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 Éponine 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 downstream, 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 downstream 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 cesspool 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 crossroads, 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 network

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

network 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 Münster that John of Leyden produced his false moon, and it

was from the cesspool 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

Germoniæ58 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 Maubuée outlet, as into a

bed-chamber.

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 fœtus 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-Barthélemys 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, François I. with Duprat, Charles IX. is there with his mother,

Richelieu is there with Louis XIII., Louvois is there, Letellier is

there, Hébert 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 cesspool, it reconstitutes 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 cesspool, 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; Dædalus 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 cesspool 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-Honoré by the two mouths to the sewer in the Champs-Élysées, the

Rue Saint-Florentin through the Saint-Florentin sewer, the Rue

Pierre-à-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-Élysées 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’Échaudé,

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 Créqui, 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 Gemoniæ; 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 cesspool 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 Decrès or Crétet 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 Kléber; the aérostiers 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 Vieille-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 Ménilmontant 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

Salpêtrière; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Pères, under the

Rue du Mail, under the Rue de l’Écharpe, under the Place Royale; in

1812, under the Rue de la Paix, and under the Chaussée d’Antin. At the

same time, he had the whole network 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, cœcum,

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 network 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 antennæ, 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 cesspool 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 Lumière 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 Bièvre from

the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, 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 Barrière des Martyrs, after having, let us state,

constructed the line of sewers from the Barrière 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 Traversière-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 Arbalète, 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.

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-Mandé,

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 crossroads 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

In 1832, in a number of streets, in the Rue de l’Étoile, the Rue

Saint-Louis, the Rue du Temple, the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, the Rue

Notre-Dame de Nazareth, the Rue Folie-Méricourt, the Quai aux Fleurs,

the Rue du Petit-Musc, 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-Batelière, in

the Champs-Élysées, 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 cesspool 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 cesspool 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

cesspool 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 network, thanks to the

special activity of the last thirty years, was no less than sixty

leagues in extent.

Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder. He thought that he was

beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it was a pity that it was not so.

Under the Rue Saint-Denis there is an old stone sewer which dates from

Louis XIII. and which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the

Grand Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation of

the ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-Martin

sewer, whose four arms describe a cross. But the gut of the

Petite-Truanderie the entrance to which was in the vicinity of the

Corinthe wine-shop has never communicated with the sewer of the Rue

Saint-Denis; it ended at the Montmartre sewer, and it was in this that

Jean Valjean was entangled. There opportunities of losing oneself

abound. The Montmartre sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the

ancient network. Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind him the

sewer of the markets whose geometrical plan presents the appearance of

a multitude of parrots’ roosts piled on top of each other; but he had

before him more than one embarrassing encounter and more than one

street corner—for they are streets—presenting itself in the gloom like

an interrogation point; first, on his left, the vast sewer of the

Plâtrière, a sort of Chinese puzzle, thrusting out and entangling its

chaos of Ts and Zs under the Post-Office and under the rotunda of the

Wheat Market, as far as the Seine, where it terminates in a Y;

secondly, on his right, the curving corridor of the Rue du Cadran with

its three teeth, which are also blind courts; thirdly, on his left, the

branch of the Mail, complicated, almost at its inception, with a sort

of fork, and proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag until it ends in the

grand crypt of the outlet of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in

every direction; and lastly, the blind alley of a passage of the Rue

des Jeûneurs, 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 _à petits

matériaux_—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 watersheds

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 Michel-le-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 crossroads 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-Élysées. 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 manœuvring, 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-Élysées, 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 François 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 Jéna, 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 Jéna 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

reanimated 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

Ménilmontant, 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 Ménilmontant. 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 Ménilmontant

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 Chaussée 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

Ménilmontant, 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 cesspool? 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 Lunière 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 Parthénon,

obliterated, a century ago, a portion of the vaults of Saint-Geneviève

hill. When a sewer was broken in under the pressure of the houses, the

mischief was sometimes betrayed in the street above by a sort of space,

like the teeth of a saw, between the paving-stones; this crevice was

developed in an undulating line throughout the entire length of the

cracked vault, and then, the evil being visible, the remedy could be

promptly applied. It also frequently happened, that the interior

ravages were not revealed by any external scar, and in that case, woe

to the sewermen. When they entered without precaution into the sewer,

they were liable to be lost. Ancient registers make mention of several

scavengers who were buried in fontis in this manner. They give many

names; among others, that of the sewerman who was swallowed up in a

quagmire under the man-hole of the Rue Carême-Prenant, a certain Blaise

Poutrain; this Blaise Poutrain was the brother of Nicholas Poutrain,

who was the last grave-digger of the cemetery called the Charnier des

Innocents, in 1785, the epoch when that cemetery expired.

There was also that young and charming Vicomte d’Escoubleau, of whom we

have just spoken, one of the heroes of the siege of Lérida, where they

delivered the assault in silk stockings, with violins at their head.

D’Escoubleau, surprised one night at his cousin’s, the Duchesse 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-Élysées, 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-Honoré, in which we now see Jean

Valjean, was demolished for the purpose of reconstructing it, the

quicksand, which forms the subsoil of the Champs-Élysées 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 watershed 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, downstream, the bridge of Jéna 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 Thénardier.

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 Thénardier himself

could add nothing to this blackness of this night.

A momentary pause ensued.

Thénardier, 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, Thénardier, 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 Thénardier unmasked.

Jean Valjean immediately perceived that Thénardier did not recognize

him.

They surveyed each other for a moment in that half-gloom, as though

taking each other’s measure. Thénardier was the first to break the

silence.

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

Jean Valjean made no reply. Thénardier 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.”

Thénardier 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. Thénardier took him for an assassin.

Thénardier 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 Thénardier.

Thénardier 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.

Thénardier 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.

Thénardier 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 Thénardier became, the more mute was Jean Valjean.

Again Thénardier shook him by the shoulder.

“Now let’s settle this business. Let’s go shares. You have seen my key,

show me your money.”

Thénardier was haggard, fierce, suspicious, rather menacing, yet

amicable.

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

Thénardier 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.

Thénardier 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, Thénardier, 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.

Thénardier 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.

Thénardier 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-Élysées

was audible. A few stars, daintily piercing the pale blue of the

zenith, and visible to reverie 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 Thénardier’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-Élysées, which had, for some time past, aroused the attention of

the police. There he had caught sight of Thénardier 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 Thénardier’s part.

Thénardier 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. Thénardier, 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 Thénardier

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 reverie. At length he released Jean Valjean,

straightened himself stiffly up without bending, grasped his bludgeon

again firmly, and, as though in a dream, he murmured rather than

uttered this question:

“What are you doing here? And who is this man?”

He still abstained from addressing Jean Valjean as _thou_.

Jean Valjean replied, and the sound of his voice appeared to rouse

Javert:

“It is with regard to him that I desire to speak to you. Dispose of me

as you see fit; but first help me to carry him home. That is all that I

ask of you.”

Javert’s face contracted as was always the case when any one seemed to

think him capable of making a concession. Nevertheless, he did not say

“no.”

Again he bent over, drew from his pocket a handkerchief which he

moistened in the water and with which he then wiped Marius’

blood-stained brow.

“This man was at the barricade,” said he in a low voice and as though

speaking to himself. “He is the one they called Marius.”

A spy of the first quality, who had observed everything, listened to

everything, and taken in everything, even when he thought that he was

to die; who had played the spy even in his agony, and who, with his

elbows leaning on the first step of the sepulchre, had taken notes.

He seized Marius’ hand and felt his pulse.

“He is wounded,” said Jean Valjean.

“He is a dead man,” said Javert.

Jean Valjean replied:

“No. Not yet.”

“So you have brought him thither from the barricade?” remarked Javert.

His preoccupation must indeed have been very profound for him not to

insist on this alarming rescue through the sewer, and for him not to

even notice Jean Valjean’s silence after his question.

Jean Valjean, on his side, seemed to have but one thought. He resumed:

“He lives in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, with his

grandfather. I do not recollect his name.”

Jean Valjean fumbled in Marius’ coat, pulled out his pocket-book,

opened it at the page which Marius had pencilled, and held it out to

Javert.

There was still sufficient light to admit of reading. Besides this,

Javert possessed in his eye the feline phosphorescence of night birds.

He deciphered the few lines written by Marius, and muttered:

“Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du Calvaire, 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 Armé, 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 Thénardier 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 Armé, 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.”