell
to Cosette and to save Gavroche.  He was obliged to content himself
with the half of his desire.

The despatch of his letter and the presence of M. Fauchelevent
in the barricade, was a coincidence which occurred to him. 
He pointed out M. Fauchelevent to Gavroche.

"Do you know that man?"

"No," said Gavroche.

Gavroche had, in fact, as we have just mentioned, seen Jean Valjean
only at night.

The troubled and unhealthy conjectures which had outlined themselves
in Marius' mind were dissipated.  Did he know M. Fauchelevent's opinions? 
Perhaps M. Fauchelevent was a republican.  Hence his very natural
presence in this combat.

In the meanwhile, Gavroche was shouting, at the other end
of the barricade:  "My gun!"

Courfeyrac had it returned to him.

Gavroche warned "his comrades" as he called them, that the barricade
was blocked.  He had had great difficulty in reaching it. 
A battalion of the line whose arms were piled in the Rue de la Petite
Truanderie was on the watch on the side of the Rue du Cygne; on the
opposite side, the municipal guard occupied the Rue des Precheurs. 
The bulk of the army was facing them in front.

This information given, Gavroche added:

"I authorize you to hit 'em a tremendous whack."

Meanwhile, Enjolras was straining his ears and watching at his embrasure.

The assailants, dissatisfied, no doubt, with their shot, had not
repeated it.

A company of infantry of the line had come up and occupied the end
of the street behind the piece of ordnance.  The soldiers were
tearing up the pavement and constructing with the stones a small,
low wall, a sort of side-work not more than eighteen inches high,
and facing the barricade.  In the angle at the left of this epaulement,
there was visible the head of the column of a battalion from the
suburbs massed in the Rue Saint-Denis.

Enjolras, on the watch, thought he distinguished the peculiar
sound which is produced when the shells of grape-shot are drawn
from the caissons, and he saw the commander of the piece change the
elevation and incline the mouth of the cannon slightly to the left. 
Then the cannoneers began to load the piece.  The chief seized
the lint-stock himself and lowered it to the vent.

"Down with your heads, hug the wall!" shouted Enjolras, "and all
on your knees along the barricade!"

The insurgents who were straggling in front of the wine-shop,
and who had quitted their posts of combat on Gavroche's arrival,
rushed pell-mell towards the barricade; but before Enjolras'
order could be executed, the discharge took place with the terrifying
rattle of a round of grape-shot. This is what it was, in fact.

The charge had been aimed at the cut in the redoubt, and had there
rebounded from the wall; and this terrible rebound had produced
two dead and three wounded.

If this were continued, the barricade was no longer tenable. 
The grape-shot made its way in.

A murmur of consternation arose.

"Let us prevent the second discharge," said Enjolras.

And, lowering his rifle, he took aim at the captain of the gun,
who, at that moment, was bearing down on the breach of his gun
and rectifying and definitely fixing its pointing.

The captain of the piece was a handsome sergeant of artillery,
very young, blond, with a very gentle face, and the intelligent
air peculiar to that predestined and redoubtable weapon which,
by dint of perfecting itself in horror, must end in killing war.

Combeferre, who was standing beside Enjolras, scrutinized this
young man.

"What a pity!" said Combeferre.  "What hideous things these
butcheries are!  Come, when there are no more kings, there will
be no more war.  Enjolras, you are taking aim at that sergeant,
you are not looking at him.  Fancy, he is a charming young man;
he is intrepid; it is evident that he is thoughtful; those young
artillery-men are very well educated; he has a father, a mother,
a family; he is probably in love; he is not more than five and twenty
at the most; he might be your brother."

"He is," said Enjolras.

"Yes," replied Combeferre, "he is mine too.  Well, let us not
kill him."

"Let me alone.  It must be done."

And a tear trickled slowly down Enjolras' marble cheek.

At the same moment, he pressed the trigger of his rifle.  The flame
leaped forth.  The artillery-man turned round twice, his arms
extended in front of him, his head uplifted, as though for breath,
then he fell with his side on the gun, and lay there motionless. 
They could see his back, from the centre of which there flowed
directly a stream of blood.  The ball had traversed his breast
from side to side.  He was dead.

He had to be carried away and replaced by another.  Several minutes
were thus gained, in fact.



CHAPTER IX

EMPLOYMENT OF THE OLD TALENTS OF A POACHER AND THAT INFALLIBLE
MARKSMANSHIP WHICH INFLUENCED THE CONDEMNATION OF 1796


Opinions were exchanged in the barricade.  The firing from the gun
was about to begin again.  Against that grape-shot, they could not
hold out a quarter of an hour longer.  It was absolutely necessary
to deaden the blows.

Enjolras issued this command:

"We must place a mattress there."

"We have none," said Combeferre, "the wounded are lying on them."

Jean Valjean, who was seated apart on a stone post, at the corner
of the tavern, with his gun between his knees, had, up to that moment,
taken no part in anything that was going on.  He did not appear
to hear the combatants saying around him:  "Here is a gun that is
doing nothing."

At the order issued by Enjolras, he rose.

It will be remembered that, on the arrival of the rabble in the Rue
de la Chanvrerie, an old woman, foreseeing the bullets, had placed
her mattress in front of her window.  This window, an attic window,
was on the roof of a six-story house situated a little beyond
the barricade.  The mattress, placed cross-wise, supported at
the bottom on two poles for drying linen, was upheld at the top
by two ropes, which, at that distance, looked like two threads,
and which were attached to two nails planted in the window frames. 
These ropes were distinctly visible, like hairs, against the sky.

"Can some one lend me a double-barrelled rifle?" said Jean Valjean.

Enjolras, who had just re-loaded his, handed it to him.

Jean Valjean took aim at the attic window and fired.

One of the mattress ropes was cut.

The mattress now hung by one thread only.

Jean Valjean fired the second charge.  The second rope lashed
the panes of the attic window.  The mattress slipped between
the two poles and fell into the street.

The barricade applauded.

All voices cried:

"Here is a mattress!"

"Yes," said Combeferre, "but who will go and fetch it?"

The mattress had, in fact, fallen outside the barricade,
between besiegers and besieged.  Now, the death of the sergeant
of artillery having exasperated the troop, the soldiers had,
for several minutes, been lying flat on their stomachs behind
the line of paving-stones which they had erected, and, in order
to supply the forced silence of the piece, which was quiet while
its service was in course of reorganization, they had opened fire
on the barricade.  The insurgents did not reply to this musketry,
in order to spare their ammunition The fusillade broke against
the barricade; but the street, which it filled, was terrible.

Jean Valjean stepped out of the cut, entered the street,
traversed the storm of bullets, walked up to the mattress,
hoisted it upon his back, and returned to the barricade.

He placed the mattress in the cut with his own hands.  He fixed
it there against the wall in such a manner that the artillery-men
should not see it.

That done, they awaited the next discharge of grape-shot.

It was not long in coming.

The cannon vomited forth its package of buck-shot with a roar. 
But there was no rebound.  The effect which they had foreseen had
been attained.  The barricade was saved.

"Citizen," said Enjolras to Jean Valjean, "the Republic thanks you."

Bossuet admired and laughed.  He exclaimed:

"It is immoral that a mattress should have so much power. 
Triumph of that which yields over that which strikes with lightning. 
But never mind, glory to the mattress which annuls a cannon!"



CHAPTER X

DAWN


At that moment, Cosette awoke.

Her chamber was narrow, neat, unobtrusive, with a long sash-window,
facing the East on the back court-yard of the house.

Cosette knew nothing of what was going on in Paris.  She had not
been there on the preceding evening, and she had already retired
to her chamber when Toussaint had said:

"It appears that there is a row."

Cosette had slept only a few hours, but soundly.  She had had
sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little
bed was very white.  Some one, who was Marius, had appeared to her
in the light.  She awoke with the sun in her eyes, which, at first,
produced on her the effect of being a continuation of her dream. 
Her first thought on emerging from this dream was a smiling one. 
Cosette felt herself thoroughly reassured.  Like Jean Valjean,
she had, a few hours previously, passed through that reaction
of the soul which absolutely will not hear of unhappiness. 
She began to cherish hope, with all her might, without knowing why. 
Then she felt a pang at her heart.  It was three days since she
had seen Marius.  But she said to herself that he must have received
her letter, that he knew where she was, and that he was so clever
that he would find means of reaching her.--And that certainly
to-day, and perhaps that very morning.--It was broad daylight,
but the rays of light were very horizontal; she thought that it
was very early, but that she must rise, nevertheless, in order to
receive Marius.

She felt that she could not live without Marius, and that,
consequently, that was sufficient and that Marius would come. 
No objection was valid.  All this was certain.  It was monstrous enough
already to have suffered for three days.  Marius absent three days,
this was horrible on the part of the good God.  Now, this cruel
teasing from on high had been gone through with.  Marius was about
to arrive, and he would bring good news.  Youth is made thus;
it quickly dries its eyes; it finds sorrow useless and does not
accept it.  Youth is the smile of the future in the presence of an
unknown quantity, which is itself.  It is natural to it to be happy. 
It seems as though its respiration were made of hope.

Moreover, Cosette could not remember what Marius had said to her
on the subject of this absence which was to last only one day,
and what explanation of it he had given her.  Every one has noticed
with what nimbleness a coin which one has dropped on the ground rolls
away and hides, and with what art it renders itself undiscoverable. 
There are thoughts which play us the same trick; they nestle away
in a corner of our brain; that is the end of them; they are lost;
it is impossible to lay the memory on them.  Cosette was somewhat vexed
at the useless little effort made by her memory.  She told herself,
that it was very naughty and very wicked of her, to have forgotten
the words uttered by Marius.

She sprang out of bed and accomplished the two ablutions of soul
and body, her prayers and her toilet.

One may, in a case of exigency, introduce the reader into
a nuptial chamber, not into a virginal chamber.  Verse would
hardly venture it, prose must not.

It is the interior of a flower that is not yet unfolded, it is
whiteness in the dark, it is the private cell of a closed lily,
which must not be gazed upon by man so long as the sun has not
gazed upon it.  Woman in the bud is sacred.  That innocent bud
which opens, that adorable half-nudity which is afraid of itself,
that white foot which takes refuge in a slipper, that throat
which veils itself before a mirror as though a mirror were an eye,
that chemise which makes haste to rise up and conceal the shoulder
for a creaking bit of furniture or a passing vehicle, those cords tied,
those clasps fastened, those laces drawn, those tremors, those shivers
of cold and modesty, that exquisite affright in every movement,
that almost winged uneasiness where there is no cause for alarm,
the successive phases of dressing, as charming as the clouds of dawn,--
it is not fitting that all this should be narrated, and it is too much
to have even called attention to it.

The eye of man must be more religious in the presence of the rising
of a young girl than in the presence of the rising of a star. 
The possibility of hurting should inspire an augmentation of respect. 
The down on the peach, the bloom on the plum, the radiated crystal of
the snow, the wing of the butterfly powdered with feathers, are coarse
compared to that chastity which does not even know that it is chaste. 
The young girl is only the flash of a dream, and is not yet a statue. 
Her bed-chamber is hidden in the sombre part of the ideal. 
The indiscreet touch of a glance brutalizes this vague penumbra. 
Here, contemplation is profanation.

We shall, therefore, show nothing of that sweet little flutter
of Cosette's rising.

An oriental tale relates how the rose was made white by God,
but that Adam looked upon her when she was unfolding, and she
was ashamed and turned crimson.  We are of the number who fall
speechless in the presence of young girls and flowers, since we
think them worthy of veneration.

Cosette dressed herself very hastily, combed and dressed her hair,
which was a very simple matter in those days, when women did not
swell out their curls and bands with cushions and puffs, and did
not put crinoline in their locks.  Then she opened the window
and cast her eyes around her in every direction, hoping to descry
some bit of the street, an angle of the house, an edge of pavement,
so that she might be able to watch for Marius there.  But no view
of the outside was to be had.  The back court was surrounded by
tolerably high walls, and the outlook was only on several gardens. 
Cosette pronounced these gardens hideous:  for the first time
in her life, she found flowers ugly.  The smallest scrap of the
gutter of the street would have met her wishes better.  She decided
to gaze at the sky, as though she thought that Marius might come
from that quarter.

All at once, she burst into tears.  Not that this was fickleness
of soul; but hopes cut in twain by dejection--that was her case. 
She had a confused consciousness of something horrible.  Thoughts were
rife in the air, in fact.  She told herself that she was not sure
of anything, that to withdraw herself from sight was to be lost;
and the idea that Marius could return to her from heaven appeared
to her no longer charming but mournful.

Then, as is the nature of these clouds, calm returned to her,
and hope and a sort of unconscious smile, which yet indicated trust
in God.

Every one in the house was still asleep.  A country-like silence reigned. 
Not a shutter had been opened.  The porter's lodge was closed. 
Toussaint had not risen, and Cosette, naturally, thought that her
father was asleep.  She must have suffered much, and she must have
still been suffering greatly, for she said to herself, that her
father had been unkind; but she counted on Marius.  The eclipse
of such a light was decidedly impossible.  Now and then, she heard
sharp shocks in the distance, and she said:  "It is odd that people
should be opening and shutting their carriage gates so early." 
They were the reports of the cannon battering the barricade.

A few feet below Cosette's window, in the ancient and perfectly
black cornice of the wall, there was a martin's nest; the curve
of this nest formed a little projection beyond the cornice,
so that from above it was possible to look into this little paradise. 
The mother was there, spreading her wings like a fan over her brood;
the father fluttered about, flew away, then came back, bearing in
his beak food and kisses.  The dawning day gilded this happy thing,
the great law, "Multiply," lay there smiling and august, and that sweet
mystery unfolded in the glory of the morning.  Cosette, with her hair
in the sunlight, her soul absorbed in chimeras, illuminated by love
within and by the dawn without, bent over mechanically, and almost
without daring to avow to herself that she was thinking at the same
time of Marius, began to gaze at these birds, at this family,
at that male and female, that mother and her little ones,
with the profound trouble which a nest produces on a virgin.



CHAPTER XI

THE SHOT WHICH MISSES NOTHING AND KILLS NO ONE


The assailants' fire continued.  Musketry and grape-shot alternated,
but without committing great ravages, to tell the truth.  The top
alone of the Corinthe facade suffered; the window on the first floor,
and the attic window in the roof, riddled with buck-shot and biscaiens,
were slowly losing their shape.  The combatants who had been posted
there had been obliged to withdraw.  However, this is according
to the tactics of barricades; to fire for a long while, in order
to exhaust the insurgents' ammunition, if they commit the mistake
of replying.  When it is perceived, from the slackening of their fire,
that they have no more powder and ball, the assault is made. 
Enjolras had not fallen into this trap; the barricade did not reply.

At every discharge by platoons, Gavroche puffed out his cheek
with his tongue, a sign of supreme disdain.

"Good for you," said he, "rip up the cloth.  We want some lint."

Courfeyrac called the grape-shot to order for the little effect
which it produced, and said to the cannon:

"You are growing diffuse, my good fellow."

One gets puzzled in battle, as at a ball.  It is probable that this
silence on the part of the redoubt began to render the besiegers uneasy,
and to make them fear some unexpected incident, and that they felt
the necessity of getting a clear view behind that heap of paving-stones,
and of knowing what was going on behind that impassable wall
which received blows without retorting.  The insurgents suddenly
perceived a helmet glittering in the sun on a neighboring roof. 
A fireman had placed his back against a tall chimney, and seemed to
be acting as sentinel.  His glance fell directly down into the barricade.

"There's an embarrassing watcher," said Enjolras.

Jean Valjean had returned Enjolras' rifle, but he had his own gun.

Without saying a word, he took aim at the fireman, and, a second later,
the helmet, smashed by a bullet, rattled noisily into the street. 
The terrified soldier made haste to disappear.  A second observer
took his place.  This one was an officer.  Jean Valjean, who had
re-loaded his gun, took aim at the newcomer and sent the officer's
casque to join the soldier's. The officer did not persist,
and retired speedily.  This time the warning was understood. 
No one made his appearance thereafter on that roof; and the idea
of spying on the barricade was abandoned.

"Why did you not kill the man?"  Bossuet asked Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean made no reply.



CHAPTER XII

DISORDER A PARTISAN OF ORDER


Bossuet muttered in Combeferre's ear:

"He did not answer my question."

"He is a man who does good by gun-shots," said Combeferre.

Those who have preserved some memory of this already distant
epoch know that the National Guard from the suburbs was valiant
against insurrections.  It was particularly zealous and intrepid
in the days of June, 1832.  A certain good dram-shop keeper of
Pantin des Vertus or la Cunette, whose "establishment" had been
closed by the riots, became leonine at the sight of his deserted
dance-hall, and got himself killed to preserve the order represented
by a tea-garden. In that bourgeois and heroic time, in the presence
of ideas which had their knights, interests had their paladins. 
The prosiness of the originators detracted nothing from the
bravery of the movement.  The diminution of a pile of crowns made
bankers sing the Marseillaise.  They shed their blood lyrically
for the counting-house; and they defended the shop, that immense
diminutive of the fatherland, with Lacedaemonian enthusiasm.

At bottom, we will observe, there was nothing in all this that was
not extremely serious.  It was social elements entering into strife,
while awaiting the day when they should enter into equilibrium.

Another sign of the times was the anarchy mingled with governmentalism
[the barbarous name of the correct party]. People were for order
in combination with lack of discipline.

The drum suddenly beat capricious calls, at the command of such or such
a Colonel of the National Guard; such and such a captain went into
action through inspiration; such and such National Guardsmen fought,
"for an idea," and on their own account.  At critical moments, on "days"
they took counsel less of their leaders than of their instincts. 
There existed in the army of order, veritable guerilleros, some of
the sword, like Fannicot, others of the pen, like Henri Fonfrede.

Civilization, unfortunately, represented at this epoch rather
by an aggregation of interests than by a group of principles,
was or thought itself, in peril; it set up the cry of alarm;
each, constituting himself a centre, defended it, succored it,
and protected it with his own head; and the first comer took
it upon himself to save society.

Zeal sometimes proceeded to extermination.  A platoon of the National
Guard would constitute itself on its own authority a private council
of war, and judge and execute a captured insurgent in five minutes. 
It was an improvisation of this sort that had slain Jean Prouvaire. 
Fierce Lynch law, with which no one party had any right to reproach
the rest, for it has been applied by the Republic in America,
as well as by the monarchy in Europe.  This Lynch law was complicated
with mistakes.  On one day of rioting, a young poet, named Paul
Aime Garnier, was pursued in the Place Royale, with a bayonet at
his loins, and only escaped by taking refuge under the porte-cochere
of No. 6.  They shouted:--"There's another of those Saint-Simonians!"
and they wanted to kill him.  Now, he had under his arm a volume
of the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. A National Guard had read
the words Saint-Simon on the book, and had shouted:  "Death!"

On the 6th of June, 1832, a company of the National Guards from
the suburbs, commanded by the Captain Fannicot, above mentioned,
had itself decimated in the Rue de la Chanvrerie out of caprice
and its own good pleasure.  This fact, singular though it may seem,
was proved at the judicial investigation opened in consequence
of the insurrection of 1832.  Captain Fannicot, a bold and impatient
bourgeois, a sort of condottiere of the order of those whom we have
just characterized, a fanatical and intractable governmentalist,
could not resist the temptation to fire prematurely, and the ambition
of capturing the barricade alone and unaided, that is to say,
with his company.  Exasperated by the successive apparition of
the red flag and the old coat which he took for the black flag,
he loudly blamed the generals and chiefs of the corps, who were
holding council and did not think that the moment for the decisive
assault had arrived, and who were allowing "the insurrection to fry
in its own fat," to use the celebrated expression of one of them. 
For his part, he thought the barricade ripe, and as that which is
ripe ought to fall, he made the attempt.

He commanded men as resolute as himself, "raging fellows," as a witness
said.  His company, the same which had shot Jean Prouvaire the poet,
was the first of the battalion posted at the angle of the street. 
At the moment when they were least expecting it, the captain launched
his men against the barricade.  This movement, executed with
more good will than strategy, cost the Fannicot company dear. 
Before it had traversed two thirds of the street it was received
by a general discharge from the barricade.  Four, the most audacious,
who were running on in front, were mown down point-blank at the very
foot of the redoubt, and this courageous throng of National Guards,
very brave men but lacking in military tenacity, were forced to fall back,
after some hesitation, leaving fifteen corpses on the pavement. 
This momentary hesitation gave the insurgents time to re-load
their weapons, and a second and very destructive discharge struck
the company before it could regain the corner of the street,
its shelter.  A moment more, and it was caught between two fires,
and it received the volley from the battery piece which,
not having received the order, had not discontinued its firing.

The intrepid and imprudent Fannicot was one of the dead from this
grape-shot. He was killed by the cannon, that is to say, by order.

This attack, which was more furious than serious,
irritated Enjolras.--"The fools!" said he.  "They are getting
their own men killed and they are using up our ammunition for nothing."

Enjolras spoke like the real general of insurrection which he was. 
Insurrection and repression do not fight with equal weapons. 
Insurrection, which is speedily exhausted, has only a certain number
of shots to fire and a certain number of combatants to expend. 
An empty cartridge-box, a man killed, cannot be replaced.  As repression
has the army, it does not count its men, and, as it has Vincennes,
it does not count its shots.  Repression has as many regiments
as the barricade has men, and as many arsenals as the barricade has
cartridge-boxes. Thus they are struggles of one against a hundred,
which always end in crushing the barricade; unless the revolution,
uprising suddenly, flings into the balance its flaming archangel's sword. 
This does happen sometimes.  Then everything rises, the pavements
begin to seethe, popular redoubts abound.  Paris quivers supremely,
the quid divinum is given forth, a 10th of August is in the air,
a 29th of July is in the air, a wonderful light appears, the yawning
maw of force draws back, and the army, that lion, sees before it,
erect and tranquil, that prophet, France.



CHAPTER XIII

PASSING GLEAMS


In the chaos of sentiments and passions which defend a barricade,
there is a little of everything; there is bravery, there is youth,
honor, enthusiasm, the ideal, conviction, the rage of the gambler,
and, above all, intermittences of hope.

One of these intermittences, one of these vague quivers of hope
suddenly traversed the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie
at the moment when it was least expected.

"Listen," suddenly cried Enjolras, who was still on the watch,
"it seems to me that Paris is waking up."

It is certain that, on the morning of the 6th of June, the insurrection
broke out afresh for an hour or two, to a certain extent. 
The obstinacy of the alarm peal of Saint-Merry reanimated
some fancies.  Barricades were begun in the Rue du Poirier and the Rue
des Gravilliers.  In front of the Porte Saint-Martin, a young man,
armed with a rifle, attacked alone a squadron of cavalry. 
In plain sight, on the open boulevard, he placed one knee on the ground,
shouldered his weapon, fired, killed the commander of the squadron,
and turned away, saying:  "There's another who will do us no more harm."

He was put to the sword.  In the Rue Saint-Denis, a woman fired
on the National Guard from behind a lowered blind.  The slats
of the blind could be seen to tremble at every shot.  A child
fourteen years of age was arrested in the Rue de la Cossonerie,
with his pockets full of cartridges.  Many posts were attacked. 
At the entrance to the Rue Bertin-Poiree, a very lively and
utterly unexpected fusillade welcomed a regiment of cuirrassiers,
at whose head marched Marshal General Cavaignac de Barague. 
In the Rue Planche-Mibray, they threw old pieces of pottery and
household utensils down on the soldiers from the roofs; a bad sign;
and when this matter was reported to Marshal Soult, Napoleon's old
lieutenant grew thoughtful, as he recalled Suchet's saying at Saragossa: 
"We are lost when the old women empty their pots de chambre on
our heads."

These general symptoms which presented themselves at the moment
when it was thought that the uprising had been rendered local,
this fever of wrath, these sparks which flew hither and thither above
those deep masses of combustibles which are called the faubourgs
of Paris,--all this, taken together, disturbed the military chiefs. 
They made haste to stamp out these beginnings of conflagration.

They delayed the attack on the barricades Maubuee, de la Chanvrerie
and Saint-Merry until these sparks had been extinguished, in order
that they might have to deal with the barricades only and be able
to finish them at one blow.  Columns were thrown into the streets
where there was fermentation, sweeping the large, sounding the small,
right and left, now slowly and cautiously, now at full charge. 
The troops broke in the doors of houses whence shots had been fired;
at the same time, manoeuvres by the cavalry dispersed the groups
on the boulevards.  This repression was not effected without
some commotion, and without that tumultuous uproar peculiar to
collisions between the army and the people.  This was what Enjolras
had caught in the intervals of the cannonade and the musketry. 
Moreover, he had seen wounded men passing the end of the street
in litters, and he said to Courfeyrac:--"Those wounded do not come
from us."

Their hope did not last long; the gleam was quickly eclipsed. 
In less than half an hour, what was in the air vanished, it was
a flash of lightning unaccompanied by thunder, and the insurgents
felt that sort of leaden cope, which the indifference of the people
casts over obstinate and deserted men, fall over them once more.

The general movement, which seemed to have assumed a vague outline,
had miscarried; and the attention of the minister of war and the
strategy of the generals could now be concentrated on the three
or four barricades which still remained standing.

The sun was mounting above the horizon.

An insurgent hailed Enjolras.

"We are hungry here.  Are we really going to die like this,
without anything to eat?"

Enjolras, who was still leaning on his elbows at his embrasure,
made an affirmative sign with his head, but without taking his eyes
from the end of the street.



CHAPTER XIV

WHEREIN WILL APPEAR THE NAME OF ENJOLRAS' MISTRESS


Courfeyrac, seated on a paving-stone beside Enjolras,
continued to insult the cannon, and each time that that gloomy
cloud of projectiles which is called grape-shot passed overhead
with its terrible sound he assailed it with a burst of irony.

"You are wearing out your lungs, poor, brutal, old fellow, you pain me,
you are wasting your row.  That's not thunder, it's a cough."

And the bystanders laughed.

Courfeyrac and Bossuet, whose brave good humor increased with
the peril, like Madame Scarron, replaced nourishment with pleasantry,
and, as wine was lacking, they poured out gayety to all.

"I admire Enjolras," said Bossuet.  "His impassive temerity
astounds me.  He lives alone, which renders him a little sad, perhaps;
Enjolras complains of his greatness, which binds him to widowhood. 
The rest of us have mistresses, more or less, who make us crazy,
that is to say, brave.  When a man is as much in love as a tiger,
the least that he can do is to fight like a lion.  That is one way
of taking our revenge for the capers that mesdames our grisettes play
on us.  Roland gets himself killed for Angelique; all our heroism
comes from our women.  A man without a woman is a pistol without
a trigger; it is the woman that sets the man off.  Well, Enjolras has
no woman.  He is not in love, and yet he manages to be intrepid. 
It is a thing unheard of that a man should be as cold as ice and as
bold as fire."

Enjolras did not appear to be listening, but had any one been near him,
that person would have heard him mutter in a low voice:  "Patria."

Bossuet was still laughing when Courfeyrac exclaimed:

"News!"

And assuming the tone of an usher making an announcement, he added:

"My name is Eight-Pounder."

In fact, a new personage had entered on the scene.  This was
a second piece of ordnance.

The artillery-men rapidly performed their manoeuvres in force
and placed this second piece in line with the first.

This outlined the catastrophe.

A few minutes later, the two pieces, rapidly served, were firing
point-blank at the redoubt; the platoon firing of the line
and of the soldiers from the suburbs sustained the artillery.

Another cannonade was audible at some distance.  At the same time
that the two guns were furiously attacking the redoubt from the Rue
de la Chanvrerie, two other cannons, trained one from the Rue
Saint-Denis, the other from the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, were riddling
the Saint-Merry barricade.  The four cannons echoed each other mournfully.

The barking of these sombre dogs of war replied to each other.

One of the two pieces which was now battering the barricade on
the Rue de la Chanvrerie was firing grape-shot, the other balls.

The piece which was firing balls was pointed a little high,
and the aim was calculated so that the ball struck the extreme
edge of the upper crest of the barricade, and crumbled the stone
down upon the insurgents, mingled with bursts of grape-shot.

The object of this mode of firing was to drive the insurgents
from the summit of the redoubt, and to compel them to gather close
in the interior, that is to say, this announced the assault.

The combatants once driven from the crest of the barricade by balls,
and from the windows of the cabaret by grape-shot, the attacking columns
could venture into the street without being picked off, perhaps, even,
without being seen, could briskly and suddenly scale the redoubt,
as on the preceding evening, and, who knows? take it by surprise.

"It is absolutely necessary that the inconvenience of those guns
should be diminished," said Enjolras, and he shouted:  "Fire on
the artillery-men!"

All were ready.  The barricade, which had long been silent,
poured forth a desperate fire; seven or eight discharges followed,
with a sort of rage and joy; the street was filled with blinding smoke,
and, at the end of a few minutes, athwart this mist all streaked
with flame, two thirds of the gunners could be distinguished
lying beneath the wheels of the cannons.  Those who were left
standing continued to serve the pieces with severe tranquillity,
but the fire had slackened.

"Things are going well now," said Bossuet to Enjolras.  "Success."

Enjolras shook his head and replied:

"Another quarter of an hour of this success, and there will not
be any cartridges left in the barricade."

It appears that Gavroche overheard this remark.



CHAPTER XV

GAVROCHE OUTSIDE


Courfeyrac suddenly caught sight of some one at the base
of the barricade, outside in the street, amid the bullets.

Gavroche had taken a bottle basket from the wine-shop, had made
his way out through the cut, and was quietly engaged in emptying
the full cartridge-boxes of the National Guardsmen who had been
killed on the slope of the redoubt, into his basket.

"What are you doing there?" asked Courfeyrac.

Gavroche raised his face:--

"I'm filling my basket, citizen."

"Don't you see the grape-shot?"

Gavroche replied:

"Well, it is raining.  What then?"

Courfeyrac shouted:--"Come in!"

"Instanter," said Gavroche.

And with a single bound he plunged into the street.

It will be remembered that Fannicot's company had left behind
it a trail of bodies.  Twenty corpses lay scattered here and
there on the pavement, through the whole length of the street. 
Twenty cartouches for Gavroche meant a provision of cartridges
for the barricade.

The smoke in the street was like a fog.  Whoever has beheld a cloud
which has fallen into a mountain gorge between two peaked escarpments
can imagine this smoke rendered denser and thicker by two gloomy rows
of lofty houses.  It rose gradually and was incessantly renewed;
hence a twilight which made even the broad daylight turn pale. 
The combatants could hardly see each other from one end of the street
to the other, short as it was.

This obscurity, which had probably been desired and calculated on
by the commanders who were to direct the assault on the barricade,
was useful to Gavroche.

Beneath the folds of this veil of smoke, and thanks to his small size,
he could advance tolerably far into the street without being seen. 
He rifled the first seven or eight cartridge-boxes without
much danger.

He crawled flat on his belly, galloped on all fours, took his basket
in his teeth, twisted, glided, undulated, wound from one dead body
to another, and emptied the cartridge-box or cartouche as a monkey
opens a nut.

They did not dare to shout to him to return from the barricade,
which was quite near, for fear of attracting attention to him.

On one body, that of a corporal, he found a powder-flask.

"For thirst," said he, putting it in his pocket.

By dint of advancing, he reached a point where the fog of the
fusillade became transparent.  So that the sharpshooters of the
line ranged on the outlook behind their paving-stone dike and the
sharpshooters of the banlieue massed at the corner of the street
suddenly pointed out to each other something moving through the smoke.

At the moment when Gavroche was relieving a sergeant, who was lying
near a stone door-post, of his cartridges, a bullet struck the body.

"Fichtre!" ejaculated Gavroche.  "They are killing my dead men
for me."

A second bullet struck a spark from the pavement beside him.--
A third overturned his basket.

Gavroche looked and saw that this came from the men of the banlieue.

He sprang to his feet, stood erect, with his hair flying in the wind,
his hands on his hips, his eyes fixed on the National Guardsmen
who were firing, and sang:

      "On est laid a Nanterre,       "Men are ugly at Nanterre,
       C'est la faute a Voltaire;     'Tis the  fault of Voltaire;
       Et bete a Palaiseau,           And dull at Palaiseau,
       C'est la faute a Rousseau."    'Tis the fault of Rousseau."


Then he picked up his basket, replaced the cartridges which had
fallen from it, without missing a single one, and, advancing towards
the fusillade, set about plundering another cartridge-box. There
a fourth bullet missed him, again.  Gavroche sang:

       "Je ne suis pas notaire,      "I am not a notary,
        C'est la faute a Voltaire;    'Tis the fault of Voltaire;
        Je suis un petit oiseau,      I'm a little bird,
        C'est la faute a Rousseau."   'Tis the fault of Rousseau."

   A fifth bullet only succeeded in drawing from him a third couplet.

       "Joie est mon caractere,      "Joy is my character,
        C'est la faute a Voltaire;    'Tis the fault of Voltaire;
        Misere est mon trousseau,     Misery is my trousseau,
        C'est la faute a Rousseau."   'Tis the fault of Rousseau."


Thus it went on for some time.

It was a charming and terrible sight.  Gavroche, though shot at,
was teasing the fusillade.  He had the air of being greatly diverted. 
It was the sparrow pecking at the sportsmen.  To each discharge
he retorted with a couplet.  They aimed at him constantly,
and always missed him.  The National Guardsmen and the soldiers
laughed as they took aim at him.  He lay down, sprang to his feet,
hid in the corner of a doorway, then made a bound, disappeared,
re-appeared, scampered away, returned, replied to the grape-shot
with his thumb at his nose, and, all the while, went on pillaging
the cartouches, emptying the cartridge-boxes, and filling his basket. 
The insurgents, panting with anxiety, followed him with their eyes. 
The barricade trembled; he sang.  He was not a child, he was not a man;
he was a strange gamin-fairy. He might have been called the invulnerable
dwarf of the fray.  The bullets flew after him, he was more nimble
than they.  He played a fearful game of hide and seek with death;
every time that the flat-nosed face of the spectre approached,
the urchin administered to it a fillip.

One bullet, however, better aimed or more treacherous than the rest,
finally struck the will-o'-the-wisp of a child.  Gavroche was seen
to stagger, then he sank to the earth.  The whole barricade gave
vent to a cry; but there was something of Antaeus in that pygmy;
for the gamin to touch the pavement is the same as for the giant
to touch the earth; Gavroche had fallen only to rise again;
he remained in a sitting posture, a long thread of blood streaked
his face, he raised both arms in the air, glanced in the direction
whence the shot had come, and began to sing:


      "Je suis tombe par terre,     "I have fallen to the earth,
       C'est la faute a Voltaire;    'Tis the fault of Voltaire;
       Le nez dans le ruisseau,      With my nose in the gutter,
       C'est la faute a . . . "      'Tis the fault of . . . "


He did not finish.  A second bullet from the same marksman stopped
him short.  This time he fell face downward on the pavement,
and moved no more.  This grand little soul had taken its flight.



CHAPTER XVI

HOW FROM A BROTHER ONE BECOMES A FATHER


At that same moment, in the garden of the Luxembourg,--for the gaze
of the drama must be everywhere present,--two children were holding
each other by the hand.  One might have been seven years old,
the other five.  The rain having soaked them, they were walking along
the paths on the sunny side; the elder was leading the younger;
they were pale and ragged; they had the air of wild birds. 
The smaller of them said:  "I am very hungry."

The elder, who was already somewhat of a protector, was leading his
brother with his left hand and in his right he carried a small stick.

They were alone in the garden.  The garden was deserted, the gates had
been closed by order of the police, on account of the insurrection. 
The troops who had been bivouacking there had departed for the
exigencies of combat.

How did those children come there?  Perhaps they had escaped from
some guard-house which stood ajar; perhaps there was in the vicinity,
at the Barriere d'Enfer; or on the Esplanade de l'Observatoire,
or in the neighboring carrefour, dominated by the pediment
on which could be read:  Invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum,
some mountebank's booth from which they had fled; perhaps they had,
on the preceding evening, escaped the eye of the inspectors
of the garden at the hour of closing, and had passed the night
in some one of those sentry-boxes where people read the papers? 
The fact is, they were stray lambs and they seemed free.  To be astray
and to seem free is to be lost.  These poor little creatures were,
in fact, lost.

These two children were the same over whom Gavroche had been put to
some trouble, as the reader will recollect.  Children of the Thenardiers,
leased out to Magnon, attributed to M. Gillenormand, and now leaves
fallen from all these rootless branches, and swept over the ground
by the wind.  Their clothing, which had been clean in Magnon's day,
and which had served her as a prospectus with M. Gillenormand,
had been converted into rags.

Henceforth these beings belonged to the statistics
as "Abandoned children," whom the police
take note of, collect, mislay and find again on the pavements of Paris.

It required the disturbance of a day like that to account for these
miserable little creatures being in that garden.  If the superintendents
had caught sight of them, they would have driven such rags forth. 
Poor little things do not enter public gardens; still, people should
reflect that, as children, they have a right to flowers.

These children were there, thanks to the locked gates.  They were
there contrary to the regulations.  They had slipped into the garden
and there they remained.  Closed gates do not dismiss the inspectors,
oversight is supposed to continue, but it grows slack and reposes;
and the inspectors, moved by the public anxiety and more occupied
with the outside than the inside, no longer glanced into the garden,
and had not seen the two delinquents.

It had rained the night before, and even a little in the morning. 
But in June, showers do not count for much.  An hour after a storm,
it can hardly be seen that the beautiful blonde day has wept. 
The earth, in summer, is as quickly dried as the cheek of a child. 
At that period of the solstice, the light of full noonday is,
so to speak, poignant.  It takes everything.  It applies itself to
the earth, and superposes itself with a sort of suction.  One would
say that the sun was thirsty.  A shower is but a glass of water;
a rainstorm is instantly drunk up.  In the morning everything
was dripping, in the afternoon everything is powdered over.

Nothing is so worthy of admiration as foliage washed by the rain
and wiped by the rays of sunlight; it is warm freshness.  The gardens
and meadows, having water at their roots, and sun in their flowers,
become perfuming-pans of incense, and smoke with all their odors
at once.  Everything smiles, sings and offers itself.  One feels
gently intoxicated.  The springtime is a provisional paradise,
the sun helps man to have patience.

There are beings who demand nothing further; mortals, who, having
the azure of heaven, say:  "It is enough!" dreamers absorbed in
the wonderful, dipping into the idolatry of nature, indifferent to
good and evil, contemplators of cosmos and radiantly forgetful
of man, who do not understand how people can occupy themselves
with the hunger of these, and the thirst of those, with the nudity
of the poor in winter, with the lymphatic curvature of the little
spinal column, with the pallet, the attic, the dungeon, and the rags
of shivering young girls, when they can dream beneath the trees;
peaceful and terrible spirits they, and pitilessly satisfied. 
Strange to say, the infinite suffices them.  That great need of man,
the finite, which admits of embrace, they ignore.  The finite
which admits of progress and sublime toil, they do not think about. 
The indefinite, which is born from the human and divine combination
of the infinite and the finite, escapes them.  Provided that they are
face to face with immensity, they smile.  Joy never, ecstasy forever. 
Their life lies in surrendering their personality in contemplation. 
The history of humanity is for them only a detailed plan.  All is
not there; the true All remains without; what is the use of busying
oneself over that detail, man?  Man suffers, that is quite possible;
but look at Aldebaran rising!  The mother has no more milk,
the new-born babe is dying.  I know nothing about that, but just
look at this wonderful rosette which a slice of wood-cells of the
pine presents under the microscope!  Compare the most beautiful
Mechlin lace to that if you can!  These thinkers forget to love. 
The zodiac thrives with them to such a point that it prevents
their seeing the weeping child.  God eclipses their souls. 
This is a family of minds which are, at once, great and petty. 
Horace was one of them; so was Goethe.  La Fontaine perhaps;
magnificent egoists of the infinite, tranquil spectators of sorrow,
who do not behold Nero if the weather be fair, for whom the sun
conceals the funeral pile, who would look on at an execution by the
guillotine in the search for an effect of light, who hear neither
the cry nor the sob, nor the death rattle, nor the alarm peal,
for whom everything is well, since there is a month of May, who,
so long as there are clouds of purple and gold above their heads,
declare themselves content, and who are determined to be happy
until the radiance of the stars and the songs of the birds
are exhausted.

These are dark radiances.  They have no suspicion that they
are to be pitied.  Certainly they are so.  He who does not weep
does not see.  They are to be admired and pitied, as one would
both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes
beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.

The indifference of these thinkers, is, according to some,
a superior philosophy.  That may be; but in this superiority
there is some infirmity.  One may be immortal and yet limp: 
witness Vulcan.  One may be more than man and less than man. 
There is incomplete immensity in nature.  Who knows whether the sun
is not a blind man?

But then, what?  In whom can we trust?  Solem quis dicere falsum audeat? 
Who shall dare to say that the sun is false?  Thus certain geniuses,
themselves, certain Very-Lofty mortals, man-stars, may be mistaken? 
That which is on high at the summit, at the crest, at the zenith,
that which sends down so much light on the earth, sees but little,
sees badly, sees not at all?  Is not this a desperate state of things? 
No. But what is there, then, above the sun?  The god.

On the 6th of June, 1832, about eleven o'clock in the morning,
the Luxembourg, solitary and depopulated, was charming. 
The quincunxes and flower-beds shed forth balm and dazzling beauty
into the sunlight.  The branches, wild with the brilliant glow
of midday, seemed endeavoring to embrace.  In the sycamores there
was an uproar of linnets, sparrows triumphed, woodpeckers climbed
along the chestnut trees, administering little pecks on the bark. 
The flower-beds accepted the legitimate royalty of the lilies;
the most august of perfumes is that which emanates from whiteness. 
The peppery odor of the carnations was perceptible.  The old crows
of Marie de Medici were amorous in the tall trees.  The sun gilded,
empurpled, set fire to and lighted up the tulips, which are nothing
but all the varieties of flame made into flowers.  All around the
banks of tulips the bees, the sparks of these flame-flowers, hummed. 
All was grace and gayety, even the impending rain; this relapse,
by which the lilies of the valley and the honeysuckles were destined
to profit, had nothing disturbing about it; the swallows indulged
in the charming threat of flying low.  He who was there aspired
to happiness; life smelled good; all nature exhaled candor,
help, assistance, paternity, caress, dawn.  The thoughts which fell
from heaven were as sweet as the tiny hand of a baby when one
kisses it.

The statues under the trees, white and nude, had robes of shadow
pierced with light; these goddesses were all tattered with sunlight;
rays hung from them on all sides.  Around the great fountain,
the earth was already dried up to the point of being burnt. 
There was sufficient breeze to raise little insurrections of dust
here and there.  A few yellow leaves, left over from the autumn,
chased each other merrily, and seemed to be playing tricks on
each other.

This abundance of light had something indescribably reassuring
about it.  Life, sap, heat, odors overflowed; one was conscious,
beneath creation, of the enormous size of the source; in all these
breaths permeated with love, in this interchange of reverberations
and reflections, in this marvellous expenditure of rays, in this
infinite outpouring of liquid gold, one felt the prodigality of
the inexhaustible; and, behind this splendor as behind a curtain
of flame, one caught a glimpse of God, that millionaire of stars.

Thanks to the sand, there was not a speck of mud; thanks to the rain,
there was not a grain of ashes.  The clumps of blossoms had just
been bathed; every sort of velvet, satin, gold and varnish,
which springs from the earth in the form of flowers, was irreproachable. 
This magnificence was cleanly.  The grand silence of happy nature
filled the garden.  A celestial silence that is compatible with a
thousand sorts of music, the cooing of nests, the buzzing of swarms,
the flutterings of the breeze.  All the harmony of the season was
complete in one gracious whole; the entrances and exits of spring
took place in proper order; the lilacs ended; the jasmines began;
some flowers were tardy, some insects in advance of their time;
the van-guard of the red June butterflies fraternized with the
rear-guard of the white butterflies of May.  The plantain trees
were getting their new skins.  The breeze hollowed out undulations
in the magnificent enormity of the chestnut-trees. It was splendid. 
A veteran from the neighboring barracks, who was gazing through
the fence, said:  "Here is the Spring presenting arms and in
full uniform."

All nature was breakfasting; creation was at table; this was its hour;
the great blue cloth was spread in the sky, and the great green cloth
on earth; the sun lighted it all up brilliantly.  God was serving
the universal repast.  Each creature had his pasture or his mess. 
The ring-dove found his hemp-seed, the chaffinch found his millet,
the goldfinch found chickweed, the red-breast found worms, the green
finch found flies, the fly found infusoriae, the bee found flowers. 
They ate each other somewhat, it is true, which is the misery of evil
mixed with good; but not a beast of them all had an empty stomach.

The two little abandoned creatures had arrived in the vicinity
of the grand fountain, and, rather bewildered by all this light,
they tried to hide themselves, the instinct of the poor and the weak
in the presence of even impersonal magnificence; and they kept
behind the swans' hutch.

Here and there, at intervals, when the wind blew, shouts, clamor, a sort
of tumultuous death rattle, which was the firing, and dull blows,
which were discharges of cannon, struck the ear confusedly. 
Smoke hung over the roofs in the direction of the Halles.  A bell,
which had the air of an appeal, was ringing in the distance.

These children did not appear to notice these noises.  The little
one repeated from time to time:  "I am hungry."

Almost at the same instant with the children, another couple approached
the great basin.  They consisted of a goodman, about fifty years
of age, who was leading by the hand a little fellow of six.  No doubt,
a father and his son.  The little man of six had a big brioche.

At that epoch, certain houses abutting on the river, in the
Rues Madame and d'Enfer, had keys to the Luxembourg garden,
of which the lodgers enjoyed the use when the gates were shut,
a privilege which was suppressed later on.  This father and son
came from one of these houses, no doubt.

The two poor little creatures watched "that gentleman" approaching,
and hid themselves a little more thoroughly.

He was a bourgeois.  The same person, perhaps, whom Marius had
one day heard, through his love fever, near the same grand basin,
counselling his son "to avoid excesses."  He had an affable and haughty
air, and a mouth which was always smiling, since it did not shut. 
This mechanical smile, produced by too much jaw and too little skin,
shows the teeth rather than the soul.  The child, with his brioche,
which he had bitten into but had not finished eating, seemed satiated. 
The child was dressed as a National Guardsman, owing to the insurrection,
and the father had remained clad as a bourgeois out of prudence.

Father and son halted near the fountain where two swans were sporting. 
This bourgeois appeared to cherish a special admiration for the swans. 
He resembled them in this sense, that he walked like them.

For the moment, the swans were swimming, which is their
principal talent, and they were superb.

If the two poor little beings had listened and if they had been
of an age to understand, they might have gathered the words of this
grave man.  The father was saying to his son:

"The sage lives content with little.  Look at me, my son.  I do
not love pomp.  I am never seen in clothes decked with gold lace
and stones; I leave that false splendor to badly organized souls."

Here the deep shouts which proceeded from the direction of the
Halles burst out with fresh force of bell and uproar.

"What is that?" inquired the child.

The father replied:

"It is the Saturnalia."

All at once, he caught sight of the two little ragged boys behind
the green swan-hutch.

"There is the beginning," said he.

And, after a pause, he added:

"Anarchy is entering this garden."

In the meanwhile, his son took a bite of his brioche, spit it out,
and, suddenly burst out crying.

"What are you crying about?" demanded his father.

"I am not hungry any more," said the child.

The father's smile became more accentuated.

"One does not need to be hungry in order to eat a cake."

"My cake tires me.  It is stale."

"Don't you want any more of it?"

"No."

The father pointed to the swans.

"Throw it to those palmipeds."

The child hesitated.  A person may not want any more of his cake;
but that is no reason for giving it away.

The father went on:

"Be humane.  You must have compassion on animals."

And, taking the cake from his son, he flung it into the basin.

The cake fell very near the edge.

The swans were far away, in the centre of the basin, and busy
with some prey.  They had seen neither the bourgeois nor the brioche.

The bourgeois, feeling that the cake was in danger of being wasted,
and moved by this useless shipwreck, entered upon a telegraphic
agitation, which finally attracted the attention of the swans.

They perceived something floating, steered for the edge like ships,
as they are, and slowly directed their course toward the brioche,
with the stupid majesty which befits white creatures.

"The swans [cygnes] understand signs [signes]," said the bourgeois,
delighted to make a jest.

At that moment, the distant tumult of the city underwent another
sudden increase.  This time it was sinister.  There are some gusts
of wind which speak more distinctly than others.  The one which was
blowing at that moment brought clearly defined drum-beats, clamors,
platoon firing, and the dismal replies of the tocsin and the cannon. 
This coincided with a black cloud which suddenly veiled the sun.

The swans had not yet reached the brioche.

"Let us return home," said the father, "they are attacking
the Tuileries."

He grasped his son's hand again.  Then he continued:

"From the Tuileries to the Luxembourg, there is but the distance
which separates Royalty from the peerage; that is not far. 
Shots will soon rain down."

He glanced at the cloud.

"Perhaps it is rain itself that is about to shower down; the sky
is joining in; the younger branch is condemned.  Let us return
home quickly."

"I should like to see the swans eat the brioche," said the child.

The father replied:

"That would be imprudent."

And he led his little bourgeois away.

The son, regretting the swans, turned his head back toward the basin
until a corner of the quincunxes concealed it from him.

In the meanwhile, the two little waifs had approached the brioche
at the same time as the swans.  It was floating on the water. 
The smaller of them stared at the cake, the elder gazed after the
retreating bourgeois.

Father and son entered the labyrinth of walks which leads to the grand
flight of steps near the clump of trees on the side of the Rue Madame.

As soon as they had disappeared from view, the elder child hastily
flung himself flat on his stomach on the rounding curb of the basin,
and clinging to it with his left hand, and leaning over the water,
on the verge of falling in, he stretched out his right hand with his
stick towards the cake.  The swans, perceiving the enemy, made haste,
and in so doing, they produced an effect of their breasts which was of
service to the little fisher; the water flowed back before the swans,
and one of these gentle concentric undulations softly floated
the brioche towards the child's wand.  Just as the swans came up,
the stick touched the cake.  The child gave it a brisk rap, drew in
the brioche, frightened away the swans, seized the cake, and sprang
to his feet.  The cake was wet; but they were hungry and thirsty. 
The elder broke the cake into two portions, a large one and a small one,
took the small one for himself, gave the large one to his brother,
and said to him:

"Ram that into your muzzle."



CHAPTER XVII

MORTUUS PATER FILIUM MORITURUM EXPECTAT


Marius dashed out of the barricade, Combeferre followed him. 
But he was too late.  Gavroche was dead.  Combeferre brought back
the basket of cartridges; Marius bore the child.

"Alas!" he thought, "that which the father had done for his father,
he was requiting to the son; only, Thenardier had brought back his
father alive; he was bringing back the child dead."

When Marius re-entered the redoubt with Gavroche in his arms,
his face, like the child, was inundated with blood.

At the moment when he had stooped to lift Gavroche, a bullet had
grazed his head; he had not noticed it.

Courfeyrac untied his cravat and with it bandaged Marius' brow.

They laid Gavroche on the same table with Mabeuf, and spread over
the two corpses the black shawl.  There was enough of it for both
the old man and the child.

Combeferre distributed the cartridges from the basket which he
had brought in.

This gave each man fifteen rounds to fire.

Jean Valjean was still in the same place, motionless on his
stone post.  When Combeferre offered him his fifteen cartridges,
he shook his head.

"Here's a rare eccentric," said Combeferre in a low voice to Enjolras. 
"He finds a way of not fighting in this barricade."

"Which does not prevent him from defending it," responded Enjolras.

"Heroism has its originals," resumed Combeferre.

And Courfeyrac, who had overheard, added:

"He is another sort from Father Mabeuf."

One thing which must be noted is, that the fire which was battering
the barricade hardly disturbed the interior.  Those who have never
traversed the whirlwind of this sort of war can form no idea of the
singular moments of tranquillity mingled with these convulsions. 
Men go and come, they talk, they jest, they lounge.  Some one whom
we know heard a combatant say to him in the midst of the grape-shot:
"We are here as at a bachelor breakfast."  The redoubt of the Rue de
la Chanvrerie, we repeat, seemed very calm within.  All mutations
and all phases had been, or were about to be, exhausted.  The position,
from critical, had become menacing, and, from menacing, was probably
about to become desperate.  In proportion as the situation grew gloomy,
the glow of heroism empurpled the barricade more and more. 
Enjolras, who was grave, dominated it, in the attitude of a young
Spartan sacrificing his naked sword to the sombre genius, Epidotas.

Combeferre, wearing an apron, was dressing the wounds: 
Bossuet and Feuilly were making cartridges with the powder-flask
picked up by Gavroche on the dead corporal, and Bossuet said
to Feuilly:  "We are soon to take the diligence for another planet";
Courfeyrac was disposing and arranging on some paving-stones which
he had reserved for himself near Enjolras, a complete arsenal,
his sword-cane, his gun, two holster pistols, and a cudgel,
with the care of a young girl setting a small dunkerque in order. 
Jean Valjean stared silently at the wall opposite him.  An artisan
was fastening Mother Hucheloup's big straw hat on his head with
a string, "for fear of sun-stroke," as he said.  The young men
from the Cougourde d'Aix were chatting merrily among themselves,
as though eager to speak patois for the last time.  Joly, who had
taken Widow Hucheloup's mirror from the wall, was examining his
tongue in it.  Some combatants, having discovered a few crusts
of rather mouldy bread, in a drawer, were eagerly devouring them. 
Marius was disturbed with regard to what his father was about to say
to him.



CHAPTER XVIII

THE VULTURE BECOME PREY


We must insist upon one psychological fact peculiar to barricades. 
Nothing which is characteristic of that surprising war of the streets
should be omitted.

Whatever may have been the singular inward tranquillity which we
have just mentioned, the barricade, for those who are inside it,
remains, none the less, a vision.

There is something of the apocalypse in civil war,
all the mists of the unknown are commingled with
fierce flashes, revolutions are sphinxes, and any
one who has passed through a barricade thinks he has traversed a dream.

The feelings to which one is subject in these places we have pointed
out in the case of Marius, and we shall see the consequences;
they are both more and less than life.  On emerging from a barricade,
one no longer knows what one has seen there.  One has been terrible,
but one knows it not.  One has been surrounded with conflicting ideas
which had human faces; one's head has been in the light of the future. 
There were corpses lying prone there, and phantoms standing erect. 
The hours were colossal and seemed hours of eternity.  One has lived
in death.  Shadows have passed by.  What were they?

One has beheld hands on which there was blood; there was a
deafening horror; there was also a frightful silence; there were open
mouths which shouted, and other open mouths which held their peace;
one was in the midst of smoke, of night, perhaps.  One fancied
that one had touched the sinister ooze of unknown depths; one stares
at something red on one's finger nails.  One no longer remembers anything.

Let us return to the Rue de la Chanvrerie.

All at once, between two discharges, the distant sound of a clock
striking the hour became audible.

"It is midday," said Combeferre.

The twelve strokes had not finished striking when Enjolras sprang
to his feet, and from the summit of the barricade hurled this
thundering shout:

"Carry stones up into the houses; line the windowsills and the
roofs with them.  Half the men to their guns, the other half
to the paving-stones. There is not a minute to be lost."

A squad of sappers and miners, axe on shoulder, had just made
their appearance in battle array at the end of the street.

This could only be the head of a column; and of what column? 
The attacking column, evidently; the sappers charged with the demolition
of the barricade must always precede the soldiers who are to scale it.

They were, evidently, on the brink of that moment which
M. Clermont-Tonnerre, in 1822, called "the tug of war."

Enjolras' order was executed with the correct haste which is peculiar
to ships and barricades, the only two scenes of combat where escape
is impossible.  In less than a minute, two thirds of the stones
which Enjolras had had piled up at the door of Corinthe had been
carried up to the first floor and the attic, and before a second
minute had elapsed, these stones, artistically set one upon the other,
walled up the sash-window on the first floor and the windows
in the roof to half their height.  A few loop-holes carefully
planned by Feuilly, the principal architect, allowed of the passage
of the gun-barrels. This armament of the windows could be effected
all the more easily since the firing of grape-shot had ceased. 
The two cannons were now discharging ball against the centre
of the barrier in order to make a hole there, and, if possible,
a breach for the assault.

When the stones destined to the final defence were in place,
Enjolras had the bottles which he had set under the table where
Mabeuf lay, carried to the first floor.

"Who is to drink that?"  Bossuet asked him.

"They," replied Enjolras.

Then they barricaded the window below, and held in readiness the iron
cross-bars which served to secure the door of the wine-shop at night.

The fortress was complete.  The barricade was the rampart,
the wine-shop was the dungeon.  With the stones which remained
they stopped up the outlet.

As the defenders of a barricade are always obliged to be sparing
of their ammunition, and as the assailants know this, the assailants
combine their arrangements with a sort of irritating leisure,
expose themselves to fire prematurely, though in appearance more
than in reality, and take their ease.  The preparations for attack
are always made with a certain methodical deliberation; after which,
the lightning strikes.

This deliberation permitted Enjolras to take a review of everything
and to perfect everything.  He felt that, since such men were to die,
their death ought to be a masterpiece.

He said to Marius:  "We are the two leaders.  I will give the last
orders inside.  Do you remain outside and observe."

Marius posted himself on the lookout upon the crest of the barricade.

Enjolras had the door of the kitchen, which was the ambulance,
as the reader will remember, nailed up.

"No splashing of the wounded," he said.

He issued his final orders in the tap-room in a curt, but profoundly
tranquil tone; Feuilly listened and replied in the name of all.

"On the first floor, hold your axes in readiness to cut the staircase. 
Have you them?"

"Yes," said Feuilly.

"How many?"

"Two axes and a pole-axe."

"That is good.  There are now twenty-six combatants of us on foot. 
How many guns are there?"

"Thirty-four."

"Eight too many.  Keep those eight guns loaded like the rest and at hand. 
Swords and pistols in your belts.  Twenty men to the barricade. 
Six ambushed in the attic windows, and at the window on the first
floor to fire on the assailants through the loop-holes in the stones. 
Let not a single worker remain inactive here.  Presently, when the drum
beats the assault, let the twenty below stairs rush to the barricade. 
The first to arrive will have the best places."

These arrangements made, he turned to Javert and said:

"I am not forgetting you."

And, laying a pistol on the table, he added:

"The last man to leave this room will smash the skull of this spy."

"Here?" inquired a voice.

"No, let us not mix their corpses with our own.  The little barricade
of the Mondetour lane can be scaled.  It is only four feet high. 
The man is well pinioned.  He shall be taken thither and put
to death."

There was some one who was more impassive at that moment than Enjolras,
it was Javert.  Here Jean Valjean made his appearance.

He had been lost among the group of insurgents.  He stepped forth
and said to Enjolras:

"You are the commander?"

"Yes."

"You thanked me a while ago."

"In the name of the Republic.  The barricade has two saviors,
Marius Pontmercy and yourself."

"Do you think that I deserve a recompense?"

"Certainly."

"Well, I request one."

"What is it?"

"That I may blow that man's brains out."

Javert raised his head, saw Jean Valjean, made an almost
imperceptible movement, and said:

"That is just."

As for Enjolras, he had begun to re-load his rifle; he cut his eyes
about him:

"No objections."

And he turned to Jean Valjean:

"Take the spy."

Jean Valjean did, in fact, take possession of Javert, by seating
himself on the end of the table.  He seized the pistol, and a faint
click announced that he had cocked it.

Almost at the same moment, a blast of trumpets became audible.

"Take care!" shouted Marius from the top of the barricade.

Javert began to laugh with that noiseless laugh which was peculiar
to him, and gazing intently at the insurgents, he said to them:

"You are in no better case than I am."

"All out!" shouted Enjolras.

The insurgents poured out tumultuously, and, as they went,
received in the back,--may we be permitted the expression,--
this sally of Javert's:

"We shall meet again shortly!"



CHAPTER XIX

JEAN VALJEAN TAKES HIS REVENGE


When Jean Valjean was left alone with Javert, he untied the rope
which fastened the prisoner across the middle of the body,
and the knot of which was under the table.  After this he made
him a sign to rise.

Javert obeyed with that indefinable smile in which the supremacy
of enchained authority is condensed.

Jean Valjean took Javert by the martingale, as one would take
a beast of burden by the breast-band, and, dragging the latter
after him, emerged from the wine-shop slowly, because Javert,
with his impeded limbs, could take only very short steps.

Jean Valjean had the pistol in his hand.

In this manner they crossed the inner trapezium of the barricade. 
The insurgents, all intent on the attack, which was imminent,
had their backs turned to these two.

Marius alone, stationed on one side, at the extreme left of
the barricade, saw them pass.  This group of victim and executioner
was illuminated by the sepulchral light which he bore in his own soul.

Jean Valjean with some difficulty, but without relaxing his hold
for a single instant, made Javert, pinioned as he was, scale the
little entrenchment in the Mondetour lane.

When they had crossed this barrier, they found themselves alone
in the lane.  No one saw them.  Among the heap they could
distinguish a livid face, streaming hair, a pierced hand and
the half nude breast of a woman.  It was Eponine.  The corner
of the houses hid them from the insurgents.  The corpses carried
away from the barricade formed a terrible pile a few paces distant.

Javert gazed askance at this body, and, profoundly calm, said in
a low tone:

"It strikes me that I know that girl."

Then he turned to Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean thrust the pistol under his arm and fixed on Javert
a look which it required no words to interpret:  "Javert, it is I."

Javert replied:

"Take your revenge."

Jean Valjean drew from his pocket a knife, and opened it.

"A clasp-knife!" exclaimed Javert, "you are right.  That suits
you better."

Jean Valjean cut the martingale which Javert had about his neck,
then he cut the cords on his wrists, then, stooping down, he cut
the cord on his feet; and, straightening himself up, he said to him:

"You are free."

Javert was not easily astonished.  Still, master of himself though
he was, he could not repress a start.  He remained open-mouthed
and motionless.

Jean Valjean continued:

"I do not think that I shall escape from this place.  But if,
by chance, I do, I live, under the name of Fauchelevent, in the Rue
de l'Homme Arme, No. 7."

Javert snarled like a tiger, which made him half open one corner
of his mouth, and he muttered between his teeth:

"Have a care."

"Go," said Jean Valjean.

Javert began again:

"Thou saidst Fauchelevent, Rue de l'Homme Arme?"

"Number 7."

Javert repeated in a low voice:--"Number 7."

He buttoned up his coat once more, resumed the military stiffness
between his shoulders, made a half turn, folded his arms and,
supporting his chin on one of his hands, he set out in the direction
of the Halles.  Jean Valjean followed him with his eyes:

A few minutes later, Javert turned round and shouted to Jean Valjean:

"You annoy me.  Kill me, rather."

Javert himself did not notice that he no longer addressed Jean
Valjean as "thou."

"Be off with you," said Jean Valjean.

Javert retreated slowly.  A moment later he turned the corner
of the Rue des Precheurs.

When Javert had disappeared, Jean Valjean fired his pistol in the air.

Then he returned to the barricade and said:

"It is done."

In the meanwhile, this is what had taken place.

Marius, more intent on the outside than on the interior, had not,
up to that time, taken a good look at the pinioned spy in the dark
background of the tap-room.

When he beheld him in broad daylight, striding over the
barricade in order to proceed to his death, he recognized him. 
Something suddenly recurred to his mind.  He recalled the inspector
of the Rue de Pontoise, and the two pistols which the latter had
handed to him and which he, Marius, had used in this very barricade,
and not only did he recall his face, but his name as well.

This recollection was misty and troubled, however, like all his ideas.

It was not an affirmation that he made, but a question which he
put to himself:

"Is not that the inspector of police who told me that his name
was Javert?"

Perhaps there was still time to intervene in behalf of that man. 
But, in the first place, he must know whether this was Javert.

Marius called to Enjolras, who had just stationed himself
at the other extremity of the barricade:

"Enjolras!"

"What?"

"What is the name of yonder man?"

"What man?"

"The police agent.  Do you know his name?"

"Of course.  He told us."

"What is it?"

"Javert."

Marius sprang to his feet.

At that moment, they heard the report of the pistol.

Jean Valjean re-appeared and cried:  "It is done."

A gloomy chill traversed Marius' heart.



CHAPTER XX

THE DEAD ARE IN THE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT IN THE WRONG


The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.

Everything contributed to its tragic majesty at that supreme moment;
a thousand mysterious crashes in the air, the breath of armed
masses set in movement in the streets which were not visible,
the intermittent gallop of cavalry, the heavy shock of artillery
on the march, the firing by squads, and the cannonades crossing
each other in the labyrinth of Paris, the smokes of battle mounting
all gilded above the roofs, indescribable and vaguely terrible cries,
lightnings of menace everywhere, the tocsin of Saint-Merry, which now
had the accents of a sob, the mildness of the weather, the splendor
of the sky filled with sun and clouds, the beauty of the day,
and the alarming silence of the houses.

For, since the preceding evening, the two rows of houses in the Rue
de la Chanvrerie had become two walls; ferocious walls, doors closed,
windows closed, shutters closed.

In those days, so different from those in which we live, when the
hour was come, when the people wished to put an end to a situation,
which had lasted too long, with a charter granted or with a
legal country, when universal wrath was diffused in the atmosphere,
when the city consented to the tearing up of the pavements,
when insurrection made the bourgeoisie smile by whispering its
password in its ear, then the inhabitant, thoroughly penetrated
with the revolt, so to speak, was the auxiliary of the combatant,
and the house fraternized with the improvised fortress which rested
on it.  When the situation was not ripe, when the insurrection
was not decidedly admitted, when the masses disowned the movement,
all was over with the combatants, the city was changed into a desert
around the revolt, souls grew chilled, refuges were nailed up,
and the street turned into a defile to help the army to take
the barricade.

A people cannot be forced, through surprise, to walk more quickly
than it chooses.  Woe to whomsoever tries to force its hand!  A people
does not let itself go at random.  Then it abandons the insurrection
to itself.  The insurgents become noxious, infected with the plague. 
A house is an escarpment, a door is a refusal, a facade is a wall. 
This wall hears, sees and will not.  It might open and save you. 
No. This wall is a judge.  It gazes at you and condemns you. 
What dismal things are closed houses.  They seem dead, they are living. 
Life which is, as it were, suspended there, persists there. 
No one has gone out of them for four and twenty hours, but no one
is missing from them.  In the interior of that rock, people go
and come, go to bed and rise again; they are a family party there;
there they eat and drink; they are afraid, a terrible thing! 
Fear excuses this fearful lack of hospitality; terror is mixed
with it, an extenuating circumstance.  Sometimes, even, and this
has been actually seen, fear turns to passion; fright may change
into fury, as prudence does into rage; hence this wise saying: 
"The enraged moderates."  There are outbursts of supreme terror,
whence springs wrath like a mournful smoke.--"What do these people want? 
What have they come there to do?  Let them get out of the scrape. 
So much the worse for them.  It is their fault.  They are only getting
what they deserve.  It does not concern us.  Here is our poor street
all riddled with balls.  They are a pack of rascals.  Above all things,
don't open the door."--And the house assumes the air of a tomb. 
The insurgent is in the death-throes in front of that house; he sees
the grape-shot and naked swords drawing near; if he cries, he knows
that they are listening to him, and that no one will come; there stand
walls which might protect him, there are men who might save him;
and these walls have ears of flesh, and these men have bowels of
stone.

Whom shall he reproach?

No one and every one.

The incomplete times in which we live.

It is always at its own risk and peril that Utopia is converted
into revolution, and from philosophical protest becomes
an armed protest, and from Minerva turns to Pallas.

The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes revolt knows what awaits it;
it almost always comes too soon.  Then it becomes resigned, and stoically
accepts catastrophe in lieu of triumph.  It serves those who deny it
without complaint, even excusing them, and even disculpates them,
and its magnanimity consists in consenting to abandonment. 
It is indomitable in the face of obstacles and gentle towards ingratitude.

Is this ingratitude, however?

Yes, from the point of view of the human race.

No, from the point of view of the individual.

Progress is man's mode of existence.  The general life of the human
race is called Progress, the collective stride of the human race
is called Progress.  Progress advances; it makes the great human
and terrestrial journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has
its halting places where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its
stations where it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan
suddenly unveiled on its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps;
and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees
the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness
without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.

"God is dead, perhaps," said Gerard de Nerval one day to the
writer of these lines, confounding progress with God, and taking
the interruption of movement for the death of Being.

He who despairs is in the wrong.  Progress infallibly awakes, and,
in short, we may say that it marches on, even when it is asleep,
for it has increased in size.  When we behold it erect once more,
we find it taller.  To be always peaceful does not depend on
progress any more than it does on the stream; erect no barriers,
cast in no boulders; obstacles make water froth and humanity boil. 
Hence arise troubles; but after these troubles, we recognize the fact
that ground has been gained.  Until order, which is nothing else than
universal peace, has been established, until harmony and unity reign,
progress will have revolutions as its halting-places.

What, then, is progress?  We have just enunciated it; the permanent
life of the peoples.

Now, it sometimes happens, that the momentary life of individuals
offers resistance to the eternal life of the human race.

Let us admit without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct
interests, and can, without forfeiture, stipulate for his interest,
and defend it; the present has its pardonable dose of egotism;
momentary life has its rights, and is not bound to sacrifice itself
constantly to the future.  The generation which is passing in its
turn over the earth, is not forced to abridge it for the sake
of the generations, its equal, after all, who will have their turn
later on.--"I exist," murmurs that some one whose name is All. 
"I am young and in love, I am old and I wish to repose, I am the
father of a family, I toil, I prosper, I am successful in business,
I have houses to lease, I have money in the government funds,
I am happy, I have a wife and children, I have all this, I desire
to live, leave me in peace."--Hence, at certain hours, a profound
cold broods over the magnanimous vanguard of the human race.

Utopia, moreover, we must admit, quits its radiant sphere when
it makes war.  It, the truth of to-morrow, borrows its mode
of procedure, battle, from the lie of yesterday.  It, the future,
behaves like the past.  It, pure idea, becomes a deed of violence. 
It complicates its heroism with a violence for which it is just that
it should be held to answer; a violence of occasion and expedient,
contrary to principle, and for which it is fatally punished. 
The Utopia, insurrection, fights with the old military code in its fist;
it shoots spies, it executes traitors; it suppresses living beings
and flings them into unknown darkness.  It makes use of death,
a serious matter.  It seems as though Utopia had no longer any faith
in radiance, its irresistible and incorruptible force.  It strikes
with the sword.  Now, no sword is simple.  Every blade has two edges;
he who wounds with the one is wounded with the other.

Having made this reservation, and made it with all severity,
it is impossible for us not to admire, whether they succeed or not,
those the glorious combatants of the future, the confessors
of Utopia.  Even when they miscarry, they are worthy of veneration;
and it is, perhaps, in failure, that they possess the most majesty. 
Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause
of the people; but a heroic defeat merits their tender compassion. 
The one is magnificent, the other sublime.  For our own part,
we prefer martyrdom to success.  John Brown is greater than Washington,
and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.

It certainly is necessary that some one should take the part
of the vanquished.

We are unjust towards these great men who attempt the future,
when they fail.

Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad.  Every barricade
seems a crime.  Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected,
their ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced. 
They are reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the
reigning social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities,
of wrongs, of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks
of shadow in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. 
People shout to them:  "You are tearing up the pavements of hell!" 
They might reply:  "That is because our barricade is made of
good intentions."

The best thing, assuredly, is the pacific solution.  In short,
let us agree that when we behold the pavement, we think of the bear,
and it is a good will which renders society uneasy.  But it depends
on society to save itself, it is to its own good will that we make
our appeal.  No violent remedy is necessary.  To study evil amiably,
to prove its existence, then to cure it.  It is to this that we
invite it.

However that may be, even when fallen, above all when fallen, these men,
who at every point of the universe, with their eyes fixed on France,
are striving for the grand work with the inflexible logic of the ideal,
are august; they give their life a free offering to progress;
they accomplish the will of providence; they perform a religious act. 
At the appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as an actor
who answers to his cue, in obedience to the divine stage-manager,
they enter the tomb.  And this hopeless combat, this stoical
disappearance they accept in order to bring about the supreme
and universal consequences, the magnificent and irresistibly human
movement begun on the 14th of July, 1789; these soldiers are priests. 
The French revolution is an act of God.

Moreover, there are, and it is proper to add this distinction to
the distinctions already pointed out in another chapter,--there are
accepted revolutions, revolutions which are called revolutions;
there are refused revolutions, which are called riots.

An insurrection which breaks out, is an idea which is passing its
examination before the people.  If the people lets fall a black ball,
the idea is dried fruit; the insurrection is a mere skirmish.

Waging war at every summons and every time that Utopia desires it,
is not the thing for the peoples.  Nations have not always and at
every hour the temperament of heroes and martyrs.

They are positive.  A priori, insurrection is repugnant to them,
in the first place, because it often results in a catastrophe,
in the second place, because it always has an abstraction as its point
of departure.

Because, and this is a noble thing, it is always for the ideal,
and for the ideal alone, that those who sacrifice themselves do thus
sacrifice themselves.  An insurrection is an enthusiasm.  Enthusiasm may
wax wroth; hence the appeal to arms.  But every insurrection,
which aims at a government or a regime, aims higher.  Thus, for instance,
and we insist upon it, what the chiefs of the insurrection
of 1832, and, in particular, the young enthusiasts of the Rue de
la Chanvrerie were combating, was not precisely Louis Philippe. 
The majority of them, when talking freely, did justice to this king
who stood midway between monarchy and revolution; no one hated him. 
But they attacked the younger branch of the divine right in Louis
Philippe as they had attacked its elder branch in Charles X.;
and that which they wished to overturn in overturning royalty
in France, was, as we have explained, the usurpation of man
over man, and of privilege over right in the entire universe. 
Paris without a king has as result the world without despots. 
This is the manner in which they reasoned.  Their aim was distant
no doubt, vague perhaps, and it retreated in the face of their efforts;
but it was great.

Thus it is.  And we sacrifice ourselves for these visions,
which are almost always illusions for the sacrificed, but illusions
with which, after all, the whole of human certainty is mingled. 
We throw ourselves into these tragic affairs and become intoxicated
with that which we are about to do.  Who knows?  We may succeed. 
We are few in number, we have a whole army arrayed against us;
but we are defending right, the natural law, the sovereignty
of each one over himself from which no abdication is possible,
justice and truth, and in case of need, we die like the three
hundred Spartans.  We do not think of Don Quixote but of Leonidas. 
And we march straight before us, and once pledged, we do not draw back,
and we rush onwards with head held low, cherishing as our hope an
unprecedented victory, revolution completed, progress set free again,
the aggrandizement of the human race, universal deliverance;
and in the event of the worst, Thermopylae.

These passages of arms for the sake of progress often suffer shipwreck,
and we have just explained why.  The crowd is restive in the
presence of the impulses of paladins.  Heavy masses, the multitudes
which are fragile because of their very weight, fear adventures;
and there is a touch of adventure in the ideal.

Moreover, and we must not forget this, interests which are not
very friendly to the ideal and the sentimental are in the way. 
Sometimes the stomach paralyzes the heart.

The grandeur and beauty of France lies in this, that she takes
less from the stomach than other nations:  she more easily knots
the rope about her loins.  She is the first awake, the last asleep. 
She marches forwards.  She is a seeker.

This arises from the fact that she is an artist.

The ideal is nothing but the culminating point of logic,
the same as the beautiful is nothing but the summit of the true. 
Artistic peoples are also consistent peoples.  To love beauty is
to see the light.  That is why the torch of Europe, that is to say
of civilization, was first borne by Greece, who passed it on to Italy,
who handed it on to France.  Divine, illuminating nations of scouts! 
Vitaelampada tradunt.

It is an admirable thing that the poetry of a people is the element
of its progress.  The amount of civilization is measured by the
quantity of imagination.  Only, a civilizing people should remain
a manly people.  Corinth, yes; Sybaris, no.  Whoever becomes effeminate
makes himself a bastard.  He must be neither a dilettante nor
a virtuoso:  but he must be artistic.  In the matter of civilization,
he must not refine, but he must sublime.  On this condition,
one gives to the human race the pattern of the ideal.

The modern ideal has its type in art, and its means is science. 
It is through science that it will realize that august vision
of the poets, the socially beautiful.  Eden will be reconstructed
by A+B. At the point which civilization has now reached, the exact
is a necessary element of the splendid, and the artistic sentiment
is not only served, but completed by the scientific organ;
dreams must be calculated.  Art, which is the conqueror,
should have for support science, which is the walker; the solidity
of the creature which is ridden is of importance.  The modern spirit
is the genius of Greece with the genius of India as its vehicle;
Alexander on the elephant.

Races which are petrified in dogma or demoralized by lucre are unfit
to guide civilization.  Genuflection before the idol or before money
wastes away the muscles which walk and the will which advances. 
Hieratic or mercantile absorption lessens a people's power of radiance,
lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and deprives it of that
intelligence, at once both human and divine of the universal goal,
which makes missionaries of nations.  Babylon has no ideal;
Carthage has no ideal.  Athens and Rome have and keep, throughout
all the nocturnal darkness of the centuries, halos of civilization.

France is in the same quality of race as Greece and Italy. 
She is Athenian in the matter of beauty, and Roman in her greatness. 
Moreover, she is good.  She gives herself.  Oftener than is the case
with other races, is she in the humor for self-devotion and sacrifice. 
Only, this humor seizes upon her, and again abandons her. 
And therein lies the great peril for those who run when she
desires only to walk, or who walk on when she desires to halt. 
France has her relapses into materialism, and, at certain instants,
the ideas which obstruct that sublime brain have no longer anything
which recalls French greatness and are of the dimensions of a
Missouri or a South Carolina.  What is to be done in such a case? 
The giantess plays at being a dwarf; immense France has her freaks
of pettiness.  That is all.

To this there is nothing to say.  Peoples, like planets, possess the
right to an eclipse.  And all is well, provided that the light
returns and that the eclipse does not degenerate into night. 
Dawn and resurrection are synonymous.  The reappearance of the light
is identical with the persistence of the _I_.

Let us state these facts calmly.  Death on the barricade
or the tomb in exile, is an acceptable occasion for devotion. 
The real name of devotion is disinterestedness.  Let the abandoned
allow themselves to be abandoned, let the exiled allow themselves
to be exiled, and let us confine ourselves to entreating great
nations not to retreat too far, when they do retreat.  One must
not push too far in descent under pretext of a return to reason.

Matter exists, the minute exists, interest exists, the stomach exists;
but the stomach must not be the sole wisdom.  The life of the moment
has its rights, we admit, but permanent life has its rights also. 
Alas! the fact that one is mounted does not preclude a fall. 
This can be seen in history more frequently than is desirable: 
A nation is great, it tastes the ideal, then it bites the mire,
and finds it good; and if it be asked how it happens that it
has abandoned Socrates for Falstaff, it replies:  "Because I
love statesmen."

One word more before returning to our subject, the conflict.

A battle like the one which we are engaged in describing is nothing
else than a convulsion towards the ideal.  Progress trammelled
is sickly, and is subject to these tragic epilepsies.  With that malady
of progress, civil war, we have been obliged to come in contact
in our passage.  This is one of the fatal phases, at once act
and entr'acte of that drama whose pivot is a social condemnation,
and whose veritable title is Progress.

Progress!

The cry to which we frequently give utterance is our whole thought;
and, at the point of this drama which we have now reached, the idea
which it contains having still more than one trial to undergo,
it is, perhaps, permitted to us, if not to lift the veil from it,
to at least allow its light to shine through.

The book which the reader has under his eye at this moment is,
from one end to the other, as a whole and in detail, whatever may
be its intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil
to good, from the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite
to conscience, from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven,
from nothingness to God.  Point of departure:  matter; point of arrival: 
the soul.  The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end.



CHAPTER XXI

THE HEROES


All at once, the drum beat the charge.

The attack was a hurricane.  On the evening before, in the darkness,
the barricade had been approached silently, as by a boa.  Now, in broad
daylight, in that widening street, surprise was decidedly impossible,
rude force had, moreover, been unmasked, the cannon had begun the roar,
the army hurled itself on the barricade.  Fury now became skill. 
A powerful detachment of infantry of the line, broken at regular
intervals, by the National Guard and the Municipal Guard on foot,
and supported by serried masses which could be heard though
not seen, debauched into the street at a run, with drums beating,
trumpets braying, bayonets levelled, the sappers at their head,
and, imperturbable under the projectiles, charged straight
for the barricade with the weight of a brazen beam against a wall.

The wall held firm.

The insurgents fired impetuously.  The barricade once scaled
had a mane of lightning flashes.  The assault was so furious,
that for one moment, it was inundated with assailants; but it
shook off the soldiers as the lion shakes off the dogs, and it
was only covered with besiegers as the cliff is covered with foam,
to re-appear, a moment later, beetling, black and formidable.

The column, forced to retreat, remained massed in the street,
unprotected but terrible, and replied to the redoubt with a terrible
discharge of musketry.  Any one who has seen fireworks will recall
the sheaf formed of interlacing lightnings which is called a bouquet. 
Let the reader picture to himself this bouquet, no longer vertical
but horizontal, bearing a bullet, buck-shot or a biscaien at the
tip of each one of its jets of flame, and picking off dead men
one after another from its clusters of lightning.  The barricade
was underneath it.

On both sides, the resolution was equal.  The bravery exhibited
there was almost barbarous and was complicated with a sort of heroic
ferocity which began by the sacrifice of self.

This was the epoch when a National Guardsman fought like a Zouave. 
The troop wished to make an end of it, insurrection was desirous
of fighting.  The acceptance of the death agony in the flower
of youth and in the flush of health turns intrepidity into frenzy. 
In this fray, each one underwent the broadening growth of the death hour. 
The street was strewn with corpses.

The barricade had Enjolras at one of its extremities and Marius at
the other.  Enjolras, who carried the whole barricade in his head,
reserved and sheltered himself; three soldiers fell, one after
the other, under his embrasure, without having even seen him;
Marius fought unprotected.  He made himself a target.  He stood
with more than half his body above the breastworks.  There is no
more violent prodigal than the avaricious man who takes the bit in
his teeth; there is no man more terrible in action than a dreamer. 
Marius was formidable and pensive.  In battle he was as in a dream. 
One would have pronounced him a phantom engaged in firing a gun.

The insurgents' cartridges were giving out; but not their sarcasms. 
In this whirlwind of the sepulchre in which they stood, they laughed.

Courfeyrac was bare-headed.

"What have you done with your hat?"  Bossuet asked him.

Courfeyrac replied:

"They have finally taken it away from me with cannon-balls."

Or they uttered haughty comments.

"Can any one understand," exclaimed Feuilly bitterly, "those
men,--[and he cited names, well-known names, even celebrated names,
some belonging to the old army]--who had promised to join us,
and taken an oath to aid us, and who had pledged their honor to it,
and who are our generals, and who abandon us!"

And Combeferre restricted himself to replying with a grave smile.

"There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes
the stars, from a great distance."

The interior of the barricade was so strewn with torn cartridges
that one would have said that there had been a snowstorm.

The assailants had numbers in their favor; the insurgents had position. 
They were at the top of a wall, and they thundered point-blank
upon the soldiers tripping over the dead and wounded and entangled
in the escarpment.  This barricade, constructed as it was and
admirably buttressed, was really one of those situations where a handful
of men hold a legion in check.  Nevertheless, the attacking column,
constantly recruited and enlarged under the shower of bullets,
drew inexorably nearer, and now, little by little, step by step,
but surely, the army closed in around the barricade as the vice
grasps the wine-press.

One assault followed another.  The horror of the situation
kept increasing.

Then there burst forth on that heap of paving-stones, in that
Rue de la Chanvrerie, a battle worthy of a wall of Troy. 
These haggard, ragged, exhausted men, who had had nothing to eat
for four and twenty hours, who had not slept, who had but a few
more rounds to fire, who were fumbling in their pockets which had
been emptied of cartridges, nearly all of whom were wounded,
with head or arm bandaged with black and blood-stained linen,
with holes in their clothes from which the blood trickled, and who
were hardly armed with poor guns and notched swords, became Titans. 
The barricade was ten times attacked, approached, assailed, scaled,
and never captured.

In order to form an idea of this struggle, it is necessary to
imagine fire set to a throng of terrible courages, and then to gaze
at the conflagration.  It was not a combat, it was the interior
of a furnace; there mouths breathed the flame; there countenances
were extraordinary.  The human form seemed impossible there,
the combatants flamed forth there, and it was formidable to behold
the going and coming in that red glow of those salamanders of the fray.

The successive and simultaneous scenes of this grand slaughter we
renounce all attempts at depicting.  The epic alone has the right
to fill twelve thousand verses with a battle.

One would have pronounced this that hell of Brahmanism,
the most redoubtable of the seventeen abysses,
which the Veda calls the Forest of Swords.

They fought hand to hand, foot to foot, with pistol shots, with blows
of the sword, with their fists, at a distance, close at hand,
from above, from below, from everywhere, from the roofs of the houses,
from the windows of the wine-shop, from the cellar windows,
whither some had crawled.  They were one against sixty.

The facade of Corinthe, half demolished, was hideous.  The window,
tattooed with grape-shot, had lost glass and frame and was nothing
now but a shapeless hole, tumultuously blocked with paving-stones.

Bossuet was killed; Feuilly was killed; Courfeyrac was killed;
Combeferre, transfixed by three blows from a bayonet in the
breast at the moment when he was lifting up a wounded soldier,
had only time to cast a glance to heaven when he expired.

Marius, still fighting, was so riddled with wounds, particularly in
the head, that his countenance disappeared beneath the blood,
and one would have said that his face was covered with a red kerchief.

Enjolras alone was not struck.  When he had no longer any weapon,
he reached out his hands to right and left and an insurgent thrust
some arm or other into his fist.  All he had left was the stumps
of four swords; one more than Francois I. at Marignan.  Homer says: 
"Diomedes cuts the throat of Axylus, son of Teuthranis, who dwelt
in happy Arisba; Euryalus, son of Mecistaeus, exterminates Dresos
and Opheltios, Esepius, and that Pedasus whom the naiad Abarbarea bore
to the blameless Bucolion; Ulysses overthrows Pidytes of Percosius;
Antilochus, Ablerus; Polypaetes, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otos, of Cyllene;
and Teucer, Aretaon.  Meganthios dies under the blows of Euripylus'
pike.  Agamemnon, king of the heroes, flings to earth Elatos,
born in the rocky city which is laved by the sounding river Satnois." 
In our old poems of exploits, Esplandian attacks the giant marquis
Swantibore with a cobbler's shoulder-stick of fire, and the latter
defends himself by stoning the hero with towers which he plucks up
by the roots.  Our ancient mural frescoes show us the two Dukes of
Bretagne and Bourbon, armed, emblazoned and crested in war-like guise,
on horseback and approaching each other, their battle-axes in hand,
masked with iron, gloved with iron, booted with iron, the one
caparisoned in ermine, the other draped in azure:  Bretagne with
his lion between the two horns of his crown, Bourbon helmeted with
a monster fleur de lys on his visor.  But, in order to be superb,
it is not necessary to wear, like Yvon, the ducal morion, to have
in the fist, like Esplandian, a living flame, or, like Phyles,
father of Polydamas, to have brought back from Ephyra a good suit of mail,
a present from the king of men, Euphetes; it suffices to give one's
life for a conviction or a loyalty.  This ingenuous little soldier,
yesterday a peasant of Bauce or Limousin, who prowls with his clasp-knife
by his side, around the children's nurses in the Luxembourg garden,
this pale young student bent over a piece of anatomy or a book,
a blond youth who shaves his beard with scissors,--take both of them,
breathe upon them with a breath of duty, place them face to face
in the Carrefour Boucherat or in the blind alley Planche-Mibray,
and let the one fight for his flag, and the other for his ideal,
and let both of them imagine that they are fighting for their country;
the struggle will be colossal; and the shadow which this raw recruit
and this sawbones in conflict will produce in that grand epic field
where humanity is striving, will equal the shadow cast by Megaryon,
King of Lycia, tiger-filled, crushing in his embrace the immense
body of Ajax, equal to the gods.



CHAPTER XXII

FOOT TO FOOT


When there were no longer any of the leaders left alive,
except Enjolras and Marius at the two extremities of the barricade,
the centre, which had so long sustained Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet,
Feuilly and Combeferre, gave way.  The cannon, though it had not
effected a practicable breach, had made a rather large hollow
in the middle of the redoubt; there, the summit of the wall had
disappeared before the balls, and had crumbled away; and the rubbish
which had fallen, now inside, now outside, had, as it accumulated,
formed two piles in the nature of slopes on the two sides
of the barrier, one on the inside, the other on the outside. 
The exterior slope presented an inclined plane to the attack.

A final assault was there attempted, and this assault succeeded. 
The mass bristling with bayonets and hurled forward at a run,
came up with irresistible force, and the serried front of battle
of the attacking column made its appearance through the smoke
on the crest of the battlements.  This time, it was decisive. 
The group of insurgents who were defending the centre retreated
in confusion.

Then the gloomy love of life awoke once more in some of them. 
Many, finding themselves under the muzzles of this forest of guns,
did not wish to die.  This is a moment when the instinct of
self-preservation emits howls, when the beast re-appears in men. 
They were hemmed in by the lofty, six-story house which formed the
background of their redoubt.  This house might prove their salvation. 
The building was barricaded, and walled, as it were, from top to bottom. 
Before the troops of the line had reached the interior of the redoubt,
there was time for a door to open and shut, the space of a flash
of lightning was sufficient for that, and the door of that house,
suddenly opened a crack and closed again instantly, was life
for these despairing men.  Behind this house, there were streets,
possible flight, space.  They set to knocking at that door with the
butts of their guns, and with kicks, shouting, calling, entreating,
wringing their hands.  No one opened.  From the little window
on the third floor, the head of the dead man gazed down upon them.

But Enjolras and Marius, and the seven or eight rallied about them,
sprang forward and protected them.  Enjolras had shouted to
the soldiers:  "Don't advance!" and as an officer had not obeyed,
Enjolras had killed the officer.  He was now in the little inner court
of the redoubt, with his back planted against the Corinthe building,
a sword in one hand, a rifle in the other, holding open the door
of the wine-shop which he barred against assailants.  He shouted
to the desperate men:--"There is but one door open; this one."--
And shielding them with his body, and facing an entire battalion alone,
he made them pass in behind him.  All precipitated themselves thither. 
Enjolras, executing with his rifle, which he now used like a cane,
what single-stick players call a "covered rose" round his head,
levelled the bayonets around and in front of him, and was the last
to enter; and then ensued a horrible moment, when the soldiers tried
to make their way in, and the insurgents strove to bar them out. 
The door was slammed with such violence, that, as it fell back into
its frame, it showed the five fingers of a soldier who had been
clinging to it, cut off and glued to the post.

Marius remained outside.  A shot had just broken his collar bone,
he felt that he was fainting and falling.  At that moment, with eyes
already shut, he felt the shock of a vigorous hand seizing him,
and the swoon in which his senses vanished, hardly allowed him time
for the thought, mingled with a last memory of Cosette:--"I am
taken prisoner.  I shall be shot."

Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had taken refuge in
the wine-shop, had the same idea.  But they had reached a moment
when each man has not the time to meditate on his own death. 
Enjolras fixed the bar across the door, and bolted it, and double-locked
it with key and chain, while those outside were battering furiously
at it, the soldiers with the butts of their muskets, the sappers
with their axes.  The assailants were grouped about that door. 
The siege of the wine-shop was now beginning.

The soldiers, we will observe, were full of wrath.

The death of the artillery-sergeant had enraged them, and then,
a still more melancholy circumstance.  During the few hours which had
preceded the attack, it had been reported among them that the insurgents
were mutilating their prisoners, and that there was the headless body
of a soldier in the wine-shop. This sort of fatal rumor is the usual
accompaniment of civil wars, and it was a false report of this
kind which, later on, produced the catastrophe of the Rue Transnonain.

When the door was barricaded, Enjolras said to the others:

"Let us sell our lives dearly."

Then he approached the table on which lay Mabeuf and Gavroche. 
Beneath the black cloth two straight and rigid forms were visible,
one large, the other small, and the two faces were vaguely outlined
beneath the cold folds of the shroud.  A hand projected from beneath
the winding sheet and hung near the floor.  It was that of the
old man.

Enjolras bent down and kissed that venerable hand, just as he
had kissed his brow on the preceding evening.

These were the only two kisses which he had bestowed in the course
of his life.

Let us abridge the tale.  The barricade had fought like a gate
of Thebes; the wine-shop fought like a house of Saragossa. 
These resistances are dogged.  No quarter.  No flag of truce possible. 
Men are willing to die, provided their opponent will kill them.

When Suchet says:--"Capitulate,"--Palafox replies:  "After the war
with cannon, the war with knives."  Nothing was lacking in the capture
by assault of the Hucheloup wine-shop; neither paving-stones raining
from the windows and the roof on the besiegers and exasperating
the soldiers by crushing them horribly, nor shots fired from the
attic-windows and the cellar, nor the fury of attack, nor, finally,
when the door yielded, the frenzied madness of extermination. 
The assailants, rushing into the wine-shop, their feet entangled
in the panels of the door which had been beaten in and flung on
the ground, found not a single combatant there.  The spiral staircase,
hewn asunder with the axe, lay in the middle of the tap-room, a few
wounded men were just breathing their last, every one who was not
killed was on the first floor, and from there, through the hole
in the ceiling, which had formed the entrance of the stairs,
a terrific fire burst forth.  It was the last of their cartridges. 
When they were exhausted, when these formidable men on the point
of death had no longer either powder or ball, each grasped
in his hands two of the bottles which Enjolras had reserved,
and of which we have spoken, and held the scaling party in check
with these frightfully fragile clubs.  They were bottles of aquafortis.

We relate these gloomy incidents of carnage as they occurred. 
The besieged man, alas! converts everything into a weapon.  Greek fire
did not disgrace Archimedes, boiling pitch did not disgrace Bayard. 
All war is a thing of terror, and there is no choice in it. 
The musketry of the besiegers, though confined and embarrassed by
being directed from below upwards, was deadly.  The rim of the hole
in the ceiling was speedily surrounded by heads of the slain, whence
dripped long, red and smoking streams, the uproar was indescribable;
a close and burning smoke almost produced night over this combat. 
Words are lacking to express horror when it has reached this pitch. 
There were no longer men in this conflict, which was now infernal. 
They were no longer giants matched with colossi.  It resembled Milton
and Dante rather than Homer.  Demons attacked, spectres resisted.

It was heroism become monstrous.



CHAPTER XXIII

ORESTES FASTING AND PYLADES DRUNK


At length, by dint of mounting on each other's backs,
aiding themselves with the skeleton of the staircase, climbing up
the walls, clinging to the ceiling, slashing away at the very brink
of the trap-door, the last one who offered resistance, a score
of assailants, soldiers, National Guardsmen, municipal guardsmen,
in utter confusion, the majority disfigured by wounds in the face during
that redoubtable ascent, blinded by blood, furious, rendered savage,
made an irruption into the apartment on the first floor.  There they
found only one man still on his feet, Enjolras.  Without cartridges,
without sword, he had nothing in his hand now but the barrel of his gun
whose stock he had broken over the head of those who were entering. 
He had placed the billiard table between his assailants and himself;
he had retreated into the corner of the room, and there, with haughty eye,
and head borne high, with this stump of a weapon in his hand, he was still
so alarming as to speedily create an empty space around him.  A cry arose:

"He is the leader!  It was he who slew the artillery-man. It is
well that he has placed himself there.  Let him remain there. 
Let us shoot him down on the spot."

"Shoot me," said Enjolras.

And flinging away his bit of gun-barrel, and folding his arms,
he offered his breast.

The audacity of a fine death always affects men.  As soon as
Enjolras folded his arms and accepted his end, the din of strife
ceased in the room, and this chaos suddenly stilled into a sort
of sepulchral solemnity.  The menacing majesty of Enjolras
disarmed and motionless, appeared to oppress this tumult, and this
young man, haughty, bloody, and charming, who alone had not a wound,
who was as indifferent as an invulnerable being, seemed, by the
authority of his tranquil glance, to constrain this sinister
rabble to kill him respectfully.  His beauty, at that moment
augmented by his pride, was resplendent, and he was fresh and rosy
after the fearful four and twenty hours which had just elapsed,
as though he could no more be fatigued than wounded.  It was
of him, possibly, that a witness spoke afterwards, before the council
of war:  "There was an insurgent whom I heard called Apollo." 
A National Guardsman who had taken aim at Enjolras, lowered
his gun, saying:  "It seems to me that I am about to shoot a flower."

Twelve men formed into a squad in the corner opposite Enjolras,
and silently made ready their guns.

Then a sergeant shouted:

"Take aim!"

An officer intervened.

"Wait."

And addressing Enjolras:

"Do you wish to have your eyes bandaged?"

"No."

"Was it you who killed the artillery sergeant?"

"Yes."

Grantaire had waked up a few moments before.

Grantaire, it will be remembered, had been asleep ever since the
preceding evening in the upper room of the wine-shop, seated
on a chair and leaning on the table.

He realized in its fullest sense the old metaphor of "dead drunk." 
The hideous potion of absinthe-porter and alcohol had thrown
him into a lethargy.  His table being small, and not suitable
for the barricade, he had been left in possession of it. 
He was still in the same posture, with his breast bent over
the table, his head lying flat on his arms, surrounded by glasses,
beer-jugs and bottles.  His was the overwhelming slumber of the torpid
bear and the satiated leech.  Nothing had had any effect upon it,
neither the fusillade, nor the cannon-balls, nor the grape-shot
which had made its way through the window into the room where he was. 
Nor the tremendous uproar of the assault.  He merely replied to
the cannonade, now and then, by a snore.  He seemed to be waiting
there for a bullet which should spare him the trouble of waking. 
Many corpses were strewn around him; and, at the first glance,
there was nothing to distinguish him from those profound sleepers
of death.

Noise does not rouse a drunken man; silence awakens him.  The fall
of everything around him only augmented Grantaire's prostration;
the crumbling of all things was his lullaby.  The sort of halt which
the tumult underwent in the presence of Enjolras was a shock to this
heavy slumber.  It had the effect of a carriage going at full speed,
which suddenly comes to a dead stop.  The persons dozing within it
wake up.  Grantaire rose to his feet with a start, stretched out
his arms, rubbed his eyes, stared, yawned, and understood.

A fit of drunkenness reaching its end resembles a curtain which
is torn away.  One beholds, at a single glance and as a whole,
all that it has concealed.  All suddenly presents itself to the memory;
and the drunkard who has known nothing of what has been taking place
during the last twenty-four hours, has no sooner opened his eyes than
he is perfectly informed.  Ideas recur to him with abrupt lucidity;
the obliteration of intoxication, a sort of steam which has obscured
the brain, is dissipated, and makes way for the clear and sharply
outlined importunity of realities.

Relegated, as he was, to one corner, and sheltered behind the
billiard-table, the soldiers whose eyes were fixed on Enjolras,
had not even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing
to repeat his order:  "Take aim!" when all at once, they heard
a strong voice shout beside them:

"Long live the Republic!  I'm one of them."

Grantaire had risen.  The immense gleam of the whole combat
which he had missed, and in which he had had no part,
appeared in the brilliant glance of the transfigured drunken man.

He repeated:  "Long live the Republic!" crossed the room with a firm
stride and placed himself in front of the guns beside Enjolras.

"Finish both of us at one blow," said he.

And turning gently to Enjolras, he said to him:

"Do you permit it?"

Enjolras pressed his hand with a smile.

This smile was not ended when the report resounded.

Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained leaning against the wall,
as though the balls had nailed him there.  Only, his head was bowed.

Grantaire fell at his feet, as though struck by a thunderbolt.

A few moments later, the soldiers dislodged the last remaining insurgents,
who had taken refuge at the top of the house.  They fired into the
attic through a wooden lattice.  They fought under the very roof. 
They flung bodies, some of them still alive, out through the windows. 
Two light-infantrymen, who tried to lift the shattered omnibus,
were slain by two shots fired from the attic.  A man in a blouse was
flung down from it, with a bayonet wound in the abdomen, and breathed
his last on the ground.  A soldier and an insurgent slipped together
on the sloping slates of the roof, and, as they would not release
each other, they fell, clasped in a ferocious embrace.  A similar
conflict went on in the cellar.  Shouts, shots, a fierce trampling. 
Then silence.  The barricade was captured.

The soldiers began to search the houses round about, and to pursue
the fugitives.



CHAPTER XXIV

PRISONER


Marius was, in fact, a prisoner.

The hand which had seized him from behind and whose grasp he
had felt at the moment of his fall and his loss of consciousness
was that of Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean had taken no other part in the combat than to expose
himself in it.  Had it not been for him, no one, in that supreme
phase of agony, would have thought of the wounded.  Thanks to him,
everywhere present in the carnage, like a providence, those who
fell were picked up, transported to the tap-room, and cared for. 
In the intervals, he reappeared on the barricade.  But nothing
which could resemble a blow, an attack or even personal defence
proceeded from his hands.  He held his peace and lent succor. 
Moreover he had received only a few scratches.  The bullets would
have none of him.  If suicide formed part of what he had meditated
on coming to this sepulchre, to that spot, he had not succeeded. 
But we doubt whether he had thought of suicide, an irreligious act.

Jean Valjean, in the thick cloud of the combat, did not appear to
see Marius; the truth is, that he never took his eyes from the latter. 
When a shot laid Marius low, Jean Valjean leaped forward with the
agility of a tiger, fell upon him as on his prey, and bore him off.

The whirlwind of the attack was, at that moment, so violently
concentrated upon Enjolras and upon the door of the wine-shop, that
no one saw Jean Valjean sustaining the fainting Marius in his arms,
traverse the unpaved field of the barricade and disappear behind
the angle of the Corinthe building.

The reader will recall this angle which formed a sort of cape on
the street; it afforded shelter from the bullets, the grape-shot,
and all eyes, and a few square feet of space.  There is sometimes
a chamber which does not burn in the midst of a conflagration,
and in the midst of raging seas, beyond a promontory or at the
extremity of a blind alley of shoals, a tranquil nook.  It was
in this sort of fold in the interior trapezium of the barricade,
that Eponine had breathed her last.

There Jean Valjean halted, let Marius slide to the ground,
placed his back against the wall, and cast his eyes about him.

The situation was alarming.

For an instant, for two or three perhaps, this bit of wall was
a shelter, but how was he to escape from this massacre?  He recalled
the anguish which he had suffered in the Rue Polonceau eight
years before, and in what manner he had contrived to make his escape;
it was difficult then, to-day it was impossible.  He had before him
that deaf and implacable house, six stories in height, which appeared
to be inhabited only by a dead man leaning out of his window;
he had on his right the rather low barricade, which shut off the
Rue de la Petite Truanderie; to pass this obstacle seemed easy,
but beyond the crest of the barrier a line of bayonets was visible. 
The troops of the line were posted on the watch behind that barricade. 
It was evident, that to pass the barricade was to go in quest of the
fire of the platoon, and that any head which should run the risk
of lifting itself above the top of that wall of stones would serve
as a target for sixty shots.  On his left he had the field of battle. 
Death lurked round the corner of that wall.

What was to be done?

Only a bird could have extricated itself from this predicament.

And it was necessary to decide on the instant, to devise some
expedient, to come to some decision.  Fighting was going on a few
paces away; fortunately, all were raging around a single point,
the door of the wine-shop; but if it should occur to one soldier,
to one single soldier, to turn the corner of the house,
or to attack him on the flank, all was over.

Jean Valjean gazed at the house facing him, he gazed at the
barricade at one side of him, then he looked at the ground,
with the violence of the last extremity, bewildered,
and as though he would have liked to pierce a hole there with his eyes.

By dint of staring, something vaguely striking in such an agony
began to assume form and outline at his feet, as though it had
been a power of glance which made the thing desired unfold. 
A few paces distant he perceived, at the base of the small barrier
so pitilessly guarded and watched on the exterior, beneath a disordered
mass of paving-stones which partly concealed it, an iron grating,
placed flat and on a level with the soil.  This grating,
made of stout, transverse bars, was about two feet square. 
The frame of paving-stones which supported it had been torn up,
and it was, as it were, unfastened.

Through the bars a view could be had of a dark aperture,
something like the flue of a chimney, or the pipe of a cistern. 
Jean Valjean darted forward.  His old art of escape rose to his
brain like an illumination.  To thrust aside the stones, to raise
the grating, to lift Marius, who was as inert as a dead body,
upon his shoulders, to descend, with this burden on his loins,
and with the aid of his elbows and knees into that sort of well,
fortunately not very deep, to let the heavy trap, upon which the
loosened stones rolled down afresh, fall into its place behind him,
to gain his footing on a flagged surface three metres below
the surface,--all this was executed like that which one does
in dreams, with the strength of a giant and the rapidity of an eagle;
this took only a few minutes.

Jean Valjean found himself with Marius, who was still unconscious,
in a sort of long, subterranean corridor.

There reigned profound peace, absolute silence, night.

The impression which he had formerly experienced when falling
from the wall into the convent recurred to him.  Only, what he was
carrying to-day was not Cosette; it was Marius.  He could barely
hear the formidable tumult in the wine-shop, taken by assault,
like a vague murmur overhead.



BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN



CHAPTER I

THE LAND IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA


Paris casts twenty-five millions yearly into the water.  And this
without metaphor.  How, and in what manner?  Day and night. 
With what object?  With no object.  With what intention? 
With no intention.  Why?  For no reason.  By means of what organ? 
By means of its intestine.  What is its intestine?  The sewer.

Twenty-five millions is the most moderate approximative figure
which the valuations of special science have set upon it.

Science, after having long groped about, now knows that the most
fecundating and the most efficacious of fertilizers is human manure. 
The Chinese, let us confess it to our shame, knew it before us. 
Not a Chinese peasant--it is Eckberg who says this,--goes to town without
bringing back with him, at the two extremities of his bamboo pole,
two full buckets of what we designate as filth.  Thanks to human dung,
the earth in China is still as young as in the days of Abraham. 
Chinese wheat yields a hundred fold of the seed.  There is no
guano comparable in fertility with the detritus of a capital. 
A great city is the most mighty of dung-makers. Certain success
would attend the experiment of employing the city to manure
the plain.  If our gold is manure, our manure, on the other hand,
is gold.

What is done with this golden manure?  It is swept into the abyss.

Fleets of vessels are despatched, at great expense, to collect the
dung of petrels and penguins at the South Pole, and the incalculable
element of opulence which we have on hand, we send to the sea. 
All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, restored to
the land instead of being cast into the water, would suffice
to nourish the world.

Those heaps of filth at the gate-posts, those tumbrils of mud
which jolt through the street by night, those terrible casks of
the street department, those fetid drippings of subterranean mire,
which the pavements hide from you,--do you know what they are? 
They are the meadow in flower, the green grass, wild thyme,
thyme and sage, they are game, they are cattle, they are the satisfied
bellows of great oxen in the evening, they are perfumed hay, they are
golden wheat, they are the bread on your table, they are the warm
blood in your veins, they are health, they are joy, they are life. 
This is the will of that mysterious creation which is transformation
on earth and transfiguration in heaven.

Restore this to the great crucible; your abundance will flow forth
from it.  The nutrition of the plains furnishes the nourishment
of men.

You have it in your power to lose this wealth, and to consider me
ridiculous to boot.  This will form the master-piece of your ignorance.

Statisticians have calculated that France alone makes a deposit
of half a milliard every year, in the Atlantic, through the mouths
of her rivers.  Note this:  with five hundred millions we could
pay one quarter of the expenses of our budget.  The cleverness
of man is such that he prefers to get rid of these five hundred
millions in the gutter.  It is the very substance of the people
that is carried off, here drop by drop, there wave after wave,
the wretched outpour of our sewers into the rivers, and the gigantic
collection of our rivers into the ocean.  Every hiccough of our
sewers costs us a thousand francs.  From this spring two results,
the land impoverished, and the water tainted.  Hunger arising
from the furrow, and disease from the stream.

It is notorious, for example, that at the present hour, the Thames
is poisoning London.

So far as Paris is concerned, it has become indispensable of late,
to transport the mouths of the sewers down stream, below the
last bridge.

A double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sluices,
sucking up and driving back, a system of elementary drainage,
simple as the lungs of a man, and which is already in full working
order in many communities in England, would suffice to conduct
the pure water of the fields into our cities, and to send back
to the fields the rich water of the cities, and this easy exchange,
the simplest in the world, would retain among us the five hundred
millions now thrown away.  People are thinking of other things.

The process actually in use does evil, with the intention of doing good. 
The intention is good, the result is melancholy.  Thinking to purge
the city, the population is blanched like plants raised in cellars. 
A sewer is a mistake.  When drainage, everywhere, with its double
function, restoring what it takes, shall have replaced the sewer,
which is a simple impoverishing washing, then, this being combined
with the data of a now social economy, the product of the earth will
be increased tenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly
lightened.  Add the suppression of parasitism, and it will be solved.

In the meanwhile, the public wealth flows away to the river,
and leakage takes place.  Leakage is the word.  Europe is being
ruined in this manner by exhaustion.

As for France, we have just cited its figures.  Now, Paris contains
one twenty-fifth of the total population of France, and Parisian
guano being the richest of all, we understate the truth when we value
the loss on the part of Paris at twenty-five millions in the half
milliard which France annually rejects.  These twenty-five millions,
employed in assistance and enjoyment, would double the splendor
of Paris.  The city spends them in sewers.  So that we may say that
Paris's great prodigality, its wonderful festival, its Beaujon folly,
its orgy, its stream of gold from full hands, its pomp, its luxury,
its magnificence, is its sewer system.

It is in this manner that, in the blindness of a poor
political economy, we drown and allow to float down
stream and to be lost in the gulfs the well-being
of all.  There should be nets at Saint-Cloud for the public fortune.

Economically considered, the matter can be summed up thus: 
Paris is a spendthrift.  Paris, that model city, that patron of
well-arranged capitals, of which every nation strives to possess a copy,
that metropolis of the ideal, that august country of the initiative,
of impulse and of effort, that centre and that dwelling of minds,
that nation-city, that hive of the future, that marvellous combination
of Babylon and Corinth, would make a peasant of the Fo-Kian shrug
his shoulders, from the point of view which we have just indicated.

Imitate Paris and you will ruin yourselves.

Moreover, and particularly in this immemorial and senseless waste,
Paris is itself an imitator.

These surprising exhibitions of stupidity are not novel;
this is no young folly.  The ancients did like the moderns. 
"The sewers of Rome," says Liebig, "have absorbed all the well-being
of the Roman peasant."  When the Campagna of Rome was ruined by
the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted Italy, and when she had put Italy
in her sewer, she poured in Sicily, then Sardinia, then Africa. 
The sewer of Rome has engulfed the world.  This cess-pool offered
its engulfment to the city and the universe.  Urbi et orbi. 
Eternal city, unfathomable sewer.

Rome sets the example for these things as well as for others.

Paris follows this example with all the stupidity peculiar
to intelligent towns.

For the requirements of the operation upon the subject of which we
have just explained our views, Paris has beneath it another Paris;
a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its cross-roads, its squares,
its blind-alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is of mire
and minus the human form.

For nothing must be flattered, not even a great people; where there
is everything there is also ignominy by the side of sublimity;
and, if Paris contains Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city
of might, Sparta, the city of virtue, Nineveh, the city of marvels,
it also contains Lutetia, the city of mud.

However, the stamp of its power is there also, and the Titanic sink
of Paris realizes, among monuments, that strange ideal realized
in humanity by some men like Macchiavelli, Bacon and Mirabeau,
grandiose vileness.

The sub-soil of Paris, if the eye could penetrate its surface,
would present the aspect of a colossal madrepore.  A sponge has no
more partitions and ducts than the mound of earth for a circuit of six
leagues round about, on which rests the great and ancient city. 
Not to mention its catacombs, which are a separate cellar,
not to mention the inextricable trellis-work of gas pipes,
without reckoning the vast tubular system for the distribution
of fresh water which ends in the pillar fountains, the sewers
alone form a tremendous, shadowy net-work under the two banks;
a labyrinth which has its slope for its guiding thread.

There appears, in the humid mist, the rat which seems the product
to which Paris has given birth.



CHAPTER II

ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE SEWER


Let the reader imagine Paris lifted off like a cover, the subterranean
net-work of sewers, from a bird's eye view, will outline on the banks
a species of large branch grafted on the river.  On the right bank,
the belt sewer will form the trunk of this branch, the secondary
ducts will form the branches, and those without exit the twigs.

This figure is but a summary one and half exact, the right angle,
which is the customary angle of this species of subterranean
ramifications, being very rare in vegetation.

A more accurate image of this strange geometrical plan can be formed
by supposing that one is viewing some eccentric oriental alphabet,
as intricate as a thicket, against a background of shadows,
and the misshapen letters should be welded one to another in
apparent confusion, and as at haphazard, now by their angles,
again by their extremities.

Sinks and sewers played a great part in the Middle Ages,
in the Lower Empire and in the Orient of old.  The masses regarded
these beds of decomposition, these monstrous cradles of death,
with a fear that was almost religious.  The vermin ditch of Benares
is no less conducive to giddiness than the lions' ditch of Babylon. 
Teglath-Phalasar, according to the rabbinical books, swore by the sink
of Nineveh.  It was from the sewer of Munster that John of Leyden
produced his false moon, and it was from the cess-pool of Kekscheb
that oriental menalchme, Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Khorassan,
caused his false sun to emerge.

The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers. 
The Germoniae[58] narrated Rome.  The sewer of Paris has been
an ancient and formidable thing.  It has been a sepulchre,
it has served as an asylum.  Crime, intelligence, social protest,
liberty of conscience, thought, theft, all that human laws persecute
or have persecuted, is hidden in that hole; the maillotins in the
fourteenth century, the tire-laine of the fifteenth, the Huguenots
in the sixteenth, Morin's illuminated in the seventeenth,
the chauffeurs [brigands] in the eighteenth.  A hundred years ago,
the nocturnal blow of the dagger emerged thence, the pickpocket in
danger slipped thither; the forest had its cave, Paris had its sewer. 
Vagrancy, that Gallic picareria, accepted the sewer as the adjunct
of the Cour des Miracles, and at evening, it returned thither,
fierce and sly, through the Maubuee outlet, as into a bed-chamber.


[58] Steps on the Aventine Hill, leading to the Tiber, to which the
bodies of executed criminals were dragged by hooks to be thrown
into the Tiber.


It was quite natural, that those who had the blind-alley Vide-Gousset,
[Empty-Pocket] or the Rue Coupe-Gorge [Cut-Throat], for the scene
of their daily labor, should have for their domicile by night
the culvert of the Chemin-Vert, or the catch basin of Hurepoix. 
Hence a throng of souvenirs.  All sorts of phantoms haunt these long,
solitary corridors; everywhere is putrescence and miasma;
here and there are breathing-holes, where Villon within converses
with Rabelais without.

The sewer in ancient Paris is the rendezvous of all exhaustions
and of all attempts.  Political economy therein spies a detritus,
social philosophy there beholds a residuum.

The sewer is the conscience of the city.  Everything there
converges and confronts everything else.  In that livid spot
there are shades, but there are no longer any secrets. 
Each thing bears its true form, or at least, its definitive form. 
The mass of filth has this in its favor, that it is not a liar. 
Ingenuousness has taken refuge there.  The mask of Basil is to be
found there, but one beholds its cardboard and its strings and the
inside as well as the outside, and it is accentuated by honest mud. 
Scapin's false nose is its next-door neighbor.  All the uncleannesses
of civilization, once past their use, fall into this trench of truth,
where the immense social sliding ends.  They are there engulfed,
but they display themselves there.  This mixture is a confession. 
There, no more false appearances, no plastering over is possible,
filth removes its shirt, absolute denudation puts to the rout all
illusions and mirages, there is nothing more except what really exists,
presenting the sinister form of that which is coming to an end. 
There, the bottom of a bottle indicates drunkenness, a basket-handle
tells a tale of domesticity; there the core of an apple which has
entertained literary opinions becomes an apple-core once more;
the effigy on the big sou becomes frankly covered with verdigris,
Caiphas' spittle meets Falstaff's puking, the louis-d'or which comes
from the gaming-house jostles the nail whence hangs the rope's end
of the suicide.  A livid foetus rolls along, enveloped in the spangles
which danced at the Opera last Shrove-Tuesday, a cap which has
pronounced judgment on men wallows beside a mass of rottenness which
was formerly Margoton's petticoat; it is more than fraternization,
it is equivalent to addressing each other as thou.  All which was
formerly rouged, is washed free.  The last veil is torn away. 
A sewer is a cynic.  It tells everything.

The sincerity of foulness pleases us, and rests the soul.  When one
has passed one's time in enduring upon earth the spectacle of the
great airs which reasons of state, the oath, political sagacity,
human justice, professional probity, the austerities of situation,
incorruptible robes all assume, it solaces one to enter a sewer
and to behold the mire which befits it.

This is instructive at the same time.  We have just said that history
passes through the sewer.  The Saint-Barthelemys filter through there,
drop by drop, between the paving-stones. Great public assassinations,
political and religious butcheries, traverse this underground
passage of civilization, and thrust their corpses there.  For the
eye of the thinker, all historic murderers are to be found there,
in that hideous penumbra, on their knees, with a scrap of their
winding-sheet for an apron, dismally sponging out their work. 
Louis XI.  is there with Tristan, Francois I. with Duprat, Charles IX. 
is there with his mother, Richelieu is there with Louis XIII.,
Louvois is there, Letellier is there, Hebert and Maillard are there,
scratching the stones, and trying to make the traces of their actions
disappear.  Beneath these vaults one hears the brooms of spectres. 
One there breathes the enormous fetidness of social catastrophes. 
One beholds reddish reflections in the corners.  There flows
a terrible stream, in which bloody hands have been washed.

The social observer should enter these shadows.  They form a part
of his laboratory.  Philosophy is the microscope of the thought. 
Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it. 
Tergiversation is useless.  What side of oneself does one display
in evasions? the shameful side.  Philosophy pursues with its glance,
probes the evil, and does not permit it to escape into nothingness. 
In the obliteration of things which disappear, in the watching
of things which vanish, it recognizes all.  It reconstructs the
purple from the rag, and the woman from the scrap of her dress. 
From the cess-pool, it re-constitutes the city; from mud,
it reconstructs manners; from the potsherd it infers the amphora
or the jug.  By the imprint of a finger-nail on a piece of parchment,
it recognizes the difference which separates the Jewry of the Judengasse
from the Jewry of the Ghetto.  It re-discovers in what remains that
which has been, good, evil, the true, the blood-stain of the palace,
the ink-blot of the cavern, the drop of sweat from the brothel,
trials undergone, temptations welcomed, orgies cast forth,
the turn which characters have taken as they became abased,
the trace of prostitution in souls of which their grossness rendered
them capable, and on the vesture of the porters of Rome the mark of
Messalina's elbowing.



CHAPTER III

BRUNESEAU


The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary.  In the
sixteenth century, Henri II.  attempted a bore, which failed. 
Not a hundred years ago, the cess-pool, Mercier attests the fact,
was abandoned to itself, and fared as best it might.

Such was this ancient Paris, delivered over to quarrels, to indecision,
and to gropings.  It was tolerably stupid for a long time. 
Later on, '89 showed how understanding comes to cities.  But in
the good, old times, the capital had not much head.  It did not
know how to manage its own affairs either morally or materially,
and could not sweep out filth any better than it could abuses. 
Everything presented an obstacle, everything raised a question. 
The sewer, for example, was refractory to every itinerary. 
One could no more find one's bearings in the sewer than one could
understand one's position in the city; above the unintelligible,
below the inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues there reigned
the confusion of caverns; Daedalus backed up Babel.

Sometimes the Paris sewer took a notion to overflow, as though
this misunderstood Nile were suddenly seized with a fit of rage. 
There occurred, infamous to relate, inundations of the sewer. 
At times, that stomach of civilization digested badly, the cess-pool
flowed back into the throat of the city, and Paris got an after-taste
of her own filth.  These resemblances of the sewer to remorse had
their good points; they were warnings; very badly accepted, however;
the city waxed indignant at the audacity of its mire, and did not
admit that the filth should return.  Drive it out better.

The inundation of 1802 is one of the actual memories of Parisians
of the age of eighty.  The mud spread in cross-form over the Place
des Victoires, where stands the statue of Louis XIV.; it entered the Rue
Saint-Honore by the two mouths to the sewer in the Champs-Elysees,
the Rue Saint-Florentin through the Saint-Florentin sewer,
the Rue Pierre-a-Poisson through the sewer de la Sonnerie,
the Rue Popincourt, through the sewer of the Chemin-Vert,
the Rue de la Roquette, through the sewer of the Rue de Lappe;
it covered the drain of the Rue des Champs-Elysees to the height
of thirty-five centimetres; and, to the South, through the vent of
the Seine, performing its functions in inverse sense, it penetrated
the Rue Mazarine, the Rue de l'Echaude, and the Rue des Marais,
where it stopped at a distance of one hundred and nine metres,
a few paces distant from the house in which Racine had lived,
respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more than the King. 
It attained its maximum depth in the Rue Saint-Pierre, where it
rose to the height of three feet above the flag-stones of the
water-spout, and its maximum length in the Rue Saint-Sabin, where it
spread out over a stretch two hundred and thirty-eight metres in length.

At the beginning of this century, the sewer of Paris was still
a mysterious place.  Mud can never enjoy a good fame; but in this
case its evil renown reached the verge of the terrible.  Paris knew,
in a confused way, that she had under her a terrible cavern. 
People talked of it as of that monstrous bed of Thebes in which
swarmed centipedes fifteen long feet in length, and which might have
served Behemoth for a bathtub.  The great boots of the sewermen
never ventured further than certain well-known points.  We were then
very near the epoch when the scavenger's carts, from the summit
of which Sainte-Foix fraternized with the Marquis de Crequi,
discharged their loads directly into the sewer.  As for cleaning out,--
that function was entrusted to the pouring rains which encumbered
rather than swept away.  Rome left some poetry to her sewer,
and called it the Gemoniae; Paris insulted hers, and entitled it
the Polypus-Hole. Science and superstition were in accord, in horror. 
The Polypus hole was no less repugnant to hygiene than to legend. 
The goblin was developed under the fetid covering of the Mouffetard sewer;
the corpses of the Marmousets had been cast into the sewer de
la Barillerie; Fagon attributed the redoubtable malignant fever of 1685
to the great hiatus of the sewer of the Marais, which remained yawning
until 1833 in the Rue Saint-Louis, almost opposite the sign of the
Gallant Messenger.  The mouth of the sewer of the Rue de la Mortellerie
was celebrated for the pestilences which had their source there;
with its grating of iron, with points simulating a row of teeth,
it was like a dragon's maw in that fatal street, breathing forth
hell upon men.  The popular imagination seasoned the sombre Parisian
sink with some indescribably hideous intermixture of the infinite. 
The sewer had no bottom.  The sewer was the lower world.  The idea
of exploring these leprous regions did not even occur to the police. 
To try that unknown thing, to cast the plummet into that shadow,
to set out on a voyage of discovery in that abyss--who would have dared? 
It was alarming.  Nevertheless, some one did present himself. 
The cess-pool had its Christopher Columbus.

One day, in 1805, during one of the rare apparitions which the
Emperor made in Paris, the Minister of the Interior, some Decres
or Cretet or other, came to the master's intimate levee. 
In the Carrousel there was audible the clanking of swords of all
those extraordinary soldiers of the great Republic, and of the
great Empire; then Napoleon's door was blocked with heroes;
men from the Rhine, from the Escaut, from the Adige, and from
the Nile; companions of Joubert, of Desaix, of Marceau, of Hoche,
of Kleber; the aerostiers of Fleurus, the grenadiers of Mayence,
the pontoon-builders of Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had looked
down upon, artillerists whom Junot's cannon-ball had spattered
with mud, cuirassiers who had taken by assault the fleet lying at
anchor in the Zuyderzee; some had followed Bonaparte upon the bridge
of Lodi, others had accompanied Murat in the trenches of Mantua,
others had preceded Lannes in the hollow road of Montebello. 
The whole army of that day was present there, in the court-yard of
the Tuileries, represented by a squadron or a platoon, and guarding
Napoleon in repose; and that was the splendid epoch when the grand
army had Marengo behind it and Austerlitz before it.--"Sire,"
said the Minister of the Interior to Napoleon, "yesterday I saw
the most intrepid man in your Empire."--"What man is that?"
said the Emperor brusquely, "and what has he done?"--"He wants
to do something, Sire."--"What is it?"--"To visit the sewers of Paris."

This man existed and his name was Bruneseau.



CHAPTER IV


The visit took place.  It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal
battle against pestilence and suffocation.  It was, at the same time,
a voyage of discovery.  One of the survivors of this expedition,
an intelligent workingman, who was very young at the time, related curious
details with regard to it, several years ago, which Bruneseau thought
himself obliged to omit in his report to the prefect of police,
as unworthy of official style.  The processes of disinfection were,
at that epoch, extremely rudimentary.  Hardly had Bruneseau crossed
the first articulations of that subterranean network, when eight
laborers out of the twenty refused to go any further.  The operation
was complicated; the visit entailed the necessity of cleaning;
hence it was necessary to cleanse and at the same time, to proceed;
to note the entrances of water, to count the gratings and the vents,
to lay out in detail the branches, to indicate the currents at
the point where they parted, to define the respective bounds of the
divers basins, to sound the small sewers grafted on the principal
sewer, to measure the height under the key-stone of each drain,
and the width, at the spring of the vaults as well as at the bottom,
in order to determine the arrangements with regard to the level
of each water-entrance, either of the bottom of the arch, or on
the soil of the street.  They advanced with toil.  The lanterns
pined away in the foul atmosphere.  From time to time, a fainting
sewerman was carried out.  At certain points, there were precipices. 
The soil had given away, the pavement had crumbled, the sewer
had changed into a bottomless well; they found nothing solid;
a man disappeared suddenly; they had great difficulty in getting
him out again.  On the advice of Fourcroy, they lighted large cages
filled with tow steeped in resin, from time to time, in spots
which had been sufficiently disinfected.  In some places, the wall
was covered with misshapen fungi,--one would have said tumors;
the very stone seemed diseased within this unbreathable atmosphere.

Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded down hill.  At the point
of separation of the two water-conduits of the Grand-Hurleur, he
deciphered upon a projecting stone the date of 1550; this stone
indicated the limits where Philibert Delorme, charged by Henri II. 
with visiting the subterranean drains of Paris, had halted. 
This stone was the mark of the sixteenth century on the sewer;
Bruneseau found the handiwork of the seventeenth century once more
in the Ponceau drain of the old Rue Vielle-du-Temple, vaulted between
1600 and 1650; and the handiwork of the eighteenth in the western
section of the collecting canal, walled and vaulted in 1740. 
These two vaults, especially the less ancient, that of 1740,
were more cracked and decrepit than the masonry of the belt sewer,
which dated from 1412, an epoch when the brook of fresh water of
Menilmontant was elevated to the dignity of the Grand Sewer of Paris,
an advancement analogous to that of a peasant who should become first
valet de chambre to the King; something like Gros-Jean transformed
into Lebel.

Here and there, particularly beneath the Court-House, they thought
they recognized the hollows of ancient dungeons, excavated in the
very sewer itself.  Hideous in-pace. An iron neck-collar was hanging
in one of these cells.  They walled them all up.  Some of their finds
were singular; among others, the skeleton of an ourang-outan, who had
disappeared from the Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance
probably connected with the famous and indisputable apparition of the
devil in the Rue des Bernardins, in the last year of the eighteenth
century.  The poor devil had ended by drowning himself in the sewer.

Beneath this long, arched drain which terminated at the Arche-Marion,
a perfectly preserved rag-picker's basket excited the admiration
of all connoisseurs.  Everywhere, the mire, which the sewermen came
to handle with intrepidity, abounded in precious objects, jewels of
gold and silver, precious stones, coins.  If a giant had filtered
this cesspool, he would have had the riches of centuries in his lair. 
At the point where the two branches of the Rue du Temple and of the
Rue Sainte-Avoye separate, they picked up a singular Huguenot medal
in copper, bearing on one side the pig hooded with a cardinal's hat,
and on the other, a wolf with a tiara on his head.

The most surprising rencounter was at the entrance to the Grand Sewer. 
This entrance had formerly been closed by a grating of which nothing
but the hinges remained.  From one of these hinges hung a dirty
and shapeless rag which, arrested there in its passage, no doubt,
had floated there in the darkness and finished its process of being
torn apart.  Bruneseau held his lantern close to this rag and
examined it.  It was of very fine batiste, and in one of the corners,
less frayed than the rest, they made out a heraldic coronet and
embroidered above these seven letters:  LAVBESP.  The crown was the
coronet of a Marquis, and the seven letters signified Laubespine. 
They recognized the fact, that what they had before their eyes
was a morsel of the shroud of Marat.  Marat in his youth had had
amorous intrigues.  This was when he was a member of the household
of the Comte d'Artois, in the capacity of physician to the Stables. 
From these love affairs, historically proved, with a great lady,
he had retained this sheet.  As a waif or a souvenir.  At his death,
as this was the only linen of any fineness which he had in his house,
they buried him in it.  Some old women had shrouded him for the tomb
in that swaddling-band in which the tragic Friend of the people
had enjoyed voluptuousness.  Bruneseau passed on.  They left that
rag where it hung; they did not put the finishing touch to it. 
Did this arise from scorn or from respect?  Marat deserved both. 
And then, destiny was there sufficiently stamped to make them
hesitate to touch it.  Besides, the things of the sepulchre must
be left in the spot which they select.  In short, the relic was
a strange one.  A Marquise had slept in it; Marat had rotted in it;
it had traversed the Pantheon to end with the rats of the sewer. 
This chamber rag, of which Watteau would formerly have joyfully
sketched every fold, had ended in becoming worthy of the fixed gaze
of Dante.

The whole visit to the subterranean stream of filth of Paris
lasted seven years, from 1805 to 1812.  As he proceeded,
Bruneseau drew, directed, and completed considerable works;
in 1808 he lowered the arch of the Ponceau, and, everywhere creating
new lines, he pushed the sewer, in 1809, under the Rue Saint-Denis
as far as the fountain of the Innocents; in 1810, under the Rue
Froidmanteau and under the Salpetriere; in 1811 under the Rue
Neuve-des-Petits-Peres, under the Rue du Mail, under the Rue de
l'Echarpe, under the Place Royale; in 1812, under the Rue de la Paix,
and under the Chaussee d'Antin. At the same time, he had the whole
net-work disinfected and rendered healthful.  In the second year
of his work, Bruneseau engaged the assistance of his son-in-law Nargaud.

It was thus that, at the beginning of the century, ancient society
cleansed its double bottom, and performed the toilet of its sewer. 
There was that much clean, at all events.

Tortuous, cracked, unpaved, full of fissures, intersected by gullies,
jolted by eccentric elbows, mounting and descending illogically,
fetid, wild, fierce, submerged in obscurity, with cicatrices
on its pavements and scars on its walls, terrible,--such was,
retrospectively viewed, the antique sewer of Paris.  Ramifications in
every direction, crossings, of trenches, branches, goose-feet, stars,
as in military mines, coecum, blind alleys, vaults lined with saltpetre,
pestiferous pools, scabby sweats, on the walls, drops dripping
from the ceilings, darkness; nothing could equal the horror
of this old, waste crypt, the digestive apparatus of Babylon,
a cavern, ditch, gulf pierced with streets, a titanic mole-burrow,
where the mind seems to behold that enormous blind mole, the past,
prowling through the shadows, in the filth which has been splendor.

This, we repeat, was the sewer of the past.



CHAPTER V

PRESENT PROGRESS


To-day the sewer is clean, cold, straight, correct.  It almost
realizes the ideal of what is understood in England by the
word "respectable."  It is proper and grayish; laid out by rule
and line; one might almost say as though it came out of a bandbox. 
It resembles a tradesman who has become a councillor of state. 
One can almost see distinctly there.  The mire there comports
itself with decency.  At first, one might readily mistake it
for one of those subterranean corridors, which were so common
in former days, and so useful in flights of monarchs and princes,
in those good old times, "when the people loved their kings." 
The present sewer is a beautiful sewer; the pure style reigns there;
the classical rectilinear alexandrine which, driven out of poetry,
appears to have taken refuge in architecture, seems mingled
with all the stones of that long, dark and whitish vault;
each outlet is an arcade; the Rue de Rivoli serves as pattern even
in the sewer.  However, if the geometrical line is in place anywhere,
it is certainly in the drainage trench of a great city. 
There, everything should be subordinated to the shortest road. 
The sewer has, nowadays, assumed a certain official aspect. 
The very police reports, of which it sometimes forms the subject,
no longer are wanting in respect towards it.  The words which
characterize it in administrative language are sonorous and dignified. 
What used to be called a gut is now called a gallery; what used
to be called a hole is now called a surveying orifice.  Villon would
no longer meet with his ancient temporary provisional lodging. 
This net-work of cellars has its immemorial population of prowlers,
rodents, swarming in greater numbers than ever; from time to time,
an aged and veteran rat risks his head at the window of the sewer
and surveys the Parisians; but even these vermin grow tame,
so satisfied are they with their subterranean palace.  The cesspool
no longer retains anything of its primitive ferocity.  The rain,
which in former days soiled the sewer, now washes it.  Nevertheless,
do not trust yourself too much to it.  Miasmas still inhabit it. 
It is more hypocritical than irreproachable.  The prefecture
of police and the commission of health have done their best. 
But, in spite of all the processes of disinfection, it exhales,
a vague, suspicious odor like Tartuffe after confession.

Let us confess, that, taking it all in all, this sweeping is a homage
which the sewer pays to civilization, and as, from this point of view,
Tartuffe's conscience is a progress over the Augean stables,
it is certain that the sewers of Paris have been improved.

It is more than progress; it is transmutation.  Between the ancient
and the present sewer there is a revolution.  What has effected
this revolution?

The man whom all the world forgets, and whom we have mentioned, Bruneseau.



CHAPTER VI

FUTURE PROGRESS


The excavation of the sewer of Paris has been no slight task. 
The last ten centuries have toiled at it without being able to
bring it to a termination, any more than they have been able to
finish Paris.  The sewer, in fact, receives all the counter-shocks
of the growth of Paris.  Within the bosom of the earth, it is a sort
of mysterious polyp with a thousand antennae, which expands below
as the city expands above.  Every time that the city cuts a street,
the sewer stretches out an arm.  The old monarchy had constructed
only twenty-three thousand three hundred metres of sewers; that was
where Paris stood in this respect on the first of January, 1806. 
Beginning with this epoch, of which we shall shortly speak,
the work was usefully and energetically resumed and prosecuted;
Napoleon built--the figures are curious--four thousand eight
hundred and four metres; Louis XVIII., five thousand seven hundred
and nine; Charles X., ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-six;
Louis-Philippe, eighty-nine thousand and twenty; the Republic
of 1848, twenty-three thousand three hundred and eighty-one;
the present government, seventy thousand five hundred; in all,
at the present time, two hundred and twenty-six thousand six hundred
and ten metres; sixty leagues of sewers; the enormous entrails
of Paris.  An obscure ramification ever at work; a construction
which is immense and ignored.

As the reader sees, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is to-day
more than ten times what it was at the beginning of the century. 
It is difficult to form any idea of all the perseverance and the efforts
which have been required to bring this cess-pool to the point of
relative perfection in which it now is.  It was with great difficulty
that the ancient monarchical provostship and, during the last ten
years of the eighteenth century, the revolutionary mayoralty,
had succeeded in perforating the five leagues of sewer which existed
previous to 1806.  All sorts of obstacles hindered this operation,
some peculiar to the soil, others inherent in the very prejudices
of the laborious population of Paris.  Paris is built upon a soil
which is singularly rebellious to the pick, the hoe, the bore,
and to human manipulation.  There is nothing more difficult to
pierce and to penetrate than the geological formation upon which
is superposed the marvellous historical formation called Paris;
as soon as work in any form whatsoever is begun and adventures
upon this stretch of alluvium, subterranean resistances abound. 
There are liquid clays, springs, hard rocks, and those soft
and deep quagmires which special science calls moutardes.[59]
The pick advances laboriously through the calcareous layers
alternating with very slender threads of clay, and schistose beds
in plates incrusted with oyster-shells, the contemporaries of the
pre-Adamite oceans.  Sometimes a rivulet suddenly bursts through
a vault that has been begun, and inundates the laborers; or a layer
of marl is laid bare, and rolls down with the fury of a cataract,
breaking the stoutest supporting beams like glass.  Quite recently,
at Villette, when it became necessary to pass the collecting sewer
under the Saint-Martin canal without interrupting navigation or
emptying the canal, a fissure appeared in the basin of the canal,
water suddenly became abundant in the subterranean tunnel, which was
beyond the power of the pumping engines; it was necessary to send
a diver to explore the fissure which had been made in the narrow
entrance of the grand basin, and it was not without great difficulty
that it was stopped up.  Elsewhere near the Seine, and even at a
considerable distance from the river, as for instance, at Belleville,
Grand-Rue and Lumiere Passage, quicksands are encountered in which
one sticks fast, and in which a man sinks visibly.  Add suffocation
by miasmas, burial by slides, and sudden crumbling of the earth. 
Add the typhus, with which the workmen become slowly impregnated. 
In our own day, after having excavated the gallery of Clichy,
with a banquette to receive the principal water-conduit of Ourcq,
a piece of work which was executed in a trench ten metres deep;
after having, in the midst of land-slides, and with the aid of
excavations often putrid, and of shoring up, vaulted the Bievre
from the Boulevard de l'Hopital, as far as the Seine; after having,
in order to deliver Paris from the floods of Montmartre and in order
to provide an outlet for that river-like pool nine hectares in extent,
which crouched near the Barriere des Martyrs, after having,
let us state, constructed the line of sewers from the Barriere Blanche
to the road of Aubervilliers, in four months, working day and night,
at a depth of eleven metres; after having--a thing heretofore unseen--
made a subterranean sewer in the Rue Barre-du-Bec, without a trench,
six metres below the surface, the superintendent, Monnot, died. 
After having vaulted three thousand metres of sewer in all quarters
of the city, from the Rue Traversiere-Saint-Antoine to the Rue de
l'Ourcine, after having freed the Carrefour Censier-Mouffetard
from inundations of rain by means of the branch of the Arbalete,
after having built the Saint-Georges sewer, on rock and concrete
in the fluid sands, after having directed the formidable lowering of
the flooring of the vault timber in the Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth branch,
Duleau the engineer died.  There are no bulletins for such acts of
bravery as these, which are more useful, nevertheless, than the brutal
slaughter of the field of battle.


[59] Mustards.


The sewers of Paris in 1832 were far from being what they are
to-day. Bruneseau had given the impulse, but the cholera was
required to bring about the vast reconstruction which took place
later on.  It is surprising to say, for example, that in 1821,
a part of the belt sewer, called the Grand Canal, as in Venice,
still stood stagnating uncovered to the sky, in the Rue des Gourdes. 
It was only in 1821 that the city of Paris found in its pocket
the two hundred and sixty-thousand eighty francs and six centimes
required for covering this mass of filth.  The three absorbing
wells, of the Combat, the Cunette, and Saint-Mande, with their
discharging mouths, their apparatus, their cesspools, and their
depuratory branches, only date from 1836.  The intestinal sewer
of Paris has been made over anew, and, as we have said, it has
been extended more than tenfold within the last quarter of a century.

Thirty years ago, at the epoch of the insurrection of the 5th and 6th
of June, it was still, in many localities, nearly the same ancient sewer. 
A very great number of streets which are now convex were then
sunken causeways.  At the end of a slope, where the tributaries
of a street or cross-roads ended, there were often to be seen large,
square gratings with heavy bars, whose iron, polished by the footsteps
of the throng, gleamed dangerous and slippery for vehicles,
and caused horses to fall.  The official language of the Roads
and Bridges gave to these gratings the expressive name of Cassis.[60]


[60] From casser, to break:  break-necks.


In 1832, in a number of streets, in the Rue de l'Etoile, the Rue
Saint-Louis, the Rue du Temple, the Rue Vielle-duTemple, the Rue
Notre-Dame de Nazareth, the Rue Folie-Mericourt, the Quai aux Fleurs,
the Rue du Petit-Muse, the Rue du Normandie, the Rue Pont-Aux-Biches,
the Rue des Marais, the Faubourg Saint-Martin, the Rue Notre Dame
des-Victoires, the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Grange-Bateliere,
in the Champs-Elysees, the Rue Jacob, the Rue de Tournon,
the ancient gothic sewer still cynically displayed its maw. 
It consisted of enormous voids of stone catch-basins sometimes
surrounded by stone posts, with monumental effrontery.

Paris in 1806 still had nearly the same sewers numerically as stated
in 1663; five thousand three hundred fathoms.  After Bruneseau,
on the 1st of January, 1832, it had forty thousand three hundred metres. 
Between 1806 and 1831, there had been built, on an average,
seven hundred and fifty metres annually, afterwards eight and even
ten thousand metres of galleries were constructed every year,
in masonry, of small stones, with hydraulic mortar which hardens
under water, on a cement foundation.  At two hundred francs the metre,
the sixty leagues of Paris' sewers of the present day represent
forty-eight millions.

In addition to the economic progress which we have indicated
at the beginning, grave problems of public hygiene are connected
with that immense question:  the sewers of Paris.

Paris is the centre of two sheets, a sheet of water and a sheet of air. 
The sheet of water, lying at a tolerably great depth underground,
but already sounded by two bores, is furnished by the layer of green
clay situated between the chalk and the Jurassic lime-stone; this layer
may be represented by a disk five and twenty leagues in circumference;
a multitude of rivers and brooks ooze there; one drinks the Seine,
the Marne, the Yonne, the Oise, the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne
and the Loire in a glass of water from the well of Grenelle. 
The sheet of water is healthy, it comes from heaven in the first
place and next from the earth; the sheet of air is unhealthy,
it comes from the sewer.  All the miasms of the cess-pool are mingled
with the breath of the city; hence this bad breath.  The air taken
from above a dung-heap, as has been scientifically proved, is purer
than the air taken from above Paris.  In a given time, with the aid
of progress, mechanisms become perfected, and as light increases,
the sheet of water will be employed to purify the sheet of air;
that is to say, to wash the sewer.  The reader knows, that by "washing
the sewer" we mean:  the restitution of the filth to the earth;
the return to the soil of dung and of manure to the fields. 
Through this simple act, the entire social community will
experience a diminution of misery and an augmentation of health. 
At the present hour, the radiation of diseases from Paris extends
to fifty leagues around the Louvre, taken as the hub of this
pestilential wheel.

We might say that, for ten centuries, the cess-pool has been the disease
of Paris.  The sewer is the blemish which Paris has in her blood. 
The popular instinct has never been deceived in it.  The occupation
of sewermen was formerly almost as perilous, and almost as repugnant
to the people, as the occupation of knacker, which was so long
held in horror and handed over to the executioner.  High wages
were necessary to induce a mason to disappear in that fetid mine;
the ladder of the cess-pool cleaner hesitated to plunge into it;
it was said, in proverbial form:  "to descend into the sewer is to
enter the grave;" and all sorts of hideous legends, as we have said,
covered this colossal sink with terror; a dread sink-hole which bears
the traces of the revolutions of the globe as of the revolutions
of man, and where are to be found vestiges of all cataclysms from
the shells of the Deluge to the rag of Marat.



BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL



CHAPTER I

THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.

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

He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.

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

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

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

It was not easy to direct his course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER II

EXPLANATION


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

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

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

This was an indescribable moment for Jean Valjean.

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

Jean Valjean having paused, the sound ceased.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER III

THE "SPUN" MAN


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was the object of the second man?

Probably to succeed in clothing the first more warmly.

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

There is a purple from below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His position was visibly becoming critical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Total eclipse of the man in the blouse.

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

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

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

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

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

"That is too much!  A government key!"

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

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

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



CHAPTER IV

HE ALSO BEARS HIS CROSS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suddenly this darkness became terrible.



CHAPTER V

IN THE CASE OF SAND AS IN THAT OF WOMAN, THERE IS A FINENESS WHICH
IS TREACHEROUS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER VI

THE FONTIS


Jean Valjean found himself in the presence of a fontis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER VII

ONE SOMETIMES RUNS AGROUND WHEN ONE FANCIES THAT ONE IS DISEMBARKING


He set out on his way once more.

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

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

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

Jean Valjean reached the outlet.

There he halted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER VIII

THE TORN COAT-TAIL


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

"Half shares."

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

A man stood before him.

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

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

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

A momentary pause ensued.

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

Jean Valjean immediately perceived that Thenardier did not recognize him.

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

"How are you going to manage to get out?"

Jean Valjean made no reply.  Thenardier continued:

"It's impossible to pick the lock of that gate.  But still you must
get out of this."

"That is true," said Jean Valjean.

"Well, half shares then."

"What do you mean by that?"

"You have killed that man; that's all right.  I have the key."

Thenardier pointed to Marius.  He went on:

"I don't know you, but I want to help you.  You must be a friend."

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

Thenardier resumed:

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

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

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

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

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

"Hold on," said he, "I'll give you the rope to boot."

"What is the rope for?"

"You will need a stone also, but you can find one outside. 
There's a heap of rubbish."

"What am I to do with a stone?"

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

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

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

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

After a pause he added:

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

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

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

Jean Valjean preserved silence.

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

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

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

Again Thenardier shook him by the shoulder.

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

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

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

Thenardier resumed:

"Let's settle up.  How much did the stiff have in his bags?"

Jean Valjean searched his pockets.

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

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

"You knocked him over cheap," said he.

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

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

"That's true," said he, "both of you together have no more than that."

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

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

"Never mind!  You cut folks' throats too cheap altogether."

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

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

And he began to laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jean Valjean found himself in the open air.



CHAPTER IX

MARIUS PRODUCES ON SOME ONE WHO IS A JUDGE OF THE MATTER, THE EFFECT
OF BEING DEAD


He allowed Marius to slide down upon the shore.

They were in the open air!

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

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

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

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

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

He turned round.

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

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

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

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

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

Jean Valjean had fallen from one danger upon another.

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

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

"Who are you?"

"I."

"Who is `I'?"

"Jean Valjean."

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

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

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

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

"What are you doing here?  And who is this man?"

He still abstained from addressing Jean Valjean as thou.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He seized Marius' hand and felt his pulse.

"He is wounded," said Jean Valjean.

"He is a dead man," said Javert.

Jean Valjean replied:

"No. Not yet."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he exclaimed:  "Coachman!"

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

Javert kept Marius' pocket-book.

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

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

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



CHAPTER X

RETURN OF THE SON WHO WAS PRODIGAL OF HIS LIFE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Some person whose name is Gillenormand?"

"Here.  What do you want with him?"

"His son is brought back."

"His son?" said the porter stupidly.

"He is dead."

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

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

Javert continued:

"He went to the barricade, and here he is."

"To the barricade?" ejaculated the porter.

"He has got himself killed.  Go waken his father."

The porter did not stir.

"Go along with you!" repeated Javert.

And he added:

"There will be a funeral here to-morrow."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Inspector Javert," said Jean, "grant me yet another favor."

"What is it?" demanded Javert roughly.

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

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

"Driver," said he, "Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7."



CHAPTER XI

CONCUSSION IN THE ABSOLUTE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It is well," said Javert.  "Go up stairs."

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

"I will wait for you here."

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

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

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

Javert had taken his departure.



CHAPTER XII

THE GRANDFATHER


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was the grandfather.

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

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

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

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

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

"Marius!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ah! heartless lad!  Ah! clubbist!  Ah! wretch!  Ah!  Septembrist!"

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

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

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

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

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

And he fell fainting.



BOOK FOURTH.--JAVERT DERAILED


CHAPTER I


Javert passed slowly down the Rue de l'Homme Arme.

He walked with drooping head for the first time in his life,
and likewise, for the first time in his life, with his hands behind
his back.

Up to that day, Javert had borrowed from Napoleon's attitudes,
only that which is expressive of resolution, with arms folded across
the chest; that which is expressive of uncertainty--with the hands behind
the back--had been unknown to him.  Now, a change had taken place;
his whole person, slow and sombre, was stamped with anxiety.

He plunged into the silent streets.

Nevertheless, he followed one given direction.

He took the shortest cut to the Seine, reached the Quai des Ormes,
skirted the quay, passed the Greve, and halted at some distance
from the post of the Place du Chatelet, at the angle of the Pont
Notre-Dame. There, between the Notre-Dame and the Pont au Change
on the one hand, and the Quai de la Megisserie and the Quai aux
Fleurs on the other, the Seine forms a sort of square lake,
traversed by a rapid.

This point of the Seine is dreaded by mariners.  Nothing is more
dangerous than this rapid, hemmed in, at that epoch, and irritated
by the piles of the mill on the bridge, now demolished. 
The two bridges, situated thus close together, augment the peril;
the water hurries in formidable wise through the arches.  It rolls
in vast and terrible waves; it accumulates and piles up there;
the flood attacks the piles of the bridges as though in an effort
to pluck them up with great liquid ropes.  Men who fall in there
never re-appear; the best of swimmers are drowned there.

Javert leaned both elbows on the parapet, his chin resting
in both hands, and, while his nails were mechanically twined
in the abundance of his whiskers, he meditated.

A novelty, a revolution, a catastrophe had just taken place in the
depths of his being; and he had something upon which to examine himself.

Javert was undergoing horrible suffering.

For several hours, Javert had ceased to be simple.  He was troubled;
that brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency;
that crystal was clouded.  Javert felt duty divided within his conscience,
and he could not conceal the fact from himself.  When he had so
unexpectedly encountered Jean Valjean on the banks of the Seine,
there had been in him something of the wolf which regains his grip
on his prey, and of the dog who finds his master again.

He beheld before him two paths, both equally straight, but he
beheld two; and that terrified him; him, who had never in all his
life known more than one straight line.  And, the poignant anguish
lay in this, that the two paths were contrary to each other. 
One of these straight lines excluded the other.  Which of the two
was the true one?

His situation was indescribable.

To owe his life to a malefactor, to accept that debt and to repay it;
to be, in spite of himself, on a level with a fugitive from justice,
and to repay his service with another service; to allow it to be said
to him, "Go," and to say to the latter in his turn:  "Be free";
to sacrifice to personal motives duty, that general obligation,
and to be conscious, in those personal motives, of something that
was also general, and, perchance, superior, to betray society in
order to remain true to his conscience; that all these absurdities
should be realized and should accumulate upon him,--this was what
overwhelmed him.

One thing had amazed him,--this was that Jean Valjean
should have done him a favor, and one thing petrified him,--
that he, Javert, should have done Jean Valjean a favor.

Where did he stand?  He sought to comprehend his position, and could
no longer find his bearings.

What was he to do now?  To deliver up Jean Valjean was bad;
to leave Jean Valjean at liberty was bad.  In the first case,
the man of authority fell lower than the man of the galleys,
in the second, a convict rose above the law, and set his foot
upon it.  In both cases, dishonor for him, Javert.  There was
disgrace in any resolution at which he might arrive.  Destiny has
some extremities which rise perpendicularly from the impossible,
and beyond which life is no longer anything but a precipice. 
Javert had reached one of those extremities.

One of his anxieties consisted in being constrained to think. 
The very violence of all these conflicting emotions forced him to it. 
Thought was something to which he was unused, and which was
peculiarly painful.

In thought there always exists a certain amount of internal rebellion;
and it irritated him to have that within him.

Thought on any subject whatever, outside of the restricted circle of
his functions, would have been for him in any case useless and a fatigue;
thought on the day which had just passed was a torture.  Nevertheless,
it was indispensable that he should take a look into his conscience,
after such shocks, and render to himself an account of himself.

What he had just done made him shudder.  He, Javert, had seen fit
to decide, contrary to all the regulations of the police, contrary to
the whole social and judicial organization, contrary to the entire code,
upon a release; this had suited him; he had substituted his own
affairs for the affairs of the public; was not this unjustifiable? 
Every time that he brought himself face to face with this deed without
a name which he had committed, he trembled from head to foot. 
Upon what should he decide?  One sole resource remained to him;
to return in all haste to the Rue de l'Homme Arme, and commit Jean
Valjean to prison.  It was clear that that was what he ought to do. 
He could not.

Something barred his way in that direction.

Something?  What?  Is there in the world, anything outside of
the tribunals, executory sentences, the police and the authorities? 
Javert was overwhelmed.

A galley-slave sacred!  A convict who could not be touched by the law! 
And that the deed of Javert!

Was it not a fearful thing that Javert and Jean Valjean, the man made
to proceed with vigor, the man made to submit,--that these two men
who were both the things of the law, should have come to such a pass,
that both of them had set themselves above the law?  What then! such
enormities were to happen and no one was to be punished!  Jean Valjean,
stronger than the whole social order, was to remain at liberty,
and he, Javert, was to go on eating the government's bread!

His revery gradually became terrible.

He might, athwart this revery, have also reproached himself
on the subject of that insurgent who had been taken to the Rue
des Filles-du-Calvaire; but he never even thought of that. 
The lesser fault was lost in the greater.  Besides, that insurgent
was, obviously, a dead man, and, legally, death puts an end to pursuit.

Jean Valjean was the load which weighed upon his spirit.

Jean Valjean disconcerted him.  All the axioms which had served
him as points of support all his life long, had crumbled away
in the presence of this man.  Jean Valjean's generosity towards
him, Javert, crushed him.  Other facts which he now recalled,
and which he had formerly treated as lies and folly, now recurred
to him as realities.  M. Madeleine re-appeared behind Jean Valjean,
and the two figures were superposed in such fashion that they now
formed but one, which was venerable.  Javert felt that something
terrible was penetrating his soul--admiration for a convict. 
Respect for a galley-slave--is that a possible thing?  He shuddered
at it, yet could not escape from it.  In vain did he struggle,
he was reduced to confess, in his inmost heart, the sublimity
of that wretch.  This was odious.

A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement,
a convict, returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred,
preferring pity to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather
than to ruin his enemy, saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on
the heights of virtue, more nearly akin to an angel than to a man. 
Javert was constrained to admit to himself that this monster existed.

Things could not go on in this manner.

Certainly, and we insist upon this point, he had not yielded
without resistance to that monster, to that infamous angel,
to that hideous hero, who enraged almost as much as he amazed him. 
Twenty times, as he sat in that carriage face to face with Jean Valjean,
the legal tiger had roared within him.  A score of times he had
been tempted to fling himself upon Jean Valjean, to seize him
and devour him, that is to say, to arrest him.  What more simple,
in fact?  To cry out at the first post that they passed:--"Here
is a fugitive from justice, who has broken his ban!" to summon
the gendarmes and say to them:  "This man is yours!" then to go off,
leaving that condemned man there, to ignore the rest and not to meddle
further in the matter.  This man is forever a prisoner of the law;
the law may do with him what it will.  What could be more just? 
Javert had said all this to himself; he had wished to pass beyond,
to act, to apprehend the man, and then, as at present, he had not been
able to do it; and every time that his arm had been raised convulsively
towards Jean Valjean's collar, his hand had fallen back again,
as beneath an enormous weight, and in the depths of his thought he
had heard a voice, a strange voice crying to him:--"It is well. 
Deliver up your savior.  Then have the basin of Pontius Pilate
brought and wash your claws."

Then his reflections reverted to himself and beside Jean Valjean
glorified he beheld himself, Javert, degraded.

A convict was his benefactor!

But then, why had he permitted that man to leave him alive? 
He had the right to be killed in that barricade.  He should have
asserted that right.  It would have been better to summon the other
insurgents to his succor against Jean Valjean, to get himself shot
by force.

His supreme anguish was the loss of certainty.  He felt that he had
been uprooted.  The code was no longer anything more than a stump
in his hand.  He had to deal with scruples of an unknown species. 
There had taken place within him a sentimental revelation entirely
distinct from legal affirmation, his only standard of measurement
hitherto.  To remain in his former uprightness did not suffice. 
A whole order of unexpected facts had cropped up and subjugated him. 
A whole new world was dawning on his soul:  kindness accepted
and repaid, devotion, mercy, indulgence, violences committed by pity
on austerity, respect for persons, no more definitive condemnation,
no more conviction, the possibility of a tear in the eye of the law,
no one knows what justice according to God, running in inverse sense
to justice according to men.  He perceived amid the shadows the terrible
rising of an unknown moral sun; it horrified and dazzled him. 
An owl forced to the gaze of an eagle.

He said to himself that it was true that there were exceptional
cases, that authority might be put out of countenance,
that the rule might be inadequate in the presence of a fact,
that everything could not be framed within the text of the code,
that the unforeseen compelled obedience, that the virtue of a
convict might set a snare for the virtue of the functionary,
that destiny did indulge in such ambushes, and he reflected with
despair that he himself had not even been fortified against a surprise.

He was forced to acknowledge that goodness did exist.  This convict
had been good.  And he himself, unprecedented circumstance,
had just been good also.  So he was becoming depraved.

He found that he was a coward.  He conceived a horror of himself.

Javert's ideal, was not to be human, to be grand, to be sublime;
it was to be irreproachable.

Now, he had just failed in this.

How had he come to such a pass?  How had all this happened? 
He could not have told himself.  He clasped his head in both hands,
but in spite of all that he could do, he could not contrive to explain
it to himself.

He had certainly always entertained the intention of restoring
Jean Valjean to the law of which Jean Valjean was the captive,
and of which he, Javert, was the slave.  Not for a single instant
while he held him in his grasp had he confessed to himself that he
entertained the idea of releasing him.  It was, in some sort,
without his consciousness, that his hand had relaxed and had let him
go free.

All sorts of interrogation points flashed before his eyes.  He put
questions to himself, and made replies to himself, and his replies
frightened him.  He asked himself:  "What has that convict done,
that desperate fellow, whom I have pursued even to persecution,
and who has had me under his foot, and who could have avenged himself,
and who owed it both to his rancor and to his safety, in leaving me
my life, in showing mercy upon me?  His duty?  No. Something more. 
And I in showing mercy upon him in my turn--what have I done? 
My duty?  No. Something more.  So there is something beyond duty?" 
Here he took fright; his balance became disjointed; one of the scales
fell into the abyss, the other rose heavenward, and Javert was no
less terrified by the one which was on high than by the one which
was below.  Without being in the least in the world what is called
Voltairian or a philosopher, or incredulous, being, on the contrary,
respectful by instinct, towards the established church, he knew it
only as an august fragment of the social whole; order was his dogma,
and sufficed for him; ever since he had attained to man's estate
and the rank of a functionary, he had centred nearly all his religion
in the police.  Being,--and here we employ words without the least
irony and in their most serious acceptation, being, as we have said,
a spy as other men are priests.  He had a superior, M. Gisquet;
up to that day he had never dreamed of that other superior,
God.

This new chief, God, he became unexpectedly conscious of, and he felt
embarrassed by him.  This unforeseen presence threw him off his bearings;
he did not know what to do with this superior, he, who was not
ignorant of the fact that the subordinate is bound always to bow,
that he must not disobey, nor find fault, nor discuss, and that,
in the presence of a superior who amazes him too greatly, the inferior
has no other resource than that of handing in his resignation.

But how was he to set about handing in his resignation to God?

However things might stand,--and it was to this point that he
reverted constantly,--one fact dominated everything else for him,
and that was, that he had just committed a terrible infraction
of the law.  He had just shut his eyes on an escaped convict
who had broken his ban.  He had just set a galley-slave at large. 
He had just robbed the laws of a man who belonged to them. 
That was what he had done.  He no longer understood himself. 
The very reasons for his action escaped him; only their vertigo
was left with him.  Up to that moment he had lived with that blind
faith which gloomy probity engenders.  This faith had quitted him,
this probity had deserted him.  All that he had believed in
melted away.  Truths which he did not wish to recognize were
besieging him, inexorably.  Henceforth, he must be a different man. 
He was suffering from the strange pains of a conscience abruptly
operated on for the cataract.  He saw that which it was repugnant
to him to behold.  He felt himself emptied, useless, put out of joint
with his past life, turned out, dissolved.  Authority was dead
within him.  He had no longer any reason for existing.

A terrible situation! to be touched.

To be granite and to doubt! to be the statue of Chastisement cast
in one piece in the mould of the law, and suddenly to become aware
of the fact that one cherishes beneath one's breast of bronze
something absurd and disobedient which almost resembles a heart! 
To come to the pass of returning good for good, although one has
said to oneself up to that day that that good is evil! to be the
watch-dog, and to lick the intruder's hand! to be ice and melt!
to be the pincers and to turn into a hand! to suddenly feel one's
fingers opening! to relax one's grip,--what a terrible thing!

The man-projectile no longer acquainted with his route and retreating!

To be obliged to confess this to oneself:  infallibility is
not infallible, there may exist error in the dogma, all has not
been said when a code speaks, society is not perfect, authority is
complicated with vacillation, a crack is possible in the immutable,
judges are but men, the law may err, tribunals may make a mistake!
to behold a rift in the immense blue pane of the firmament!

That which was passing in Javert was the Fampoux of a rectilinear
conscience, the derailment of a soul, the crushing of a probity
which had been irresistibly launched in a straight line and was
breaking against God.  It certainly was singular that the stoker
of order, that the engineer of authority, mounted on the blind iron
horse with its rigid road, could be unseated by a flash of light!
that the immovable, the direct, the correct, the geometrical,
the passive, the perfect, could bend! that there should exist
for the locomotive a road to Damascus!

God, always within man, and refractory, He, the true conscience,
to the false; a prohibition to the spark to die out; an order to
the ray to remember the sun; an injunction to the soul to recognize
the veritable absolute when confronted with the fictitious absolute,
humanity which cannot be lost; the human heart indestructible;
that splendid phenomenon, the finest, perhaps, of all our interior
marvels, did Javert understand this?  Did Javert penetrate it? 
Did Javert account for it to himself?  Evidently he did not. 
But beneath the pressure of that incontestable incomprehensibility he
felt his brain bursting.

He was less the man transfigured than the victim of this prodigy. 
In all this he perceived only the tremendous difficulty of existence. 
It seemed to him that, henceforth, his respiration was repressed forever. 
He was not accustomed to having something unknown hanging over
his head.

Up to this point, everything above him had been, to his gaze,
merely a smooth, limpid and simple surface; there was nothing
incomprehensible, nothing obscure; nothing that was not defined,
regularly disposed, linked, precise, circumscribed, exact, limited,
closed, fully provided for; authority was a plane surface; there was
no fall in it, no dizziness in its presence.  Javert had never beheld
the unknown except from below.  The irregular, the unforeseen,
the disordered opening of chaos, the possible slip over a precipice--
this was the work of the lower regions, of rebels, of the wicked,
of wretches.  Now Javert threw himself back, and he was suddenly
terrified by this unprecedented apparition:  a gulf on high.

What! one was dismantled from top to bottom! one was disconcerted,
absolutely!  In what could one trust!  That which had been agreed
upon was giving way!  What! the defect in society's armor could
be discovered by a magnanimous wretch!  What! an honest servitor
of the law could suddenly find himself caught between two crimes--
the crime of allowing a man to escape and the crime of arresting
him! everything was not settled in the orders given by the State
to the functionary!  There might be blind alleys in duty!  What,--
all this was real! was it true that an ex-ruffian, weighed down
with convictions, could rise erect and end by being in the right? 
Was this credible? were there cases in which the law should retire
before transfigured crime, and stammer its excuses?--Yes, that was
the state of the case! and Javert saw it! and Javert had touched it!
and not only could he not deny it, but he had taken part in it. 
These were realities.  It was abominable that actual facts could
reach such deformity.  If facts did their duty, they would confine
themselves to being proofs of the law; facts--it is God who sends them. 
Was anarchy, then, on the point of now descending from on high?

Thus,--and in the exaggeration of anguish, and the optical illusion
of consternation, all that might have corrected and restrained
this impression was effaced, and society, and the human race,
and the universe were, henceforth, summed up in his eyes, in one
simple and terrible feature,--thus the penal laws, the thing judged,
the force due to legislation, the decrees of the sovereign courts,
the magistracy, the government, prevention, repression,
official cruelty, wisdom, legal infallibility, the principle
of authority, all the dogmas on which rest political and civil
security, sovereignty, justice, public truth, all this was rubbish,
a shapeless mass, chaos; he himself, Javert, the spy of order,
incorruptibility in the service of the police, the bull-dog providence
of society, vanquished and hurled to earth; and, erect, at the
summit of all that ruin, a man with a green cap on his head and a
halo round his brow; this was the astounding confusion to which
he had come; this was the fearful vision which he bore within his soul.

Was this to be endured?  No.

A violent state, if ever such existed.  There were only two ways
of escaping from it.  One was to go resolutely to Jean Valjean,
and restore to his cell the convict from the galleys.  The other . . .

Javert quitted the parapet, and, with head erect this time,
betook himself, with a firm tread, towards the station-house indicated
by a lantern at one of the corners of the Place du Chatelet.

On arriving there, he saw through the window a sergeant of police,
and he entered.  Policemen recognize each other by the very way
in which they open the door of a station-house. Javert mentioned
his name, showed his card to the sergeant, and seated himself at
the table of the post on which a candle was burning.  On a table
lay a pen, a leaden inkstand and paper, provided in the event of
possible reports and the orders of the night patrols.  This table,
still completed by its straw-seated chair, is an institution;
it exists in all police stations; it is invariably ornamented with a
box-wood saucer filled with sawdust and a wafer box of cardboard filled
with red wafers, and it forms the lowest stage of official style. 
It is there that the literature of the State has its beginning.

Javert took a pen and a sheet of paper, and began to write. 
This is what he wrote:

     A FEW OBSERVATIONS FOR THE GOOD OF THE SERVICE.


"In the first place:  I beg Monsieur le Prefet to cast his eyes
on this.

"Secondly:  prisoners, on arriving after examination, take off
their shoes and stand barefoot on the flagstones while they are
being searched.  Many of them cough on their return to prison. 
This entails hospital expenses.

"Thirdly:  the mode of keeping track of a man with relays of police
agents from distance to distance, is good, but, on important occasions,
it is requisite that at least two agents should never lose sight
of each other, so that, in case one agent should, for any cause,
grow weak in his service, the other may supervise him and take
his place.

"Fourthly:  it is inexplicable why the special regulation of the prison
of the Madelonettes interdicts the prisoner from having a chair,
even by paying for it.

"Fifthly:  in the Madelonettes there are only two bars to the canteen,
so that the canteen woman can touch the prisoners with her hand.

"Sixthly:  the prisoners called barkers, who summon the other
prisoners to the parlor, force the prisoner to pay them two sous
to call his name distinctly.  This is a theft.

"Seventhly:  for a broken thread ten sous are withheld in the
weaving shop; this is an abuse of the contractor, since the cloth
is none the worse for it.

"Eighthly:  it is annoying for visitors to La Force to be
obliged to traverse the boys' court in order to reach the parlor
of Sainte-Marie-l'Egyptienne.

"Ninthly:  it is a fact that any day gendarmes can be overheard
relating in the court-yard of the prefecture the interrogations put
by the magistrates to prisoners.  For a gendarme, who should be
sworn to secrecy, to repeat what he has heard in the examination
room is a grave disorder.

"Tenthly:  Mme. Henry is an honest woman; her canteen is very neat;
but it is bad to have a woman keep the wicket to the mouse-trap
of the secret cells.  This is unworthy of the Conciergerie of a
great civilization."

Javert wrote these lines in his calmest and most correct chirography,
not omitting a single comma, and making the paper screech under his pen. 
Below the last line he signed:

                                              "JAVERT,
                                   "Inspector of the 1st class.
      "The Post of the Place du Chatelet.
                "June 7th, 1832, about one o'clock in the morning."


Javert dried the fresh ink on the paper, folded it like a letter,
sealed it, wrote on the back:  Note for the administration, left it
on the table, and quitted the post.  The glazed and grated door fell
to behind him.

Again he traversed the Place du Chatelet diagonally, regained the quay,
and returned with automatic precision to the very point which he
had abandoned a quarter of an hour previously, leaned on his elbows
and found himself again in the same attitude on the same paving-stone
of the parapet.  He did not appear to have stirred.

The darkness was complete.  It was the sepulchral moment which
follows midnight.  A ceiling of clouds concealed the stars.  Not a
single light burned in the houses of the city; no one was passing;
all of the streets and quays which could be seen were deserted;
Notre-Dame and the towers of the Court-House seemed features
of the night.  A street lantern reddened the margin of the quay. 
The outlines of the bridges lay shapeless in the mist one behind
the other.  Recent rains had swollen the river.

The spot where Javert was leaning was, it will be remembered,
situated precisely over the rapids of the Seine, perpendicularly above
that formidable spiral of whirlpools which loose and knot themselves
again like an endless screw.

Javert bent his head and gazed.  All was black.  Nothing was to
be distinguished.  A sound of foam was audible; but the river could not
be seen.  At moments, in that dizzy depth, a gleam of light appeared,
and undulated vaguely, water possessing the power of taking light,
no one knows whence, and converting it into a snake.  The light
vanished, and all became indistinct once more.  Immensity seemed
thrown open there.  What lay below was not water, it was a gulf. 
The wall of the quay, abrupt, confused, mingled with the vapors,
instantly concealed from sight, produced the effect of an escarpment
of the infinite.  Nothing was to be seen, but the hostile chill
of the water and the stale odor of the wet stones could be felt. 
A fierce breath rose from this abyss.  The flood in the river,
divined rather than perceived, the tragic whispering of the waves,
the melancholy vastness of the arches of the bridge, the imaginable
fall into that gloomy void, into all that shadow was full of horror.

Javert remained motionless for several minutes, gazing at this
opening of shadow; he considered the invisible with a fixity that
resembled attention.  The water roared.  All at once he took off
his hat and placed it on the edge of the quay.  A moment later,
a tall black figure, which a belated passer-by in the distance
might have taken for a phantom, appeared erect upon the parapet
of the quay, bent over towards the Seine, then drew itself up again,
and fell straight down into the shadows; a dull splash followed;
and the shadow alone was in the secret of the convulsions of that
obscure form which had disappeared beneath the water.



BOOK FIFTH.--GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER


CHAPTER I

IN WHICH THE TREE WITH THE ZINC PLASTER APPEARS AGAIN


Some time after the events which we have just recorded,
Sieur Boulatruelle experienced a lively emotion.

Sieur Boulatruelle was that road-mender of Montfermeil whom
the reader has already seen in the gloomy parts of this book.

Boulatruelle, as the reader may, perchance, recall, was a man
who was occupied with divers and troublesome matters.  He broke
stones and damaged travellers on the highway.

Road-mender and thief as he was, he cherished one dream; he believed
in the treasures buried in the forest of Montfermeil.  He hoped
some day to find the money in the earth at the foot of a tree;
in the meanwhile, he lived to search the pockets of passers-by.

Nevertheless, for an instant, he was prudent.  He had just
escaped neatly.  He had been, as the reader is aware, picked up
in Jondrette's garret in company with the other ruffians. 
Utility of a vice:  his drunkenness had been his salvation. 
The authorities had never been able to make out whether he had been
there in the quality of a robber or a man who had been robbed. 
An order of nolle prosequi, founded on his well authenticated state
of intoxication on the evening of the ambush, had set him at liberty. 
He had taken to his heels.  He had returned to his road from Gagny
to Lagny, to make, under administrative supervision, broken stone
for the good of the state, with downcast mien, in a very pensive mood,
his ardor for theft somewhat cooled; but he was addicted none
the less tenderly to the wine which had recently saved him.

As for the lively emotion which he had experienced a short time
after his return to his road-mender's turf-thatched cot, here it is:

One morning, Boulatruelle, while on his way as was his wont,
to his work, and possibly also to his ambush, a little before
daybreak caught sight, through the branches of the trees, of a man,
whose back alone he saw, but the shape of whose shoulders, as it
seemed to him at that distance and in the early dusk, was not
entirely unfamiliar to him.  Boulatruelle, although intoxicated,
had a correct and lucid memory, a defensive arm that is indispensable
to any one who is at all in conflict with legal order.

"Where the deuce have I seen something like that man yonder?"
he said to himself.  But he could make himself no answer,
except that the man resembled some one of whom his memory preserved
a confused trace.

However, apart from the identity which he could not manage to catch,
Boulatruelle put things together and made calculations.  This man
did not belong in the country-side. He had just arrived there. 
On foot, evidently.  No public conveyance passes through Montfermeil
at that hour.  He had walked all night.  Whence came he?  Not from
a very great distance; for he had neither haversack, nor bundle. 
From Paris, no doubt.  Why was he in these woods? why was he there at
such an hour? what had he come there for?

Boulatruelle thought of the treasure.  By dint of ransacking his memory,
he recalled in a vague way that he had already, many years before,
had a similar alarm in connection with a man who produced on him
the effect that he might well be this very individual.

"By the deuce," said Boulatruelle, "I'll find him again. 
I'll discover the parish of that parishioner.  This prowler
of Patron-Minette has a reason, and I'll know it.  People can't
have secrets in my forest if I don't have a finger in the pie."

He took his pick-axe which was very sharply pointed.

"There now," he grumbled, "is something that will search the earth
and a man."

And, as one knots one thread to another thread, he took up the line
of march at his best pace in the direction which the man must follow,
and set out across the thickets.

When he had compassed a hundred strides, the day, which was already
beginning to break, came to his assistance.  Footprints stamped
in the sand, weeds trodden down here and there, heather crushed,
young branches in the brushwood bent and in the act of straightening
themselves up again with the graceful deliberation of the arms of a
pretty woman who stretches herself when she wakes, pointed out to him
a sort of track.  He followed it, then lost it.  Time was flying. 
He plunged deeper into the woods and came to a sort of eminence. 
An early huntsman who was passing in the distance along a path,
whistling the air of Guillery, suggested to him the idea of climbing
a tree.  Old as he was, he was agile.  There stood close at hand
a beech-tree of great size, worthy of Tityrus and of Boulatruelle. 
Boulatruelle ascended the beech as high as he was able.

The idea was a good one.  On scrutinizing the solitary waste
on the side where the forest is thoroughly entangled and wild,
Boulatruelle suddenly caught sight of his man.

Hardly had he got his eye upon him when he lost sight of him.

The man entered, or rather, glided into, an open glade, at a
considerable distance, masked by large trees, but with which
Boulatruelle was perfectly familiar, on account of having noticed,
near a large pile of porous stones, an ailing chestnut-tree
bandaged with a sheet of zinc nailed directly upon the bark. 
This glade was the one which was formerly called the Blaru-bottom.
The heap of stones, destined for no one knows what employment,
which was visible there thirty years ago, is doubtless still there. 
Nothing equals a heap of stones in longevity, unless it is a board fence. 
They are temporary expedients.  What a reason for lasting!

Boulatruelle, with the rapidity of joy, dropped rather than descended
from the tree.  The lair was unearthed, the question now was to seize
the beast.  That famous treasure of his dreams was probably there.

It was no small matter to reach that glade.  By the beaten paths,
which indulge in a thousand teasing zigzags, it required a good
quarter of an hour.  In a bee-line, through the underbrush, which is
peculiarly dense, very thorny, and very aggressive in that locality,
a full half hour was necessary.  Boulatruelle committed the error
of not comprehending this.  He believed in the straight line;
a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.  The thicket,
bristling as it was, struck him as the best road.

"Let's take to the wolves' Rue de Rivoli," said he.

Boulatruelle, accustomed to taking crooked courses, was on this
occasion guilty of the fault of going straight.

He flung himself resolutely into the tangle of undergrowth.

He had to deal with holly bushes, nettles, hawthorns, eglantines,
thistles, and very irascible brambles.  He was much lacerated.

At the bottom of the ravine he found water which he was obliged
to traverse.

At last he reached the Blaru-bottom, after the lapse of forty
minutes, sweating, soaked, breathless, scratched, and ferocious.

There was no one in the glade.  Boulatruelle rushed to the heap
of stones.  It was in its place.  It had not been carried off.

As for the man, he had vanished in the forest.  He had made his escape. 
Where? in what direction? into what thicket?  Impossible to guess.

And, heartrending to say, there, behind the pile of stones, in front
of the tree with the sheet of zinc, was freshly turned earth,
a pick-axe, abandoned or forgotten, and a hole.

The hole was empty.

"Thief!" shrieked Boulatruelle, shaking his fist at the horizon.



CHAPTER II

MARIUS, EMERGING FROM CIVIL WAR, MAKES READY FOR DOMESTIC WAR


For a long time, Marius was neither dead nor alive.  For many
weeks he lay in a fever accompanied by delirium, and by tolerably
grave cerebral symptoms, caused more by the shocks of the wounds
on the head than by the wounds themselves.

He repeated Cosette's name for whole nights in the melancholy loquacity
of fever, and with the sombre obstinacy of agony.  The extent of some
of the lesions presented a serious danger, the suppuration of large
wounds being always liable to become re-absorbed, and consequently,
to kill the sick man, under certain atmospheric conditions; at every
change of weather, at the slightest storm, the physician was uneasy.

"Above all things," he repeated, "let the wounded man be subjected
to no emotion."  The dressing of the wounds was complicated
and difficult, the fixation of apparatus and bandages by
cerecloths not having been invented as yet, at that epoch. 
Nicolette used up a sheet "as big as the ceiling," as she put it,
for lint.  It was not without difficulty that the chloruretted
lotions and the nitrate of silver overcame the gangrene. 
As long as there was any danger, M. Gillenormand, seated in despair
at his grandson's pillow, was, like Marius, neither alive nor dead.

Every day, sometimes twice a day, a very well dressed gentleman
with white hair,--such was the description given by the porter,--
came to inquire about the wounded man, and left a large package
of lint for the dressings.

Finally, on the 7th of September, four months to a day, after the
sorrowful night when he had been brought back to his grandfather
in a dying condition, the doctor declared that he would answer
for Marius.  Convalescence began.  But Marius was forced to remain
for two months more stretched out on a long chair, on account of the
results called up by the fracture of his collar-bone. There always
is a last wound like that which will not close, and which prolongs
the dressings indefinitely, to the great annoyance of the sick person.

However, this long illness and this long convalescence saved him
from all pursuit.  In France, there is no wrath, not even of a
public character, which six months will not extinguish.  Revolts,
in the present state of society, are so much the fault of every one,
that they are followed by a certain necessity of shutting the eyes.

Let us add, that the inexcusable Gisquet order, which enjoined
doctors to lodge information against the wounded, having outraged
public opinion, and not opinion alone, but the King first of all,
the wounded were covered and protected by this indignation; and,
with the exception of those who had been made prisoners in the very
act of combat, the councils of war did not dare to trouble any one. 
So Marius was left in peace.

M. Gillenormand first passed through all manner of anguish, and then
through every form of ecstasy.  It was found difficult to prevent
his passing every night beside the wounded man; he had his big
arm-chair carried to Marius' bedside; he required his daughter
to take the finest linen in the house for compresses and bandages. 
Mademoiselle Gillenormand, like a sage and elderly person,
contrived to spare the fine linen, while allowing the grandfather
to think that he was obeyed.  M. Gillenormand would not permit
any one to explain to him, that for the preparation of lint
batiste is not nearly so good as coarse linen, nor new linen
as old linen.  He was present at all the dressings of the wounds
from which Mademoiselle Gillenormand modestly absented herself. 
When the dead flesh was cut away with scissors, he said:  "Aie! aie!" 
Nothing was more touching than to see him with his gentle,
senile palsy, offer the wounded man a cup of his cooling-draught.
He overwhelmed the doctor with questions.  He did not observe
that he asked the same ones over and over again.

On the day when the doctor announced to him that Marius was out
of danger, the good man was in a delirium.  He made his porter a present
of three louis.  That evening, on his return to his own chamber,
he danced a gavotte, using his thumb and forefinger as castanets,
and he sang the following song:

      "Jeanne est nee a Fougere     "Amour, tu vis en elle;
       Vrai nid d'une bergere;       Car c'est dans sa prunelle
       J'adore son jupon,            Que tu mets ton carquois.
           Fripon.                       Narquois!

                "Moi, je la chante, et j'aime,
                 Plus que Diane meme,
                 Jeanne et ses durs tetons
                     Bretons."[61]



[61] "Jeanne was born at Fougere, a true shepherd's nest; I adore
her petticoat, the rogue.

"Love, thou dwellest in her; For 'tis in her eyes that thou placest
thy quiver, sly scamp!

"As for me, I sing her, and I love, more than Diana herself,
Jeanne and her firm Breton breasts."


Then he knelt upon a chair, and Basque, who was watching him
through the half-open door, made sure that he was praying.

Up to that time, he had not believed in God.

At each succeeding phase of improvement, which became more and
more pronounced, the grandfather raved.  He executed a multitude of
mechanical actions full of joy; he ascended and descended the stairs,
without knowing why.  A pretty female neighbor was amazed one morning
at receiving a big bouquet; it was M. Gillenormand who had sent it
to her.  The husband made a jealous scene.  M. Gillenormand tried
to draw Nicolette upon his knees.  He called Marius, "M. le Baron." 
He shouted:  "Long live the Republic!"

Every moment, he kept asking the doctor:  "Is he no longer in danger?" 
He gazed upon Marius with the eyes of a grandmother.  He brooded
over him while he ate.  He no longer knew himself, he no longer
rendered himself an account of himself.  Marius was the master
of the house, there was abdication in his joy, he was the grandson
of his grandson.

In the state of joy in which he then was, he was the most venerable
of children.  In his fear lest he might fatigue or annoy the convalescent,
he stepped behind him to smile.  He was content, joyous, delighted,
charming, young.  His white locks added a gentle majesty to the gay
radiance of his visage.  When grace is mingled with wrinkles,
it is adorable.  There is an indescribable aurora in beaming old age.

As for Marius, as he allowed them to dress his wounds and care
for him, he had but one fixed idea:  Cosette.

After the fever and delirium had left him, he did not again pronounce
her name, and it might have been supposed that he no longer thought
of her.  He held his peace, precisely because his soul was there.

He did not know what had become of Cosette; the whole affair of the Rue
de la Chanvrerie was like a cloud in his memory; shadows that were
almost indistinct, floated through his mind, Eponine, Gavroche, Mabeuf,
the Thenardiers, all his friends gloomily intermingled with the smoke
of the barricade; the strange passage of M. Fauchelevent through
that adventure produced on him the effect of a puzzle in a tempest;
he understood nothing connected with his own life, he did not know
how nor by whom he had been saved, and no one of those around him
knew this; all that they had been able to tell him was, that he
had been brought home at night in a hackney-coach, to the Rue
des Filles-du-Calvaire; past, present, future were nothing more
to him than the mist of a vague idea; but in that fog there was
one immovable point, one clear and precise outline, something made
of granite, a resolution, a will; to find Cosette once more. 
For him, the idea of life was not distinct from the idea of Cosette. 
He had decreed in his heart that he would not accept the one without
the other, and he was immovably resolved to exact of any person whatever,
who should desire to force him to live,--from his grandfather,
from fate, from hell,--the restitution of his vanished Eden.

He did not conceal from himself the fact that obstacles existed.

Let us here emphasize one detail, he was not won over and was but little
softened by all the solicitude and tenderness of his grandfather. 
In the first place, he was not in the secret; then, in his reveries
of an invalid, which were still feverish, possibly, he distrusted
this tenderness as a strange and novel thing, which had for its
object his conquest.  He remained cold.  The grandfather absolutely
wasted his poor old smile.  Marius said to himself that it was
all right so long as he, Marius, did not speak, and let things
take their course; but that when it became a question of Cosette,
he would find another face, and that his grandfather's true attitude
would be unmasked.  Then there would be an unpleasant scene;
a recrudescence of family questions, a confrontation of positions,
every sort of sarcasm and all manner of objections at one and the
same time, Fauchelevent, Coupelevent, fortune, poverty, a stone about
his neck, the future.  Violent resistance; conclusion:  a refusal. 
Marius stiffened himself in advance.

And then, in proportion as he regained life, the old ulcers
of his memory opened once more, he reflected again on the past,
Colonel Pontmercy placed himself once more between M. Gillenormand
and him, Marius, he told himself that he had no true kindness to expect
from a person who had been so unjust and so hard to his father. 
And with health, there returned to him a sort of harshness
towards his grandfather.  The old man was gently pained by this. 
M. Gillenormand, without however allowing it to appear, observed
that Marius, ever since the latter had been brought back to him
and had regained consciousness, had not once called him father. 
It is true that he did not say "monsieur" to him; but he contrived
not to say either the one or the other, by means of a certain way
of turning his phrases.  Obviously, a crisis was approaching.

As almost always happens in such cases, Marius skirmished before
giving battle, by way of proving himself.  This is called "feeling
the ground."  One morning it came to pass that M. Gillenormand spoke
slightingly of the Convention, apropos of a newspaper which had fallen
into his hands, and gave vent to a Royalist harangue on Danton,
Saint-Juste and Robespierre.--"The men of '93 were giants,"
said Marius with severity.  The old man held his peace, and uttered
not a sound during the remainder of that day.

Marius, who had always present to his mind the inflexible grandfather
of his early years, interpreted this silence as a profound
concentration of wrath, augured from it a hot conflict, and augmented
his preparations for the fray in the inmost recesses of his mind.

He decided that, in case of a refusal, he would tear off his bandages,
dislocate his collar-bone, that he would lay bare all the wounds
which he had left, and would reject all food.  His wounds were his
munitions of war.  He would have Cosette or die.

He awaited the propitious moment with the crafty patience of the sick.

That moment arrived.



CHAPTER III

MARIUS ATTACKED


One day, M. Gillenormand, while his daughter was putting in order
the phials and cups on the marble of the commode, bent over Marius
and said to him in his tenderest accents:  "Look here, my little Marius,
if I were in your place, I would eat meat now in preference to fish. 
A fried sole is excellent to begin a convalescence with, but a good
cutlet is needed to put a sick man on his feet."

Marius, who had almost entirely recovered his strength,
collected the whole of it, drew himself up into a sitting posture,
laid his two clenched fists on the sheets of his bed, looked his
grandfather in the face, assumed a terrible air, and said:

"This leads me to say something to you."

"What is it?"

"That I wish to marry."

"Agreed," said his grandfather.--And he burst out laughing.

"How agreed?"

"Yes, agreed.  You shall have your little girl."

Marius, stunned and overwhelmed with the dazzling shock,
trembled in every limb.

M. Gillenormand went on:

"Yes, you shall have her, that pretty little girl of yours. 
She comes every day in the shape of an old gentleman to inquire
after you.  Ever since you were wounded, she has passed her time
in weeping and making lint.  I have made inquiries.  She lives
in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7.  Ah!  There we have it! 
Ah! so you want her!  Well, you shall have her.  You're caught. 
You had arranged your little plot, you had said to yourself:--`I'm
going to signify this squarely to my grandfather, to that mummy
of the Regency and of the Directory, to that ancient beau, to that
Dorante turned Geronte; he has indulged in his frivolities also,
that he has, and he has had his love affairs, and his grisettes
and his Cosettes; he has made his rustle, he has had his wings,
he has eaten of the bread of spring; he certainly must remember it.' 
Ah! you take the cockchafer by the horns.  That's good.  I offer
you a cutlet and you answer me:  `By the way, I want to marry.' 
There's a transition for you!  Ah! you reckoned on a bickering! 
You do not know that I am an old coward.  What do you say to that? 
You are vexed?  You did not expect to find your grandfather still
more foolish than yourself, you are wasting the discourse which
you meant to bestow upon me, Mr. Lawyer, and that's vexatious. 
Well, so much the worse, rage away.  I'll do whatever you wish,
and that cuts you short, imbecile!  Listen.  I have made my inquiries,
I'm cunning too; she is charming, she is discreet, it is not true
about the lancer, she has made heaps of lint, she's a jewel,
she adores you, if you had died, there would have been three of us,
her coffin would have accompanied mine.  I have had an idea,
ever since you have been better, of simply planting her at your bedside,
but it is only in romances that young girls are brought to the bedsides
of handsome young wounded men who interest them.  It is not done. 
What would your aunt have said to it?  You were nude three quarters
of the time, my good fellow.  Ask Nicolette, who has not left you
for a moment, if there was any possibility of having a woman here. 
And then, what would the doctor have said?  A pretty girl does
not cure a man of fever.  In short, it's all right, let us say no
more about it, all's said, all's done, it's all settled, take her. 
Such is my ferocity.  You see, I perceived that you did not love me. 
I said to myself:  `Here now, I have my little Cosette right under
my hand, I'm going to give her to him, he will be obliged to love
me a little then, or he must tell the reason why.'  Ah! so you
thought that the old man was going to storm, to put on a big voice,
to shout no, and to lift his cane at all that aurora.  Not a bit
of it.  Cosette, so be it; love, so be it; I ask nothing better. 
Pray take the trouble of getting married, sir.  Be happy, my well-beloved
child."

That said, the old man burst forth into sobs.

And he seized Marius' head, and pressed it with both arms against
his breast, and both fell to weeping.  This is one of the forms
of supreme happiness.

"Father!" cried Marius.

"Ah, so you love me!" said the old man.

An ineffable moment ensued.  They were choking and could not speak.

At length the old man stammered:

"Come! his mouth is unstopped at last.  He has said:  `Father' to me."

Marius disengaged his head from his grandfather's arms, and said gently:

"But, father, now that I am quite well, it seems to me that I
might see her."

"Agreed again, you shall see her to-morrow."

"Father!"

"What?"

"Why not to-day?"

"Well, to-day then.  Let it be to-day. You have called me `father'
three times, and it is worth it.  I will attend to it.  She shall
be brought hither.  Agreed, I tell you.  It has already been put
into verse.  This is the ending of the elegy of the `Jeune Malade'
by Andre Chenier, by Andre Chenier whose throat was cut by the ras .
. . by the giants of '93."

M. Gillenormand fancied that he detected a faint frown on the part
of Marius, who, in truth, as we must admit, was no longer listening
to him, and who was thinking far more of Cosette than of 1793.

The grandfather, trembling at having so inopportunely introduced
Andre Chenier, resumed precipitately:

"Cut his throat is not the word.  The fact is that the great
revolutionary geniuses, who were not malicious, that is incontestable,
who were heroes, pardi! found that Andre Chenier embarrassed
them somewhat, and they had him guillot . . . that is to say,
those great men on the 7th of Thermidor, besought Andre Chenier,
in the interests of public safety, to be so good as to go . . ."

M. Gillenormand, clutched by the throat by his own phrase,
could not proceed.  Being able neither to finish it nor to retract it,
while his daughter arranged the pillow behind Marius, who was
overwhelmed with so many emotions, the old man rushed headlong,
with as much rapidity as his age permitted, from the bed-chamber, shut
the door behind him, and, purple, choking and foaming at the mouth,
his eyes starting from his head, he found himself nose to nose
with honest Basque, who was blacking boots in the anteroom. 
He seized Basque by the collar, and shouted full in his face
in fury:--"By the hundred thousand Javottes of the devil,
those ruffians did assassinate him!"

"Who, sir?"

"Andre Chenier!"

"Yes, sir," said Basque in alarm.



CHAPTER IV

MADEMOISELLE GILLENORMAND ENDS BY NO LONGER THINKING IT A BAD THING
THAT M. FAUCHELEVENT SHOULD HAVE ENTERED WITH SOMETHING UNDER HIS
ARM


Cosette and Marius beheld each other once more.

What that interview was like we decline to say.  There are things
which one must not attempt to depict; the sun is one of them.

The entire family, including Basque and Nicolette, were assembled
in Marius' chamber at the moment when Cosette entered it.

Precisely at that moment, the grandfather was on the point of blowing
his nose; he stopped short, holding his nose in his handkerchief,
and gazing over it at Cosette.

She appeared on the threshold; it seemed to him that she was
surrounded by a glory.

"Adorable!" he exclaimed.

Then he blew his nose noisily.

Cosette was intoxicated, delighted, frightened, in heaven. 
She was as thoroughly alarmed as any one can be by happiness. 
She stammered all pale, yet flushed, she wanted to fling herself
into Marius' arms, and dared not.  Ashamed of loving in the presence
of all these people.  People are pitiless towards happy lovers;
they remain when the latter most desire to be left alone.  Lovers have
no need of any people whatever.

With Cosette, and behind her, there had entered a man with white hair
who was grave yet smiling, though with a vague and heartrending smile. 
It was "Monsieur Fauchelevent"; it was Jean Valjean.

He was very well dressed, as the porter had said, entirely in black,
in perfectly new garments, and with a white cravat.

The porter was a thousand leagues from recognizing in this
correct bourgeois, in this probable notary, the fear-inspiring
bearer of the corpse, who had sprung up at his door on the night
of the 7th of June, tattered, muddy, hideous, haggard, his face
masked in blood and mire, supporting in his arms the fainting Marius;
still, his porter's scent was aroused.  When M. Fauchelevent
arrived with Cosette, the porter had not been able to refrain
from communicating to his wife this aside:  "I don't know
why it is, but I can't help fancying that I've seen that face before."

M. Fauchelevent in Marius' chamber, remained apart near the door. 
He had under his arm, a package which bore considerable resemblance
to an octavo volume enveloped in paper.  The enveloping paper was
of a greenish hue, and appeared to be mouldy.

"Does the gentleman always have books like that under his arm?" 
Mademoiselle Gillenormand, who did not like books, demanded in a low
tone of Nicolette.

"Well," retorted M. Gillenormand, who had overheard her, in the
same tone, "he's a learned man.  What then?  Is that his fault? 
Monsieur Boulard, one of my acquaintances, never walked out without
a book under his arm either, and he always had some old volume
hugged to his heart like that."

And, with a bow, he said aloud:

"Monsieur Tranchelevent . . ."

Father Gillenormand did not do it intentionally, but inattention
to proper names was an aristocratic habit of his.

"Monsieur Tranchelevent, I have the honor of asking you, on behalf
of my grandson, Baron Marius Pontmercy, for the hand of Mademoiselle."

Monsieur Tranchelevent bowed.

"That's settled," said the grandfather.

And, turning to Marius and Cosette, with both arms extended
in blessing, he cried:

"Permission to adore each other!"

They did not require him to repeat it twice.  So much the worse!
the chirping began.  They talked low.  Marius, resting on his elbow
on his reclining chair, Cosette standing beside him.  "Oh, heavens!"
murmured Cosette, "I see you once again! it is thou! it is you! 
The idea of going and fighting like that!  But why?  It is horrible. 
I have been dead for four months.  Oh! how wicked it was of you
to go to that battle!  What had I done to you?  I pardon you,
but you will never do it again.  A little while ago, when they
came to tell us to come to you, I still thought that I was about
to die, but it was from joy.  I was so sad!  I have not taken
the time to dress myself, I must frighten people with my looks! 
What will your relatives say to see me in a crumpled collar? 
Do speak!  You let me do all the talking.  We are still in the Rue
de l'Homme Arme.  It seems that your shoulder was terrible. 
They told me that you could put your fist in it.  And then, it seems
that they cut your flesh with the scissors.  That is frightful. 
I have cried till I have no eyes left.  It is queer that a person
can suffer like that.  Your grandfather has a very kindly air. 
Don't disturb yourself, don't rise on your elbow, you will
injure yourself.  Oh! how happy I am!  So our unhappiness is over! 
I am quite foolish.  I had things to say to you, and I no longer
know in the least what they were.  Do you still love me?  We live
in the Rue de l'Homme Arme.  There is no garden.  I made lint all
the time; stay, sir, look, it is your fault, I have a callous on my
fingers."

"Angel!" said Marius.

Angel is the only word in the language which cannot be worn out. 
No other word could resist the merciless use which lovers make
of it.

Then as there were spectators, they paused and said not a word more,
contenting themselves with softly touching each other's hands.

M. Gillenormand turned towards those who were in the room and cried:

"Talk loud, the rest of you.  Make a noise, you people behind
the scenes.  Come, a little uproar, the deuce! so that the children
can chatter at their ease."

And, approaching Marius and Cosette, he said to them in a very
low voice:

"Call each other thou.  Don't stand on ceremony."

Aunt Gillenormand looked on in amazement at this irruption
of light in her elderly household.  There was nothing aggressive
about this amazement; it was not the least in the world like the
scandalized and envious glance of an owl at two turtle-doves, it
was the stupid eye of a poor innocent seven and fifty years of age;
it was a life which had been a failure gazing at that triumph, love.

"Mademoiselle Gillenormand senior," said her father to her,
"I told you that this is what would happen to you."

He remained silent for a moment, and then added:

"Look at the happiness of others."

Then he turned to Cosette.

"How pretty she is! how pretty she is!  She's a Greuze. 
So you are going to have that all to yourself, you scamp! 
Ah! my rogue, you are getting off nicely with me, you are happy;
if I were not fifteen years too old, we would fight with swords
to see which of us should have her.  Come now!  I am in love
with you, mademoiselle.  It's perfectly simple.  It is your right. 
You are in the right.  Ah! what a sweet, charming little wedding
this will make!  Our parish is Saint-Denis du Saint Sacrament,
but I will get a dispensation so that you can be married at
Saint-Paul. The church is better.  It was built by the Jesuits. 
It is more coquettish.  It is opposite the fountain of Cardinal
de Birague.  The masterpiece of Jesuit architecture is at Namur. 
It is called Saint-Loup. You must go there after you are married. 
It is worth the journey.  Mademoiselle, I am quite of your mind,
I think girls ought to marry; that is what they are made for. 
There is a certain Sainte-Catherine whom I should always like
to see uncoiffed.[62] It's a fine thing to remain a spinster,
but it is chilly.  The Bible says:  Multiply.  In order to save
the people, Jeanne d'Arc is needed; but in order to make people,
what is needed is Mother Goose.  So, marry, my beauties.  I really
do not see the use in remaining a spinster!  I know that they
have their chapel apart in the church, and that they fall back
on the Society of the Virgin; but, sapristi, a handsome husband,
a fine fellow, and at the expiration of a year, a big, blond brat
who nurses lustily, and who has fine rolls of fat on his thighs,
and who musses up your breast in handfuls with his little rosy paws,
laughing the while like the dawn,--that's better than holding a candle
at vespers, and chanting Turris eburnea!"

[62] In allusion to the expression, coiffer Sainte-Catherine, "to
remain unmarried."


The grandfather executed a pirouette on his eighty-year-old heels,
and began to talk again like a spring that has broken loose once more:

           "Ainsi, bornant les cours de tes revasseries,
            Alcippe, il est donc vrai, dans peu tu te maries."[63]

[63] "Thus, hemming in the course of thy musings, Alcippus, it is
true that thou wilt wed ere long."


"By the way!"

"What is it, father?"

"Have not you an intimate friend?"

"Yes, Courfeyrac."

"What has become of him?"

"He is dead."

"That is good."

He seated himself near them, made Cosette sit down, and took their
four hands in his aged and wrinkled hands:

"She is exquisite, this darling.  She's a masterpiece, this Cosette! 
She is a very little girl and a very great lady.  She will only be
a Baroness, which is a come down for her; she was born a Marquise. 
What eyelashes she has!  Get it well fixed in your noddles,
my children, that you are in the true road.  Love each other. 
Be foolish about it.  Love is the folly of men and the wit of God. 
Adore each other.  Only," he added, suddenly becoming gloomy,
"what a misfortune!  It has just occurred to me!  More than half
of what I possess is swallowed up in an annuity; so long as I live,
it will not matter, but after my death, a score of years hence, ah! my
poor children, you will not have a sou!  Your beautiful white hands,
Madame la Baronne, will do the devil the honor of pulling him by the
tail."[64]


[64] Tirer le diable par la queue, "to live from hand to mouth."


At this point they heard a grave and tranquil voice say:

"Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent possesses six hundred
thousand francs."

It was the voice of Jean Valjean.

So far he had not uttered a single word, no one seemed to be aware
that he was there, and he had remained standing erect and motionless,
behind all these happy people.

"What has Mademoiselle Euphrasie to do with the question?"
inquired the startled grandfather.

"I am she," replied Cosette.

"Six hundred thousand francs?" resumed M. Gillenormand.

"Minus fourteen or fifteen thousand francs, possibly," said Jean Valjean.

And he laid on the table the package which Mademoiselle Gillenormand
had mistaken for a book.

Jean Valjean himself opened the package; it was a bundle of bank-notes.
They were turned over and counted.  There were five hundred notes
for a thousand francs each, and one hundred and sixty-eight
of five hundred.  In all, five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.

"This is a fine book," said M. Gillenormand.

"Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!" murmured the aunt.

"This arranges things well, does it not, Mademoiselle Gillenormand
senior?" said the grandfather.  "That devil of a Marius has ferreted
out the nest of a millionaire grisette in his tree of dreams! 
Just trust to the love affairs of young folks now, will you! 
Students find studentesses with six hundred thousand francs. 
Cherubino works better than Rothschild."

"Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!" repeated Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, in a low tone.  "Five hundred and eighty-four!
one might as well say six hundred thousand!"

As for Marius and Cosette, they were gazing at each other while this
was going on; they hardly heeded this detail.



CHAPTER V

DEPOSIT YOUR MONEY IN A FOREST RATHER THAN WITH A NOTARY


The reader has, no doubt, understood, without necessitating a
lengthy explanation, that Jean Valjean, after the Champmathieu affair,
had been able, thanks to his first escape of a few days' duration, to come
to Paris and to withdraw in season, from the hands of Laffitte,
the sum earned by him, under the name of Monsieur Madeleine,
at Montreuil-sur-Mer; and that fearing that he might be recaptured,--
which eventually happened--he had buried and hidden that sum in the
forest of Montfermeil, in the locality known as the Blaru-bottom.
The sum, six hundred and thirty thousand francs, all in bank-bills,
was not very bulky, and was contained in a box; only, in order
to preserve the box from dampness, he had placed it in a coffer
filled with chestnut shavings.  In the same coffer he had placed his
other treasures, the Bishop's candlesticks.  It will be remembered
that he had carried off the candlesticks when he made his escape
from Montreuil-sur-Mer. The man seen one evening for the first time
by Boulatruelle, was Jean Valjean.  Later on, every time that Jean
Valjean needed money, he went to get it in the Blaru-bottom. Hence
the absences which we have mentioned.  He had a pickaxe somewhere
in the heather, in a hiding-place known to himself alone.  When he
beheld Marius convalescent, feeling that the hour was at hand, when that
money might prove of service, he had gone to get it; it was he again,
whom Boulatruelle had seen in the woods, but on this occasion, in the
morning instead of in the evening.  Boulatreulle inherited his pickaxe.

The actual sum was five hundred and eighty-four thousand,
five hundred francs.  Jean Valjean withdrew the five hundred
francs for himself.--"We shall see hereafter," he thought.

The difference between that sum and the six hundred and thirty
thousand francs withdrawn from Laffitte represented his expenditure
in ten years, from 1823 to 1833.  The five years of his stay
in the convent had cost only five thousand francs.

Jean Valjean set the two candlesticks on the chimney-piece,
where they glittered to the great admiration of Toussaint.

Moreover, Jean Valjean knew that he was delivered from Javert. 
The story had been told in his presence, and he had verified the fact
in the Moniteur, how a police inspector named Javert had been found
drowned under a boat belonging to some laundresses, between the Pont
au Change and the Pont-Neuf, and that a writing left by this man,
otherwise irreproachable and highly esteemed by his superiors,
pointed to a fit of mental aberration and a suicide.--"In fact,"
thought Jean Valjean, "since he left me at liberty, once having got me
in his power, he must have been already mad."



CHAPTER VI

THE TWO OLD MEN DO EVERYTHING, EACH ONE AFTER HIS OWN FASHION,
TO RENDER COSETTE HAPPY


Everything was made ready for the wedding.  The doctor,
on being consulted, declared that it might take place in February. 
It was then December.  A few ravishing weeks of perfect happiness passed.

The grandfather was not the least happy of them all.  He remained
for a quarter of an hour at a time gazing at Cosette.

"The wonderful, beautiful girl!" he exclaimed.  "And she has so sweet
and good an air! she is, without exception, the most charming girl
that I have ever seen in my life.  Later on, she'll have virtues
with an odor of violets.  How graceful! one cannot live otherwise
than nobly with such a creature.  Marius, my boy, you are a Baron,
you are rich, don't go to pettifogging, I beg of you."

Cosette and Marius had passed abruptly from the sepulchre to paradise. 
The transition had not been softened, and they would have been stunned,
had they not been dazzled by it.

"Do you understand anything about it?" said Marius to Cosette.

"No," replied Cosette, "but it seems to me that the good God
is caring for us."

Jean Valjean did everything, smoothed away every difficulty,
arranged everything, made everything easy.  He hastened towards
Cosette's happiness with as much ardor, and, apparently with
as much joy, as Cosette herself.

As he had been a mayor, he understood how to solve that delicate
problem, with the secret of which he alone was acquainted,
Cosette's civil status.  If he were to announce her origin bluntly,
it might prevent the marriage, who knows?  He extricated
Cosette from all difficulties.  He concocted for her a family
of dead people, a sure means of not encountering any objections. 
Cosette was the only scion of an extinct family; Cosette was not
his own daughter, but the daughter of the other Fauchelevent. 
Two brothers Fauchelevent had been gardeners to the convent of
the Petit-Picpus. Inquiry was made at that convent; the very best
information and the most respectable references abounded; the good nuns,
not very apt and but little inclined to fathom questions of paternity,
and not attaching any importance to the matter, had never understood
exactly of which of the two Fauchelevents Cosette was the daughter. 
They said what was wanted and they said it with zeal.  An acte de
notoriete was drawn up.  Cosette became in the eyes of the law,
Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent.  She was declared an orphan,
both father and mother being dead.  Jean Valjean so arranged it
that he was appointed, under the name of Fauchelevent, as Cosette's
guardian, with M. Gillenormand as supervising guardian over him.

As for the five hundred and eighty thousand francs, they constituted
a legacy bequeathed to Cosette by a dead person, who desired
to remain unknown.  The original legacy had consisted of five
hundred and ninety-four thousand francs; but ten thousand francs
had been expended on the education of Mademoiselle Euphrasie,
five thousand francs of that amount having been paid to the convent. 
This legacy, deposited in the hands of a third party, was to be turned
over to Cosette at her majority, or at the date of her marriage. 
This, taken as a whole, was very acceptable, as the reader will perceive,
especially when the sum due was half a million.  There were some
peculiarities here and there, it is true, but they were not noticed;
one of the interested parties had his eyes blindfolded by love,
the others by the six hundred thousand francs.

Cosette learned that she was not the daughter of that old man
whom she had so long called father.  He was merely a kinsman;
another Fauchelevent was her real father.  At any other time this
would have broken her heart.  But at the ineffable moment which she
was then passing through, it cast but a slight shadow, a faint cloud,
and she was so full of joy that the cloud did not last long. 
She had Marius.  The young man arrived, the old man was effaced;
such is life.

And then, Cosette had, for long years, been habituated to seeing
enigmas around her; every being who has had a mysterious childhood
is always prepared for certain renunciations.

Nevertheless, she continued to call Jean Valjean:  Father.

Cosette, happy as the angels, was enthusiastic over Father Gillenormand. 
It is true that he overwhelmed her with gallant compliments
and presents.  While Jean Valjean was building up for Cosette a normal
situation in society and an unassailable status, M. Gillenormand
was superintending the basket of wedding gifts.  Nothing so
amused him as being magnificent.  He had given to Cosette a robe
of Binche guipure which had descended to him from his own grandmother.

"These fashions come up again," said he, "ancient things are
the rage, and the young women of my old age dress like the old
women of my childhood."

He rifled his respectable chests of drawers in Coromandel lacquer,
with swelling fronts, which had not been opened for years.--"Let us
hear the confession of these dowagers," he said, "let us see what they
have in their paunches."  He noisily violated the pot-bellied drawers
of all his wives, of all his mistresses and of all his grandmothers. 
Pekins, damasks, lampas, painted moires, robes of shot gros
de Tours, India kerchiefs embroidered in gold that could be washed,
dauphines without a right or wrong side, in the piece, Genoa and
Alencon point lace, parures in antique goldsmith's work, ivory bon-bon
boxes ornamented with microscopic battles, gewgaws and ribbons--
he lavished everything on Cosette.  Cosette, amazed, desperately in
love with Marius, and wild with gratitude towards M. Gillenormand,
dreamed of a happiness without limit clothed in satin and velvet. 
Her wedding basket seemed to her to be upheld by seraphim. 
Her soul flew out into the azure depths, with wings of Mechlin lace.

The intoxication of the lovers was only equalled, as we have
already said, by the ecstasy of the grandfather.  A sort of flourish
of trumpets went on in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.

Every morning, a fresh offering of bric-a-brac from the grandfather
to Cosette.  All possible knickknacks glittered around her.

One day Marius, who was fond of talking gravely in the midst
of his bliss, said, apropos of I know not what incident:

"The men of the revolution are so great, that they have the prestige
of the ages, like Cato and like Phocion, and each one of them
seems to me an antique memory."

"Moire antique!" exclaimed the old gentleman.  "Thanks, Marius. 
That is precisely the idea of which I was in search."

And on the following day, a magnificent dress of tea-rose colored
moire antique was added to Cosette's wedding presents.

From these fripperies, the grandfather extracted a bit of wisdom.

"Love is all very well; but there must be something else to go
with it.  The useless must be mingled with happiness.  Happiness is
only the necessary.  Season that enormously with the superfluous
for me.  A palace and her heart.  Her heart and the Louvre. 
Her heart and the grand waterworks of Versailles.  Give me my
shepherdess and try to make her a duchess.  Fetch me Phyllis crowned
with corn-flowers, and add a hundred thousand francs income. 
Open for me a bucolic perspective as far as you can see, beneath a
marble colonnade.  I consent to the bucolic and also to the fairy
spectacle of marble and gold.  Dry happiness resembles dry bread. 
One eats, but one does not dine.  I want the superfluous,
the useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves no purpose. 
I remember to have seen, in the Cathedral of Strasburg, a clock,
as tall as a three-story house which marked the hours, which had
the kindness to indicate the hour, but which had not the air of being
made for that; and which, after having struck midday, or midnight,--
midday, the hour of the sun, or midnight, the hour of love,--
or any other hour that you like, gave you the moon and the stars,
the earth and the sea, birds and fishes, Phoebus and Phoebe, and a
host of things which emerged from a niche, and the twelve apostles,
and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and Eponine, and Sabinus,
and a throng of little gilded goodmen, who played on the trumpet
to boot.  Without reckoning delicious chimes which it sprinkled
through the air, on every occasion, without any one's knowing why. 
Is a petty bald clock-face which merely tells the hour equal to that? 
For my part, I am of the opinion of the big clock of Strasburg,
and I prefer it to the cuckoo clock from the Black Forest."

M. Gillenormand talked nonsense in connection with the wedding,
and all the fripperies of the eighteenth century passed pell-mell
through his dithyrambs.

"You are ignorant of the art of festivals.  You do not know
how to organize a day of enjoyment in this age," he exclaimed. 
"Your nineteenth century is weak.  It lacks excess.  It ignores
the rich, it ignores the noble.  In everything it is clean-shaven.
Your third estate is insipid, colorless, odorless, and shapeless. 
The dreams of your bourgeois who set up, as they express it: 
a pretty boudoir freshly decorated, violet, ebony and calico. 
Make way!  Make way! the Sieur Curmudgeon is marrying Mademoiselle
Clutch-penny. Sumptuousness and splendor.  A louis d'or has been
stuck to a candle.  There's the epoch for you.  My demand is that I
may flee from it beyond the Sarmatians.  Ah! in 1787, I predict
that all was lost, from the day when I beheld the Duc de Rohan,
Prince de Leon, Duc de Chabot, Duc de Montbazon, Marquis de Sonbise,
Vicomte de Thouars, peer of France, go to Longchamps in a tapecu! 
That has borne its fruits.  In this century, men attend to business,
they gamble on 'Change, they win money, they are stingy.  People take
care of their surfaces and varnish them; every one is dressed as though
just out of a band-box, washed, soaped, scraped, shaved, combed, waked,
smoothed, rubbed, brushed, cleaned on the outside, irreproachable,
polished as a pebble, discreet, neat, and at the same time,
death of my life, in the depths of their consciences they have
dung-heaps and cesspools that are enough to make a cow-herd who blows
his nose in his fingers, recoil.  I grant to this age the device: 
`Dirty Cleanliness.'  Don't be vexed, Marius, give me permission
to speak; I say no evil of the people as you see, I am always
harping on your people, but do look favorably on my dealing a bit
of a slap to the bourgeoisie.  I belong to it.  He who loves well
lashes well.  Thereupon, I say plainly, that now-a-days people marry,
but that they no longer know how to marry.  Ah! it is true, I regret
the grace of the ancient manners.  I regret everything about them,
their elegance, their chivalry, those courteous and delicate ways,
that joyous luxury which every one possessed, music forming part of
the wedding, a symphony above stairs, a beating of drums below stairs,
the dances, the joyous faces round the table, the fine-spun
gallant compliments, the songs, the fireworks, the frank laughter,
the devil's own row, the huge knots of ribbon.  I regret the
bride's garter.  The bride's garter is cousin to the girdle of Venus. 
On what does the war of Troy turn?  On Helen's garter, parbleu! 
Why did they fight, why did Diomed the divine break over the head
of Meriones that great brazen helmet of ten points? why did Achilles
and Hector hew each other up with vast blows of their lances? 
Because Helen allowed Paris to take her garter.  With Cosette's garter,
Homer would construct the Iliad.  He would put in his poem,
a loquacious old fellow, like me, and he would call him Nestor. 
My friends, in bygone days, in those amiable days of yore,
people married wisely; they had a good contract, and then they
had a good carouse.  As soon as Cujas had taken his departure,
Gamacho entered.  But, in sooth! the stomach is an agreeable beast
which demands its due, and which wants to have its wedding also. 
People supped well, and had at table a beautiful neighbor without
a guimpe so that her throat was only moderately concealed. 
Oh! the large laughing mouths, and how gay we were in those days!
youth was a bouquet; every young man terminated in a branch of
lilacs or a tuft of roses; whether he was a shepherd or a warrior;
and if, by chance, one was a captain of dragoons, one found means
to call oneself Florian.  People thought much of looking well. 
They embroidered and tinted themselves.  A bourgeois had the air
of a flower, a Marquis had the air of a precious stone.  People had
no straps to their boots, they had no boots.  They were spruce,
shining, waved, lustrous, fluttering, dainty, coquettish, which did not
at all prevent their wearing swords by their sides.  The humming-bird
has beak and claws.  That was the day of the Galland Indies.  One of
the sides of that century was delicate, the other was magnificent;
and by the green cabbages! people amused themselves.  To-day, people
are serious.  The bourgeois is avaricious, the bourgeoise is a prude;
your century is unfortunate.  People would drive away the Graces
as being too low in the neck.  Alas! beauty is concealed as though
it were ugliness.  Since the revolution, everything, including the
ballet-dancers, has had its trousers; a mountebank dancer must be grave;
your rigadoons are doctrinarian.  It is necessary to be majestic. 
People would be greatly annoyed if they did not carry their chins
in their cravats.  The ideal of an urchin of twenty when he marries,
is to resemble M. Royer-Collard. And do you know what one
arrives at with that majesty? at being petty.  Learn this: 
joy is not only joyous; it is great.  But be in love gayly then,
what the deuce! marry, when you marry, with fever and giddiness,
and tumult, and the uproar of happiness!  Be grave in church,
well and good.  But, as soon as the mass is finished, sarpejou! you
must make a dream whirl around the bride.  A marriage should be
royal and chimerical; it should promenade its ceremony from the
cathedral of Rheims to the pagoda of Chanteloup.  I have a horror
of a paltry wedding.  Ventregoulette! be in Olympus for that one day,
at least.  Be one of the gods.  Ah! people might be sylphs. 
Games and Laughter, argiraspides; they are stupids.  My friends,
every recently made bridegroom ought to be Prince Aldobrandini. 
Profit by that unique minute in life to soar away to the empyrean
with the swans and the eagles, even if you do have to fall back
on the morrow into the bourgeoisie of the frogs.  Don't economize
on the nuptials, do not prune them of their splendors; don't scrimp
on the day when you beam.  The wedding is not the housekeeping. 
Oh! if I were to carry out my fancy, it would be gallant, violins would
be heard under the trees.  Here is my programme:  sky-blue and silver. 
I would mingle with the festival the rural divinities, I would
convoke the Dryads and the Nereids.  The nuptials of Amphitrite,
a rosy cloud, nymphs with well dressed locks and entirely naked,
an Academician offering quatrains to the goddess, a chariot drawn by
marine monsters.

     "Triton trottait devant, et tirait de sa conque
      Des sons si ravissants qu'il ravissait quiconque!"[65]

--there's a festive programme, there's a good one, or else I know
nothing of such matters, deuce take it!"


[65] "Triton trotted on before, and drew from his conch-shell
sounds so ravishing that he delighted everyone!"


While the grandfather, in full lyrical effusion, was listening
to himself, Cosette and Marius grew intoxicated as they gazed
freely at each other.

Aunt Gillenormand surveyed all this with her imperturbable placidity. 
Within the last five or six months she had experienced a certain
amount of emotions.  Marius returned, Marius brought back bleeding,
Marius brought back from a barricade, Marius dead, then living,
Marius reconciled, Marius betrothed, Marius wedding a poor girl,
Marius wedding a millionairess.  The six hundred thousand francs
had been her last surprise.  Then, her indifference of a girl taking
her first communion returned to her.  She went regularly to service,
told her beads, read her euchology, mumbled Aves in one corner
of the house, while I love you was being whispered in the other,
and she beheld Marius and Cosette in a vague way, like two shadows. 
The shadow was herself.

There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the soul,
neutralized by torpor, a stranger to that which may be designated as the
business of living, receives no impressions, either human, or pleasant
or painful, with the exception of earthquakes and catastrophes. 
This devotion, as Father Gillenormand said to his daughter,
corresponds to a cold in the head.  You smell nothing of life. 
Neither any bad, nor any good odor.

Moreover, the six hundred thousand francs had settled the elderly
spinster's indecision.  Her father had acquired the habit of taking
her so little into account, that he had not consulted her in the
matter of consent to Marius' marriage.  He had acted impetuously,
according to his wont, having, a despot-turned slave, but a
single thought,--to satisfy Marius.  As for the aunt,--it had not
even occurred to him that the aunt existed, and that she could have
an opinion of her own, and, sheep as she was, this had vexed her. 
Somewhat resentful in her inmost soul, but impassible externally,
she had said to herself:  "My father has settled the question of
the marriage without reference to me; I shall settle the question
of the inheritance without consulting him."  She was rich, in fact,
and her father was not.  She had reserved her decision on this point. 
It is probable that, had the match been a poor one, she would have
left him poor.  "So much the worse for my nephew! he is wedding
a beggar, let him be a beggar himself!"  But Cosette's half-million
pleased the aunt, and altered her inward situation so far as this
pair of lovers were concerned.  One owes some consideration to six
hundred thousand francs, and it was evident that she could not do
otherwise than leave her fortune to these young people, since they
did not need it.

It was arranged that the couple should live with the grandfather--
M. Gillenormand insisted on resigning to them his chamber,
the finest in the house.  "That will make me young again," he said. 
"It's an old plan of mine.  I have always entertained the idea of
having a wedding in my chamber."

He furnished this chamber with a multitude of elegant trifles. 
He had the ceiling and walls hung with an extraordinary stuff,
which he had by him in the piece, and which he believed to have
emanated from Utrecht with a buttercup-colored satin ground, covered
with velvet auricula blossoms.--"It was with that stuff," said he,
"that the bed of the Duchesse d'Anville at la Roche-Guyon was draped."--
On the chimney-piece, he set a little figure in Saxe porcelain,
carrying a muff against her nude stomach.

M. Gillenormand's library became the lawyer's study, which Marius needed;
a study, it will be remembered, being required by the council
of the order.



CHAPTER VII

THE EFFECTS OF DREAMS MINGLED WITH HAPPINESS


The lovers saw each other every day.  Cosette came with
M. Fauchelevent.--"This is reversing things," said Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, "to have the bride come to the house to do the
courting like this."  But Marius' convalescence had caused the
habit to become established, and the arm-chairs of the Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire, better adapted to interviews than the straw
chairs of the Rue de l'Homme Arme, had rooted it.  Marius and
M. Fauchelevent saw each other, but did not address each other. 
It seemed as though this had been agreed upon.  Every girl needs
a chaperon.  Cosette could not have come without M. Fauchelevent. 
In Marius' eyes, M. Fauchelevent was the condition attached to Cosette. 
He accepted it.  By dint of discussing political matters, vaguely and
without precision, from the point of view of the general amelioration
of the fate of all men, they came to say a little more than "yes"
and "no."  Once, on the subject of education, which Marius wished
to have free and obligatory, multiplied under all forms lavished
on every one, like the air and the sun in a word, respirable for the
entire population, they were in unison, and they almost conversed. 
M. Fauchelevent talked well, and even with a certain loftiness
of language--still he lacked something indescribable.  M. Fauchelevent
possessed something less and also something more, than a man of the world.

Marius, inwardly, and in the depths of his thought, surrounded with all
sorts of mute questions this M. Fauchelevent, who was to him simply
benevolent and cold.  There were moments when doubts as to his own
recollections occurred to him.  There was a void in his memory,
a black spot, an abyss excavated by four months of agony.--Many things
had been lost therein.  He had come to the point of asking himself
whether it were really a fact that he had seen M. Fauchelevent,
so serious and so calm a man, in the barricade.

This was not, however, the only stupor which the apparitions
and the disappearances of the past had left in his mind.  It must
not be supposed that he was delivered from all those obsessions
of the memory which force us, even when happy, even when satisfied,
to glance sadly behind us.  The head which does not turn backwards
towards horizons that have vanished contains neither thought
nor love.  At times, Marius clasped his face between his hands,
and the vague and tumultuous past traversed the twilight which
reigned in his brain.  Again he beheld Mabeuf fall, he heard
Gavroche singing amid the grape-shot, he felt beneath his lips
the cold brow of Eponine; Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire,
Combeferre, Bossuet, Grantaire, all his friends rose erect
before him, then dispersed into thin air.  Were all those dear,
sorrowful, valiant, charming or tragic beings merely dreams? had they
actually existed?  The revolt had enveloped everything in its smoke. 
These great fevers create great dreams.  He questioned himself;
he felt himself; all these vanished realities made him dizzy. 
Where were they all then? was it really true that all were dead? 
A fall into the shadows had carried off all except himself. 
It all seemed to him to have disappeared as though behind the curtain
of a theatre.  There are curtains like this which drop in life. 
God passes on to the following act.

And he himself--was he actually the same man?  He, the poor man,
was rich; he, the abandoned, had a family; he, the despairing,
was to marry Cosette.  It seemed to him that he had traversed a tomb,
and that he had entered into it black and had emerged from it white,
and in that tomb the others had remained.  At certain moments,
all these beings of the past, returned and present, formed a circle
around him, and overshadowed him; then he thought of Cosette,
and recovered his serenity; but nothing less than this felicity could
have sufficed to efface that catastrophe.

M. Fauchelevent almost occupied a place among these vanished beings. 
Marius hesitated to believe that the Fauchelevent of the barricade
was the same as this Fauchelevent in flesh and blood, sitting so
gravely beside Cosette.  The first was, probably, one of those
nightmares occasioned and brought back by his hours of delirium. 
However, the natures of both men were rigid, no question from Marius
to M. Fauchelevent was possible.  Such an idea had not even occurred
to him.  We have already indicated this characteristic detail.

Two men who have a secret in common, and who, by a sort of
tacit agreement, exchange not a word on the subject, are less
rare than is commonly supposed.

Once only, did Marius make the attempt.  He introduced into the
conversation the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and, turning to M. Fauchelevent,
he said to him:

"Of course, you are acquainted with that street?"

"What street?"

"The Rue de la Chanvrerie."

"I have no idea of the name of that street," replied M. Fauchelevent,
in the most natural manner in the world.

The response which bore upon the name of the street and not upon
the street itself, appeared to Marius to be more conclusive than it
really was.

"Decidedly," thought he, "I have been dreaming.  I have been
subject to a hallucination.  It was some one who resembled him. 
M. Fauchelevent was not there."'



CHAPTER VIII

TWO MEN IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND


Marius' enchantment, great as it was, could not efface from his
mind other pre-occupations.

While the wedding was in preparation, and while awaiting the date
fixed upon, he caused difficult and scrupulous retrospective
researches to be made.

He owed gratitude in various quarters;
he owed it on his father's account, he owed it on his own.

There was Thenardier; there
was the unknown man who had brought him, Marius, back to M. Gillenormand.

Marius endeavored to find these two men, not intending to marry,
to be happy, and to forget them, and fearing that, were these debts
of gratitude not discharged, they would leave a shadow on his life,
which promised so brightly for the future.

It was impossible for him to leave all these arrears of suffering
behind him, and he wished, before entering joyously into the future,
to obtain a quittance from the past.

That Thenardier was a villain detracted nothing from the fact
that he had saved Colonel Pontmercy.  Thenardier was a ruffian
in the eyes of all the world except Marius.

And Marius, ignorant of the real scene in the battle field
of Waterloo, was not aware of the peculiar detail, that his father,
so far as Thenardier was concerned was in the strange position
of being indebted to the latter for his life, without being
indebted to him for any gratitude.

None of the various agents whom Marius employed succeeded in
discovering any trace of Thenardier.  Obliteration appeared to be
complete in that quarter.  Madame Thenardier had died in prison
pending the trial.  Thenardier and his daughter Azelma, the only two
remaining of that lamentable group, had plunged back into the gloom. 
The gulf of the social unknown had silently closed above those beings. 
On the surface there was not visible so much as that quiver,
that trembling, those obscure concentric circles which announce
that something has fallen in, and that the plummet may be dropped.

Madame Thenardier being dead, Boulatruelle being eliminated
from the case, Claquesous having disappeared, the principal
persons accused having escaped from prison, the trial connected
with the ambush in the Gorbeau house had come to nothing.

That affair had remained rather obscure.  The bench of Assizes had
been obliged to content themselves with two subordinates.  Panchaud,
alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, and Demi-Liard, alias Deux-Milliards,
who had been inconsistently condemned, after a hearing of both sides
of the case, to ten years in the galleys.  Hard labor for life had been
the sentence pronounced against the escaped and contumacious accomplices.

Thenardier, the head and leader, had been, through contumacy,
likewise condemned to death.

This sentence was the only information remaining about Thenardier,
casting upon that buried name its sinister light like a candle beside
a bier.

Moreover, by thrusting Thenardier back into the very remotest depths,
through a fear of being re-captured, this sentence added to the
density of the shadows which enveloped this man.

As for the other person, as for the unknown man who had saved Marius,
the researches were at first to some extent successful, then came
to an abrupt conclusion.  They succeeded in finding the carriage
which had brought Marius to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire on
the evening of the 6th of June.

The coachman declared that, on the 6th of June, in obedience
to the commands of a police-agent, he had stood from three o'clock
in the afternoon until nightfall on the Quai des Champs-Elysees,
above the outlet of the Grand Sewer; that, towards nine o'clock
in the evening, the grating of the sewer, which abuts on the bank
of the river, had opened; that a man had emerged therefrom, bearing on
his shoulders another man, who seemed to be dead; that the agent,
who was on the watch at that point, had arrested the living man and
had seized the dead man; that, at the order of the police-agent, he,
the coachman, had taken "all those folks" into his carriage;
that they had first driven to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire;
that they had there deposited the dead man; that the dead man was
Monsieur Marius, and that he, the coachman, recognized him perfectly,
although he was alive "this time"; that afterwards, they had
entered the vehicle again, that he had whipped up his horses;
a few paces from the gate of the Archives, they had called to him
to halt; that there, in the street, they had paid him and left him,
and that the police-agent had led the other man away; that he knew
nothing more; that the night had been very dark.

Marius, as we have said, recalled nothing.  He only remembered
that he had been seized from behind by an energetic hand at
the moment when he was falling backwards into the barricade;
then, everything vanished so far as he was concerned.

He had only regained consciousness at M. Gillenormand's.

He was lost in conjectures.

He could not doubt his own identity.  Still, how had it come
to pass that, having fallen in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, he had
been picked up by the police-agent on the banks of the Seine,
near the Pont des Invalides?

Some one had carried him from the Quartier des Halles to the
Champs-Elysees. And how?  Through the sewer.  Unheard-of devotion!

Some one?  Who?

This was the man for whom Marius was searching.

Of this man, who was his savior, nothing; not a trace; not the
faintest indication.

Marius, although forced to preserve great reserve, in that direction,
pushed his inquiries as far as the prefecture of police.  There, no more
than elsewhere, did the information obtained lead to any enlightenment.

The prefecture knew less about the matter than did the
hackney-coachman. They had no knowledge of any arrest
having been made on the 6th of June at the mouth of the Grand Sewer.

No report of any agent had been received there upon this matter,
which was regarded at the prefecture as a fable.  The invention
of this fable was attributed to the coachman.

A coachman who wants a gratuity is capable of anything, even
of imagination.  The fact was assured, nevertheless, and Marius could
not doubt it, unless he doubted his own identity, as we have just said.

Everything about this singular enigma was inexplicable.

What had become of that man, that mysterious man, whom the coachman
had seen emerge from the grating of the Grand Sewer bearing upon
his back the unconscious Marius, and whom the police-agent on
the watch had arrested in the very act of rescuing an insurgent? 
What had become of the agent himself?

Why had this agent preserved silence?  Had the man succeeded
in making his escape?  Had he bribed the agent?  Why did this
man give no sign of life to Marius, who owed everything to him? 
His disinterestedness was no less tremendous than his devotion. 
Why had not that man appeared again?  Perhaps he was above compensation,
but no one is above gratitude.  Was he dead?  Who was the man? 
What sort of a face had he?  No one could tell him this.

The coachman answered:  "The night was very dark."  Basque and Nicolette,
all in a flutter, had looked only at their young master all covered
with blood.

The porter, whose candle had lighted the tragic arrival of Marius,
had been the only one to take note of the man in question, and this
is the description that he gave:

"That man was terrible."

Marius had the blood-stained clothing which he had worn when he
had been brought back to his grandfather preserved, in the hope
that it would prove of service in his researches.

On examining the coat, it was found that one skirt had been torn
in a singular way.  A piece was missing.

One evening, Marius was speaking in the presence of Cosette and Jean
Valjean of the whole of that singular adventure, of the innumerable
inquiries which he had made, and of the fruitlessness of his efforts. 
The cold countenance of "Monsieur Fauchelevent" angered him.

He exclaimed, with a vivacity which had something of wrath in it:

"Yes, that man, whoever he may have been, was sublime. 
Do you know what he did, sir?  He intervened like an archangel. 
He must have flung himself into the midst of the battle, have stolen
me away, have opened the sewer, have dragged me into it and have
carried me through it!  He must have traversed more than a league
and a half in those frightful subterranean galleries, bent over,
weighed down, in the dark, in the cess-pool,--more than a league
and a half, sir, with a corpse upon his back!  And with what object? 
With the sole object of saving the corpse.  And that corpse I was. 
He said to himself:  `There may still be a glimpse of life there,
perchance; I will risk my own existence for that miserable spark!' 
And his existence he risked not once but twenty times!  And every step
was a danger.  The proof of it is, that on emerging from the sewer,
he was arrested.  Do you know, sir, that that man did all this? 
And he had no recompense to expect.  What was I?  An insurgent. 
What was I?  One of the conquered.  Oh! if Cosette's six hundred
thousand francs were mine . . ."

"They are yours," interrupted Jean Valjean.

"Well," resumed Marius, "I would give them all to find that man
once more."

Jean Valjean remained silent.



BOOK SIXTH.--THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT


CHAPTER I

THE 16TH OF FEBRUARY, 1833


The night of the 16th to the 17th of February, 1833, was a blessed night. 
Above its shadows heaven stood open.  It was the wedding night
of Marius and Cosette.

The day had been adorable.

It had not been the grand festival dreamed by the grandfather,
a fairy spectacle, with a confusion of cherubim and Cupids over
the heads of the bridal pair, a marriage worthy to form the subject
of a painting to be placed over a door; but it had been sweet
and smiling.

The manner of marriage in 1833 was not the same as it is to-day.
France had not yet borrowed from England that supreme delicacy
of carrying off one's wife, of fleeing, on coming out of church,
of hiding oneself with shame from one's happiness, and of combining
the ways of a bankrupt with the delights of the Song of Songs. 
People had not yet grasped to the full the chastity, exquisiteness,
and decency of jolting their paradise in a posting-chaise, of breaking
up their mystery with clic-clacs, of taking for a nuptial bed the bed
of an inn, and of leaving behind them, in a commonplace chamber,
at so much a night, the most sacred of the souvenirs of life mingled
pell-mell with the tete-a-tete of the conductor of the diligence
and the maid-servant of the inn.

In this second half of the nineteenth century in which we are now living,
the mayor and his scarf, the priest and his chasuble, the law and God
no longer suffice; they must be eked out by the Postilion de Lonjumeau;
a blue waistcoat turned up with red, and with bell buttons,
a plaque like a vantbrace, knee-breeches of green leather, oaths to
the Norman horses with their tails knotted up, false galloons,
varnished hat, long powdered locks, an enormous whip and tall boots. 
France does not yet carry elegance to the length of doing like
the English nobility, and raining down on the post-chaise of the
bridal pair a hail storm of slippers trodden down at heel and of
worn-out shoes, in memory of Churchill, afterwards Marlborough,
or Malbrouck, who was assailed on his wedding-day by the wrath of an
aunt which brought him good luck.  Old shoes and slippers do not,
as yet, form a part of our nuptial celebrations; but patience,
as good taste continues to spread, we shall come to that.

In 1833, a hundred years ago, marriage was not conducted at a full trot.

Strange to say, at that epoch, people still imagined that a wedding
was a private and social festival, that a patriarchal banquet
does not spoil a domestic solemnity, that gayety, even in excess,
provided it be honest, and decent, does happiness no harm, and that,
in short, it is a good and a venerable thing that the fusion
of these two destinies whence a family is destined to spring,
should begin at home, and that the household should thenceforth
have its nuptial chamber as its witness.

And people were so immodest as to marry in their own homes.

The marriage took place, therefore, in accordance with this now
superannuated fashion, at M. Gillenormand's house.

Natural and commonplace as this matter of marrying is, the banns to
publish, the papers to be drawn up, the mayoralty, and the church produce
some complication.  They could not get ready before the 16th of February.

Now, we note this detail, for the pure satisfaction of being exact,
it chanced that the 16th fell on Shrove Tuesday.  Hesitations, scruples,
particularly on the part of Aunt Gillenormand.

"Shrove Tuesday!" exclaimed the grandfather, "so much the better. 
There is a proverb:

                "`Mariage un Mardi gras
                  N'aura point enfants ingrats.'[66]


[66] "A Shrove-Tuesday marriage will have no ungrateful children."


Let us proceed.  Here goes for the 16th!  Do you want to delay, Marius?"

"No, certainly not!" replied the lover.

"Let us marry, then," cried the grandfather.

Accordingly, the marriage took place on the 16th, notwithstanding the
public merrymaking.  It rained that day, but there is always in the sky
a tiny scrap of blue at the service of happiness, which lovers see,
even when the rest of creation is under an umbrella.

On the preceding evening, Jean Valjean handed to Marius, in the presence
of M. Gillenormand, the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.

As the marriage was taking place under the regime of community
of property, the papers had been simple.

Henceforth, Toussaint was of no use to Jean Valjean; Cosette inherited
her and promoted her to the rank of lady's maid.

As for Jean Valjean, a beautiful chamber in the Gillenormand
house had been furnished expressly for him, and Cosette had said
to him in such an irresistible manner:  "Father, I entreat you,"
that she had almost persuaded him to promise that he would come
and occupy it.

A few days before that fixed on for the marriage, an accident
happened to Jean Valjean; he crushed the thumb of his right hand. 
This was not a serious matter; and he had not allowed any one to
trouble himself about it, nor to dress it, nor even to see his hurt,
not even Cosette.  Nevertheless, this had forced him to swathe
his hand in a linen bandage, and to carry his arm in a sling,
and had prevented his signing.  M. Gillenormand, in his capacity
of Cosette's supervising-guardian, had supplied his place.

We will not conduct the reader either to the mayor's office or to
the church.  One does not follow a pair of lovers to that extent,
and one is accustomed to turn one's back on the drama as soon as it
puts a wedding nosegay in its buttonhole.  We will confine ourselves
to noting an incident which, though unnoticed by the wedding party,
marked the transit from the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire to the church
of Saint-Paul.

At that epoch, the northern extremity of the Rue Saint-Louis was in
process of repaving.  It was barred off, beginning with the Rue du
Pare-Royal. It was impossible for the wedding carriages to go directly
to Saint-Paul. They were obliged to alter their course, and the simplest
way was to turn through the boulevard.  One of the invited guests
observed that it was Shrove Tuesday, and that there would be a jam
of vehicles.--"Why?" asked M. Gillenormand--"Because of the maskers."--
"Capital," said the grandfather, "let us go that way.  These young
folks are on the way to be married; they are about to enter the serious
part of life.  This will prepare them for seeing a bit of the masquerade."

They went by way of the boulevard.  The first wedding coach held
Cosette and Aunt Gillenormand, M. Gillenormand and Jean Valjean. 
Marius, still separated from his betrothed according to usage,
did not come until the second.  The nuptial train, on emerging
from the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, became entangled in a long
procession of vehicles which formed an endless chain from the
Madeleine to the Bastille, and from the Bastille to the Madeleine. 
Maskers abounded on the boulevard.  In spite of the fact that it was
raining at intervals, Merry-Andrew, Pantaloon and Clown persisted. 
In the good humor of that winter of 1833, Paris had disguised
itself as Venice.  Such Shrove Tuesdays are no longer to be seen
now-a-days. Everything which exists being a scattered Carnival,
there is no longer any Carnival.

The sidewalks were overflowing with pedestrians and the windows with
curious spectators.  The terraces which crown the peristyles of the
theatres were bordered with spectators.  Besides the maskers, they stared
at that procession--peculiar to Shrove Tuesday as to Longchamps,--
of vehicles of every description, citadines, tapissieres, carioles,
cabriolets marching in order, rigorously riveted to each other
by the police regulations, and locked into rails, as it were. 
Any one in these vehicles is at once a spectator and a spectacle. 
Police-sergeants maintained, on the sides of the boulevard,
these two interminable parallel files, moving in contrary directions,
and saw to it that nothing interfered with that double current,
those two brooks of carriages, flowing, the one down stream,
the other up stream, the one towards the Chaussee d'Antin, the other
towards the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The carriages of the peers
of France and of the Ambassadors, emblazoned with coats of arms,
held the middle of the way, going and coming freely.  Certain joyous
and magnificent trains, notably that of the Boeuf Gras, had the
same privilege.  In this gayety of Paris, England cracked her whip;
Lord Seymour's post-chaise, harassed by a nickname from the populace,
passed with great noise.

In the double file, along which the municipal guards galloped like
sheep-dogs, honest family coaches, loaded down with great-aunts
and grandmothers, displayed at their doors fresh groups of children
in disguise, Clowns of seven years of age, Columbines of six,
ravishing little creatures, who felt that they formed an official
part of the public mirth, who were imbued with the dignity
of their harlequinade, and who possessed the gravity of functionaries.

From time to time, a hitch arose somewhere in the procession
of vehicles; one or other of the two lateral files halted until
the knot was disentangled; one carriage delayed sufficed to paralyze
the whole line.  Then they set out again on the march.

The wedding carriages were in the file proceeding towards the Bastille,
and skirting the right side of the Boulevard.  At the top of the
Pont-aux-Choux, there was a stoppage.  Nearly at the same moment,
the other file, which was proceeding towards the Madeleine,
halted also.  At that point of the file there was a carriage-load
of maskers.

These carriages, or to speak more correctly, these wagon-loads
of maskers are very familiar to Parisians.  If they were missing on
a Shrove Tuesday, or at the Mid-Lent, it would be taken in bad part,
and people would say:  "There's something behind that.  Probably the
ministry is about to undergo a change."  A pile of Cassandras,
Harlequins and Columbines, jolted along high above the passers-by,
all possible grotesquenesses, from the Turk to the savage,
Hercules supporting Marquises, fishwives who would have made Rabelais
stop up his ears just as the Maenads made Aristophanes drop his eyes,
tow wigs, pink tights, dandified hats, spectacles of a grimacer,
three-cornered hats of Janot tormented with a butterfly, shouts directed
at pedestrians, fists on hips, bold attitudes, bare shoulders,
immodesty unchained; a chaos of shamelessness driven by a coachman
crowned with flowers; this is what that institution was like.

Greece stood in need of the chariot of Thespis, France stands
in need of the hackney-coach of Vade.

Everything can be parodied, even parody.  The Saturnalia, that grimace
of antique beauty, ends, through exaggeration after exaggeration,
in Shrove Tuesday; and the Bacchanal, formerly crowned with sprays
of vine leaves and grapes, inundated with sunshine, displaying her
marble breast in a divine semi-nudity, having at the present day
lost her shape under the soaked rags of the North, has finally
come to be called the Jack-pudding.

The tradition of carriage-loads of maskers runs back to the
most ancient days of the monarchy.  The accounts of Louis XI. 
allot to the bailiff of the palace "twenty sous, Tournois, for three
coaches of mascarades in the cross-roads." In our day, these noisy
heaps of creatures are accustomed to have themselves driven
in some ancient cuckoo carriage, whose imperial they load down,
or they overwhelm a hired landau, with its top thrown back,
with their tumultuous groups.  Twenty of them ride in a carriage
intended for six.  They cling to the seats, to the rumble,
on the cheeks of the hood, on the shafts.  They even bestride the
carriage lamps.  They stand, sit, lie, with their knees drawn up
in a knot, and their legs hanging.  The women sit on the men's laps. 
Far away, above the throng of heads, their wild pyramid is visible. 
These carriage-loads form mountains of mirth in the midst of
the rout.  Colle, Panard and Piron flow from it, enriched with slang. 
This carriage which has become colossal through its freight,
has an air of conquest.  Uproar reigns in front, tumult behind. 
People vociferate, shout, howl, there they break forth and writhe
with enjoyment; gayety roars; sarcasm flames forth, joviality is
flaunted like a red flag; two jades there drag farce blossomed
forth into an apotheosis; it is the triumphal car of laughter.

A laughter that is too cynical to be frank.  In truth,
this laughter is suspicious.  This laughter has a mission. 
It is charged with proving the Carnival to the Parisians.

These fishwife vehicles, in which one feels one knows not what shadows,
set the philosopher to thinking.  There is government therein. 
There one lays one's finger on a mysterious affinity between public
men and public women.

It certainly is sad that turpitude heaped up should give a sum total
of gayety, that by piling ignominy upon opprobrium the people should
be enticed, that the system of spying, and serving as caryatids
to prostitution should amuse the rabble when it confronts them,
that the crowd loves to behold that monstrous living pile of tinsel rags,
half dung, half light, roll by on four wheels howling and laughing,
that they should clap their hands at this glory composed of all shames,
that there would be no festival for the populace, did not the police
promenade in their midst these sorts of twenty-headed hydras of joy. 
But what can be done about it?  These be-ribboned and be-flowered tumbrils
of mire are insulted and pardoned by the laughter of the public. 
The laughter of all is the accomplice of universal degradation. 
Certain unhealthy festivals disaggregate the people and convert them
into the populace.  And populaces, like tyrants, require buffoons. 
The King has Roquelaure, the populace has the Merry-Andrew. Paris is
a great, mad city on every occasion that it is a great sublime city. 
There the Carnival forms part of politics.  Paris,--let us
confess it--willingly allows infamy to furnish it with comedy. 
She only demands of her masters--when she has masters--one thing: 
"Paint me the mud."  Rome was of the same mind.  She loved Nero. 
Nero was a titanic lighterman.

Chance ordained, as we have just said, that one of these shapeless
clusters of masked men and women, dragged about on a vast calash,
should halt on the left of the boulevard, while the wedding train
halted on the right.  The carriage-load of masks caught sight
of the wedding carriage containing the bridal party opposite them
on the other side of the boulevard.

"Hullo!" said a masker, "here's a wedding."

"A sham wedding," retorted another.  "We are the genuine article."

And, being too far off to accost the wedding party, and fearing also,
the rebuke of the police, the two maskers turned their eyes elsewhere.

At the end of another minute, the carriage-load of maskers had their
hands full, the multitude set to yelling, which is the crowd's
caress to masquerades; and the two maskers who had just spoken had
to face the throng with their comrades, and did not find the entire
repertory of projectiles of the fishmarkets too extensive to retort
to the enormous verbal attacks of the populace.  A frightful
exchange of metaphors took place between the maskers and the crowd.

In the meanwhile, two other maskers in the same carriage, a Spaniard
with an enormous nose, an elderly air, and huge black moustache,
and a gaunt fishwife, who was quite a young girl, masked with a
loup,[67] had also noticed the wedding, and while their companions
and the passers-by were exchanging insults, they had held a dialogue
in a low voice.


[67] A short mask.


Their aside was covered by the tumult and was lost in it. 
The gusts of rain had drenched the front of the vehicle, which was
wide open; the breezes of February are not warm; as the fishwife,
clad in a low-necked gown, replied to the Spaniard, she shivered,
laughed and coughed.

Here is their dialogue:

"Say, now."

"What, daddy?"

"Do you see that old cove?"

"What old cove?"

"Yonder, in the first wedding-cart, on our side."

"The one with his arm hung up in a black cravat?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

"I'm sure that I know him."

"Ah!"

"I'm willing that they should cut my throat, and I'm ready to swear
that I never said either you, thou, or I, in my life, if I don't
know that Parisian."  [pantinois.]

"Paris in Pantin to-day."

"Can you see the bride if you stoop down?"

"No."

"And the bridegroom?"

"There's no bridegroom in that trap."

"Bah!"

"Unless it's the old fellow."

"Try to get a sight of the bride by stooping very low."

"I can't."

"Never mind, that old cove who has something the matter with his
paw I know, and that I'm positive."

"And what good does it do to know him?"

"No one can tell.  Sometimes it does!"

"I don't care a hang for old fellows, that I don't!"

"I know him."

"Know him, if you want to."

"How the devil does he come to be one of the wedding party?"

"We are in it, too."

"Where does that wedding come from?"

"How should I know?"

"Listen."

"Well, what?"

"There's one thing you ought to do."

"What's that?"

"Get off of our trap and spin that wedding."

"What for?"

"To find out where it goes, and what it is.  Hurry up
and jump down, trot, my girl, your legs are young."

"I can't quit the vehicle."

"Why not?"

"I'm hired."

"Ah, the devil!"

"I owe my fishwife day to the prefecture."

"That's true."

"If I leave the cart, the first inspector who gets his eye on me
will arrest me.  You know that well enough."

"Yes, I do."

"I'm bought by the government for to-day."

"All the same, that old fellow bothers me."

"Do the old fellows bother you?  But you're not a young girl."

"He's in the first carriage."

"Well?"

"In the bride's trap."

"What then?"

"So he is the father."

"What concern is that of mine?"

"I tell you that he's the father."

"As if he were the only father."

"Listen."

"What?"

"I can't go out otherwise than masked.  Here I'm concealed, no one
knows that I'm here.  But to-morrow, there will be no more maskers. 
It's Ash Wednesday.  I run the risk of being nabbed.  I must sneak
back into my hole.  But you are free."

"Not particularly."

"More than I am, at any rate."

"Well, what of that?"

"You must try to find out where that wedding-party went to."

"Where it went?"

"Yes."

"I know."

"Where is it going then?"

"To the Cadran-Bleu."

"In the first place, it's not in that direction."

"Well! to la Rapee."

"Or elsewhere."

"It's free.  Wedding-parties are at liberty."

"That's not the point at all.  I tell you that you must try to
learn for me what that wedding is, who that old cove belongs to,
and where that wedding pair lives."

"I like that! that would be queer.  It's so easy to find out a
wedding-party that passed through the street on a Shrove Tuesday,
a week afterwards.  A pin in a hay-mow! It ain't possible!"

"That don't matter.  You must try.  You understand me, Azelma."

The two files resumed their movement on both sides of the boulevard,
in opposite directions, and the carriage of the maskers lost sight
of the "trap" of the bride.



CHAPTER II

JEAN VALJEAN STILL WEARS HIS ARM IN A SLING


To realize one's dream.  To whom is this accorded?  There must
be elections for this in heaven; we are all candidates, unknown
to ourselves; the angels vote.  Cosette and Marius had been elected.

Cosette, both at the mayor's office and at church, was dazzling
and touching.  Toussaint, assisted by Nicolette, had dressed her.

Cosette wore over a petticoat of white taffeta, her robe of
Binche guipure, a veil of English point, a necklace of fine pearls,
a wreath of orange flowers; all this was white, and, from the midst
of that whiteness she beamed forth.  It was an exquisite candor
expanding and becoming transfigured in the light.  One would
have pronounced her a virgin on the point of turning into a goddess.

Marius' handsome hair was lustrous and perfumed; here and there,
beneath the thick curls, pale lines--the scars of the barricade--
were visible.

The grandfather, haughty, with head held high, amalgamating more
than ever in his toilet and his manners all the elegances
of the epoch of Barras, escorted Cosette.  He took the place of
Jean Valjean, who, on account of his arm being still in a sling,
could not give his hand to the bride.

Jean Valjean, dressed in black, followed them with a smile.

"Monsieur Fauchelevent," said the grandfather to him, "this is
a fine day.  I vote for the end of afflictions and sorrows. 
Henceforth, there must be no sadness anywhere.  Pardieu, I decree joy! 
Evil has no right to exist.  That there should be any unhappy men is,
in sooth, a disgrace to the azure of the sky.  Evil does not come
from man, who is good at bottom.  All human miseries have for
their capital and central government hell, otherwise, known as the
Devil's Tuileries.  Good, here I am uttering demagogical words! 
As far as I am concerned, I have no longer any political opinions;
let all me be rich, that is to say, mirthful, and I confine myself
to that."

When, at the conclusion of all the ceremonies, after having pronounced
before the mayor and before the priest all possible "yesses," after
having signed the registers at the municipality and at the sacristy,
after having exchanged their rings, after having knelt side by side
under the pall of white moire in the smoke of the censer, they arrived,
hand in hand, admired and envied by all, Marius in black, she in white,
preceded by the suisse, with the epaulets of a colonel, tapping the
pavement with his halberd, between two rows of astonished spectators,
at the portals of the church, both leaves of which were thrown
wide open, ready to enter their carriage again, and all being finished,
Cosette still could not believe that it was real.  She looked at Marius,
she looked at the crowd, she looked at the sky:  it seemed as though
she feared that she should wake up from her dream.  Her amazed and
uneasy air added something indescribably enchanting to her beauty. 
They entered the same carriage to return home, Marius beside Cosette;
M. Gillenormand and Jean Valjean sat opposite them; Aunt Gillenormand
had withdrawn one degree, and was in the second vehicle.

"My children," said the grandfather, "here you are, Monsieur le Baron
and Madame la Baronne, with an income of thirty thousand livres."

And Cosette, nestling close to Marius, caressed his ear with an
angelic whisper:  "So it is true.  My name is Marius.  I am Madame Thou."

These two creatures were resplendent.  They had reached that
irrevocable and irrecoverable moment, at the dazzling intersection
of all youth and all joy.  They realized the verses of Jean Prouvaire;
they were forty years old taken together.  It was marriage sublimated;
these two children were two lilies.  They did not see each other,
they did not contemplate each other.  Cosette perceived Marius
in the midst of a glory; Marius perceived Cosette on an altar. 
And on that altar, and in that glory, the two apotheoses mingling,
in the background, one knows not how, behind a cloud for Cosette,
in a flash for Marius, there was the ideal thing, the real thing,
the meeting of the kiss and the dream, the nuptial pillow. 
All the torments through which they had passed came back to them
in intoxication.  It seemed to them that their sorrows, their sleepless
nights, their tears, their anguish, their terrors, their despair,
converted into caresses and rays of light, rendered still more charming
the charming hour which was approaching; and that their griefs
were but so many handmaidens who were preparing the toilet of joy. 
How good it is to have suffered!  Their unhappiness formed a halo
round their happiness.  The long agony of their love was terminating
in an ascension.

It was the same enchantment in two souls, tinged with voluptuousness
in Marius, and with modesty in Cosette.  They said to each other
in low tones:  "We will go back to take a look at our little garden
in the Rue Plumet."  The folds of Cosette's gown lay across Marius.

Such a day is an ineffable mixture of dream and of reality. 
One possesses and one supposes.  One still has time before one to divine. 
The emotion on that day, of being at mid-day and of dreaming
of midnight is indescribable.  The delights of these two hearts
overflowed upon the crowd, and inspired the passers-by with cheerfulness.

People halted in the Rue Saint-Antoine, in front of Saint-Paul,
to gaze through the windows of the carriage at the orange-flowers
quivering on Cosette's head.

Then they returned home to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. Marius,
triumphant and radiant, mounted side by side with Cosette the staircase
up which he had been borne in a dying condition.  The poor, who had
trooped to the door, and who shared their purses, blessed them. 
There were flowers everywhere.  The house was no less fragrant
than the church; after the incense, roses.  They thought they heard
voices carolling in the infinite; they had God in their hearts;
destiny appeared to them like a ceiling of stars; above their heads
they beheld the light of a rising sun.  All at once, the clock struck. 
Marius glanced at Cosette's charming bare arm, and at the rosy
things which were vaguely visible through the lace of her bodice,
and Cosette, intercepting Marius' glance, blushed to her very hair.

Quite a number of old family friends of the Gillenormand family
had been invited; they pressed about Cosette.  Each one vied
with the rest in saluting her as Madame la Baronne.

The officer, Theodule Gillenormand, now a captain, had come
from Chartres, where he was stationed in garrison, to be present
at the wedding of his cousin Pontmercy.  Cosette did not recognize him.

He, on his side, habituated as he was to have women consider him handsome,
retained no more recollection of Cosette than of any other woman.

"How right I was not to believe in that story about the lancer!"
said Father Gillenormand, to himself.

Cosette had never been more tender with Jean Valjean. 
She was in unison with Father Gillenormand; while he erected joy
into aphorisms and maxims, she exhaled goodness like a perfume. 
Happiness desires that all the world should be happy.

She regained, for the purpose of addressing Jean Valjean,
inflections of voice belonging to the time when she was a little girl. 
She caressed him with her smile.

A banquet had been spread in the dining-room.

Illumination as brilliant as the daylight is the necessary seasoning
of a great joy.  Mist and obscurity are not accepted by the happy. 
They do not consent to be black.  The night, yes; the shadows, no. 
If there is no sun, one must be made.

The dining-room was full of gay things.  In the centre, above the white
and glittering table, was a Venetian lustre with flat plates, with all
sorts of colored birds, blue, violet, red, and green, perched amid
the candles; around the chandelier, girandoles, on the walls, sconces with
triple and quintuple branches; mirrors, silverware, glassware, plate,
porcelain, faience, pottery, gold and silversmith's work, all was
sparkling and gay.  The empty spaces between the candelabra were filled
in with bouquets, so that where there was not a light, there was a flower.

In the antechamber, three violins and a flute softly played
quartettes by Haydn.

Jean Valjean had seated himself on a chair in the drawing-room,
behind the door, the leaf of which folded back upon him in such
a manner as to nearly conceal him.  A few moments before they sat
down to table, Cosette came, as though inspired by a sudden whim,
and made him a deep courtesy, spreading out her bridal toilet
with both hands, and with a tenderly roguish glance, she asked him:

"Father, are you satisfied?"

"Yes," said Jean Valjean, "I am content!"

"Well, then, laugh."

Jean Valjean began to laugh.

A few moments later, Basque announced that dinner was served.

The guests, preceded by M. Gillenormand with Cosette on his arm,
entered the dining-room, and arranged themselves in the proper order
around the table.

Two large arm-chairs figured on the right and left of the bride,
the first for M. Gillenormand, the other for Jean Valjean. 
M. Gillenormand took his seat.  The other arm-chair remained empty.

They looked about for M. Fauchelevent.

He was no longer there.

M. Gillenormand questioned Basque.

"Do you know where M. Fauchelevent is?"

"Sir," replied Basque, "I do, precisely.  M. Fauchelevent told
me to say to you, sir, that he was suffering, his injured hand
was paining him somewhat, and that he could not dine with Monsieur
le Baron and Madame la Baronne.  That he begged to be excused,
that he would come to-morrow. He has just taken his departure."

That empty arm-chair chilled the effusion of the wedding
feast for a moment.  But, if M. Fauchelevent was absent,
M. Gillenormand was present, and the grandfather beamed for two. 
He affirmed that M. Fauchelevent had done well to retire early,
if he were suffering, but that it was only a slight ailment. 
This declaration sufficed.  Moreover, what is an obscure corner
in such a submersion of joy?  Cosette and Marius were passing
through one of those egotistical and blessed moments when no other
faculty is left to a person than that of receiving happiness. 
And then, an idea occurred to M. Gillenormand.--"Pardieu, this
armchair is empty.  Come hither, Marius.  Your aunt will permit it,
although she has a right to you.  This armchair is for you. 
That is legal and delightful.  Fortunatus beside Fortunata."--
Applause from the whole table.  Marius took Jean Valjean's place
beside Cosette, and things fell out so that Cosette, who had,
at first, been saddened by Jean Valjean's absence, ended by being
satisfied with it.  From the moment when Marius took his place,
and was the substitute, Cosette would not have regretted God himself. 
She set her sweet little foot, shod in white satin, on Marius' foot.

The arm-chair being occupied, M. Fauchelevent was obliterated;
and nothing was lacking.

And, five minutes afterward, the whole table from one end to the other,
was laughing with all the animation of forgetfulness.

At dessert, M. Gillenormand, rising to his feet, with a glass
of champagne in his hand--only half full so that the palsy of his
eighty years might not cause an overflow,--proposed the health
of the married pair.

"You shall not escape two sermons," he exclaimed.  "This morning
you had one from the cure, this evening you shall have one from
your grandfather.  Listen to me; I will give you a bit of advice: 
Adore each other.  I do not make a pack of gyrations, I go straight
to the mark, be happy.  In all creation, only the turtle-doves are wise. 
Philosophers say:  `Moderate your joys.'  I say:  `Give rein
to your joys.'  Be as much smitten with each other as fiends. 
Be in a rage about it.  The philosophers talk stuff and nonsense. 
I should like to stuff their philosophy down their gullets again. 
Can there be too many perfumes, too many open rose-buds, too many
nightingales singing, too many green leaves, too much aurora
in life? can people love each other too much? can people please
each other too much?  Take care, Estelle, thou art too pretty! 
Have a care, Nemorin, thou art too handsome!  Fine stupidity, in sooth! 
Can people enchant each other too much, cajole each other too much,
charm each other too much?  Can one be too much alive, too happy? 
Moderate your joys.  Ah, indeed!  Down with the philosophers! 
Wisdom consists in jubilation.  Make merry, let us make merry. 
Are we happy because we are good, or are we good because we are happy? 
Is the Sancy diamond called the Sancy because it belonged
to Harley de Sancy, or because it weighs six hundred carats? 
I know nothing about it, life is full of such problems; the important
point is to possess the Sancy and happiness.  Let us be happy
without quibbling and quirking.  Let us obey the sun blindly. 
What is the sun?  It is love.  He who says love, says woman. 
Ah! ah! behold omnipotence--women.  Ask that demagogue of a Marius
if he is not the slave of that little tyrant of a Cosette.  And of
his own free will, too, the coward!  Woman!  There is no Robespierre
who keeps his place but woman reigns.  I am no longer Royalist
except towards that royalty.  What is Adam?  The kingdom of Eve. 
No '89 for Eve.  There has been the royal sceptre surmounted by a
fleur-de-lys, there has been the imperial sceptre surmounted by a globe,
there has been the sceptre of Charlemagne, which was of iron,
there has been the sceptre of Louis the Great, which was of gold,--
the revolution twisted them between its thumb and forefinger,
ha'penny straws; it is done with, it is broken, it lies on the earth,
there is no longer any sceptre, but make me a revolution against
that little embroidered handkerchief, which smells of patchouli! 
I should like to see you do it.  Try.  Why is it so solid?  Because it
is a gewgaw.  Ah! you are the nineteenth century?  Well, what then? 
And we have been as foolish as you.  Do not imagine that you have
effected much change in the universe, because your trip-gallant is called
the cholera-morbus, and because your pourree is called the cachuca. 
In fact, the women must always be loved.  I defy you to escape from that. 
These friends are our angels.  Yes, love, woman, the kiss forms
a circle from which I defy you to escape; and, for my own part,
I should be only too happy to re-enter it.  Which of you has
seen the planet Venus, the coquette of the abyss, the Celimene
of the ocean, rise in the infinite, calming all here below? 
The ocean is a rough Alcestis.  Well, grumble as he will, when Venus
appears he is forced to smile.  That brute beast submits.  We are all
made so.  Wrath, tempest, claps of thunder, foam to the very ceiling. 
A woman enters on the scene, a planet rises; flat on your face! 
Marius was fighting six months ago; to-day he is married. 
That is well.  Yes, Marius, yes, Cosette, you are in the right. 
Exist boldly for each other, make us burst with rage that we cannot
do the same, idealize each other, catch in your beaks all the tiny
blades of felicity that exist on earth, and arrange yourselves a nest
for life.  Pardi, to love, to be loved, what a fine miracle when one
is young!  Don't imagine that you have invented that.  I, too, have had
my dream, I, too, have meditated, I, too, have sighed; I, too,
have had a moonlight soul.  Love is a child six thousand years old. 
Love has the right to a long white beard.  Methusalem is a street
arab beside Cupid.  For sixty centuries men and women have got
out of their scrape by loving.  The devil, who is cunning, took to
hating man; man, who is still more cunning, took to loving woman. 
In this way he does more good than the devil does him harm. 
This craft was discovered in the days of the terrestrial paradise. 
The invention is old, my friends, but it is perfectly new.  Profit by it. 
Be Daphnis and Chloe, while waiting to become Philemon and Baucis. 
Manage so that, when you are with each other, nothing shall
be lacking to you, and that Cosette may be the sun for Marius,
and that Marius may be the universe to Cosette.  Cosette, let your
fine weather be the smile of your husband; Marius, let your rain
be your wife's tears.  And let it never rain in your household. 
You have filched the winning number in the lottery; you have
gained the great prize, guard it well, keep it under lock and key,
do not squander it, adore each other and snap your fingers at
all the rest.  Believe what I say to you.  It is good sense. 
And good sense cannot lie.  Be a religion to each other. 
Each man has his own fashion of adoring God.  Saperlotte! the best
way to adore God is to love one's wife.  I love thee! that's
my catechism.  He who loves is orthodox.  The oath of Henri IV. 
places sanctity somewhere between feasting and drunkenness. 
Ventre-saint-gris! I don't belong to the religion of that oath. 
Woman is forgotten in it.  This astonishes me on the part
of Henri IV.  My friends, long live women!  I am old, they say;
it's astonishing how much I feel in the mood to be young.  I should
like to go and listen to the bagpipes in the woods.  Children who
contrive to be beautiful and contented,--that intoxicates me. 
I would like greatly to get married, if any one would have me. 
It is impossible to imagine that God could have made us for anything
but this:  to idolize, to coo, to preen ourselves, to be dove-like,
to be dainty, to bill and coo our loves from morn to night, to gaze
at one's image in one's little wife, to be proud, to be triumphant,
to plume oneself; that is the aim of life.  There, let not that displease
you which we used to think in our day, when we were young folks. 
Ah! vertu-bamboche! what charming women there were in those days,
and what pretty little faces and what lovely lasses!  I committed
my ravages among them.  Then love each other.  If people did
not love each other, I really do not see what use there would
be in having any springtime; and for my own part, I should pray
the good God to shut up all the beautiful things that he shows us,
and to take away from us and put back in his box, the flowers,
the birds, and the pretty maidens.  My children, receive an old man's
blessing."

The evening was gay, lively and agreeable.  The grandfather's
sovereign good humor gave the key-note to the whole feast, and each
person regulated his conduct on that almost centenarian cordiality. 
They danced a little, they laughed a great deal; it was an
amiable wedding.  Goodman Days of Yore might have been invited
to it.  However, he was present in the person of Father Gillenormand.

There was a tumult, then silence.

The married pair disappeared.

A little after midnight, the Gillenormand house became a temple.

Here we pause.  On the threshold of wedding nights stands a smiling
angel with his finger on his lips.

The soul enters into contemplation before that sanctuary where
the celebration of love takes place.

There should be flashes of light athwart such houses.  The joy
which they contain ought to make its escape through the stones
of the walls in brilliancy, and vaguely illuminate the gloom. 
It is impossible that this sacred and fatal festival should not give
off a celestial radiance to the infinite.  Love is the sublime
crucible wherein the fusion of the man and the woman takes place;
the being one, the being triple, the being final, the human trinity
proceeds from it.  This birth of two souls into one, ought to be
an emotion for the gloom.  The lover is the priest; the ravished
virgin is terrified.  Something of that joy ascends to God. 
Where true marriage is, that is to say, where there is love, the ideal
enters in.  A nuptial bed makes a nook of dawn amid the shadows. 
If it were given to the eye of the flesh to scan the formidable
and charming visions of the upper life, it is probable that we
should behold the forms of night, the winged unknowns, the blue
passers of the invisible, bend down, a throng of sombre heads,
around the luminous house, satisfied, showering benedictions,
pointing out to each other the virgin wife gently alarmed,
sweetly terrified, and bearing the reflection of human bliss upon
their divine countenances.  If at that supreme hour, the wedded pair,
dazzled with voluptuousness and believing themselves alone,
were to listen, they would hear in their chamber a confused rustling
of wings.  Perfect happiness implies a mutual understanding with
the angels.  That dark little chamber has all heaven for its ceiling. 
When two mouths, rendered sacred by love, approach to create,
it is impossible that there should not be, above that ineffable kiss,
a quivering throughout the immense mystery of stars.

These felicities are the true ones.  There is no joy outside
of these joys.  Love is the only ecstasy.  All the rest weeps.

To love, or to have loved,--this suffices.  Demand nothing more. 
There is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. 
To love is a fulfilment.



CHAPTER III

THE INSEPARABLE


What had become of Jean Valjean?

Immediately after having laughed, at Cosette's graceful command,
when no one was paying any heed to him, Jean Valjean had risen
and had gained the antechamber unperceived.  This was the very
room which, eight months before, he had entered black with mud,
with blood and powder, bringing back the grandson to the grandfather. 
The old wainscoting was garlanded with foliage and flowers;
the musicians were seated on the sofa on which they had laid
Marius down.  Basque, in a black coat, knee-breeches, white stockings
and white gloves, was arranging roses round all of the dishes that
were to be served.  Jean Valjean pointed to his arm in its sling,
charged Basque to explain his absence, and went away.

The long windows of the dining-room opened on the street. 
Jean Valjean stood for several minutes, erect and motionless
in the darkness, beneath those radiant windows.  He listened. 
The confused sounds of the banquet reached his ear.  He heard the loud,
commanding tones of the grandfather, the violins, the clatter of
the plates, the bursts of laughter, and through all that merry uproar,
he distinguished Cosette's sweet and joyous voice.

He quitted the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, and returned to the Rue
de l'Homme Arme.

In order to return thither, he took the Rue Saint-Louis, the Rue
Culture-Sainte-Catherine, and the Blancs-Manteaux; it was a little longer,
but it was the road through which, for the last three months,
he had become accustomed to pass every day on his way from the
Rue de l'Homme Arme to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, in order
to avoid the obstructions and the mud in the Rue Vielle-du-Temple.

This road, through which Cosette had passed, excluded for him
all possibility of any other itinerary.

Jean Valjean entered his lodgings.  He lighted his candle and
mounted the stairs.  The apartment was empty.  Even Toussaint
was no longer there.  Jean Valjean's step made more noise
than usual in the chambers.  All the cupboards stood open. 
He penetrated to Cosette's bedroom.  There were no sheets on the bed. 
The pillow, covered with ticking, and without a case or lace,
was laid on the blankets folded up on the foot of the mattress,
whose covering was visible, and on which no one was ever to sleep again. 
All the little feminine objects which Cosette was attached to had
been carried away; nothing remained except the heavy furniture
and the four walls.  Toussaint's bed was despoiled in like manner. 
One bed only was made up, and seemed to be waiting some one,
and this was Jean Valjean's bed.

Jean Valjean looked at the walls, closed some of the cupboard doors,
and went and came from one room to another.

Then he sought his own chamber once more, and set his candle
on a table.

He had disengaged his arm from the sling, and he used his right
hand as though it did not hurt him.

He approached his bed, and his eyes rested, was it by chance?
was it intentionally? on the inseparable of which Cosette had
been jealous, on the little portmanteau which never left him. 
On his arrival in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, on the 4th of June,
he had deposited it on a round table near the head of his bed. 
He went to this table with a sort of vivacity, took a key from
his pocket, and opened the valise.

From it he slowly drew forth the garments in which, ten years before,
Cosette had quitted Montfermeil; first the little gown, then the
black fichu, then the stout, coarse child's shoes which Cosette
might almost have worn still, so tiny were her feet, then the
fustian bodice, which was very thick, then the knitted petticoat,
next the apron with pockets, then the woollen stockings. 
These stockings, which still preserved the graceful form of a tiny leg,
were no longer than Jean Valjean's hand.  All this was black of hue. 
It was he who had brought those garments to Montfermeil for her. 
As he removed them from the valise, he laid them on the bed. 
He fell to thinking.  He called up memories.  It was in winter,
in a very cold month of December, she was shivering, half-naked,
in rags, her poor little feet were all red in their wooden shoes. 
He, Jean Valjean, had made her abandon those rags to clothe herself
in these mourning habiliments.  The mother must have felt pleased in
her grave, to see her daughter wearing mourning for her, and, above all,
to see that she was properly clothed, and that she was warm. 
He thought of that forest of Montfermeil; they had traversed
it together, Cosette and he; he thought of what the weather had been,
of the leafless trees, of the wood destitute of birds, of the
sunless sky; it mattered not, it was charming.  He arranged the tiny
garments on the bed, the fichu next to the petticoat, the stockings
beside the shoes, and he looked at them, one after the other. 
She was no taller than that, she had her big doll in her arms,
she had put her louis d'or in the pocket of that apron, she had laughed,
they walked hand in hand, she had no one in the world but him.

Then his venerable, white head fell forward on the bed,
that stoical old heart broke, his face was engulfed, so to speak,
in Cosette's garments, and if any one had passed up the stairs
at that moment, he would have heard frightful sobs.



CHAPTER IV

THE IMMORTAL LIVER[68]

[68] In allusion to the story of Prometheus.


The old and formidable struggle, of which we have already witnessed
so many phases, began once more.

Jacob struggled with the angel but one night.  Alas! how many
times have we beheld Jean Valjean seized bodily by his conscience,
in the darkness, and struggling desperately against it!

Unheard-of conflict!  At certain moments the foot slips; at other
moments the ground crumbles away underfoot.  How many times had
that conscience, mad for the good, clasped and overthrown him! 
How many times had the truth set her knee inexorably upon his breast! 
How many times, hurled to earth by the light, had he begged for mercy! 
How many times had that implacable spark, lighted within him,
and upon him by the Bishop, dazzled him by force when he had
wished to be blind!  How many times had he risen to his feet
in the combat, held fast to the rock, leaning against sophism,
dragged in the dust, now getting the upper hand of his conscience,
again overthrown by it!  How many times, after an equivoque,
after the specious and treacherous reasoning of egotism, had he heard
his irritated conscience cry in his ear:  "A trip! you wretch!" 
How many times had his refractory thoughts rattled convulsively
in his throat, under the evidence of duty!  Resistance to God. 
Funereal sweats.  What secret wounds which he alone felt bleed! 
What excoriations in his lamentable existence!  How many times
he had risen bleeding, bruised, broken, enlightened, despair in
his heart, serenity in his soul! and, vanquished, he had felt
himself the conqueror.  And, after having dislocated, broken,
and rent his conscience with red-hot pincers, it had said to him,
as it stood over him, formidable, luminous, and tranquil:  "Now, go
in peace!"

But on emerging from so melancholy a conflict, what a lugubrious
peace, alas!

Nevertheless, that night Jean Valjean felt that he was passing
through his final combat.

A heart-rending question presented itself.

Predestinations are not all direct; they do not open out in a
straight avenue before the predestined man; they have blind courts,
impassable alleys, obscure turns, disturbing crossroads offering
the choice of many ways.  Jean Valjean had halted at that moment
at the most perilous of these crossroads.

He had come to the supreme crossing of good and evil.  He had that
gloomy intersection beneath his eyes.  On this occasion once more,
as had happened to him already in other sad vicissitudes, two roads
opened out before him, the one tempting, the other alarming.

Which was he to take?

He was counselled to the one which alarmed him by that mysterious
index finger which we all perceive whenever we fix our eyes
on the darkness.

Once more, Jean Valjean had the choice between the terrible port
and the smiling ambush.

Is it then true? the soul may recover; but not fate.  Frightful thing!
an incurable destiny!

This is the problem which presented itself to him:

In what manner was Jean Valjean to behave in relation to the happiness
of Cosette and Marius?  It was he who had willed that happiness,
it was he who had brought it about; he had, himself, buried it
in his entrails, and at that moment, when he reflected on it,
he was able to enjoy the sort of satisfaction which an armorer
would experience on recognizing his factory mark on a knife,
on withdrawing it, all smoking, from his own breast.

Cosette had Marius, Marius possessed Cosette.  They had everything,
even riches.  And this was his doing.

But what was he, Jean Valjean, to do with this happiness,
now that it existed, now that it was there?  Should he force himself
on this happiness?  Should he treat it as belonging to him? 
No doubt, Cosette did belong to another; but should he, Jean Valjean,
retain of Cosette all that he could retain?  Should he remain the sort
of father, half seen but respected, which he had hitherto been? 
Should he, without saying a word, bring his past to that future? 
Should he present himself there, as though he had a right,
and should he seat himself, veiled, at that luminous fireside? 
Should he take those innocent hands into his tragic hands,
with a smile?  Should he place upon the peaceful fender of the
Gillenormand drawing-room those feet of his, which dragged
behind them the disgraceful shadow of the law?  Should he enter
into participation in the fair fortunes of Cosette and Marius? 
Should he render the obscurity on his brow and the cloud upon theirs
still more dense?  Should he place his catastrophe as a third
associate in their felicity?  Should he continue to hold his peace? 
In a word, should he be the sinister mute of destiny beside these two
happy beings?

We must have become habituated to fatality and to encounters with it,
in order to have the daring to raise our eyes when certain questions
appear to us in all their horrible nakedness.  Good or evil stands
behind this severe interrogation point.  What are you going to do?
demands the sphinx.

This habit of trial Jean Valjean possessed.  He gazed intently
at the sphinx.

He examined the pitiless problem under all its aspects.

Cosette, that charming existence, was the raft of this shipwreck. 
What was he to do?  To cling fast to it, or to let go his hold?

If he clung to it, he should emerge from disaster, he should ascend
again into the sunlight, he should let the bitter water drip from
his garments and his hair, he was saved, he should live.

And if he let go his hold?

Then the abyss.

Thus he took sad council with his thoughts.  Or, to speak more correctly,
he fought; he kicked furiously internally, now against his will,
now against his conviction.

Happily for Jean Valjean that he had been able to weep. 
That relieved him, possibly.  But the beginning was savage. 
A tempest, more furious than the one which had formerly driven him
to Arras, broke loose within him.  The past surged up before him
facing the present; he compared them and sobbed.  The silence
of tears once opened, the despairing man writhed.

He felt that he had been stopped short.

Alas! in this fight to the death between our egotism and our duty,
when we thus retreat step by step before our immutable ideal,
bewildered, furious, exasperated at having to yield, disputing the ground,
hoping for a possible flight, seeking an escape, what an abrupt
and sinister resistance does the foot of the wall offer in our rear!

To feel the sacred shadow which forms an obstacle!

The invisible inexorable, what an obsession!

Then, one is never done with conscience.  Make your choice, Brutus;
make your choice, Cato.  It is fathomless, since it is God. 
One flings into that well the labor of one's whole life, one flings in
one's fortune, one flings in one's riches, one flings in one's success,
one flings in one's liberty or fatherland, one flings in one's
well-being, one flings in one's repose, one flings in one's joy! 
More! more! more!  Empty the vase! tip the urn!  One must finish
by flinging in one's heart.

Somewhere in the fog of the ancient hells, there is a tun like that.

Is not one pardonable, if one at last refuses!  Can the inexhaustible
have any right?  Are not chains which are endless above human strength? 
Who would blame Sisyphus and Jean Valjean for saying:  "It is enough!"

The obedience of matter is limited by friction; is there no limit
to the obedience of the soul?  If perpetual motion is impossible,
can perpetual self-sacrifice be exacted?

The first step is nothing, it is the last which is difficult. 
What was the Champmathieu affair in comparison with Cosette's marriage
and of that which it entailed?  What is a re-entrance into the galleys,
compared to entrance into the void?

Oh, first step that must be descended, how sombre art thou! 
Oh, second step, how black art thou!

How could he refrain from turning aside his head this time?

Martyrdom is sublimation, corrosive sublimation.  It is a torture
which consecrates.  One can consent to it for the first hour;
one seats oneself on the throne of glowing iron, one places on one's
head the crown of hot iron, one accepts the globe of red hot iron,
one takes the sceptre of red hot iron, but the mantle of flame still
remains to be donned, and comes there not a moment when the miserable
flesh revolts and when one abdicates from suffering?

At length, Jean Valjean entered into the peace of exhaustion.

He weighed, he reflected, he considered the alternatives,
the mysterious balance of light and darkness.

Should he impose his galleys on those two dazzling children,
or should he consummate his irremediable engulfment by himself? 
On one side lay the sacrifice of Cosette, on the other that of himself.

At what solution should he arrive?  What decision did he come to?

What resolution did he take?  What was his own inward definitive
response to the unbribable interrogatory of fatality?  What door
did he decide to open?  Which side of his life did he resolve upon
closing and condemning?  Among all the unfathomable precipices which
surrounded him, which was his choice?  What extremity did he accept? 
To which of the gulfs did he nod his head?

His dizzy revery lasted all night long.

He remained there until daylight, in the same attitude,
bent double over that bed, prostrate beneath the enormity
of fate, crushed, perchance, alas! with clenched fists, with arms
outspread at right angles, like a man crucified who has been
un-nailed, and flung face down on the earth.  There he remained
for twelve hours, the twelve long hours of a long winter's night,
ice-cold, without once raising his head, and without uttering a word. 
He was as motionless as a corpse, while his thoughts wallowed
on the earth and soared, now like the hydra, now like the eagle. 
Any one to behold him thus motionless would have pronounced him dead;
all at once he shuddered convulsively, and his mouth, glued to
Cosette's garments, kissed them; then it could be seen that he was alive.

Who could see?  Since Jean Valjean was alone, and there was no
one there.

The One who is in the shadows.



BOOK SEVENTH.--THE LAST DRAUGHT FROM THE CUP



CHAPTER I

THE SEVENTH CIRCLE AND THE EIGHTH HEAVEN


The days that follow weddings are solitary.  People respect the
meditations of the happy pair.  And also, their tardy slumbers,
to some degree.  The tumult of visits and congratulations only begins
later on.  On the morning of the 17th of February, it was a little
past midday when Basque, with napkin and feather-duster under his arm,
busy in setting his antechamber to rights, heard a light tap at
the door.  There had been no ring, which was discreet on such a day. 
Basque opened the door, and beheld M. Fauchelevent.  He introduced him
into the drawing-room, still encumbered and topsy-turvy, and which bore
the air of a field of battle after the joys of the preceding evening.

"Dame, sir," remarked Basque, "we all woke up late."

"Is your master up?" asked Jean Valjean.

"How is Monsieur's arm?" replied Basque.

"Better.  Is your master up?"

"Which one? the old one or the new one?"

"Monsieur Pontmercy."

"Monsieur le Baron," said Basque, drawing himself up.

A man is a Baron most of all to his servants.  He counts for something
with them; they are what a philosopher would call, bespattered with
the title, and that flatters them.  Marius, be it said in passing,
a militant republican as he had proved, was now a Baron in spite
of himself.  A small revolution had taken place in the family
in connection with this title.  It was now M. Gillenormand
who clung to it, and Marius who detached himself from it. 
But Colonel Pontmercy had written:  "My son will bear my title." 
Marius obeyed.  And then, Cosette, in whom the woman was beginning
to dawn, was delighted to be a Baroness.

"Monsieur le Baron?" repeated Basque.  "I will go and see. 
I will tell him that M. Fauchelevent is here."

"No. Do not tell him that it is I. Tell him that some one wishes
to speak to him in private, and mention no name."

"Ah!" ejaculated Basque.

"I wish to surprise him."

"Ah!" ejaculated Basque once more, emitting his second "ah!"
as an explanation of the first.

And he left the room.

Jean Valjean remained alone.

The drawing-room, as we have just said, was in great disorder. 
It seemed as though, by lending an air, one might still hear the vague
noise of the wedding.  On the polished floor lay all sorts of flowers
which had fallen from garlands and head-dresses. The wax candles,
burned to stumps, added stalactites of wax to the crystal drops of
the chandeliers.  Not a single piece of furniture was in its place. 
In the corners, three or four arm-chairs, drawn close together
in a circle, had the appearance of continuing a conversation. 
The whole effect was cheerful.  A certain grace still lingers
round a dead feast.  It has been a happy thing.  On the chairs
in disarray, among those fading flowers, beneath those extinct lights,
people have thought of joy.  The sun had succeeded to the chandelier,
and made its way gayly into the drawing-room.

Several minutes elapsed.  Jean Valjean stood motionless on the spot
where Basque had left him.  He was very pale.  His eyes were hollow,
and so sunken in his head by sleeplessness that they nearly
disappeared in their orbits.  His black coat bore the weary folds
of a garment that has been up all night.  The elbows were whitened
with the down which the friction of cloth against linen leaves behind it.

Jean Valjean stared at the window outlined on the polished floor
at his feet by the sun.

There came a sound at the door, and he raised his eyes.

Marius entered, his head well up, his mouth smiling, an indescribable
light on his countenance, his brow expanded, his eyes triumphant. 
He had not slept either.

"It is you, father!" he exclaimed, on catching sight of Jean Valjean;
"that idiot of a Basque had such a mysterious air!  But you have come
too early.  It is only half past twelve.  Cosette is asleep."

That word:  "Father," said to M. Fauchelevent by Marius, signified: 
supreme felicity.  There had always existed, as the reader knows,
a lofty wall, a coldness and a constraint between them;
ice which must be broken or melted.  Marius had reached that point
of intoxication when the wall was lowered, when the ice dissolved,
and when M. Fauchelevent was to him, as to Cosette, a father.

He continued:  his words poured forth, as is the peculiarity
of divine paroxysms of joy.

"How glad I am to see you!  If you only knew how we missed you yesterday! 
Good morning, father.  How is your hand?  Better, is it not?"

And, satisfied with the favorable reply which he had made to himself,
he pursued:

"We have both been talking about you.  Cosette loves you so dearly! 
You must not forget that you have a chamber here, We want nothing more
to do with the Rue de l'Homme Arme.  We will have no more of it at all. 
How could you go to live in a street like that, which is sickly,
which is disagreeable, which is ugly, which has a barrier at one end,
where one is cold, and into which one cannot enter?  You are to come
and install yourself here.  And this very day.  Or you will have to deal
with Cosette.  She means to lead us all by the nose, I warn you. 
You have your own chamber here, it is close to ours, it opens on
the garden; the trouble with the clock has been attended to, the bed
is made, it is all ready, you have only to take possession of it. 
Near your bed Cosette has placed a huge, old, easy-chair covered
with Utrecht velvet and she has said to it:  `Stretch out your arms
to him.'  A nightingale comes to the clump of acacias opposite
your windows, every spring.  In two months more you will have it. 
You will have its nest on your left and ours on your right.  By night
it will sing, and by day Cosette will prattle.  Your chamber faces
due South.  Cosette will arrange your books for you, your Voyages
of Captain Cook and the other,--Vancouver's and all your affairs. 
I believe that there is a little valise to which you are attached,
I have fixed upon a corner of honor for that.  You have conquered
my grandfather, you suit him.  We will live together.  Do you
play whist? you will overwhelm my grandfather with delight if you
play whist.  It is you who shall take Cosette to walk on the days
when I am at the courts, you shall give her your arm, you know,
as you used to, in the Luxembourg.  We are absolutely resolved
to be happy.  And you shall be included in it, in our happiness,
do you hear, father?  Come, will you breakfast with us to-day?"

"Sir," said Jean Valjean, "I have something to say to you. 
I am an ex-convict."

The limit of shrill sounds perceptible can be overleaped, as well
in the case of the mind as in that of the ear.  These words: 
"I am an ex-convict," proceeding from the mouth of M. Fauchelevent
and entering the ear of Marius overshot the possible.  It seemed to him
that something had just been said to him; but he did not know what. 
He stood with his mouth wide open.

Then he perceived that the man who was addressing him was frightful. 
Wholly absorbed in his own dazzled state, he had not, up to that moment,
observed the other man's terrible pallor.

Jean Valjean untied the black cravat which supported his right arm,
unrolled the linen from around his hand, bared his thumb and showed
it to Marius.

"There is nothing the matter with my hand," said he.

Marius looked at the thumb.

"There has not been anything the matter with it," went on Jean Valjean.

There was, in fact, no trace of any injury.

Jean Valjean continued:

"It was fitting that I should be absent from your marriage. 
I absented myself as much as was in my power.  So I invented this
injury in order that I might not commit a forgery, that I might
not introduce a flaw into the marriage documents, in order that I
might escape from signing."

Marius stammered.

"What is the meaning of this?"

"The meaning of it is," replied Jean Valjean, "that I have been
in the galleys."

"You are driving me mad!" exclaimed Marius in terror.

"Monsieur Pontmercy," said Jean Valjean, "I was nineteen years in
the galleys.  For theft.  Then, I was condemned for life for theft,
for a second offence.  At the present moment, I have broken my ban."

In vain did Marius recoil before the reality, refuse the fact,
resist the evidence, he was forced to give way.  He began to understand,
and, as always happens in such cases, he understood too much. 
An inward shudder of hideous enlightenment flashed through him;
an idea which made him quiver traversed his mind.  He caught
a glimpse of a wretched destiny for himself in the future.

"Say all, say all!" he cried.  "You are Cosette's father!"

And he retreated a couple of paces with a movement
of indescribable horror.

Jean Valjean elevated his head with so much majesty of attitude
that he seemed to grow even to the ceiling.

"It is necessary that you should believe me here, sir; although our
oath to others may not be received in law . . ."

Here he paused, then, with a sort of sovereign and sepulchral authority,
he added, articulating slowly, and emphasizing the syllables:

". . . You will believe me.  I the father of Cosette! before God, no. 
Monsieur le Baron Pontmercy, I am a peasant of Faverolles. 
I earned my living by pruning trees.  My name is not Fauchelevent,
but Jean Valjean.  I am not related to Cosette.  Reassure yourself."

Marius stammered:

"Who will prove that to me?"

"I. Since I tell you so."

Marius looked at the man.  He was melancholy yet tranquil.  No lie
could proceed from such a calm.  That which is icy is sincere. 
The truth could be felt in that chill of the tomb.

"I believe you," said Marius.

Jean Valjean bent his head, as though taking note of this,
and continued:

"What am I to Cosette?  A passer-by. Ten years ago, I did not know
that she was in existence.  I love her, it is true.  One loves a child
whom one has seen when very young, being old oneself.  When one is old,
one feels oneself a grandfather towards all little children. 
You may, it seems to me, suppose that I have something which resembles
a heart.  She was an orphan.  Without either father or mother. 
She needed me.  That is why I began to love her.  Children are
so weak that the first comer, even a man like me, can become
their protector.  I have fulfilled this duty towards Cosette. 
I do not think that so slight a thing can be called a good action;
but if it be a good action, well, say that I have done it. 
Register this attenuating circumstance.  To-day, Cosette passes
out of my life; our two roads part.  Henceforth, I can do nothing
for her.  She is Madame Pontmercy.  Her providence has changed. 
And Cosette gains by the change.  All is well.  As for the six
hundred thousand francs, you do not mention them to me, but I
forestall your thought, they are a deposit.  How did that deposit
come into my hands?  What does that matter?  I restore the deposit. 
Nothing more can be demanded of me.  I complete the restitution
by announcing my true name.  That concerns me.  I have a reason
for desiring that you should know who I am."

And Jean Valjean looked Marius full in the face.

All that Marius experienced was tumultuous and incoherent. 
Certain gusts of destiny produce these billows in our souls.

We have all undergone moments of trouble in which everything
within us is dispersed; we say the first things that occur to us,
which are not always precisely those which should be said. 
There are sudden revelations which one cannot bear, and which
intoxicate like baleful wine.  Marius was stupefied by the novel
situation which presented itself to him, to the point of addressing
that man almost like a person who was angry with him for this avowal.

"But why," he exclaimed, "do you tell me all this?  Who forces
you to do so?  You could have kept your secret to yourself. 
You are neither denounced, nor tracked nor pursued.  You have a
reason for wantonly making such a revelation.  Conclude.  There is
something more.  In what connection do you make this confession? 
What is your motive?"

"My motive?" replied Jean Valjean in a voice so low and dull that one
would have said that he was talking to himself rather than to Marius. 
"From what motive, in fact, has this convict just said `I am a
convict'? Well, yes! the motive is strange.  It is out of honesty. 
Stay, the unfortunate point is that I have a thread in my heart,
which keeps me fast.  It is when one is old that that sort of
thread is particularly solid.  All life falls in ruin around one;
one resists.  Had I been able to tear out that thread, to break it,
to undo the knot or to cut it, to go far away, I should have been safe. 
I had only to go away; there are diligences in the Rue Bouloy;
you are happy; I am going.  I have tried to break that thread,
I have jerked at it, it would not break, I tore my heart with it. 
Then I said:  `I cannot live anywhere else than here.'  I must stay. 
Well, yes, you are right, I am a fool, why not simply remain here? 
You offer me a chamber in this house, Madame Pontmercy is sincerely
attached to me, she said to the arm-chair: `Stretch out your arms
to him,' your grandfather demands nothing better than to have me,
I suit him, we shall live together, and take our meals in common,
I shall give Cosette my arm . . . Madame Pontmercy, excuse me, it is
a habit, we shall have but one roof, one table, one fire, the same
chimney-corner in winter, the same promenade in summer, that is joy,
that is happiness, that is everything.  We shall live as one family. 
One family!"

At that word, Jean Valjean became wild.  He folded his arms,
glared at the floor beneath his feet as though he would have excavated
an abyss therein, and his voice suddenly rose in thundering tones:

"As one family!  No. I belong to no family.  I do not belong to yours. 
I do not belong to any family of men.  In houses where people
are among themselves, I am superfluous.  There are families,
but there is nothing of the sort for me.  I am an unlucky wretch;
I am left outside.  Did I have a father and mother?  I almost doubt it. 
On the day when I gave that child in marriage, all came to an end. 
I have seen her happy, and that she is with a man whom she loves,
and that there exists here a kind old man, a household of two angels,
and all joys in that house, and that it was well, I said to myself: 
`Enter thou not.'  I could have lied, it is true, have deceived you all,
and remained Monsieur Fauchelevent.  So long as it was for her,
I could lie; but now it would be for myself, and I must not.  It was
sufficient for me to hold my peace, it is true, and all would go on. 
You ask me what has forced me to speak? a very odd thing; my conscience. 
To hold my peace was very easy, however.  I passed the night in trying
to persuade myself to it; you questioned me, and what I have just
said to you is so extraordinary that you have the right to do it;
well, yes, I have passed the night in alleging reasons to myself,
and I gave myself very good reasons, I have done what I could. 
But there are two things in which I have not succeeded; in breaking
the thread that holds me fixed, riveted and sealed here by the heart,
or in silencing some one who speaks softly to me when I am alone. 
That is why I have come hither to tell you everything this morning. 
Everything or nearly everything.  It is useless to tell you
that which concerns only myself; I keep that to myself.  You know
the essential points.  So I have taken my mystery and have brought
it to you.  And I have disembowelled my secret before your eyes. 
It was not a resolution that was easy to take.  I struggled all
night long.  Ah! you think that I did not tell myself that this
was no Champmathieu affair, that by concealing my name I was doing
no one any injury, that the name of Fauchelevent had been given
to me by Fauchelevent himself, out of gratitude for a service
rendered to him, and that I might assuredly keep it, and that I
should be happy in that chamber which you offer me, that I should
not be in any one's way, that I should be in my own little corner,
and that, while you would have Cosette, I should have the idea that I
was in the same house with her.  Each one of us would have had his
share of happiness.  If I continued to be Monsieur Fauchelevent,
that would arrange everything.  Yes, with the exception of my soul. 
There was joy everywhere upon my surface, but the bottom of my soul
remained black.  It is not enough to be happy, one must be content. 
Thus I should have remained Monsieur Fauchelevent, thus I should have
concealed my true visage, thus, in the presence of your expansion,
I should have had an enigma, thus, in the midst of your full noonday,
I should have had shadows, thus, without crying `'ware,' I should
have simply introduced the galleys to your fireside, I should have
taken my seat at your table with the thought that if you knew
who I was, you would drive me from it, I should have allowed myself
to be served by domestics who, had they known, would have said: 
`How horrible!'  I should have touched you with my elbow,
which you have a right to dislike, I should have filched your clasps
of the hand!  There would have existed in your house a division
of respect between venerable white locks and tainted white locks;
at your most intimate hours, when all hearts thought themselves open
to the very bottom to all the rest, when we four were together,
your grandfather, you two and myself, a stranger would have been present! 
I should have been side by side with you in your existence,
having for my only care not to disarrange the cover of my dreadful pit. 
Thus, I, a dead man, should have thrust myself upon you who are
living beings.  I should have condemned her to myself forever. 
You and Cosette and I would have had all three of our heads in
the green cap!  Does it not make you shudder?  I am only the most
crushed of men; I should have been the most monstrous of men. 
And I should have committed that crime every day!  And I should
have had that face of night upon my visage every day! every day! 
And I should have communicated to you a share in my taint every
day! every day! to you, my dearly beloved, my children, to you,
my innocent creatures!  Is it nothing to hold one's peace? is it
a simple matter to keep silence?  No, it is not simple.  There is
a silence which lies.  And my lie, and my fraud and my indignity,
and my cowardice and my treason and my crime, I should have drained
drop by drop, I should have spit it out, then swallowed it again,
I should have finished at midnight and have begun again at midday,
and my `good morning' would have lied, and my `good night'
would have lied, and I should have slept on it, I should have eaten it,
with my bread, and I should have looked Cosette in the face,
and I should have responded to the smile of the angel by the smile
of the damned soul, and I should have been an abominable villain! 
Why should I do it? in order to be happy.  In order to be happy. 
Have I the right to be happy?  I stand outside of life,
Sir."

Jean Valjean paused.  Marius listened.  Such chains of ideas and of
anguishes cannot be interrupted.  Jean Valjean lowered his voice
once more, but it was no longer a dull voice--it was a sinister voice.

"You ask why I speak?  I am neither denounced, nor pursued, nor tracked,
you say.  Yes!  I am denounced! yes!  I am tracked!  By whom? 
By myself.  It is I who bar the passage to myself, and I drag myself,
and I push myself, and I arrest myself, and I execute myself,
and when one holds oneself, one is firmly held."

And, seizing a handful of his own coat by the nape of the neck
and extending it towards Marius:

"Do you see that fist?" he continued.  "Don't you think that
it holds that collar in such a wise as not to release it? 
Well! conscience is another grasp!  If one desires to be happy,
sir, one must never understand duty; for, as soon as one has
comprehended it, it is implacable.  One would say that it
punished you for comprehending it; but no, it rewards you; for it
places you in a hell, where you feel God beside you.  One has
no sooner lacerated his own entrails than he is at peace with himself."

And, with a poignant accent, he added:

"Monsieur Pontmercy, this is not common sense, I am an honest man. 
It is by degrading myself in your eyes that I elevate myself in my own. 
This has happened to me once before, but it was less painful then;
it was a mere nothing.  Yes, an honest man.  I should not be so if,
through my fault, you had continued to esteem me; now that you
despise me, I am so.  I have that fatality hanging over me that,
not being able to ever have anything but stolen consideration,
that consideration humiliates me, and crushes me inwardly, and,
in order that I may respect myself, it is necessary that I should
be despised.  Then I straighten up again.  I am a galley-slave who
obeys his conscience.  I know well that that is most improbable. 
But what would you have me do about it? it is the fact.  I have entered
into engagements with myself; I keep them.  There are encounters
which bind us, there are chances which involve us in duties. 
You see, Monsieur Pontmercy, various things have happened to me in
the course of my life."

Again Jean Valjean paused, swallowing his saliva with an effort,
as though his words had a bitter after-taste, and then he went on:

"When one has such a horror hanging over one, one has not the right
to make others share it without their knowledge, one has not the right
to make them slip over one's own precipice without their perceiving it,
one has not the right to let one's red blouse drag upon them,
one has no right to slyly encumber with one's misery the happiness
of others.  It is hideous to approach those who are healthy,
and to touch them in the dark with one's ulcer.  In spite of the fact
that Fauchelevent lent me his name, I have no right to use it;
he could give it to me, but I could not take it.  A name is an _I_. 
You see, sir, that I have thought somewhat, I have read a little,
although I am a peasant; and you see that I express myself properly. 
I understand things.  I have procured myself an education.  Well, yes,
to abstract a name and to place oneself under it is dishonest. 
Letters of the alphabet can be filched, like a purse or a watch. 
To be a false signature in flesh and blood, to be a living false key,
to enter the house of honest people by picking their lock,
never more to look straightforward, to forever eye askance,
to be infamous within the _I_, no! no! no! no! no!  It is better
to suffer, to bleed, to weep, to tear one's skin from the flesh
with one's nails, to pass nights writhing in anguish, to devour
oneself body and soul.  That is why I have just told you all this. 
Wantonly, as you say."

He drew a painful breath, and hurled this final word:

"In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live;
to-day, in order to live, I will not steal a name."

"To live!" interrupted Marius.  "You do not need that name in order
to live?"

"Ah!  I understand the matter," said Jean Valjean, raising and
lowering his head several times in succession.

A silence ensued.  Both held their peace, each plunged in a gulf
of thoughts.  Marius was sitting near a table and resting the
corner of his mouth on one of his fingers, which was folded back. 
Jean Valjean was pacing to and fro.  He paused before a mirror,
and remained motionless.  Then, as though replying to some inward
course of reasoning, he said, as he gazed at the mirror, which he did
not see:

"While, at present, I am relieved."

He took up his march again, and walked to the other end of the
drawing-room. At the moment when he turned round, he perceived that Marius
was watching his walk.  Then he said, with an inexpressible intonation:

"I drag my leg a little.  Now you understand why!"

Then he turned fully round towards Marius:

"And now, sir, imagine this:  I have said nothing, I have remained
Monsieur Fauchelevent, I have taken my place in your house,
I am one of you, I am in my chamber, I come to breakfast in the
morning in slippers, in the evening all three of us go to the play,
I accompany Madame Pontmercy to the Tuileries, and to the Place Royale,
we are together, you think me your equal; one fine day you are there,
and I am there, we are conversing, we are laughing; all at once,
you hear a voice shouting this name:  `Jean Valjean!' and behold,
that terrible hand, the police, darts from the darkness, and abruptly
tears off my mask!"

Again he paused; Marius had sprung to his feet with a shudder. 
Jean Valjean resumed:

"What do you say to that?"

Marius' silence answered for him.

Jean Valjean continued:

"You see that I am right in not holding my peace.  Be happy, be in heaven,
be the angel of an angel, exist in the sun, be content therewith,
and do not trouble yourself about the means which a poor damned
wretch takes to open his breast and force his duty to come forth;
you have before you, sir, a wretched man."

Marius slowly crossed the room, and, when he was quite close
to Jean Valjean, he offered the latter his hand.

But Marius was obliged to step up and take that hand which was
not offered, Jean Valjean let him have his own way, and it seemed
to Marius that he pressed a hand of marble.

"My grandfather has friends," said Marius; "I will procure your pardon."

"It is useless," replied Jean Valjean.  "I am believed to be dead,
and that suffices.  The dead are not subjected to surveillance. 
They are supposed to rot in peace.  Death is the same thing
as pardon."

And, disengaging the hand which Marius held, he added, with a sort
of inexorable dignity:

"Moreover, the friend to whom I have recourse is the doing of my duty;
and I need but one pardon, that of my conscience."

At that moment, a door at the other end of the drawing-room opened
gently half way, and in the opening Cosette's head appeared. 
They saw only her sweet face, her hair was in charming disorder,
her eyelids were still swollen with sleep.  She made the movement
of a bird, which thrusts its head out of its nest, glanced first at
her husband, then at Jean Valjean, and cried to them with a smile,
so that they seemed to behold a smile at the heart of a rose:

"I will wager that you are talking politics.  How stupid that is,
instead of being with me!"

Jean Valjean shuddered.

"Cosette! . . ." stammered Marius.

And he paused.  One would have said that they were two criminals.

Cosette, who was radiant, continued to gaze at both of them. 
There was something in her eyes like gleams of paradise.

"I have caught you in the very act," said Cosette.  "Just now,
I heard my father Fauchelevent through the door saying:  `Conscience .
. . doing my duty . . .' That is politics, indeed it is.  I will
not have it.  People should not talk politics the very next day. 
It is not right."

"You are mistaken.  Cosette," said Marius, "we are talking business. 
We are discussing the best investment of your six hundred thousand
francs . . ."

"That is not it at all," interrupted Cosette.  "I am coming. 
Does any body want me here?"

And, passing resolutely through the door, she entered the drawing-room.
She was dressed in a voluminous white dressing-gown, with a thousand
folds and large sleeves which, starting from the neck, fell to
her feet.  In the golden heavens of some ancient gothic pictures,
there are these charming sacks fit to clothe the angels.

She contemplated herself from head to foot in a long mirror,
then exclaimed, in an outburst of ineffable ecstasy:

"There was once a King and a Queen.  Oh! how happy I am!"

That said, she made a curtsey to Marius and to Jean Valjean.

"There," said she, "I am going to install myself near you in an
easy-chair, we breakfast in half an hour, you shall say anything
you like, I know well that men must talk, and I will be very good."

Marius took her by the arm and said lovingly to her:

"We are talking business."

"By the way," said Cosette, "I have opened my window, a flock
of pierrots has arrived in the garden,--Birds, not maskers. 
To-day is Ash-Wednesday; but not for the birds."

"I tell you that we are talking business, go, my little Cosette,
leave us alone for a moment.  We are talking figures.  That will
bore you."

"You have a charming cravat on this morning, Marius.  You are
very dandified, monseigneur.  No, it will not bore me."

"I assure you that it will bore you."

"No. Since it is you.  I shall not understand you, but I shall
listen to you.  When one hears the voices of those whom one loves,
one does not need to understand the words that they utter. 
That we should be here together--that is all that I desire. 
I shall remain with you, bah!"

"You are my beloved Cosette!  Impossible."

"Impossible!"

"Yes."

"Very good," said Cosette.  "I was going to tell you some news. 
I could have told you that your grandfather is still asleep,
that your aunt is at mass, that the chimney in my father Fauchelevent's
room smokes, that Nicolette has sent for the chimney-sweep, that
Toussaint and Nicolette have already quarrelled, that Nicolette
makes sport of Toussaint's stammer.  Well, you shall know nothing. 
Ah! it is impossible? you shall see, gentlemen, that I, in my turn,
can say:  It is impossible.  Then who will be caught?  I beseech you,
my little Marius, let me stay here with you two."

"I swear to you, that it is indispensable that we should be alone."

"Well, am I anybody?"

Jean Valjean had not uttered a single word.  Cosette turned to him:

"In the first place, father, I want you to come and embrace me. 
What do you mean by not saying anything instead of taking my part? who
gave me such a father as that?  You must perceive that my family life
is very unhappy.  My husband beats me.  Come, embrace me instantly."

Jean Valjean approached.

Cosette turned toward Marius.

"As for you, I shall make a face at you."

Then she presented her brow to Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean advanced a step toward her.

Cosette recoiled.

"Father, you are pale.  Does your arm hurt you?"

"It is well," said Jean Valjean.

"Did you sleep badly?"

"No."

"Are you sad?"

"No."

"Embrace me if you are well, if you sleep well, if you are content,
I will not scold you."

And again she offered him her brow.

Jean Valjean dropped a kiss upon that brow whereon rested
a celestial gleam.

"Smile."

Jean Valjean obeyed.  It was the smile of a spectre.

"Now, defend me against my husband."

"Cosette! . . ." ejaculated Marius.

"Get angry, father.  Say that I must stay.  You can certainly
talk before me.  So you think me very silly.  What you say is
astonishing! business, placing money in a bank a great matter truly. 
Men make mysteries out of nothing.  I am very pretty this morning. 
Look at me, Marius."

And with an adorable shrug of the shoulders, and an indescribably
exquisite pout, she glanced at Marius.

"I love you!" said Marius.

"I adore you!" said Cosette.

And they fell irresistibly into each other's arms.

"Now," said Cosette, adjusting a fold of her dressing-gown,
with a triumphant little grimace, "I shall stay."

"No, not that," said Marius, in a supplicating tone.  "We have
to finish something."

"Still no?"

Marius assumed a grave tone:

"I assure you, Cosette, that it is impossible."

"Ah! you put on your man's voice, sir.  That is well, I go. 
You, father, have not upheld me.  Monsieur my father, monsieur
my husband, you are tyrants.  I shall go and tell grandpapa. 
If you think that I am going to return and talk platitudes to you,
you are mistaken.  I am proud.  I shall wait for you now. 
You shall see, that it is you who are going to be bored without me. 
I am going, it is well."

And she left the room.

Two seconds later, the door opened once more, her fresh and rosy
head was again thrust between the two leaves, and she cried to them:

"I am very angry indeed."

The door closed again, and the shadows descended once more.

It was as though a ray of sunlight should have suddenly traversed
the night, without itself being conscious of it.

Marius made sure that the door was securely closed.

"Poor Cosette!" he murmured, "when she finds out . . ."

At that word Jean Valjean trembled in every limb.  He fixed
on Marius a bewildered eye.

"Cosette! oh yes, it is true, you are going to tell Cosette about this. 
That is right.  Stay, I had not thought of that.  One has the
strength for one thing, but not for another.  Sir, I conjure you,
I entreat now, sir, give me your most sacred word of honor, that you
will not tell her.  Is it not enough that you should know it? 
I have been able to say it myself without being forced to it,
I could have told it to the universe, to the whole world,--it was
all one to me.  But she, she does not know what it is, it would
terrify her.  What, a convict! we should be obliged to explain matters
to her, to say to her:  `He is a man who has been in the galleys.' 
She saw the chain-gang pass by one day.  Oh!  My God!" . . . He
dropped into an arm-chair and hid his face in his hands.

His grief was not audible, but from the quivering of his shoulders
it was evident that he was weeping.  Silent tears, terrible tears.

There is something of suffocation in the sob.  He was seized with a
sort of convulsion, he threw himself against the back of the chair
as though to gain breath, letting his arms fall, and allowing Marius
to see his face inundated with tears, and Marius heard him murmur,
so low that his voice seemed to issue from fathomless depths:

"Oh! would that I could die!"

"Be at your ease," said Marius, "I will keep your secret for
myself alone."  x And, less touched, perhaps, than he ought to
have been, but forced, for the last hour, to familiarize himself
with something as unexpected as it was dreadful, gradually beholding
the convict superposed before his very eyes, upon M. Fauchelevent,
overcome, little by little, by that lugubrious reality, and led,
by the natural inclination of the situation, to recognize the space
which had just been placed between that man and himself, Marius added:

"It is impossible that I should not speak a word to you with regard
to the deposit which you have so faithfully and honestly remitted. 
That is an act of probity.  It is just that some recompense should be
bestowed on you.  Fix the sum yourself, it shall be counted out to you. 
Do not fear to set it very high."

"I thank you, sir," replied Jean Valjean, gently.

He remained in thought for a moment, mechanically passing the tip
of his fore-finger across his thumb-nail, then he lifted up his voice:

"All is nearly over.  But one last thing remains for me . . ."

"What is it?"

Jean Valjean struggled with what seemed a last hesitation, and,
without voice, without breath, he stammered rather than said:

"Now that you know, do you think, sir, you, who are the master,
that I ought not to see Cosette any more?"

"I think that would be better," replied Marius coldly.

"I shall never see her more," murmured Jean Valjean.  And he
directed his steps towards the door.

He laid his hand on the knob, the latch yielded, the door opened. 
Jean Valjean pushed it open far enough to pass through, stood motionless
for a second, then closed the door again and turned to Marius.

He was no longer pale, he was livid.  There were no longer any
tears in his eyes, but only a sort of tragic flame.  His voice
had regained a strange composure.

"Stay, sir," he said.  "If you will allow it, I will come to see her. 
I assure you that I desire it greatly.  If I had not cared to
see Cosette, I should not have made to you the confession that I
have made, I should have gone away; but, as I desired to remain
in the place where Cosette is, and to continue to see her,
I had to tell you about it honestly.  You follow my reasoning,
do you not? it is a matter easily understood.  You see, I have had
her with me for more than nine years.  We lived first in that hut
on the boulevard, then in the convent, then near the Luxembourg. 
That was where you saw her for the first time.  You remember
her blue plush hat.  Then we went to the Quartier des Invalides,
where there was a railing on a garden, the Rue Plumet.  I lived
in a little back court-yard, whence I could hear her piano. 
That was my life.  We never left each other.  That lasted for nine
years and some months.  I was like her own father, and she was
my child.  I do not know whether you understand, Monsieur Pontmercy,
but to go away now, never to see her again, never to speak to
her again, to no longer have anything, would be hard.  If you do not
disapprove of it, I will come to see Cosette from time to time. 
I will not come often.  I will not remain long.  You shall give
orders that I am to be received in the little waiting-room. On
the ground floor.  I could enter perfectly well by the back door,
but that might create surprise perhaps, and it would be better,
I think, for me to enter by the usual door.  Truly, sir, I should
like to see a little more of Cosette.  As rarely as you please. 
Put yourself in my place, I have nothing left but that.  And then,
we must be cautious.  If I no longer come at all, it would produce
a bad effect, it would be considered singular.  What I can do,
by the way, is to come in the afternoon, when night is beginning
to fall."

"You shall come every evening," said Marius, "and Cosette will
be waiting for you."

"You are kind, sir," said Jean Valjean.

Marius saluted Jean Valjean, happiness escorted despair to the door,
and these two men parted.



CHAPTER II

THE OBSCURITIES WHICH A REVELATION CAN CONTAIN


Marius was quite upset.

The sort of estrangement which he had always felt towards the man
beside whom he had seen Cosette, was now explained to him. 
There was something enigmatic about that person, of which his
instinct had warned him.

This enigma was the most hideous of disgraces, the galleys. 
This M. Fauchelevent was the convict Jean Valjean.

To abruptly find such a secret in the midst of one's happiness
resembles the discovery of a scorpion in a nest of turtledoves.

Was the happiness of Marius and Cosette thenceforth condemned
to such a neighborhood?  Was this an accomplished fact?  Did the
acceptance of that man form a part of the marriage now consummated? 
Was there nothing to be done?

Had Marius wedded the convict as well?

In vain may one be crowned with light and joy, in vain may one taste
the grand purple hour of life, happy love, such shocks would force
even the archangel in his ecstasy, even the demigod in his glory,
to shudder.

As is always the case in changes of view of this nature, Marius asked
himself whether he had nothing with which to reproach himself. 
Had he been wanting in divination?  Had he been wanting in prudence? 
Had he involuntarily dulled his wits?  A little, perhaps.  Had he
entered upon this love affair, which had ended in his marriage
to Cosette, without taking sufficient precautions to throw light
upon the surroundings?  He admitted,--it is thus, by a series
of successive admissions of ourselves in regard to ourselves,
that life amends us, little by little,--he admitted the chimerical
and visionary side of his nature, a sort of internal cloud peculiar
to many organizations, and which, in paroxysms of passion and sorrow,
dilates as the temperature of the soul changes, and invades the
entire man, to such a degree as to render him nothing more than a
conscience bathed in a mist.  We have more than once indicated this
characteristic element of Marius' individuality.

He recalled that, in the intoxication of his love, in the Rue Plumet,
during those six or seven ecstatic weeks, he had not even spoke
to Cosette of that drama in the Gorbeau hovel, where the victim
had taken up such a singular line of silence during the struggle
and the ensuing flight.  How had it happened that he had not
mentioned this to Cosette?  Yet it was so near and so terrible! 
How had it come to pass that he had not even named the Thenardiers,
and, particularly, on the day when he had encountered Eponine? 
He now found it almost difficult to explain his silence of that time. 
Nevertheless, he could account for it.  He recalled his benumbed
state, his intoxication with Cosette, love absorbing everything,
that catching away of each other into the ideal, and perhaps also,
like the imperceptible quantity of reason mingled with this violent
and charming state of the soul, a vague, dull instinct impelling him
to conceal and abolish in his memory that redoubtable adventure,
contact with which he dreaded, in which he did not wish to play
any part, his agency in which he had kept secret, and in which he
could be neither narrator nor witness without being an accuser.

Moreover, these few weeks had been a flash of lightning; there had
been no time for anything except love.

In short, having weighed everything, turned everything over in his mind,
examined everything, whatever might have been the consequences if he
had told Cosette about the Gorbeau ambush, even if he had discovered
that Jean Valjean was a convict, would that have changed him, Marius? 
Would that have changed her, Cosette?  Would he have drawn back? 
Would he have adored her any the less?  Would he have refrained
from marrying her?  No. Then there was nothing to regret,
nothing with which he need reproach himself.  All was well. 
There is a deity for those drunken men who are called lovers. 
Marius blind, had followed the path which he would have chosen had he
been in full possession of his sight.  Love had bandaged his eyes,
in order to lead him whither?  To paradise.

But this paradise was henceforth complicated
with an infernal accompaniment.

Marius' ancient estrangement towards this man, towards this Fauchelevent
who had turned into Jean Valjean, was at present mingled with horror.

In this horror, let us state, there was some pity, and even
a certain surprise.

This thief, this thief guilty of a second offence, had restored
that deposit.  And what a deposit!  Six hundred thousand francs.

He alone was in the secret of that deposit.  He might have kept
it all, he had restored it all.

Moreover, he had himself revealed his situation.  Nothing forced him
to this.  If any one learned who he was, it was through himself. 
In this avowal there was something more than acceptance of humiliation,
there was acceptance of peril.  For a condemned man, a mask is not
a mask, it is a shelter.  A false name is security, and he had rejected
that false name.  He, the galley-slave, might have hidden himself
forever in an honest family; he had withstood this temptation. 
And with what motive?  Through a conscientious scruple. 
He himself explained this with the irresistible accents of truth. 
In short, whatever this Jean Valjean might be, he was, undoubtedly,
a conscience which was awakening.  There existed some mysterious
re-habilitation which had begun; and, to all appearances,
scruples had for a long time already controlled this man.  Such fits
of justice and goodness are not characteristic of vulgar natures. 
An awakening of conscience is grandeur of soul.

Jean Valjean was sincere.  This sincerity, visible, palpable,
irrefragable, evident from the very grief that it caused him, rendered
inquiries useless, and conferred authority on all that that man had said.

Here, for Marius, there was a strange reversal of situations. 
What breathed from M. Fauchelevent? distrust.  What did Jean Valjean
inspire? confidence.

In the mysterious balance of this Jean Valjean which the pensive
Marius struck, he admitted the active principle, he admitted
the passive principle, and he tried to reach a balance.

But all this went on as in a storm.  Marius, while endeavoring
to form a clear idea of this man, and while pursuing Jean Valjean,
so to speak, in the depths of his thought, lost him and found him
again in a fatal mist.

The deposit honestly restored, the probity of the confession--
these were good.  This produced a lightening of the cloud,
then the cloud became black once more.

Troubled as were Marius' memories, a shadow of them returned to him.

After all, what was that adventure in the Jondrette attic? 
Why had that man taken to flight on the arrival of the police,
instead of entering a complaint?

Here Marius found the answer.  Because that man was a fugitive
from justice, who had broken his ban.

Another question:  Why had that man come to the barricade?

For Marius now once more distinctly beheld that recollection
which had re-appeared in his emotions like sympathetic ink at
the application of heat.  This man had been in the barricade. 
He had not fought there.  What had he come there for?  In the presence
of this question a spectre sprang up and replied:  "Javert."

Marius recalled perfectly now that funereal sight of Jean Valjean
dragging the pinioned Javert out of the barricade, and he still
heard behind the corner of the little Rue Mondetour that frightful
pistol shot.  Obviously, there was hatred between that police spy
and the galley-slave. The one was in the other's way.  Jean Valjean
had gone to the barricade for the purpose of revenging himself. 
He had arrived late.  He probably knew that Javert was a prisoner there. 
The Corsican vendetta has penetrated to certain lower strata and has
become the law there; it is so simple that it does not astonish
souls which are but half turned towards good; and those hearts are
so constituted that a criminal, who is in the path of repentance,
may be scrupulous in the matter of theft and unscrupulous in the
matter of vengeance.  Jean Valjean had killed Javert.  At least,
that seemed to be evident.

This was the final question, to be sure; but to this there was
no reply.  This question Marius felt like pincers.  How had it come
to pass that Jean Valjean's existence had elbowed that of Cosette
for so long a period?

What melancholy sport of Providence was that which had placed
that child in contact with that man?  Are there then chains
for two which are forged on high? and does God take pleasure
in coupling the angel with the demon?  So a crime and an innocence
can be room-mates in the mysterious galleys of wretchedness? 
In that defiling of condemned persons which is called human destiny,
can two brows pass side by side, the one ingenuous, the other
formidable, the one all bathed in the divine whiteness of dawn,
the other forever blemished by the flash of an eternal lightning? 
Who could have arranged that inexplicable pairing off?  In what manner,
in consequence of what prodigy, had any community of life been
established between this celestial little creature and that old criminal?

Who could have bound the lamb to the wolf, and, what was still
more incomprehensible, have attached the wolf to the lamb? 
For the wolf loved the lamb, for the fierce creature adored
the feeble one, for, during the space of nine years, the angel
had had the monster as her point of support.  Cosette's childhood
and girlhood, her advent in the daylight, her virginal growth towards
life and light, had been sheltered by that hideous devotion. 
Here questions exfoliated, so to speak, into innumerable enigmas,
abysses yawned at the bottoms of abysses, and Marius could no longer bend
over Jean Valjean without becoming dizzy.  What was this man-precipice?

The old symbols of Genesis are eternal; in human society, such as it
now exists, and until a broader day shall effect a change in it,
there will always be two men, the one superior, the other subterranean;
the one which is according to good is Abel; the other which is
according to evil is Cain.  What was this tender Cain?  What was
this ruffian religiously absorbed in the adoration of a virgin,
watching over her, rearing her, guarding her, dignifying her,
and enveloping her, impure as he was himself, with purity?

What was that cess-pool which had venerated that innocence to such
a point as not to leave upon it a single spot?  What was this Jean
Valjean educating Cosette?  What was this figure of the shadows
which had for its only object the preservation of the rising
of a star from every shadow and from every cloud?

That was Jean Valjean's secret; that was also God's secret.

In the presence of this double secret, Marius recoiled.  The one,
in some sort, reassured him as to the other.  God was as visible
in this affair as was Jean Valjean.  God has his instruments. 
He makes use of the tool which he wills.  He is not responsible
to men.  Do we know how God sets about the work?  Jean Valjean
had labored over Cosette.  He had, to some extent, made that soul. 
That was incontestable.  Well, what then?  The workman was horrible;
but the work was admirable.  God produces his miracles as seems
good to him.  He had constructed that charming Cosette, and he had
employed Jean Valjean.  It had pleased him to choose this strange
collaborator for himself.  What account have we to demand of him? 
Is this the first time that the dung-heap has aided the spring to create
the rose?

Marius made himself these replies, and declared to himself that they
were good.  He had not dared to press Jean Valjean on all the points
which we have just indicated, but he did not confess to himself that
he did not dare to do it.  He adored Cosette, he possessed Cosette,
Cosette was splendidly pure.  That was sufficient for him. 
What enlightenment did he need?  Cosette was a light.  Does light require
enlightenment?  He had everything; what more could he desire?  All,--
is not that enough?  Jean Valjean's personal affairs did not concern him.

And bending over the fatal shadow of that man, he clung fast,
convulsively, to the solemn declaration of that unhappy wretch: 
"I am nothing to Cosette.  Ten years ago I did not know that she
was in existence."

Jean Valjean was a passer-by. He had said so himself. 
Well, he had passed.  Whatever he was, his part was finished.

Henceforth, there remained Marius to fulfil the part of Providence
to Cosette.  Cosette had sought the azure in a person like herself,
in her lover, her husband, her celestial male.  Cosette, as she took
her flight, winged and transfigured, left behind her on the earth
her hideous and empty chrysalis, Jean Valjean.

In whatever circle of ideas Marius revolved, he always returned
to a certain horror for Jean Valjean.  A sacred horror, perhaps, for,
as we have just pointed out, he felt a quid divinum in that man. 
But do what he would, and seek what extenuation he would, he was
certainly forced to fall back upon this:  the man was a convict;
that is to say, a being who has not even a place in the social ladder,
since he is lower than the very lowest rung.  After the very last
of men comes the convict.  The convict is no longer, so to speak,
in the semblance of the living.  The law has deprived him of the entire
quantity of humanity of which it can deprive a man.

Marius, on penal questions, still held to the inexorable system,
though he was a democrat and he entertained all the ideas of the
law on the subject of those whom the law strikes.  He had not yet
accomplished all progress, we admit.  He had not yet come to distinguish
between that which is written by man and that which is written by God,
between law and right.  He had not examined and weighed the right
which man takes to dispose of the irrevocable and the irreparable. 
He was not shocked by the word vindicte.  He found it quite simple
that certain breaches of the written law should be followed by
eternal suffering, and he accepted, as the process of civilization,
social damnation.  He still stood at this point, though safe to advance
infallibly later on, since his nature was good, and, at bottom,
wholly formed of latent progress.

In this stage of his ideas, Jean Valjean appeared to him hideous
and repulsive.  He was a man reproved, he was the convict. 
That word was for him like the sound of the trump on the Day
of Judgment; and, after having reflected upon Jean Valjean for
a long time, his final gesture had been to turn away his head. 
Vade retro.

Marius, if we must recognize and even insist upon the fact,
while interrogating Jean Valjean to such a point that Jean Valjean
had said:  "You are confessing me," had not, nevertheless, put to
him two or three decisive questions.

It was not that they had not presented themselves to his mind,
but that he had been afraid of them.  The Jondrette attic? 
The barricade?  Javert?  Who knows where these revelations would
have stopped?  Jean Valjean did not seem like a man who would
draw back, and who knows whether Marius, after having urged him on,
would not have himself desired to hold him back?

Has it not happened to all of us, in certain supreme conjunctures,
to stop our ears in order that we may not hear the reply, after we have
asked a question?  It is especially when one loves that one gives way
to these exhibitions of cowardice.  It is not wise to question sinister
situations to the last point, particularly when the indissoluble side
of our life is fatally intermingled with them.  What a terrible light
might have proceeded from the despairing explanations of Jean Valjean,
and who knows whether that hideous glare would not have darted
forth as far as Cosette?  Who knows whether a sort of infernal
glow would not have lingered behind it on the brow of that angel? 
The spattering of a lightning-flash is of the thunder also. 
Fatality has points of juncture where innocence itself is stamped
with crime by the gloomy law of the reflections which give color. 
The purest figures may forever preserve the reflection of a
horrible association.  Rightly or wrongly, Marius had been afraid. 
He already knew too much.  He sought to dull his senses rather
than to gain further light.

In dismay he bore off Cosette in his arms and shut his eyes
to Jean Valjean.

That man was the night, the living and horrible night. 
How should he dare to seek the bottom of it?  It is a terrible thing
to interrogate the shadow.  Who knows what its reply will be? 
The dawn may be blackened forever by it.

In this state of mind the thought that that man would, henceforth,
come into any contact whatever with Cosette was a heartrending
perplexity to Marius.

He now almost reproached himself for not having put those
formidable questions, before which he had recoiled, and from
which an implacable and definitive decision might have sprung. 
He felt that he was too good, too gentle, too weak, if we must say
the word.  This weakness had led him to an imprudent concession. 
He had allowed himself to be touched.  He had been in the wrong. 
He ought to have simply and purely rejected Jean Valjean.  Jean Valjean
played the part of fire, and that is what he should have done,
and have freed his house from that man.

He was vexed with himself, he was angry with that whirlwind
of emotions which had deafened, blinded, and carried him away. 
He was displeased with himself.

What was he to do now?  Jean Valjean's visits were profoundly repugnant
to him.  What was the use in having that man in his house?  What did
the man want?  Here, he became dismayed, he did not wish to dig down,
he did not wish to penetrate deeply; he did not wish to sound himself. 
He had promised, he had allowed himself to be drawn into a promise;
Jean Valjean held his promise; one must keep one's word even to a convict,
above all to a convict.  Still, his first duty was to Cosette. 
In short, he was carried away by the repugnance which dominated him.

Marius turned over all this confusion of ideas in his mind,
passing from one to the other, and moved by all of them. 
Hence arose a profound trouble.

It was not easy for him to hide this trouble from Cosette, but love
is a talent, and Marius succeeded in doing it.

However, without any apparent object, he questioned Cosette,
who was as candid as a dove is white and who suspected nothing;
he talked of her childhood and her youth, and he became more
and more convinced that that convict had been everything good,
paternal and respectable that a man can be towards Cosette. 
All that Marius had caught a glimpse of and had surmised was real. 
That sinister nettle had loved and protected that lily.



BOOK EIGHTH.--FADING AWAY OF THE TWILIGHT



CHAPTER I

THE LOWER CHAMBER


On the following day, at nightfall, Jean Valjean knocked at the carriage
gate of the Gillenormand house.  It was Basque who received him. 
Basque was in the courtyard at the appointed hour, as though he had
received his orders.  It sometimes happens that one says to a servant: 
"You will watch for Mr. So and So, when he arrives."

Basque addressed Jean Valjean without waiting for the latter
to approach him:

"Monsieur le Baron has charged me to inquire whether monsieur
desires to go upstairs or to remain below?"

"I will remain below," replied Jean Valjean.

Basque, who was perfectly respectful, opened the door of the
waiting-room and said:

"I will go and inform Madame."

The room which Jean Valjean entered was a damp, vaulted room on the ground
floor, which served as a cellar on occasion, which opened on the street,
was paved with red squares and was badly lighted by a grated window.

This chamber was not one of those which are harassed by
the feather-duster, the pope's head brush, and the broom. 
The dust rested tranquilly there.  Persecution of the spiders
was not organized there.  A fine web, which spread far and wide,
and was very black and ornamented with dead flies, formed a wheel
on one of the window-panes. The room, which was small and low-ceiled,
was furnished with a heap of empty bottles piled up in one corner.

The wall, which was daubed with an ochre yellow wash, was scaling
off in large flakes.  At one end there was a chimney-piece
painted in black with a narrow shelf.  A fire was burning there;
which indicated that Jean Valjean's reply:  "I will remain below,"
had been foreseen.

Two arm-chairs were placed at the two corners of the fireplace. 
Between the chairs an old bedside rug, which displayed more foundation
thread than wool, had been spread by way of a carpet.

The chamber was lighted by the fire on the hearth and the twilight
falling through the window.

Jean Valjean was fatigued.  For days he had neither eaten nor slept. 
He threw himself into one of the arm-chairs.

Basque returned, set a lighted candle on the chimney-piece and retired. 
Jean Valjean, his head drooping and his chin resting on his breast,
perceived neither Basque nor the candle.

All at once, he drew himself up with a start.  Cosette was standing
beside him.

He had not seen her enter, but he had felt that she was there.

He turned round.  He gazed at her.  She was adorably lovely. 
But what he was contemplating with that profound gaze was not her
beauty but her soul.

"Well," exclaimed Cosette, "father, I knew that you were peculiar,
but I never should have expected this.  What an idea!  Marius told
me that you wish me to receive you here."

"Yes, it is my wish."

"I expected that reply.  Good.  I warn you that I am going to make
a scene for you.  Let us begin at the beginning.  Embrace me, father."

And she offered him her cheek.

Jean Valjean remained motionless.

"You do not stir.  I take note of it.  Attitude of guilt. 
But never mind, I pardon you.  Jesus Christ said:  Offer the
other cheek.  Here it is."

And she presented her other cheek.

Jean Valjean did not move.  It seemed as though his feet were nailed
to the pavement.

"This is becoming serious," said Cosette.  "What have I done to you? 
I declare that I am perplexed.  You owe me reparation.  You will dine
with us."

"I have dined."

"That is not true.  I will get M. Gillenormand to scold you. 
Grandfathers are made to reprimand fathers.  Come.  Go upstairs
with me to the drawing-room. Immediately."

"Impossible."

Here Cosette lost ground a little.  She ceased to command and passed
to questioning.

"But why? and you choose the ugliest chamber in the house in which
to see me.  It's horrible here."

"Thou knowest . . ."

Jean Valjean caught himself up.

"You know, madame, that I am peculiar, I have my freaks."

Cosette struck her tiny hands together.

"Madame! . . . You know! . . . more novelties!  What is the meaning
of this?"

Jean Valjean directed upon her that heartrending smile to which he
occasionally had recourse:

"You wished to be Madame.  You are so."

"Not for you, father."

"Do not call me father."

"What?"

"Call me `Monsieur Jean.'  `Jean,' if you like."

"You are no longer my father?  I am no longer Cosette? 
`Monsieur Jean'? What does this mean? why, these are revolutions,
aren't they? what has taken place? come, look me in the face. 
And you won't live with us!  And you won't have my chamber! 
What have I done to you?  Has anything happened?"

"Nothing."

"Well then?"

"Everything is as usual."

"Why do you change your name?"

"You have changed yours, surely."

He smiled again with the same smile as before and added:

"Since you are Madame Pontmercy, I certainly can be Monsieur Jean."

"I don't understand anything about it.  All this is idiotic. 
I shall ask permission of my husband for you to be `Monsieur Jean.' 
I hope that he will not consent to it.  You cause me a great deal
of pain.  One does have freaks, but one does not cause one's little
Cosette grief.  That is wrong.  You have no right to be wicked,
you who are so good."

He made no reply.

She seized his hands with vivacity, and raising them to her face
with an irresistible movement, she pressed them against her neck
beneath her chin, which is a gesture of profound tenderness.

"Oh!" she said to him, "be good!"

And she went on:

"This is what I call being good:  being nice and coming and living here,--
there are birds here as there are in the Rue Plumet,--living with us,
quitting that hole of a Rue de l'Homme Arme, not giving us riddles
to guess, being like all the rest of the world, dining with us,
breakfasting with us, being my father."

He loosed her hands.

"You no longer need a father, you have a husband."

Cosette became angry.

"I no longer need a father!  One really does not know what to say
to things like that, which are not common sense!"

"If Toussaint were here," resumed Jean Valjean, like a person who
is driven to seek authorities, and who clutches at every branch,
"she would be the first to agree that it is true that I have always
had ways of my own.  There is nothing new in this.  I always have
loved my black corner."

"But it is cold here.  One cannot see distinctly.  It is abominable,
that it is, to wish to be Monsieur Jean!  I will not have you say
`you' to me.

"Just now, as I was coming hither," replied Jean Valjean,
"I saw a piece of furniture in the Rue Saint Louis.  It was
at a cabinet-maker's. If I were a pretty woman, I would treat
myself to that bit of furniture.  A very neat toilet table in the
reigning style.  What you call rosewood, I think.  It is inlaid. 
The mirror is quite large.  There are drawers.  It is pretty."

"Hou! the villainous bear!" replied Cosette.

And with supreme grace, setting her teeth and drawing back her lips,
she blew at Jean Valjean.  She was a Grace copying a cat.

"I am furious," she resumed.  "Ever since yesterday, you have made
me rage, all of you.  I am greatly vexed.  I don't understand.  You do
not defend me against Marius.  Marius will not uphold me against you. 
I am all alone.  I arrange a chamber prettily.  If I could have put the
good God there I would have done it.  My chamber is left on my hands. 
My lodger sends me into bankruptcy.  I order a nice little dinner
of Nicolette.  We will have nothing to do with your dinner, Madame. 
And my father Fauchelevent wants me to call him `Monsieur Jean,'
and to receive him in a frightful, old, ugly cellar, where the walls
have beards, and where the crystal consists of empty bottles,
and the curtains are of spiders' webs!  You are singular, I admit,
that is your style, but people who get married are granted a truce. 
You ought not to have begun being singular again instantly. 
So you are going to be perfectly contented in your abominable Rue
de l'Homme Arme.  I was very desperate indeed there, that I was. 
What have you against me?  You cause me a great deal of grief. 
Fi!"

And, becoming suddenly serious, she gazed intently at Jean Valjean
and added:

"Are you angry with me because I am happy?"

Ingenuousness sometimes unconsciously penetrates deep.  This question,
which was simple for Cosette, was profound for Jean Valjean. 
Cosette had meant to scratch, and she lacerated.

Jean Valjean turned pale.

He remained for a moment without replying, then, with an
inexpressible intonation, and speaking to himself, he murmured:

"Her happiness was the object of my life.  Now God may sign
my dismissal.  Cosette, thou art happy; my day is over."

"Ah, you have said thou to me!" exclaimed Cosette.

And she sprang to his neck.

Jean Valjean, in bewilderment, strained her wildly to his breast. 
It almost seemed to him as though he were taking her back.

"Thanks, father!" said Cosette.

This enthusiastic impulse was on the point of becoming poignant
for Jean Valjean.  He gently removed Cosette's arms, and took his hat.

"Well?" said Cosette.

"I leave you, Madame, they are waiting for you."

And, from the threshold, he added:

"I have said thou to you.  Tell your husband that this shall not
happen again.  Pardon me."

Jean Valjean quitted the room, leaving Cosette stupefied at this
enigmatical farewell.



CHAPTER II

ANOTHER STEP BACKWARDS


On the following day, at the same hour, Jean Valjean came.

Cosette asked him no questions, was no longer astonished, no longer
exclaimed that she was cold, no longer spoke of the drawing-room,
she avoided saying either "father" or "Monsieur Jean."  She allowed
herself to be addressed as you.  She allowed herself to be
called Madame.  Only, her joy had undergone a certain diminution. 
She would have been sad, if sadness had been possible to her.

It is probable that she had had with Marius one of those conversations
in which the beloved man says what he pleases, explains nothing,
and satisfies the beloved woman.  The curiosity of lovers does
not extend very far beyond their own love.

The lower room had made a little toilet.  Basque had suppressed
the bottles, and Nicolette the spiders.

All the days which followed brought Jean Valjean at the same hour. 
He came every day, because he had not the strength to take Marius'
words otherwise than literally.  Marius arranged matters so as to
be absent at the hours when Jean Valjean came.  The house grew
accustomed to the novel ways of M. Fauchelevent.  Toussaint helped
in this direction:  "Monsieur has always been like that," she repeated. 
The grandfather issued this decree:--"He's an original."  And all
was said.  Moreover, at the age of ninety-six, no bond is any longer
possible, all is merely juxtaposition; a newcomer is in the way. 
There is no longer any room; all habits are acquired.  M. Fauchelevent,
M. Tranchelevent, Father Gillenormand asked nothing better than
to be relieved from "that gentleman."  He added:--"Nothing is more
common than those originals.  They do all sorts of queer things. 
They have no reason.  The Marquis de Canaples was still worse. 
He bought a palace that he might lodge in the garret.  These are
fantastic appearances that people affect."

No one caught a glimpse of the sinister foundation.  And moreover,
who could have guessed such a thing?  There are marshes of this
description in India.  The water seems extraordinary, inexplicable,
rippling though there is no wind, and agitated where it should
be calm.  One gazes at the surface of these causeless ebullitions;
one does not perceive the hydra which crawls on the bottom.

Many men have a secret monster in this same manner, a dragon
which gnaws them, a despair which inhabits their night.  Such a man
resembles other men, he goes and comes.  No one knows that he
bears within him a frightful parasitic pain with a thousand teeth,
which lives within the unhappy man, and of which he is dying. 
No one knows that this man is a gulf.  He is stagnant but deep. 
From time to time, a trouble of which the onlooker understands
nothing appears on his surface.  A mysterious wrinkle is formed,
then vanishes, then re-appears; an air-bubble rises and bursts. 
It is the breathing of the unknown beast.

Certain strange habits:  arriving at the hour when other people
are taking their leave, keeping in the background when other people
are displaying themselves, preserving on all occasions what may be
designated as the wall-colored mantle, seeking the solitary walk,
preferring the deserted street, avoiding any share in conversation,
avoiding crowds and festivals, seeming at one's ease and living
poorly, having one's key in one's pocket, and one's candle at the
porter's lodge, however rich one may be, entering by the side door,
ascending the private staircase,--all these insignificant singularities,
fugitive folds on the surface, often proceed from a formidable foundation.

Many weeks passed in this manner.  A new life gradually took possession
of Cosette:  the relations which marriage creates, visits, the care
of the house, pleasures, great matters.  Cosette's pleasures were
not costly, they consisted in one thing:  being with Marius.  The great
occupation of her life was to go out with him, to remain with him. 
It was for them a joy that was always fresh, to go out arm in arm,
in the face of the sun, in the open street, without hiding themselves,
before the whole world, both of them completely alone.

Cosette had one vexation.  Toussaint could not get on with Nicolette,
the soldering of two elderly maids being impossible, and she went away. 
The grandfather was well; Marius argued a case here and there;
Aunt Gillenormand peacefully led that life aside which sufficed for her,
beside the new household.  Jean Valjean came every day.

The address as thou disappeared, the you, the "Madame," the
"Monsieur Jean," rendered him another person to Cosette.  The care
which he had himself taken to detach her from him was succeeding. 
She became more and more gay and less and less tender.  Yet she
still loved him sincerely, and he felt it.

One day she said to him suddenly:  "You used to be my father, you are
no longer my father, you were my uncle, you are no longer my uncle,
you were Monsieur Fauchelevent, you are Jean.  Who are you then? 
I don't like all this.  If I did not know how good you are, I should
be afraid of you."

He still lived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, because he could not make
up his mind to remove to a distance from the quarter where Cosette dwelt.

At first, he only remained a few minutes with Cosette, and then
went away.

Little by little he acquired the habit of making his visits less brief. 
One would have said that he was taking advantage of the authorization
of the days which were lengthening, he arrived earlier and departed later.

One day Cosette chanced to say "father" to him.  A flash
of joy illuminated Jean Valjean's melancholy old countenance. 
He caught her up:  "Say Jean."--"Ah! truly," she replied with a
burst of laughter, "Monsieur Jean."--"That is right," said he. 
And he turned aside so that she might not see him wipe his eyes.



CHAPTER III

THEY RECALL THE GARDEN OF THE RUE PLUMET


This was the last time.  After that last flash of light, complete
extinction ensued.  No more familiarity, no more good-morning with
a kiss, never more that word so profoundly sweet:  "My father!" 
He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out
of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow,
that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards
obliged to lose her again in detail.

The eye eventually becomes accustomed to the light of a cellar. 
In short, it sufficed for him to have an apparition of Cosette
every day.  His whole life was concentrated in that one hour.

He seated himself close to her, he gazed at her in silence, or he
talked to her of years gone by, of her childhood, of the convent,
of her little friends of those bygone days.

One afternoon,--it was on one of those early days in April,
already warm and fresh, the moment of the sun's great gayety,
the gardens which surrounded the windows of Marius and Cosette felt
the emotion of waking, the hawthorn was on the point of budding,
a jewelled garniture of gillyflowers spread over the ancient walls,
snapdragons yawned through the crevices of the stones, amid the
grass there was a charming beginning of daisies, and buttercups,
the white butterflies of the year were making their first appearance,
the wind, that minstrel of the eternal wedding, was trying in the trees
the first notes of that grand, auroral symphony which the old poets
called the springtide,--Marius said to Cosette:--"We said that we
would go back to take a look at our garden in the Rue Plumet. 
Let us go thither.  We must not be ungrateful."--And away they flitted,
like two swallows towards the spring.  This garden of the Rue
Plumet produced on them the effect of the dawn.  They already
had behind them in life something which was like the springtime
of their love.  The house in the Rue Plumet being held on a lease,
still belonged to Cosette.  They went to that garden and that house. 
There they found themselves again, there they forgot themselves. 
That evening, at the usual hour, Jean Valjean came to the Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire.--"Madame went out with Monsieur and has not
yet returned," Basque said to him.  He seated himself in silence,
and waited an hour.  Cosette did not return.  He departed with
drooping head.

Cosette was so intoxicated with her walk to "their garden,"
and so joyous at having "lived a whole day in her past," that she
talked of nothing else on the morrow.  She did not notice that she
had not seen Jean Valjean.

"In what way did you go thither?"  Jean Valjean asked her."

"On foot."

"And how did you return?"

"In a hackney carriage."

For some time, Jean Valjean had noticed the economical life led
by the young people.  He was troubled by it.  Marius' economy was
severe, and that word had its absolute meaning for Jean Valjean. 
He hazarded a query:

"Why do you not have a carriage of your own?  A pretty coupe would
only cost you five hundred francs a month.  You are rich."

"I don't know," replied Cosette.

"It is like Toussaint," resumed Jean Valjean.  "She is gone. 
You have not replaced her.  Why?"

"Nicolette suffices."

"But you ought to have a maid."

"Have I not Marius?"

"You ought to have a house of your own, your own servants, a carriage,
a box at the theatre.  There is nothing too fine for you. 
Why not profit by your riches?  Wealth adds to happiness."

Cosette made no reply.

Jean Valjean's visits were not abridged.  Far from it.  When it is
the heart which is slipping, one does not halt on the downward slope.

When Jean Valjean wished to prolong his visit and to induce forgetfulness
of the hour, he sang the praises of Marius; he pronounced him handsome,
noble, courageous, witty, eloquent, good.  Cosette outdid him. 
Jean Valjean began again.  They were never weary.  Marius--that word
was inexhaustible; those six letters contained volumes. 
In this manner, Jean Valjean contrived to remain a long time.

It was so sweet to see Cosette, to forget by her side!  It alleviated
his wounds.  It frequently happened that Basque came twice to announce: 
"M. Gillenormand sends me to remind Madame la Baronne that dinner
is served."

On those days, Jean Valjean was very thoughtful on his return home.

Was there, then, any truth in that comparison of the chrysalis
which had presented itself to the mind of Marius?  Was Jean Valjean
really a chrysalis who would persist, and who would come to visit
his butterfly?

One day he remained still longer than usual.  On the following day he
observed that there was no fire on the hearth.--"Hello!" he thought. 
"No fire."--And he furnished the explanation for himself.--"It is
perfectly simple.  It is April.  The cold weather has ceased."

"Heavens! how cold it is here!" exclaimed Cosette when she entered.

"Why, no," said Jean Valjean.

"Was it you who told Basque not to make a fire then?"

"Yes, since we are now in the month of May."

"But we have a fire until June.  One is needed all the year
in this cellar."

"I thought that a fire was unnecessary."

"That is exactly like one of your ideas!" retorted Cosette.

On the following day there was a fire.  But the two arm-chairs
were arranged at the other end of the room near the door. 
"--What is the meaning of this?" thought Jean Valjean.

He went for the arm-chairs and restored them to their ordinary
place near the hearth.

This fire lighted once more encouraged him, however.  He prolonged
the conversation even beyond its customary limits.  As he rose
to take his leave, Cosette said to him:

"My husband said a queer thing to me yesterday."

"What was it?"

"He said to me:  `Cosette, we have an income of thirty thousand livres. 
Twenty-seven that you own, and three that my grandfather
gives me.'  I replied:  `That makes thirty.'  He went on: 
`Would you have the courage to live on the three thousand?' 
I answered:  `Yes, on nothing.  Provided that it was with you.' 
And then I asked:  `Why do you say that to me?'  He replied: 
`I wanted to know.'"

Jean Valjean found not a word to answer.  Cosette probably expected
some explanation from him; he listened in gloomy silence. 
He went back to the Rue de l'Homme Arme; he was so deeply absorbed
that he mistook the door and instead of entering his own house,
he entered the adjoining dwelling.  It was only after having ascended
nearly two stories that he perceived his error and went down again.

His mind was swarming with conjectures.  It was evident that Marius
had his doubts as to the origin of the six hundred thousand francs,
that he feared some source that was not pure, who knows? that he
had even, perhaps, discovered that the money came from him,
Jean Valjean, that he hesitated before this suspicious fortune,
and was disinclined to take it as his own,--preferring that both he
and Cosette should remain poor, rather than that they should be rich
with wealth that was not clean.

Moreover, Jean Valjean began vaguely to surmise that he was being
shown the door.

On the following day, he underwent something like a shock on
entering the ground-floor room.  The arm-chairs had disappeared. 
There was not a single chair of any sort.

"Ah, what's this!" exclaimed Cosette as she entered, "no chairs! 
Where are the arm-chairs?"

"They are no longer here," replied Jean Valjean.

"This is too much!"

Jean Valjean stammered:

"It was I who told Basque to remove them."

"And your reason?"

"I have only a few minutes to stay to-day."

"A brief stay is no reason for remaining standing."

"I think that Basque needed the chairs for the drawing-room."

"Why?"

"You have company this evening, no doubt."

"We expect no one."

Jean Valjean had not another word to say.

Cosette shrugged her shoulders.

"To have the chairs carried off!  The other day you had the fire
put out.  How odd you are!"

"Adieu!" murmured Jean Valjean.

He did not say:  "Adieu, Cosette."  But he had not the strength to say: 
"Adieu, Madame."

He went away utterly overwhelmed.

This time he had understood.

On the following day he did not come.  Cosette only observed
the fact in the evening.

"Why," said she, "Monsieur Jean has not been here today."

And she felt a slight twinge at her heart, but she hardly perceived it,
being immediately diverted by a kiss from Marius.

On the following day he did not come.

Cosette paid no heed to this, passed her evening and slept well
that night, as usual, and thought of it only when she woke. 
She was so happy!  She speedily despatched Nicolette to M. Jean's
house to inquire whether he were ill, and why he had not come
on the previous evening.  Nicolette brought back the reply of
M. Jean that he was not ill.  He was busy.  He would come soon. 
As soon as he was able.  Moreover, he was on the point of taking
a little journey.  Madame must remember that it was his custom
to take trips from time to time.  They were not to worry about him. 
They were not to think of him.

Nicolette on entering M. Jean's had repeated to him her mistress'
very words.  That Madame had sent her to inquire why M. Jean bad
not come on the preceding evening."--It is two days since I have
been there," said Jean Valjean gently.

But the remark passed unnoticed by Nicolette, who did not report
it to Cosette.



CHAPTER IV

ATTRACTION AND EXTINCTION


During the last months of spring and the first months of summer
in 1833, the rare passersby in the Marais, the petty shopkeepers,
the loungers on thresholds, noticed an old man neatly clad in black,
who emerged every day at the same hour, towards nightfall,
from the Rue de l'Homme Arme, on the side of the Rue
Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, passed in front of the Blancs Manteaux,
gained the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, and, on arriving at
the Rue de l'Echarpe, turned to the left, and entered the Rue Saint-Louis.

There he walked at a slow pace, with his head strained forward,
seeing nothing, hearing nothing, his eye immovably fixed on a point
which seemed to be a star to him, which never varied, and which was no
other than the corner of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. The nearer
he approached the corner of the street the more his eye lighted up;
a sort of joy illuminated his pupils like an inward aurora,
he had a fascinated and much affected air, his lips indulged in
obscure movements, as though he were talking to some one whom he
did not see, he smiled vaguely and advanced as slowly as possible. 
One would have said that, while desirous of reaching his destination,
he feared the moment when he should be close at hand.  When only
a few houses remained between him and that street which appeared
to attract him his pace slackened, to such a degree that, at times,
one might have thought that he was no longer advancing at all. 
The vacillation of his head and the fixity of his eyeballs
suggested the thought of the magnetic needle seeking the pole. 
Whatever time he spent on arriving, he was obliged to arrive at last;
he reached the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; then he halted,
he trembled, he thrust his head with a sort of melancholy timidity
round the corner of the last house, and gazed into that street,
and there was in that tragic look something which resembled the
dazzling light of the impossible, and the reflection from a paradise
that was closed to him.  Then a tear, which had slowly gathered
in the corner of his lids, and had become large enough to fall,
trickled down his cheek, and sometimes stopped at his mouth. 
The old man tasted its bitter flavor.  Thus he remained for several
minutes as though made of stone, then he returned by the same road
and with the same step, and, in proportion as he retreated, his glance
died out.

Little by little, this old man ceased to go as far as the corner of the
Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; he halted half way in the Rue Saint-Louis;
sometimes a little further off, sometimes a little nearer.

One day he stopped at the corner of the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine
and looked at the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire from a distance. 
Then he shook his head slowly from right to left, as though refusing
himself something, and retraced his steps.

Soon he no longer came as far as the Rue Saint-Louis. He got as far
as the Rue Pavee, shook his head and turned back; then he went no
further than the Rue des Trois-Pavillons; then he did not overstep
the Blancs-Manteaux. One would have said that he was a pendulum
which was no longer wound up, and whose oscillations were growing
shorter before ceasing altogether.

Every day he emerged from his house at the same hour, he undertook
the same trip, but he no longer completed it, and, perhaps without
himself being aware of the fact, he constantly shortened it. 
His whole countenance expressed this single idea:  What is the use?--
His eye was dim; no more radiance.  His tears were also exhausted;
they no longer collected in the corner of his eye-lid; that thoughtful
eye was dry.  The old man's head was still craned forward; his chin
moved at times; the folds in his gaunt neck were painful to behold. 
Sometimes, when the weather was bad, he had an umbrella under his arm,
but he never opened it.

The good women of the quarter said:  "He is an innocent." 
The children followed him and laughed.



BOOK NINTH.--SUPREME SHADOW, SUPREME DAWN


CHAPTER I

PITY FOR THE UNHAPPY, BUT INDULGENCE FOR THE HAPPY


It is a terrible thing to be happy!  How content one is! 
How all-sufficient one finds it!  How, being in possession of the
false object of life, happiness, one forgets the true object, duty!

Let us say, however, that the reader would do wrong were he
to blame Marius.

Marius, as we have explained, before his marriage, had put no questions
to M. Fauchelevent, and, since that time, he had feared to put any to
Jean Valjean.  He had regretted the promise into which he had allowed
himself to be drawn.  He had often said to himself that he had done
wrong in making that concession to despair.  He had confined himself
to gradually estranging Jean Valjean from his house and to effacing him,
as much as possible, from Cosette's mind.  He had, in a manner,
always placed himself between Cosette and Jean Valjean, sure that,
in this way, she would not perceive nor think of the latter. 
It was more than effacement, it was an eclipse.

Marius did what he considered necessary and just.  He thought
that he had serious reasons which the reader has already seen,
and others which will be seen later on, for getting rid of Jean
Valjean without harshness, but without weakness.

Chance having ordained that he should encounter, in a case which he
had argued, a former employee of the Laffitte establishment, he had
acquired mysterious information, without seeking it, which he had
not been able, it is true, to probe, out of respect for the secret
which he had promised to guard, and out of consideration for Jean
Valjean's perilous position.  He believed at that moment that he had
a grave duty to perform:  the restitution of the six hundred thousand
francs to some one whom he sought with all possible discretion. 
In the meanwhile, he abstained from touching that money.

As for Cosette, she had not been initiated into any of these secrets;
but it would be harsh to condemn her also.

There existed between Marius and her an all-powerful magnetism,
which caused her to do, instinctively and almost mechanically,
what Marius wished.  She was conscious of Marius' will in the direction
of "Monsieur Jean," she conformed to it.  Her husband had not been
obliged to say anything to her; she yielded to the vague but clear
pressure of his tacit intentions, and obeyed blindly.  Her obedience
in this instance consisted in not remembering what Marius forgot. 
She was not obliged to make any effort to accomplish this. 
Without her knowing why herself, and without his having any cause
to accuse her of it, her soul had become so wholly her husband's
that that which was shrouded in gloom in Marius' mind became overcast
in hers.

Let us not go too far, however; in what concerns Jean Valjean,
this forgetfulness and obliteration were merely superficial. 
She was rather heedless than forgetful.  At bottom, she was sincerely
attached to the man whom she had so long called her father;
but she loved her husband still more dearly.  This was what had
somewhat disturbed the balance of her heart, which leaned to one
side only.

It sometimes happened that Cosette spoke of Jean Valjean and expressed
her surprise.  Then Marius calmed her:  "He is absent, I think. 
Did not he say that he was setting out on a journey?"--"That is true,"
thought Cosette.  "He had a habit of disappearing in this fashion. 
But not for so long."  Two or three times she despatched Nicolette
to inquire in the Rue de l'Homme Arme whether M. Jean had returned from
his journey.  Jean Valjean caused the answer "no" to be given.

Cosette asked nothing more, since she had but one need on earth, Marius.

Let us also say that, on their side, Cosette and Marius had also
been absent.  They had been to Vernon.  Marius had taken Cosette
to his father's grave.

Marius gradually won Cosette away from Jean Valjean.  Cosette allowed it.

Moreover that which is called, far too harshly in certain cases,
the ingratitude of children, is not always a thing so deserving
of reproach as it is supposed.  It is the ingratitude of nature. 
Nature, as we have elsewhere said, "looks before her."  Nature divides
living beings into those who are arriving and those who are departing. 
Those who are departing are turned towards the shadows, those who
are arriving towards the light.  Hence a gulf which is fatal on
the part of the old, and involuntary on the part of the young. 
This breach, at first insensible, increases slowly, like all separations
of branches.  The boughs, without becoming detached from the trunk,
grow away from it.  It is no fault of theirs.  Youth goes where there
is joy, festivals, vivid lights, love.  Old age goes towards the end. 
They do not lose sight of each other, but there is no longer
a close connection.  Young people feel the cooling off of life;
old people, that of the tomb.  Let us not blame these poor children.



CHAPTER II

LAST FLICKERINGS OF A LAMP WITHOUT OIL


One day, Jean Valjean descended his staircase, took three steps
in the street, seated himself on a post, on that same stone post
where Gavroche had found him meditating on the night between the 5th
and the 6th of June; he remained there a few moments, then went
up stairs again.  This was the last oscillation of the pendulum. 
On the following day he did not leave his apartment.  On the day
after that, he did not leave his bed.

His portress, who prepared his scanty repasts, a few cabbages
or potatoes with bacon, glanced at the brown earthenware plate
and exclaimed:

"But you ate nothing yesterday, poor, dear man!"

"Certainly I did," replied Jean Valjean.

"The plate is quite full."

"Look at the water jug.  It is empty."

"That proves that you have drunk; it does not prove that you
have eaten."

"Well," said Jean Valjean, "what if I felt hungry only for water?"

"That is called thirst, and, when one does not eat at the same time,
it is called fever."

"I will eat to-morrow."

"Or at Trinity day.  Why not to-day? Is it the thing to say: 
`I will eat to-morrow'? The idea of leaving my platter without even
touching it!  My ladyfinger potatoes were so good!"

Jean Valjean took the old woman's hand:

"I promise you that I will eat them," he said, in his benevolent voice.

"I am not pleased with you," replied the portress.

Jean Valjean saw no other human creature than this good woman. 
There are streets in Paris through which no one ever passes,
and houses to which no one ever comes.  He was in one of those streets
and one of those houses.

While he still went out, he had purchased of a coppersmith,
for a few sous, a little copper crucifix which he had hung up
on a nail opposite his bed.  That gibbet is always good to look at.

A week passed, and Jean Valjean had not taken a step in his room. 
He still remained in bed.  The portress said to her husband:--"The
good man upstairs yonder does not get up, he no longer eats,
he will not last long.  That man has his sorrows, that he has. 
You won't get it out of my head that his daughter has made a
bad marriage."

The porter replied, with the tone of marital sovereignty:

"If he's rich, let him have a doctor.  If he is not rich, let him
go without.  If he has no doctor he will die."

"And if he has one?"

"He will die," said the porter.

The portress set to scraping away the grass from what she called
her pavement, with an old knife, and, as she tore out the blades,
she grumbled:

"It's a shame.  Such a neat old man!  He's as white as a chicken."

She caught sight of the doctor of the quarter as he passed the end
of the street; she took it upon herself to request him to come
up stairs.

"It's on the second floor," said she.  "You have only to enter. 
As the good man no longer stirs from his bed, the door is
always unlocked."

The doctor saw Jean Valjean and spoke with him.

When he came down again the portress interrogated him:

"Well, doctor?"

"Your sick man is very ill indeed."

"What is the matter with him?"

"Everything and nothing.  He is a man who, to all appearances,
has lost some person who is dear to him.  People die of that."

"What did he say to you?"

"He told me that he was in good health."

"Shall you come again, doctor?"

"Yes," replied the doctor.  "But some one else besides must come."



CHAPTER III

A PEN IS HEAVY TO THE MAN WHO LIFTED THE FAUCHELEVENT'S CART


One evening Jean Valjean found difficulty in raising himself
on his elbow; he felt of his wrist and could not find his pulse;
his breath was short and halted at times; he recognized the fact
that he was weaker than he had ever been before.  Then, no doubt
under the pressure of some supreme preoccupation, he made an effort,
drew himself up into a sitting posture and dressed himself. 
He put on his old workingman's clothes.  As he no longer went out,
he had returned to them and preferred them.  He was obliged to pause
many times while dressing himself; merely putting his arms through his
waistcoat made the perspiration trickle from his forehead.

Since he had been alone, he had placed his bed in the antechamber,
in order to inhabit that deserted apartment as little as possible.

He opened the valise and drew from it Cosette's outfit.

He spread it out on his bed.

The Bishop's candlesticks were in their place on the chimney-piece. He
took from a drawer two wax candles and put them in the candlesticks. 
Then, although it was still broad daylight,--it was summer,--
he lighted them.  In the same way candles are to be seen lighted
in broad daylight in chambers where there is a corpse.

Every step that he took in going from one piece of furniture
to another exhausted him, and he was obliged to sit down.  It was
not ordinary fatigue which expends the strength only to renew it;
it was the remnant of all movement possible to him, it was life
drained which flows away drop by drop in overwhelming efforts
and which will never be renewed.

The chair into which he allowed himself to fall was placed in front
of that mirror, so fatal for him, so providential for Marius,
in which he had read Cosette's reversed writing on the blotting book. 
He caught sight of himself in this mirror, and did not recognize himself. 
He was eighty years old; before Marius' marriage, he would have hardly
been taken for fifty; that year had counted for thirty.  What he bore
on his brow was no longer the wrinkles of age, it was the mysterious mark
of death.  The hollowing of that pitiless nail could be felt there. 
His cheeks were pendulous; the skin of his face had the color
which would lead one to think that it already had earth upon it;
the corners of his mouth drooped as in the mask which the ancients
sculptured on tombs.  He gazed into space with an air of reproach;
one would have said that he was one of those grand tragic beings
who have cause to complain of some one.

He was in that condition, the last phase of dejection,
in which sorrow no longer flows; it is coagulated, so to speak;
there is something on the soul like a clot of despair.

Night had come.  He laboriously dragged a table and the old
arm-chair to the fireside, and placed upon the table a pen,
some ink and some paper.

That done, he had a fainting fit.  When he recovered consciousness,
he was thirsty.  As he could not lift the jug, he tipped it over
painfully towards his mouth, and swallowed a draught.

As neither the pen nor the ink had been used for a long time,
the point of the pen had curled up, the ink had dried away, he was
forced to rise and put a few drops of water in the ink, which he did
not accomplish without pausing and sitting down two or three times,
and he was compelled to write with the back of the pen.  He wiped
his brow from time to time.

Then he turned towards the bed, and, still seated, for he could not stand,
he gazed at the little black gown and all those beloved objects.

These contemplations lasted for hours which seemed minutes.

All at once he shivered, he felt that a child was taking possession
of him; he rested his elbows on the table, which was illuminated
by the Bishop's candles and took up the pen.  His hand trembled. 
He wrote slowly the few following lines:

"Cosette, I bless thee.  I am going to explain to thee.  Thy husband
was right in giving me to understand that I ought to go away;
but there is a little error in what he believed, though he was in
the right.  He is excellent.  Love him well even after I am dead. 
Monsieur Pontmercy, love my darling child well.  Cosette, this paper
will be found; this is what I wish to say to thee, thou wilt see
the figures, if I have the strength to recall them, listen well,
this money is really thine.  Here is the whole matter:  White jet
comes from Norway, black jet comes from England, black glass jewellery
comes from Germany.  Jet is the lightest, the most precious,
the most costly.  Imitations can be made in France as well as in Germany. 
What is needed is a little anvil two inches square, and a lamp
burning spirits of wine to soften the wax.  The wax was formerly
made with resin and lampblack, and cost four livres the pound. 
I invented a way of making it with gum shellac and turpentine. 
It does not cost more than thirty sous, and is much better. 
Buckles are made with a violet glass which is stuck fast, by means
of this wax, to a little framework of black iron.  The glass must
be violet for iron jewellery, and black for gold jewellery. 
Spain buys a great deal of it.  It is the country of jet . . ."

Here he paused, the pen fell from his fingers, he was seized by one of
those sobs which at times welled up from the very depths of his being;
the poor man clasped his head in both hands, and meditated.

"Oh!" he exclaimed within himself [lamentable cries, heard by God
alone], "all is over.  I shall never see her more.  She is a smile
which passed over me.  I am about to plunge into the night without
even seeing her again.  Oh! one minute, one instant, to hear her voice,
to touch her dress, to gaze upon her, upon her, the angel! and then
to die!  It is nothing to die, what is frightful is to die without
seeing her.  She would smile on me, she would say a word to me,
would that do any harm to any one?  No, all is over, and forever. 
Here I am all alone.  My God!  My God!  I shall never see her again!" 
At that moment there came a knock at the door.



CHAPTER IV

A BOTTLE OF INK WHICH ONLY SUCCEEDED IN WHITENING


That same day, or to speak more accurately, that same evening, as Marius
left the table, and was on the point of withdrawing to his study,
having a case to look over, Basque handed him a letter saying: 
"The person who wrote the letter is in the antechamber."

Cosette had taken the grandfather's arm and was strolling in the garden.

A letter, like a man, may have an unprepossessing exterior. 
Coarse paper, coarsely folded--the very sight of certain missives
is displeasing.

The letter which Basque had brought was of this sort.

Marius took it.  It smelled of tobacco.  Nothing evokes a memory
like an odor.  Marius recognized that tobacco.  He looked at
the superscription:  "To Monsieur, Monsieur le Baron Pommerci. 
At his hotel."  The recognition of the tobacco caused him to
recognize the writing as well.  It may be said that amazement
has its lightning flashes.

Marius was, as it were, illuminated by one of these flashes.

The sense of smell, that mysterious aid to memory, had just
revived a whole world within him.  This was certainly the paper,
the fashion of folding, the dull tint of ink; it was certainly
the well-known handwriting, especially was it the same tobacco.

The Jondrette garret rose before his mind.

Thus, strange freak of chance! one of the two scents which he had
so diligently sought, the one in connection with which he had lately
again exerted so many efforts and which he supposed to be forever lost,
had come and presented itself to him of its own accord.

He eagerly broke the seal, and read:


"Monsieur le Baron:--If the Supreme Being had given me the talents,
I might have been baron Thenard, member of the Institute [academy
of ciences], but I am not.  I only bear the same as him, happy if
this memory recommends me to the eccellence of your kindnesses. 
The benefit with which you will honor me will be reciprocle. 
I am in possession of a secret concerning an individual. 
This individual concerns you.  I hold the secret at your disposal
desiring to have the honor to be huseful to you.  I will furnish
you with the simple means of driving from your honorabel family
that individual who has no right there, madame la baronne being
of lofty birth.  The sanctuary of virtue cannot cohabit longer
with crime without abdicating.

I awate in the entichamber the orders of monsieur le baron.
                                              "With respect."


The letter was signed "Thenard."

This signature was not false.  It was merely a trifle abridged.

Moreover, the rigmarole and the orthography completed the revelation. 
The certificate of origin was complete.

Marius' emotion was profound.  After a start of surprise,
he underwent a feeling of happiness.  If he could now
but find that other man of whom he was in search, the man
who had saved him, Marius, there would be nothing left for him to desire.

He opened the drawer of his secretary, took out several bank-notes, put
them in his pocket, closed the secretary again, and rang the bell. 
Basque half opened the door.

"Show the man in," said Marius.

Basque announced:

"Monsieur Thenard."

A man entered.

A fresh surprise for Marius.  The man who entered was an utter
stranger to him.

This man, who was old, moreover, had a thick nose, his chin swathed
in a cravat, green spectacles with a double screen of green taffeta
over his eyes, and his hair was plastered and flattened down on his
brow on a level with his eyebrows like the wigs of English coachmen
in "high life."  His hair was gray.  He was dressed in black from
head to foot, in garments that were very threadbare but clean;
a bunch of seals depending from his fob suggested the idea of a watch. 
He held in his hand an old hat!  He walked in a bent attitude,
and the curve in his spine augmented the profundity of his bow.

The first thing that struck the observer was, that this
personage's coat, which was too ample although carefully buttoned,
had not been made for him.

Here a short digression becomes necessary.

There was in Paris at that epoch, in a low-lived old lodging
in the Rue Beautreillis, near the Arsenal, an ingenious Jew whose
profession was to change villains into honest men.  Not for too long,
which might have proved embarrassing for the villain.  The change
was on sight, for a day or two, at the rate of thirty sous a day,
by means of a costume which resembled the honesty of the world
in general as nearly as possible.  This costumer was called
"the Changer"; the pickpockets of Paris had given him this name
and knew him by no other.  He had a tolerably complete wardrobe. 
The rags with which he tricked out people were almost probable. 
He had specialties and categories; on each nail of his shop hung
a social status, threadbare and worn; here the suit of a magistrate,
there the outfit of a Cure, beyond the outfit of a banker, in one
corner the costume of a retired military man, elsewhere the habiliments
of a man of letters, and further on the dress of a statesman.

This creature was the costumer of the immense drama which knavery
plays in Paris.  His lair was the green-room whence theft emerged,
and into which roguery retreated.  A tattered knave arrived at this
dressing-room, deposited his thirty sous and selected, according to
the part which he wished to play, the costume which suited him,
and on descending the stairs once more, the knave was a somebody. 
On the following day, the clothes were faithfully returned,
and the Changer, who trusted the thieves with everything,
was never robbed.  There was one inconvenience about these clothes,
they "did not fit"; not having been made for those who wore them,
they were too tight for one, too loose for another and did not adjust
themselves to any one.  Every pickpocket who exceeded or fell short
of the human average was ill at his ease in the Changer's costumes. 
It was necessary that one should not be either too fat or too lean. 
The changer had foreseen only ordinary men.  He had taken the measure
of the species from the first rascal who came to hand, who is
neither stout nor thin, neither tall nor short.  Hence adaptations
which were sometimes difficult and from which the Changer's clients
extricated themselves as best they might.  So much the worse
for the exceptions!  The suit of the statesman, for instance,
black from head to foot, and consequently proper, would have been
too large for Pitt and too small for Castelcicala.  The costume
of a statesman was designated as follows in the Changer's catalogue;
we copy:

"A coat of black cloth, trowsers of black wool, a silk
waistcoat, boots and linen."  On the margin there stood: 
ex-ambassador, and a note which we also copy:  "In a separate box,
a neatly frizzed peruke, green glasses, seals, and two small
quills an inch long, wrapped in cotton."  All this belonged
to the statesman, the ex-ambassador. This whole costume was,
if we may so express ourselves, debilitated; the seams were white,
a vague button-hole yawned at one of the elbows; moreover, one of the
coat buttons was missing on the breast; but this was only detail;
as the hand of the statesman should always be thrust into his coat
and laid upon his heart, its function was to conceal the absent button.

If Marius had been familiar with the occult institutions of Paris,
he would instantly have recognized upon the back of the visitor
whom Basque had just shown in, the statesman's suit borrowed from
the pick-me-down-that shop of the Changer.

Marius' disappointment on beholding another man than the one whom
he expected to see turned to the newcomer's disadvantage.

He surveyed him from head to foot, while that personage made
exaggerated bows, and demanded in a curt tone:

"What do you want?"

The man replied with an amiable grin of which the caressing smile
of a crocodile will furnish some idea:

"It seems to me impossible that I should not have already had
the honor of seeing Monsieur le Baron in society.  I think I
actually did meet monsieur personally, several years ago, at the
house of Madame la Princesse Bagration and in the drawing-rooms
of his Lordship the Vicomte Dambray, peer of France."

It is always a good bit of tactics in knavery to pretend to recognize
some one whom one does not know.

Marius paid attention to the manner of this man's speech. 
He spied on his accent and gesture, but his disappointment increased;
the pronunciation was nasal and absolutely unlike the dry,
shrill tone which he had expected.

He was utterly routed.

"I know neither Madame Bagration nor M. Dambray," said he. 
"I have never set foot in the house of either of them in my life."

The reply was ungracious.  The personage, determined to be gracious
at any cost, insisted.

"Then it must have been at Chateaubriand's that I have seen Monsieur! 
I know Chateaubriand very well.  He is very affable.  He sometimes
says to me:  `Thenard, my friend . . . won't you drink a glass
of wine with me?'"

Marius' brow grew more and more severe:

"I have never had the honor of being received by M. de Chateaubriand. 
Let us cut it short.  What do you want?"

The man bowed lower at that harsh voice.

"Monsieur le Baron, deign to listen to me.  There is in America,
in a district near Panama, a village called la Joya.  That village
is composed of a single house, a large, square house of three stories,
built of bricks dried in the sun, each side of the square five
hundred feet in length, each story retreating twelve feet back
of the story below, in such a manner as to leave in front a terrace
which makes the circuit of the edifice, in the centre an inner court
where the provisions and munitions are kept; no windows, loopholes,
no doors, ladders, ladders to mount from the ground to the first terrace,
and from the first to the second, and from the second to the third,
ladders to descend into the inner court, no doors to the chambers,
trap-doors, no staircases to the chambers, ladders; in the evening
the traps are closed, the ladders are withdrawn carbines and
blunderbusses trained from the loopholes; no means of entering,
a house by day, a citadel by night, eight hundred inhabitants,--
that is the village.  Why so many precautions? because the country
is dangerous; it is full of cannibals.  Then why do people go there?
because the country is marvellous; gold is found there."

"What are you driving at?" interrupted Marius, who had passed
from disappointment to impatience.

"At this, Monsieur le Baron.  I am an old and weary diplomat. 
Ancient civilization has thrown me on my own devices.  I want to
try savages."

"Well?"

"Monsieur le Baron, egotism is the law of the world.  The proletarian
peasant woman, who toils by the day, turns round when the diligence
passes by, the peasant proprietress, who toils in her field,
does not turn round.  The dog of the poor man barks at the rich man,
the dog of the rich man barks at the poor man.  Each one for himself. 
Self-interest--that's the object of men.  Gold, that's the loadstone."

"What then?  Finish."

"I should like to go and establish myself at la Joya.  There are three
of us.  I have my spouse and my young lady; a very beautiful girl. 
The journey is long and costly.  I need a little money."

"What concern is that of mine?" demanded Marius.

The stranger stretched his neck out of his cravat, a gesture
characteristic of the vulture, and replied with an augmented smile.

"Has not Monsieur le Baron perused my letter?"

There was some truth in this.  The fact is, that the contents of the
epistle had slipped Marius' mind.  He had seen the writing rather
than read the letter.  He could hardly recall it.  But a moment
ago a fresh start had been given him.  He had noted that detail: 
"my spouse and my young lady."

He fixed a penetrating glance on the stranger.  An examining judge
could not have done the look better.  He almost lay in wait for him.

He confined himself to replying:

"State the case precisely."

The stranger inserted his two hands in both his fobs, drew himself
up without straightening his dorsal column, but scrutinizing Marius
in his turn, with the green gaze of his spectacles.

"So be it, Monsieur le Baron.  I will be precise.  I have a secret
to sell to you."

"A secret?"

"A secret."

"Which concerns me?"

"Somewhat."

"What is the secret?"

Marius scrutinized the man more and more as he listened to him.

"I commence gratis," said the stranger.  "You will see that I
am interesting."

"Speak."

"Monsieur le Baron, you have in your house a thief and an assassin."

Marius shuddered.

"In my house? no," said he.

The imperturbable stranger brushed his hat with his elbow and went on:

"An assassin and a thief.  Remark, Monsieur le Baron, that I do not
here speak of ancient deeds, deeds of the past which have lapsed,
which can be effaced by limitation before the law and by repentance
before God.  I speak of recent deeds, of actual facts as still
unknown to justice at this hour.  I continue.  This man has
insinuated himself into your confidence, and almost into your
family under a false name.  I am about to tell you his real name. 
And to tell it to you for nothing."

"I am listening."

"His name is Jean Valjean."

"I know it."

"I am going to tell you, equally for nothing, who he is."

"Say on."

"He is an ex-convict."

"I know it."

"You know it since I have had the honor of telling you."

"No. I knew it before."

Marius' cold tone, that double reply of "I know it," his laconicism,
which was not favorable to dialogue, stirred up some smouldering
wrath in the stranger.  He launched a furious glance on the sly
at Marius, which was instantly extinguished.  Rapid as it was,
this glance was of the kind which a man recognizes when he has once
beheld it; it did not escape Marius.  Certain flashes can only
proceed from certain souls; the eye, that vent-hole of the thought,
glows with it; spectacles hide nothing; try putting a pane of glass
over hell!

The stranger resumed with a smile:

"I will not permit myself to contradict Monsieur le Baron.  In any case,
you ought to perceive that I am well informed.  Now what I have
to tell you is known to myself alone.  This concerns the fortune
of Madame la Baronne.  It is an extraordinary secret.  It is for sale--
I make you the first offer of it.  Cheap.  Twenty thousand francs."

"I know that secret as well as the others," said Marius.

The personage felt the necessity of lowering his price a trifle.

"Monsieur le Baron, say ten thousand francs and I will speak."

"I repeat to you that there is nothing which you can tell me. 
I know what you wish to say to me."

A fresh flash gleamed in the man's eye.  He exclaimed:

"But I must dine to-day, nevertheless.  It is an extraordinary secret,
I tell you.  Monsieur le Baron, I will speak.  I speak.  Give me
twenty francs."

Marius gazed intently at him:

"I know your extraordinary secret, just as I knew Jean Valjean's name,
just as I know your name."

"My name?"

"Yes."

"That is not difficult, Monsieur le Baron.  I had the honor to write
to you and to tell it to you.  Thenard."

"--Dier."

"Hey?"

"Thenardier."

"Who's that?"

In danger the porcupine bristles up, the beetle feigns death,
the old guard forms in a square; this man burst into laughter.

Then he flicked a grain of dust from the sleeve of his coat
with a fillip.

Marius continued:

"You are also Jondrette the workman, Fabantou the comedian,
Genflot the poet, Don Alvares the Spaniard, and Mistress Balizard."

"Mistress what?"

"And you kept a pot-house at Montfermeil."

"A pot-house! Never."

"And I tell you that your name is Thenardier."

"I deny it."

"And that you are a rascal.  Here."

And Marius drew a bank-note from his pocket and flung it in his face.

"Thanks!  Pardon me! five hundred francs!  Monsieur le Baron!"

And the man, overcome, bowed, seized the note and examined it.

"Five hundred francs!" he began again, taken aback.  And he stammered
in a low voice:  "An honest rustler."[69]


[69] Un fafiot serieux.  Fafiot is the slang term for a bank-bill,
derived from its rustling noise.


Then brusquely:

"Well, so be it!" he exclaimed.  "Let us put ourselves at our ease."

And with the agility of a monkey, flinging back his hair,
tearing off his spectacles, and withdrawing from his nose by
sleight of hand the two quills of which mention was recently made,
and which the reader has also met with on another page of this book,
he took off his face as the man takes off his hat.

His eye lighted up; his uneven brow, with hollows in some places
and bumps in others, hideously wrinkled at the top, was laid bare,
his nose had become as sharp as a beak; the fierce and sagacious
profile of the man of prey reappeared.

"Monsieur le Baron is infallible," he said in a clear voice whence
all nasal twang had disappeared, "I am Thenardier."

And he straightened up his crooked back.

Thenardier, for it was really he, was strangely surprised;
he would have been troubled, had he been capable of such a thing. 
He had come to bring astonishment, and it was he who had received it. 
This humiliation had been worth five hundred francs to him, and, taking it
all in all, he accepted it; but he was none the less bewildered.

He beheld this Baron Pontmercy for the first time, and, in spite
of his disguise, this Baron Pontmercy recognized him, and recognized
him thoroughly.  And not only was this Baron perfectly informed
as to Thenardier, but he seemed well posted as to Jean Valjean. 
Who was this almost beardless young man, who was so glacial and
so generous, who knew people's names, who knew all their names,
and who opened his purse to them, who bullied rascals like a judge,
and who paid them like a dupe?

Thenardier, the reader will remember, although he had been Marius'
neighbor, had never seen him, which is not unusual in Paris;
he had formerly, in a vague way, heard his daughters talk of a very poor
young man named Marius who lived in the house.  He had written to him,
without knowing him, the letter with which the reader is acquainted.

No connection between that Marius and M. le Baron Pontmercy was
possible in his mind.

As for the name Pontmercy, it will be recalled that, on the
battlefield of Waterloo, he had only heard the last two syllables,
for which he always entertained the legitimate scorn which one
owes to what is merely an expression of thanks.

However, through his daughter Azelma, who had started on the scent
of the married pair on the 16th of February, and through his own
personal researches, he had succeeded in learning many things, and,
from the depths of his own gloom, he had contrived to grasp more
than one mysterious clew.  He had discovered, by dint of industry,
or, at least, by dint of induction, he had guessed who the man
was whom he had encountered on a certain day in the Grand Sewer. 
From the man he had easily reached the name.  He knew that Madame
la Baronne Pontmercy was Cosette.  But he meant to be discreet
in that quarter.

Who was Cosette?  He did not know exactly himself.  He did,
indeed, catch an inkling of illegitimacy, the history of Fantine
had always seemed to him equivocal; but what was the use of talking
about that? in order to cause himself to be paid for his silence? 
He had, or thought he had, better wares than that for sale. 
And, according to all appearances, if he were to come and make
to the Baron Pontmercy this revelation--and without proof: 
"Your wife is a bastard," the only result would be to attract
the boot of the husband towards the loins of the revealer.

From Thenardier's point of view, the conversation with Marius
had not yet begun.  He ought to have drawn back, to have modified
his strategy, to have abandoned his position, to have changed
his front; but nothing essential had been compromised as yet,
and he had five hundred francs in his pocket.  Moreover, he had
something decisive to say, and, even against this very well-informed
and well-armed Baron Pontmercy, he felt himself strong. 
For men of Thenardier's nature, every dialogue is a combat. 
In the one in which he was about to engage, what was his situation? 
He did not know to whom he was speaking, but he did know of what
he was speaking, he made this rapid review of his inner forces,
and after having said:  "I am Thenardier," he waited.

Marius had become thoughtful.  So he had hold of Thenardier at last. 
That man whom he had so greatly desired to find was before him. 
He could honor Colonel Pontmercy's recommendation.

He felt humiliated that that hero should have owned anything to
this villain, and that the letter of change drawn from the depths
of the tomb by his father upon him, Marius, had been protested up
to that day.  It also seemed to him, in the complex state of his
mind towards Thenardier, that there was occasion to avenge the
Colonel for the misfortune of having been saved by such a rascal. 
In any case, he was content.  He was about to deliver the Colonel's
shade from this unworthy creditor at last, and it seemed to him
that he was on the point of rescuing his father's memory from
the debtors' prison.  By the side of this duty there was another--
to elucidate, if possible, the source of Cosette's fortune. 
The opportunity appeared to present itself.  Perhaps Thenardier
knew something.  It might prove useful to see the bottom of this man.

He commenced with this.

Thenardier had caused the "honest rustler" to disappear in his fob,
and was gazing at Marius with a gentleness that was almost tender.

Marius broke the silence.

"Thenardier, I have told you your name.  Now, would you like to have
me tell you your secret--the one that you came here to reveal to me? 
I have information of my own, also.  You shall see that I know more
about it than you do.  Jean Valjean, as you have said, is an assassin
and a thief.  A thief, because he robbed a wealthy manufacturer,
whose ruin he brought about.  An assassin, because he assassinated
police-agent Javert."

"I don't understand, sir," ejaculated Thenardier.

"I will make myself intelligible.  In a certain arrondissement
of the Pas de Calais, there was, in 1822, a man who had fallen out
with justice, and who, under the name of M. Madeleine, had regained
his status and rehabilitated himself.  This man had become a just
man in the full force of the term.  In a trade, the manufacture
of black glass goods, he made the fortune of an entire city. 
As far as his personal fortune was concerned he made that also,
but as a secondary matter, and in some sort, by accident. 
He was the foster-father of the poor.  He founded hospitals,
opened schools, visited the sick, dowered young girls, supported widows,
and adopted orphans; he was like the guardian angel of the country. 
He refused the cross, he was appointed Mayor.  A liberated convict
knew the secret of a penalty incurred by this man in former days;
he denounced him, and had him arrested, and profited by the arrest
to come to Paris and cause the banker Laffitte,--I have the fact
from the cashier himself,--by means of a false signature, to hand
over to him the sum of over half a million which belonged to
M. Madeleine.  This convict who robbed M. Madeleine was Jean Valjean. 
As for the other fact, you have nothing to tell me about it either. 
Jean Valjean killed the agent Javert; he shot him with a pistol. 
I, the person who is speaking to you, was present."

Thenardier cast upon Marius the sovereign glance of a conquered
man who lays his hand once more upon the victory, and who has
just regained, in one instant, all the ground which he has lost. 
But the smile returned instantly.  The inferior's triumph in the
presence of his superior must be wheedling.

Thenardier contented himself with saying to Marius:

"Monsieur le Baron, we are on the wrong track."

And he emphasized this phrase by making his bunch of seals execute
an expressive whirl.

"What!" broke forth Marius, "do you dispute that?  These are facts."

"They are chimeras.  The confidence with which Monsieur le Baron
honors me renders it my duty to tell him so.  Truth and justice
before all things.  I do not like to see folks accused unjustly. 
Monsieur le Baron, Jean Valjean did not rob M. Madeleine and Jean
Valjean did not kill Javert."

"This is too much!  How is this?"

"For two reasons."

"What are they?  Speak."

"This is the first:  he did not rob M. Madeleine, because it
is Jean Valjean himself who was M. Madeleine."

"What tale are you telling me?"

"And this is the second:  he did not assassinate Javert,
because the person who killed Javert was Javert."

"What do you mean to say?"

"That Javert committed suicide."

"Prove it! prove it!" cried Marius beside himself.

Thenardier resumed, scanning his phrase after the manner of the
ancient Alexandrine measure:

"Police-agent-Ja-vert-was-found-drowned-un-der-a-boat-of-the-Pont-au-Change."


"But prove it!"

Thenardier drew from his pocket a large envelope of gray paper,
which seemed to contain sheets folded in different sizes.

"I have my papers," he said calmly.

And he added:

"Monsieur le Baron, in your interests I desired to know Jean
Valjean thoroughly.  I say that Jean Valjean and M. Madeleine are one and
the same man, and I say that Javert had no other assassin than Javert. 
If I speak, it is because I have proofs.  Not manuscript proofs--
writing is suspicious, handwriting is complaisant,--but printed proofs."

As he spoke, Thenardier extracted from the envelope two copies
of newspapers, yellow, faded, and strongly saturated with tobacco. 
One of these two newspapers, broken at every fold and falling into rags,
seemed much older than the other.

"Two facts, two proofs," remarked Thenardier.  And he offered
the two newspapers, unfolded, to Marius.

The reader is acquainted with these two papers.  One, the most ancient,
a number of the Drapeau Blanc of the 25th of July, 1823, the text
of which can be seen in the first volume, established the identity
of M. Madeleine and Jean Valjean.

The other, a Moniteur of the 15th of June, 1832, announced the
suicide of Javert, adding that it appeared from a verbal report
of Javert to the prefect that, having been taken prisoner in the
barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, he had owed his life to the
magnanimity of an insurgent who, holding him under his pistol,
had fired into the air, instead of blowing out his brains.

Marius read.  He had evidence, a certain date, irrefragable proof,
these two newspapers had not been printed expressly for the purpose
of backing up Thenardier's statements; the note printed in the Moniteur
had been an administrative communication from the Prefecture of Police. 
Marius could not doubt.

The information of the cashier-clerk had been false, and he himself
had been deceived.

Jean Valjean, who had suddenly grown grand, emerged from his cloud. 
Marius could not repress a cry of joy.

"Well, then this unhappy wretch is an admirable man! the whole
of that fortune really belonged to him! he is Madeleine,
the providence of a whole countryside! he is Jean Valjean,
Javert's savior! he is a hero! he is a saint!"

"He's not a saint, and he's not a hero!" said Thenardier. 
"He's an assassin and a robber."

And he added, in the tone of a man who begins to feel that he
possesses some authority:

"Let us be calm."

Robber, assassin--those words which Marius thought had disappeared
and which returned, fell upon him like an ice-cold shower-bath.

"Again!" said he.

"Always," ejaculated Thenardier.  "Jean Valjean did not rob Madeleine,
but he is a thief.  He did not kill Javert, but he is a murderer."

"Will you speak," retorted Marius, "of that miserable theft,
committed forty years ago, and expiated, as your own newspapers prove,
by a whole life of repentance, of self-abnegation and of virtue?"

"I say assassination and theft, Monsieur le Baron, and I repeat
that I am speaking of actual facts.  What I have to reveal to
you is absolutely unknown.  It belongs to unpublished matter. 
And perhaps you will find in it the source of the fortune
so skilfully presented to Madame la Baronne by Jean Valjean. 
I say skilfully, because, by a gift of that nature it would not be so
very unskilful to slip into an honorable house whose comforts one would
then share, and, at the same stroke, to conceal one's crime, and to
enjoy one's theft, to bury one's name and to create for oneself a family."

"I might interrupt you at this point," said Marius, "but go on."

"Monsieur le Baron, I will tell you all, leaving the recompense to
your generosity.  This secret is worth massive gold.  You will say to me: 
`Why do not you apply to Jean Valjean?'  For a very simple reason;
I know that he has stripped himself, and stripped himself in your favor,
and I consider the combination ingenious; but he has no longer a son,
he would show me his empty hands, and, since I am in need of some
money for my trip to la Joya, I prefer you, you who have it all,
to him who has nothing.  I am a little fatigued, permit me to take
a chair."

Marius seated himself and motioned to him to do the same.

Thenardier installed himself on a tufted chair, picked up
his two newspapers, thrust them back into their envelope,
and murmured as he pecked at the Drapeau Blanc with his nail: 
"It cost me a good deal of trouble to get this one."

That done he crossed his legs and stretched himself out on the back
of the chair, an attitude characteristic of people who are sure
of what they are saying, then he entered upon his subject gravely,
emphasizing his words:

"Monsieur le Baron, on the 6th of June, 1832, about a year ago,
on the day of the insurrection, a man was in the Grand Sewer of Paris,
at the point where the sewer enters the Seine, between the Pont des
Invalides and the Pont de Jena."

Marius abruptly drew his chair closer to that of Thenardier. 
Thenardier noticed this movement and continued with the deliberation
of an orator who holds his interlocutor and who feels his adversary
palpitating under his words:

"This man, forced to conceal himself, and for reasons, moreover,
which are foreign to politics, had adopted the sewer as his
domicile and had a key to it.  It was, I repeat, on the 6th
of June; it might have been eight o'clock in the evening. 
The man hears a noise in the sewer.  Greatly surprised, he hides
himself and lies in wait.  It was the sound of footsteps,
some one was walking in the dark, and coming in his direction. 
Strange to say, there was another man in the sewer besides himself. 
The grating of the outlet from the sewer was not far off.  A little
light which fell through it permitted him to recognize the newcomer,
and to see that the man was carrying something on his back. 
He was walking in a bent attitude.  The man who was walking in a
bent attitude was an ex-convict, and what he was dragging on his
shoulders was a corpse.  Assassination caught in the very act,
if ever there was such a thing.  As for the theft, that is understood;
one does not kill a man gratis.  This convict was on his way
to fling the body into the river.  One fact is to be noticed,
that before reaching the exit grating, this convict, who had come
a long distance in the sewer, must, necessarily, have encountered
a frightful quagmire where it seems as though he might have left
the body, but the sewermen would have found the assassinated man
the very next day, while at work on the quagmire, and that did
not suit the assassin's plans.  He had preferred to traverse that
quagmire with his burden, and his exertions must have been terrible,
for it is impossible to risk one's life more completely; I don't
understand how he could have come out of that alive."

Marius' chair approached still nearer.  Thenardier took advantage
of this to draw a long breath.  He went on:

"Monsieur le Baron, a sewer is not the Champ de Mars.  One lacks
everything there, even room.  When two men are there, they must meet. 
That is what happened.  The man domiciled there and the passer-by
were forced to bid each other good-day, greatly to the regret
of both.  The passer-by said to the inhabitant:--"You see what I
have on my back, I must get out, you have the key, give it to me." 
That convict was a man of terrible strength.  There was no way
of refusing.  Nevertheless, the man who had the key parleyed,
simply to gain time.  He examined the dead man, but he could
see nothing, except that the latter was young, well dressed,
with the air of being rich, and all disfigured with blood. 
While talking, the man contrived to tear and pull off behind,
without the assassin perceiving it, a bit of the assassinated
man's coat.  A document for conviction, you understand; a means
of recovering the trace of things and of bringing home the crime
to the criminal.  He put this document for conviction in his pocket. 
After which he opened the grating, made the man go out with his
embarrassment on his back, closed the grating again, and ran off,
not caring to be mixed up with the remainder of the adventure
and above all, not wishing to be present when the assassin threw
the assassinated man into the river.  Now you comprehend.  The man
who was carrying the corpse was Jean Valjean; the one who had the key
is speaking to you at this moment; and the piece of the coat . . ."

Thenardier completed his phrase by drawing from his pocket,
and holding, on a level with his eyes, nipped between his two
thumbs and his two forefingers, a strip of torn black cloth,
all covered with dark spots.

Marius had sprung to his feet, pale, hardly able to draw his breath,
with his eyes riveted on the fragment of black cloth, and, without
uttering a word, without taking his eyes from that fragment,
he retreated to the wall and fumbled with his right hand along
the wall for a key which was in the lock of a cupboard near the chimney.

He found the key, opened the cupboard, plunged his arm into it
without looking, and without his frightened gaze quitting the rag
which Thenardier still held outspread.

But Thenardier continued:

"Monsieur le Baron, I have the strongest of reasons for believing
that the assassinated young man was an opulent stranger lured into
a trap by Jean Valjean, and the bearer of an enormous sum of money."

"The young man was myself, and here is the coat!" cried Marius,
and he flung upon the floor an old black coat all covered with blood.

Then, snatching the fragment from the hands of Thenardier, he crouched
down over the coat, and laid the torn morsel against the tattered skirt. 
The rent fitted exactly, and the strip completed the coat.

Thenardier was petrified.

This is what he thought:  "I'm struck all of a heap."

Marius rose to his feet trembling, despairing, radiant.

He fumbled in his pocket and stalked furiously to Thenardier,
presenting to him and almost thrusting in his face his fist filled
with bank-notes for five hundred and a thousand francs.

"You are an infamous wretch! you are a liar, a calumniator,
a villain.  You came to accuse that man, you have only justified him;
you wanted to ruin him, you have only succeeded in glorifying him. 
And it is you who are the thief!  And it is you who are the assassin! 
I saw you, Thenardier Jondrette, in that lair on the Rue de l'Hopital.
I know enough about you to send you to the galleys and even further
if I choose.  Here are a thousand francs, bully that you are!"

And he flung a thousand franc note at Thenardier.

"Ah!  Jondrette Thenardier, vile rascal!  Let this serve you as
a lesson, you dealer in second-hand secrets, merchant of mysteries,
rummager of the shadows, wretch!  Take these five hundred francs
and get out of here!  Waterloo protects you."

"Waterloo!" growled Thenardier, pocketing the five hundred francs
along with the thousand.

"Yes, assassin!  You there saved the life of a Colonel.  . ."

"Of a General," said Thenardier, elevating his head.

"Of a Colonel!" repeated Marius in a rage.  "I wouldn't give a ha'penny
for a general.  And you come here to commit infamies!  I tell you
that you have committed all crimes.  Go! disappear!  Only be happy,
that is all that I desire.  Ah! monster! here are three thousand
francs more.  Take them.  You will depart to-morrow, for America,
with your daughter; for your wife is dead, you abominable liar. 
I shall watch over your departure, you ruffian, and at that moment
I will count out to you twenty thousand francs.  Go get yourself
hung elsewhere!"

"Monsieur le Baron!" replied Thenardier, bowing to the very earth,
"eternal gratitude."  And Thenardier left the room, understanding nothing,
stupefied and delighted with this sweet crushing beneath sacks of gold,
and with that thunder which had burst forth over his head in bank-bills.

Struck by lightning he was, but he was also content; and he would
have been greatly angered had he had a lightning rod to ward off
such lightning as that.

Let us finish with this man at once.

Two days after the events which we are at this moment narrating,
he set out, thanks to Marius' care, for America under a false name,
with his daughter Azelma, furnished with a draft on New York for twenty
thousand francs.

The moral wretchedness of Thenardier, the bourgeois who had missed
his vocation, was irremediable.  He was in America what he had
been in Europe.  Contact with an evil man sometimes suffices to
corrupt a good action and to cause evil things to spring from it. 
With Marius' money, Thenardier set up as a slave-dealer.

As soon as Thenardier had left the house, Marius rushed to the garden,
where Cosette was still walking.

"Cosette!  Cosette!" he cried.  "Come! come quick!  Let us go. 
Basque, a carriage!  Cosette, come.  Ah!  My God!  It was he
who saved my life!  Let us not lose a minute!  Put on your shawl."

Cosette thought him mad and obeyed.

He could not breathe, he laid his hand on his heart to restrain
its throbbing.  He paced back and forth with huge strides,
he embraced Cosette:

"Ah!  Cosette!  I am an unhappy wretch!" said he.

Marius was bewildered.  He began to catch a glimpse in Jean
Valjean of some indescribably lofty and melancholy figure. 
An unheard-of virtue, supreme and sweet, humble in its immensity,
appeared to him.  The convict was transfigured into Christ.

Marius was dazzled by this prodigy.  He did not know precisely
what he beheld, but it was grand.

In an instant, a hackney-carriage stood in front of the door.

Marius helped Cosette in and darted in himself.

"Driver," said he, "Rue de l'Homme Arme, Number 7."

The carriage drove off.

"Ah! what happiness!" ejaculated Cosette.  "Rue de l'Homme Arme,
I did not dare to speak to you of that.  We are going to see
M. Jean."

"Thy father!  Cosette, thy father more than ever.  Cosette, I
guess it.  You told me that you had never received the letter
that I sent you by Gavroche.  It must have fallen into his hands. 
Cosette, he went to the barricade to save me.  As it is a necessity
with him to be an angel, he saved others also; he saved Javert. 
He rescued me from that gulf to give me to you.  He carried me
on his back through that frightful sewer.  Ah!  I am a monster
of ingratitude.  Cosette, after having been your providence,
he became mine.  Just imagine, there was a terrible quagmire
enough to drown one a hundred times over, to drown one in mire. 
Cosette! he made me traverse it.  I was unconscious; I saw nothing,
I heard nothing, I could know nothing of my own adventure. 
We are going to bring him back, to take him with us, whether he
is willing or not, he shall never leave us again.  If only he is
at home!  Provided only that we can find him, I will pass the rest
of my life in venerating him.  Yes, that is how it should be,
do you see, Cosette?  Gavroche must have delivered my letter to him. 
All is explained.  You understand."

Cosette did not understand a word.

"You are right," she said to him.

Meanwhile the carriage rolled on.



CHAPTER V

A NIGHT BEHIND WHICH THERE IS DAY


Jean Valjean turned round at the knock which he heard on his door.

"Come in," he said feebly.

The door opened.

Cosette and Marius made their appearance.

Cosette rushed into the room.

Marius remained on the threshold, leaning against the jamb of the door.

"Cosette!" said Jean Valjean.

And he sat erect in his chair, his arms outstretched and trembling,
haggard, livid, gloomy, an immense joy in his eyes.

Cosette, stifling with emotion, fell upon Jean Valjean's breast.

"Father!" said she.

Jean Valjean, overcome, stammered:

"Cosette! she! you!  Madame! it is thou!  Ah! my God!"

And, pressed close in Cosette's arms, he exclaimed:

"It is thou! thou art here!  Thou dost pardon me then!"

Marius, lowering his eyelids, in order to keep his tears from flowing,
took a step forward and murmured between lips convulsively contracted
to repress his sobs:

"My father!"

"And you also, you pardon me!"  Jean Valjean said to him.

Marius could find no words, and Jean Valjean added:

"Thanks."

Cosette tore off her shawl and tossed her hat on the bed.

"It embarrasses me," said she.

And, seating herself on the old man's knees, she put aside his white
locks with an adorable movement, and kissed his brow.

Jean Valjean, bewildered, let her have her own way.

Cosette, who only understood in a very confused manner,
redoubled her caresses, as though she desired to pay Marius' debt.

Jean Valjean stammered:

"How stupid people are!  I thought that I should never see her again. 
Imagine, Monsieur Pontmercy, at the very moment when you entered,
I was saying to myself:  `All is over.  Here is her little gown,
I am a miserable man, I shall never see Cosette again,' and I was
saying that at the very moment when you were mounting the stairs. 
Was not I an idiot?  Just see how idiotic one can be!  One reckons
without the good God.  The good God says:

"`You fancy that you are about to be abandoned, stupid!  No. No,
things will not go so.  Come, there is a good man yonder who is in
need of an angel.'  And the angel comes, and one sees one's Cosette
again! and one sees one's little Cosette once more!  Ah!  I was
very unhappy."

For a moment he could not speak, then he went on:

"I really needed to see Cosette a little bit now and then.  A heart needs
a bone to gnaw.  But I was perfectly conscious that I was in the way. 
I gave myself reasons:  `They do not want you, keep in your own course,
one has not the right to cling eternally.'  Ah!  God be praised, I see
her once more!  Dost thou know, Cosette, thy husband is very handsome? 
Ah! what a pretty embroidered collar thou hast on, luckily.  I am
fond of that pattern.  It was thy husband who chose it, was it not? 
And then, thou shouldst have some cashmere shawls.  Let me call
her thou, Monsieur Pontmercy.  It will not be for long."

And Cosette began again:

"How wicked of you to have left us like that!  Where did you go? 
Why have you stayed away so long?  Formerly your journeys only lasted
three or four days.  I sent Nicolette, the answer always was: 
`He is absent.'  How long have you been back?  Why did you
not let us know?  Do you know that you are very much changed? 
Ah! what a naughty father! he has been ill, and we have not known it! 
Stay, Marius, feel how cold his hand is!"

"So you are here!  Monsieur Pontmercy, you pardon me!"
repeated Jean Valjean.

At that word which Jean Valjean had just uttered once more,
all that was swelling Marius' heart found vent.

He burst forth:

"Cosette, do you hear? he has come to that! he asks my forgiveness! 
And do you know what he has done for me, Cosette?  He has saved
my life.  He has done more--he has given you to me.  And after having
saved me, and after having given you to me, Cosette, what has he
done with himself?  He has sacrificed himself.  Behold the man. 
And he says to me the ingrate, to me the forgetful, to me the pitiless,
to me the guilty one:  Thanks!  Cosette, my whole life passed
at the feet of this man would be too little.  That barricade,
that sewer, that furnace, that cesspool,--all that he traversed
for me, for thee, Cosette!  He carried me away through all the
deaths which he put aside before me, and accepted for himself. 
Every courage, every virtue, every heroism, every sanctity
he possesses!  Cosette, that man is an angel!"

"Hush! hush!" said Jean Valjean in a low voice.  "Why tell all that?"

"But you!" cried Marius with a wrath in which there was veneration,
"why did you not tell it to me?  It is your own fault, too. 
You save people's lives, and you conceal it from them!  You do more,
under the pretext of unmasking yourself, you calumniate yourself. 
It is frightful."

"I told the truth," replied Jean Valjean.

"No," retorted Marius, "the truth is the whole truth; and that you
did not tell.  You were Monsieur Madeleine, why not have said so? 
You saved Javert, why not have said so?  I owed my life to you,
why not have said so?"

"Because I thought as you do.  I thought that you were in the right. 
It was necessary that I should go away.  If you had known about
that affair, of the sewer, you would have made me remain near you. 
I was therefore forced to hold my peace.  If I had spoken, it would
have caused embarrassment in every way."

"It would have embarrassed what? embarrassed whom?" retorted Marius. 
"Do you think that you are going to stay here?  We shall carry you off. 
Ah! good heavens! when I reflect that it was by an accident that I have
learned all this.  You form a part of ourselves.  You are her father,
and mine.  You shall not pass another day in this dreadful house. 
Do not imagine that you will be here to-morrow."

"To-morrow," said Jean Valjean, "I shall not be here, but I shall
not be with you."

"What do you mean?" replied Marius.  "Ah! come now, we are not going
to permit any more journeys.  You shall never leave us again. 
You belong to us.  We shall not loose our hold of you."

"This time it is for good," added Cosette.  "We have a carriage
at the door.  I shall run away with you.  If necessary, I shall
employ force."

And she laughingly made a movement to lift the old man in her arms.

"Your chamber still stands ready in our house," she went on. 
"If you only knew how pretty the garden is now!  The azaleas
are doing very well there.  The walks are sanded with river sand;
there are tiny violet shells.  You shall eat my strawberries. 
I water them myself.  And no more `madame,' no more `Monsieur Jean,'
we are living under a Republic, everybody says thou, don't they, Marius? 
The programme is changed.  If you only knew, father, I have had a sorrow,
there was a robin redbreast which had made her nest in a hole in
the wall, and a horrible cat ate her.  My poor, pretty, little robin
red-breast which used to put her head out of her window and look
at me!  I cried over it.  I should have liked to kill the cat. 
But now nobody cries any more.  Everybody laughs, everybody is happy. 
You are going to come with us.  How delighted grandfather will be! 
You shall have your plot in the garden, you shall cultivate it,
and we shall see whether your strawberries are as fine as mine. 
And, then, I shall do everything that you wish, and then, you will obey
me prettily."

Jean Valjean listened to her without hearing her.  He heard
the music of her voice rather than the sense of her words;
one of those large tears which are the sombre pearls of the soul
welled up slowly in his eyes.

He murmured:

"The proof that God is good is that she is here."

"Father!" said Cosette.

Jean Valjean continued:

"It is quite true that it would be charming for us to live together. 
Their trees are full of birds.  I would walk with Cosette. 
It is sweet to be among living people who bid each other `good-day,'
who call to each other in the garden.  People see each other from
early morning.  We should each cultivate our own little corner. 
She would make me eat her strawberries.  I would make her gather
my roses.  That would be charming.  Only . . ."

He paused and said gently:

"It is a pity."

The tear did not fall, it retreated, and Jean Valjean replaced it
with a smile.

Cosette took both the old man's hands in hers.

"My God!" said she, "your hands are still colder than before. 
Are you ill?  Do you suffer?"

"I?  No," replied Jean Valjean.  "I am very well.  Only . . ."

He paused.

"Only what?"

"I am going to die presently."

Cosette and Marius shuddered.

"To die!" exclaimed Marius.

"Yes, but that is nothing," said Jean Valjean.

He took breath, smiled and resumed:

"Cosette, thou wert talking to me, go on, so thy little robin
red-breast is dead?  Speak, so that I may hear thy voice."

Marius gazed at the old man in amazement.

Cosette uttered a heartrending cry.

"Father! my father! you will live.  You are going to live. 
I insist upon your living, do you hear?"

Jean Valjean raised his head towards her with adoration.

"Oh! yes, forbid me to die.  Who knows?  Perhaps I shall obey. 
I was on the verge of dying when you came.  That stopped me,
it seemed to me that I was born again."

"You are full of strength and life," cried Marius.  "Do you imagine
that a person can die like this?  You have had sorrow, you shall
have no more.  It is I who ask your forgiveness, and on my knees! 
You are going to live, and to live with us, and to live a long time. 
We take possession of you once more.  There are two of us here who
will henceforth have no other thought than your happiness."

"You see," resumed Cosette, all bathed in tears, "that Marius says
that you shall not die."

Jean Valjean continued to smile.

"Even if you were to take possession of me, Monsieur Pontmercy,
would that make me other than I am?  No, God has thought like you
and myself, and he does not change his mind; it is useful for me
to go.  Death is a good arrangement.  God knows better than we what
we need.  May you be happy, may Monsieur Pontmercy have Cosette,
may youth wed the morning, may there be around you, my children,
lilacs and nightingales; may your life be a beautiful, sunny lawn,
may all the enchantments of heaven fill your souls, and now let me,
who am good for nothing, die; it is certain that all this is right. 
Come, be reasonable, nothing is possible now, I am fully conscious that
all is over.  And then, last night, I drank that whole jug of water. 
How good thy husband is, Cosette!  Thou art much better off with him
than with me."

A noise became audible at the door.

It was the doctor entering.

"Good-day, and farewell, doctor," said Jean Valjean.  "Here are
my poor children."

Marius stepped up to the doctor.  He addressed to him only this
single word:  "Monsieur? . . ." But his manner of pronouncing it
contained a complete question.

The doctor replied to the question by an expressive glance.

"Because things are not agreeable," said Jean Valjean, "that is
no reason for being unjust towards God."

A silence ensued.

All breasts were oppressed.

Jean Valjean turned to Cosette.  He began to gaze at her as though
he wished to retain her features for eternity.

In the depths of the shadow into which he had already descended,
ecstasy was still possible to him when gazing at Cosette. 
The reflection of that sweet face lighted up his pale visage.

The doctor felt of his pulse.

"Ah! it was you that he wanted!" he murmured, looking at Cosette
and Marius.

And bending down to Marius' ear, he added in a very low voice:

"Too late."

Jean Valjean surveyed the doctor and Marius serenely, almost without
ceasing to gaze at Cosette.

These barely articulate words were heard to issue from his mouth:

"It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live."

All at once he rose to his feet.  These accesses of strength
are sometimes the sign of the death agony.  He walked with a firm
step to the wall, thrusting aside Marius and the doctor who tried
to help him, detached from the wall a little copper crucifix
which was suspended there, and returned to his seat with all the
freedom of movement of perfect health, and said in a loud voice,
as he laid the crucifix on the table:

"Behold the great martyr."

Then his chest sank in, his head wavered, as though the intoxication
of the tomb were seizing hold upon him.

His hands, which rested on his knees, began to press their nails
into the stuff of his trousers.

Cosette supported his shoulders, and sobbed, and tried to speak
to him, but could not.

Among the words mingled with that mournful saliva which
accompanies tears, they distinguished words like the following:

"Father, do not leave us.  Is it possible that we have found you
only to lose you again?"

It might be said that agony writhes.  It goes, comes,
advances towards the sepulchre, and returns towards life. 
There is groping in the action of dying.

Jean Valjean rallied after this semi-swoon, shook his brow as though
to make the shadows fall away from it and became almost perfectly
lucid once more.

He took a fold of Cosette's sleeve and kissed it.

"He is coming back! doctor, he is coming back," cried Marius.

"You are good, both of you," said Jean Valjean.  "I am going to tell
you what has caused me pain.  What has pained me, Monsieur Pontmercy,
is that you have not been willing to touch that money. 
That money really belongs to your wife.  I will explain to you,
my children, and for that reason, also, I am glad to see you. 
Black jet comes from England, white jet comes from Norway. 
All this is in this paper, which you will read.  For bracelets,
I invented a way of substituting for slides of soldered sheet iron,
slides of iron laid together.  It is prettier, better and less costly. 
You will understand how much money can be made in that way. 
So Cosette's fortune is really hers.  I give you these details,
in order that your mind may be set at rest."

The portress had come upstairs and was gazing in at the half-open door. 
The doctor dismissed her.

But he could not prevent this zealous woman from exclaiming
to the dying man before she disappeared:  "Would you like a priest?"

"I have had one," replied Jean Valjean.

And with his finger he seemed to indicate a point above his head
where one would have said that he saw some one.

It is probable, in fact, that the Bishop was present at this
death agony.

Cosette gently slipped a pillow under his loins.

Jean Valjean resumed:

"Have no fear, Monsieur Pontmercy, I adjure you.  The six hundred
thousand francs really belong to Cosette.  My life will have been
wasted if you do not enjoy them!  We managed to do very well with
those glass goods.  We rivalled what is called Berlin jewellery. 
However, we could not equal the black glass of England.  A gross,
which contains twelve hundred very well cut grains, only costs
three francs."

When a being who is dear to us is on the point of death, we gaze
upon him with a look which clings convulsively to him and which
would fain hold him back.

Cosette gave her hand to Marius, and both, mute with anguish,
not knowing what to say to the dying man, stood trembling and
despairing before him.

Jean Valjean sank moment by moment.  He was failing; he was drawing
near to the gloomy horizon.

His breath had become intermittent; a little rattling interrupted it. 
He found some difficulty in moving his forearm, his feet had lost
all movement, and in proportion as the wretchedness of limb
and feebleness of body increased, all the majesty of his soul
was displayed and spread over his brow.  The light of the unknown
world was already visible in his eyes.

His face paled and smiled.  Life was no longer there, it was
something else.

His breath sank, his glance grew grander.  He was a corpse
on which the wings could be felt.

He made a sign to Cosette to draw near, then to Marius; the last
minute of the last hour had, evidently, arrived.

He began to speak to them in a voice so feeble that it seemed
to come from a distance, and one would have said that a wall
now rose between them and him.

"Draw near, draw near, both of you.  I love you dearly.  Oh! how
good it is to die like this!  And thou lovest me also, my Cosette. 
I knew well that thou still felt friendly towards thy poor old man. 
How kind it was of thee to place that pillow under my loins! 
Thou wilt weep for me a little, wilt thou not?  Not too much. 
I do not wish thee to have any real griefs.  You must enjoy yourselves
a great deal, my children.  I forgot to tell you that the profit was
greater still on the buckles without tongues than on all the rest. 
A gross of a dozen dozens cost ten francs and sold for sixty. 
It really was a good business.  So there is no occasion for
surprise at the six hundred thousand francs, Monsieur Pontmercy. 
It is honest money.  You may be rich with a tranquil mind. 
Thou must have a carriage, a box at the theatres now and then,
and handsome ball dresses, my Cosette, and then, thou must give good
dinners to thy friends, and be very happy.  I was writing to Cosette
a while ago.  She will find my letter.  I bequeath to her the two
candlesticks which stand on the chimney-piece. They are of silver,
but to me they are gold, they are diamonds; they change candles
which are placed in them into wax-tapers. I do not know whether
the person who gave them to me is pleased with me yonder on high. 
I have done what I could.  My children, you will not forget that I
am a poor man, you will have me buried in the first plot of earth
that you find, under a stone to mark the spot.  This is my wish. 
No name on the stone.  If Cosette cares to come for a little
while now and then, it will give me pleasure.  And you too,
Monsieur Pontmercy.  I must admit that I have not always loved you. 
I ask your pardon for that.  Now she and you form but one for me. 
I feel very grateful to you.  I am sure that you make Cosette happy. 
If you only knew, Monsieur Pontmercy, her pretty rosy cheeks
were my delight; when I saw her in the least pale, I was sad. 
In the chest of drawers, there is a bank-bill for five hundred francs. 
I have not touched it.  It is for the poor.  Cosette, dost thou see
thy little gown yonder on the bed? dost thou recognize it?  That was
ten years ago, however.  How time flies!  We have been very happy. 
All is over.  Do not weep, my children, I am not going very far,
I shall see you from there, you will only have to look at night,
and you will see me smile.  Cosette, dost thou remember Montfermeil? 
Thou wert in the forest, thou wert greatly terrified; dost thou
remember how I took hold of the handle of the water-bucket? That was
the first time that I touched thy poor, little hand.  It was so cold! 
Ah! your hands were red then, mademoiselle, they are very white now. 
And the big doll! dost thou remember?  Thou didst call her Catherine. 
Thou regrettedest not having taken her to the convent! 
How thou didst make me laugh sometimes, my sweet angel!  When it
had been raining, thou didst float bits of straw on the gutters,
and watch them pass away.  One day I gave thee a willow battledore
and a shuttlecock with yellow, blue and green feathers.  Thou hast
forgotten it.  Thou wert roguish so young!  Thou didst play. 
Thou didst put cherries in thy ears.  Those are things of the past. 
The forests through which one has passed with one's child,
the trees under which one has strolled, the convents where one has
concealed oneself, the games, the hearty laughs of childhood,
are shadows.  I imagined that all that belonged to me.  In that lay
my stupidity.  Those Thenardiers were wicked.  Thou must forgive them. 
Cosette, the moment has come to tell thee the name of thy mother. 
She was called Fantine.  Remember that name--Fantine.  Kneel whenever
thou utterest it.  She suffered much.  She loved thee dearly. 
She had as much unhappiness as thou hast had happiness.  That is
the way God apportions things.  He is there on high, he sees us all,
and he knows what he does in the midst of his great stars. 
I am on the verge of departure, my children.  Love each other
well and always.  There is nothing else but that in the world: 
love for each other.  You will think sometimes of the poor old
man who died here.  Oh my Cosette, it is not my fault, indeed,
that I have not seen thee all this time, it cut me to the heart;
I went as far as the corner of the street, I must have produced
a queer effect on the people who saw me pass, I was like a madman,
I once went out without my hat.  I no longer see clearly,
my children, I had still other things to say, but never mind. 
Think a little of me.  Come still nearer.  I die happy.  Give me
your dear and well-beloved heads, so that I may lay my hands upon
them."

Cosette and Marius fell on their knees, in despair,
suffocating with tears, each beneath one of Jean Valjean's hands. 
Those august hands no longer moved.

He had fallen backwards, the light of the candles illuminated him.

His white face looked up to heaven, he allowed Cosette and Marius
to cover his hands with kisses.

He was dead.

The night was starless and extremely dark.  No doubt, in the gloom,
some immense angel stood erect with wings outspread, awaiting that soul.



CHAPTER VI

THE GRASS COVERS AND THE RAIN EFFACES


In the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, in the vicinity of the common
grave, far from the elegant quarter of that city of sepulchres,
far from all the tombs of fancy which display in the presence of
eternity all the hideous fashions of death, in a deserted corner,
beside an old wall, beneath a great yew tree over which climbs the
wild convolvulus, amid dandelions and mosses, there lies a stone. 
That stone is no more exempt than others from the leprosy of time,
of dampness, of the lichens and from the defilement of the birds. 
The water turns it green, the air blackens it.  It is not near
any path, and people are not fond of walking in that direction,
because the grass is high and their feet are immediately wet. 
When there is a little sunshine, the lizards come thither.  All around
there is a quivering of weeds.  In the spring, linnets warble in
the trees.

This stone is perfectly plain.  In cutting it the only thought
was the requirements of the tomb, and no other care was taken than
to make the stone long enough and narrow enough to cover a man.

No name is to be read there.

Only, many years ago, a hand wrote upon it in pencil these four lines,
which have become gradually illegible beneath the rain and the dust,
and which are, to-day, probably effaced:

           Il dort. Quoique le sort fut pour lui bien etrange,
           Il vivait. Il mourut quand il n'eut plus son ange.
           La chose simplement d'elle-meme arriva,
           Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s'en va.[70]

[70] He sleeps.  Although his fate was very strange, he lived. 
He died when he had no longer his angel.  The thing came to pass simply,
of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.



LETTER TO M. DAELLI

Publisher of the Italian translation of Les Miserables in Milan.

                               HAUTEVILLE-HOUSE, October 18, 1862.


You are right, sir, when you tell me that Les Miserables is written
for all nations.  I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I
wrote it for all.  It is addressed to England as well as to Spain,
to Italy as well as to France, to Germany as well as to Ireland,
to Republics which have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs. 
Social problems overstep frontiers.  The sores of the human race,
those great sores which cover the globe, do not halt at the red
or blue lines traced upon the map.  In every place where man is
ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread,
wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should
instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the book
of Les Miserables knocks at the door and says:  "Open to me, I come
for you."

At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing,
and which is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is
agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

Your Italy is no more exempt from the evil than is our France. 
Your admirable Italy has all miseries on the face of it.  Does not
banditism, that raging form of pauperism, inhabit your mountains? 
Few nations are more deeply eaten by that ulcer of convents which I
have endeavored to fathom.  In spite of your possessing Rome,
Milan, Naples, Palermo, Turin, Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua,
Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Venice, a heroic history, sublime ruins,
magnificent ruins, and superb cities, you are, like ourselves, poor. 
You are covered with marvels and vermin.  Assuredly, the sun of Italy
is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky does not prevent rags on man.

Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms,
blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs.  You taste nothing
of the present nor of the future without a flavor of the past being
mingled with it.  You have a barbarian, the monk, and a savage,
the lazzarone.  The social question is the same for you as for us. 
There are a few less deaths from hunger with you, and a few more
from fever; your social hygiene is not much better than ours;
shadows, which are Protestant in England, are Catholic in Italy;
but, under different names, the vescovo is identical with the bishop,
and it always means night, and of pretty nearly the same quality. 
To explain the Bible badly amounts to the same thing as to understand
the Gospel badly.

Is it necessary to emphasize this?  Must this melancholy parallelism
be yet more completely verified?  Have you not indigent persons? 
Glance below.  Have you not parasites?  Glance up.  Does not
that hideous balance, whose two scales, pauperism and parasitism,
so mournfully preserve their mutual equilibrium, oscillate before
you as it does before us?  Where is your army of schoolmasters,
the only army which civilization acknowledges?

Where are your free and compulsory schools?  Does every one
know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? 
Have you made public schools of your barracks?  Have you not,
like ourselves, an opulent war-budget and a paltry budget of education? 
Have not you also that passive obedience which is so easily converted
into soldierly obedience? military establishment which pushes the
regulations to the extreme of firing upon Garibaldi; that is to say,
upon the living honor of Italy?  Let us subject your social order
to examination, let us take it where it stands and as it stands,
let us view its flagrant offences, show me the woman and the child. 
It is by the amount of protection with which these two feeble creatures
are surrounded that the degree of civilization is to be measured. 
Is prostitution less heartrending in Naples than in Paris? 
What is the amount of truth that springs from your laws, and what
amount of justice springs from your tribunals?  Do you chance to be
so fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: 
public prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner,
the death penalty?  Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead
and Farinace is alive.  And then, let us scrutinize your state reasons. 
Have you a government which comprehends the identity of morality
and politics?  You have reached the point where you grant amnesty
to heroes!  Something very similar has been done in France. 
Stay, let us pass miseries in review, let each one contribute
his pile, you are as rich as we.  Have you not, like ourselves,
two condemnations, religious condemnation pronounced by the priest,
and social condemnation decreed by the judge?  Oh, great nation of Italy,
thou resemblest the great nation of France!  Alas! our brothers,
you are, like ourselves, Miserables.

From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see
much more distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals
of Eden.  Only, the priests are mistaken.  These holy portals
are before and not behind us.

I resume.  This book, Les Miserables, is no less your mirror than ours. 
Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book,--
I understand that.  Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated;
that does not prevent them from being of use.

As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love
for my own country, but without being engrossed by France more
than by any other nation.  In proportion as I advance in life,
I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.

This is, moreover, the tendency of our age, and the law of radiance
of the French Revolution; books must cease to be exclusively French,
Italian, German, Spanish, or English, and become European, I say
more, human, if they are to correspond to the enlargement of civilization.

Hence a new logic of art, and of certain requirements of composition
which modify everything, even the conditions, formerly narrow,
of taste and language, which must grow broader like all the rest.

In France, certain critics have reproached me, to my great delight,
with having transgressed the bounds of what they call "French taste";
I should be glad if this eulogium were merited.

In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same
universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess
only the puny forces of a man, and I cry to all:  "Help me!"

This, sir, is what your letter prompts me to say; I say it
for you and for your country.  If I have insisted so strongly,
it is because of one phrase in your letter.  You write:--

"There are Italians, and they are numerous, who say:  `This book,
Les Miserables, is a French book.  It does not concern us.  Let the French
read it as a history, we read it as a romance.'"--Alas!  I repeat,
whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. 
Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated,
misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has
at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing,
upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment
of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

If this letter seems to you of service in enlightening some
minds and in dissipating some prejudices, you are at liberty
to publish it, sir.  Accept, I pray you, a renewed assurance
of my very distinguished sentiments.

                                                  VICTOR HUGO.


The end of Project Gutenberg etext of "Les Miserables"




