CHAPTER XXIV.

PRISONER!

Marius was really a prisoner;--prisoner to Jean Valjean.

The hand which had clutched him behind at the moment when he was

falling, and of which he felt the pressure as he lost his senses, was

that of Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean had taken no other part in the struggle than that of

exposing himself. Had it not been for him, in the supreme moment of

agony no one would have thought of the wounded. Thanks to him, who was

everywhere present in the carnage like a Providence, those who fell

were picked up, carried to the ground-floor room, and had their wounds

dressed, and in the intervals he repaired the barricade. But nothing

that could resemble a blow, an attack, or even personal defence, could

be seen with him, and he kept quiet and succored. However, he had only

a few scratches, and the bullets had no billet for him. If suicide

formed part of what he dreamed of when he came to this sepulchre, he

had not been successful; but we doubt whether he thought of suicide,

which is an irreligious act. Jean Valjean did not appear to see Marius

in the thick of the combat; but in truth he did not take his eyes off

him. When a bullet laid Marius low, Jean Valjean leaped upon him with

the agility of a tiger, dashed upon him as on a prey, and carried him

off.

The whirlwind of the attack was at this moment so violently

concentrated on Enjolras and the door of the wine-shop, that no one

saw Jean Valjean, supporting the fainting Marius in his arms, cross

the unpaved ground of the barricade and disappear round the corner of

Corinth. Our readers will remember this corner, which formed a sort

of cape in the street, and protected a few square feet of ground from

bullets and grape-shot, and from glances as well. There is thus at

times in fires a room which does not burn, and in the most raging seas,

beyond a promontory, or at the end of a reef, a little quiet nook. It

was in this corner of the inner trapeze of the barricade that Éponine

drew her last breath. Here Jean Valjean stopped, let Marius slip to the

ground, leaned against a wall, and looked around him.

The situation was frightful; for the instant, for two or three minutes

perhaps, this piece of wall was a shelter, but how to get out of this

massacre? He recalled the agony he had felt in the Rue Polonceau, eight

years previously, and in what way he had succeeded in escaping; it was

difficult then, but now it was impossible. He had in front of him that

implacable and silent six-storied house, which only seemed inhabited

by the dead man leaning out of his window; he had on his right the

low barricade which closed the Petite Truanderie; to climb over this

obstacle appeared easy, but a row of bayonet-points could be seen over

the crest of the barricade; they were line troops posted beyond the

barricade and on the watch. It was evident that crossing the barricade

was seeking a platoon fire, and that any head which appeared above the

wall of paving-stones would serve as a mark for sixty muskets. He had

on his left the battle-field, and death was behind the corner of the

wall.

What was he to do? A bird alone could have escaped from this place.

And he must decide at once, find an expedient, and make up his mind.

They were fighting a few paces from him, but fortunately all were

obstinately engaged at one point, the wine-shop door; but if a single

soldier had the idea of turning the house or attacking it on the flank

all would be over. Jean Valjean looked at the house opposite to him,

he looked at the barricade by his side, and then looked on the ground,

with the violence of supreme extremity, wildly, and as if he would have

liked to dig a hole with his eyes. By much looking, something vaguely

discernible in such an agony became perceptible, and assumed a shape at

his feet, as if the eyes had the power to produce the thing demanded.

He perceived a few paces from him, at the foot of the small barricade

so pitilessly guarded and watched from without, and beneath a pile of

paving-stones which almost concealed it, an iron grating, laid flat and

flush with the ground. This grating made of strong cross-bars was about

two feet square, and the framework of paving-stones which supported

it had been torn out, and it was as it were dismounted. Through the

bars a glimpse could be caught of an obscure opening, something like

a chimney-pot or the cylinder of a cistern. Jean Valjean dashed up,

and his old skill in escapes rose to his brain like a beam of light.

To remove the paving-stones, tear up the grating, take Marius, who was

inert as a dead body, on his shoulders, descend with this burden on

his loins, helping himself with his elbows and knees, into this sort

of well which was fortunately of no great depth, to let the grating

fall again over his head, to set foot on a paved surface, about ten

feet below the earth,--all this was executed like something done in

delirium, with a giant's strength and the rapidity of an eagle: this

occupied but a few minutes. Jean Valjean found himself with the still

fainting Marius in a sort of long subterranean corridor, where there

was profound peace, absolute silence, and night. The impression which

he had formerly felt in falling out of the street into the convent

recurred to him; still, what he now carried was not Cosette, but Marius.

He had scarce heard above his head like a vague murmur the formidable

tumult of the wine-shop being taken by assault.

BOOK II.

THE INTESTINE OF LEVIATHAN.

CHAPTER I.

THE EARTH IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA.

Paris casts twenty-five millions of francs annually into the sea; and

we assert this without any metaphor. How so, and in what way? By day

and night. For what object? For no object. With what thought? Without

thinking. What to do? Nothing. By means of what organ? Its intestines.

What are its intestines? Its sewers. Twenty-five millions are the most

moderate of the approximative amounts given by the estimates of modern

science. Science, after groping for a long time, knows now that the

most fertilizing and effective of manures is human manure. The Chinese,

let us say it to our shame, knew this before we did; not a Chinese

peasant--it is Eckeberg who states the fact--who goes to the city, but

brings at either end of his bamboo a bucket full of what we call filth.

Thanks to the human manure, the soil in China is still as youthful as

in the days of Abraham, and Chinese wheat yields just one hundred and

twenty fold the sowing. There is no guano comparable in fertility

to the detritus of a capital, and a large city is the strongest of

stercoraries. To employ the town in manuring the plain would be certain

success; for if gold be dung, on the other hand our dung is gold.

What is done with this golden dung? It is swept into the gulf. We

send at a great expense fleets of ships to collect at the southern

pole the guano of petrels and penguins, and cast into the sea the

incalculable element of wealth which we have under our hand. All the

human and animal manure which the world loses, if returned to the land

instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the

world. Do you know what those piles of ordure are, collected at the

corners of streets, those carts of mud carried off at night from the

streets, the frightful barrels of the night-man, and the fetid streams

of subterranean mud which the pavement conceals from you? All this is

a flowering field, it is green grass, it is mint and thyme and sage,

it is game, it is cattle, it is the satisfied lowing of heavy kine at

night, it is perfumed hay, it is gilded wheat, it is bread on your

table, it is warm blood in your veins, it is health, it is joy, it is

life. So desires that mysterious creation, which is transformation

on earth and transfiguration in heaven; restore this to the great

crucible, and your abundance will issue from it, for the nutrition

of the plains produces the nourishment of men. You are at liberty

to lose this wealth and consider me ridiculous into the bargain; it

would be the masterpiece of your ignorance. Statistics have calculated

that France alone pours every year into the Atlantic a sum of half a

milliard. Note this; with these five hundred millions one quarter of

the expenses of the budget would be paid. The cleverness of man is so

great that he prefers to get rid of these five hundred millions in the

gutter. The very substance of the people is borne away, here drop by

drop, and there in streams, by the wretched vomiting of our sewers into

the rivers, and the gigantic vomiting of our rivers into the ocean.

Each eructation of our cloacas costs us one thousand francs, and this

has two results,--the earth impoverished and the water poisoned; hunger

issuing from the furrow and illness from the river. It is notorious

that at this very hour the Thames poisons London; and as regards Paris,

it has been found necessary to remove most of the mouths of the sewers

down the river below the last bridge.

A double tubular apparatus supplied with valves and flood-gates, a

system of elementary drainage as simple as the human lungs, and which

is already in full work in several English parishes, would suffice

to bring into bur towns the pure water of the fields and send to the

fields the rich water of the towns; and this easy ebb and flow, the

most simple in the world, would retain among us the five hundred

millions thrown away. But people are thinking of other things. The

present process does mischief while meaning well. The intention is

good, but the result is sorrowful; they believe they are draining

the city, while they are destroying the population. A sewer is a

misunderstanding; and when drainage, with its double functions,

restoring what it takes, is everywhere substituted for the sewer, that

simple and impoverishing washing, and is also combined with the data

of a new social economy, the produce of the soil will be increased

tenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly attenuated.

Add the suppression of parasitisms, and it will be solved. In the

mean while the public wealth goes to the river, and a sinking takes

place,--sinking is the right word, for Europe is being ruined in this

way by exhaustion. As for France, we have mentioned the figures. Now,

as Paris contains one twenty-fifth of the whole French population,

and the Parisian guano is the richest of all, we are beneath the

truth when we estimate at twenty-five millions the share of Paris in

the half-milliard which France annually refuses. These twenty-five

millions, employed in assistance and enjoyment, would double the

splendor of Paris, and the city expends them in sewers. So that we may

say, the great prodigality of Paris, its marvellous fête, its Folie

Beaujon, its orgie, its lavishing of gold, its luxury, splendor, and

magnificence, is its sewerage. It is in this way that in the blindness

of a bad political economy people allow the comfort of all to be

drowned and wasted in the water; there ought to be St. Cloud nets to

catch the public fortunes.

Economically regarded, the fact may be thus summarized: Paris is

a regular spendthrift. Paris, that model city, that pattern of

well-conducted capitals, of which every people strives to have a copy,

that metropolis of the ideal, that august home of initiative, impulse,

and experiment, that centre and gathering-place of minds, that nation

city, that beehive of the future, that marvellous composite of Babylon

and Corinth, would make a peasant of Fo-Kian shrug his shoulders, from

our present point of view. Imitate Paris, and you will ruin yourself;

moreover, Paris imitates itself particularly in this immemorial and

insensate squandering. These surprising follies are not new; it is no

youthful nonsense. The ancients acted like the moderns. "The cloacas of

Rome," says Liebig, "absorbed the entire welfare of the Roman peasant."

When the Campagna of Rome was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted

Italy; and when it had placed Italy in its cloaca, it poured into it

Sicily, and then Sardinia, and then Africa. The sewer of Rome swallowed

up the world. This cloaca offered its tunnels to the city and to the

world. _Urbi et orbi._ Eternal city and unfathomable drain.

For these things, as for others, Rome gives the example, and this

example Paris follows with all the folly peculiar to witty cities. For

the requirements of the operation which we have been explaining, Paris

has beneath it another Paris, a Paris of sewers, which has its streets,

squares, lanes, arteries, and circulation, which is mud, with the

human forces at least. For nothing must be flattered, not even a great

people. Where there is everything, there is ignominy by the side of

sublimity; and if Paris contain Athens the city of light, Tyre the city

of power, Sparta the city of virtue, Nineveh the city of prodigies,

it also contains Lutetia the city of mud. Moreover, the stamp of its

power is there too, and the Titanic sewer of Paris realizes among

monuments the strange ideal realized in humanity by a few men like

Machiavelli, Bacon, and Mirabeau,--the grand abject. The subsoil of

Paris, if the eye could pierce the surface, would offer the aspect of a

gigantic madrepore; a sponge has not more passages and holes than the

piece of ground, six leagues in circumference, upon which the old great

city rests. Without alluding to the catacombs, which are a separate

cellar, without speaking of the inextricable net of gas-pipes, without

referring to the vast tubular system for the distribution of running

water, the drains alone form on either bank of the river a prodigious

dark ramification, a labyrinth which has its incline for its clew.

In the damp mist of this labyrinth is seen the rat, which seems the

produce of the accouchement of Paris.

CHAPTER II.

THE OLD HISTORY OF THE SEWER.

If we imagine Paris removed like a cover, the subterranean network of

sewers, regarded from a birds'-eye view, would represent on either

bank a sort of large branch grafted upon the river. On the right bank

the encircling sewer will be the trunk of this branch, the secondary

tubes the branches, and the blind alleys the twigs. This figure is

only summary and half correct, as the right angle, which is the usual

angle in subterranean ramifications of this nature, is very rare in

vegetation. Our readers will form a better likeness of this strange

geometric plan by supposing that they see lying on a bed of darkness

some strange Oriental alphabet as confused as a thicket, and whose

shapeless letters are welded to each other in an apparent confusion,

and as if accidentally, here by their angles and there by their ends.

The sewers and drains played a great part in the Middle Ages, under the

Lower Empire and in the old East. Plague sprang from them and despots

died of it. The multitudes regarded almost with a religious awe these

beds of corruption, these monstrous cradles of death. The vermin-ditch

at Benares is not more fearful than the Lion's den at Babylon.

Tiglath-Pileser, according to the rabbinical books, swore by the

sink of Nineveh. It was from the drain of Munster that John of Leyden

produced his false moon, and it was from the cesspool-well of Kekhscheb

that his Oriental menæchmus, Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Khorassan,

brought his false sun.

The history of men is reflected in the history of the sewers, and

the Gemoniæ narrated the story of Rome. The sewer of Paris is an old

formidable thing, it has been a sepulchre, and it has been an asylum.

Crime, intellect, the social protest, liberty of conscience, thought,

robbery, all that human laws pursue or have pursued, have concealed

themselves in this den,--the Maillotins in the fourteenth century,

the cloak-stealers in the fifteenth, the Huguenots in the sixteenth,

the illuminés of Morin in the seventeenth, and the Chauffeurs in the

eighteenth. One hundred years ago the nocturnal dagger-issued from

it, and the rogue in danger glided into it; the wood had the cave and

Paris had the drain. The Truanderie, that Gallic _picareria_, accepted

the drain as an annex of the Court of Miracles, and at night, cunning

and ferocious, entered beneath the Maubuée vomitory as into an alcove.

It was very simple that those who had for their place of daily toil

the Vide-Gousset lane, or the Rue Coupe-Gorge, should have for their

nightly abode the ponceau of the Chemin-Vert or the Hure-poix cagnard.

Hence comes a swarm of recollections, all sorts of phantoms haunt these

long solitary corridors, on all sides are putridity and miasma, and

here and there is a trap through which Villon inside converses with

Rabelais outside.

The sewer in old Paris is the meeting-place of all exhaustions and of

all experiments; political economy sees there a detritus, and social

philosophy a residuum. The sewer is the conscience of the city, and

everything converges and is confronted there. In this livid spot there

is darkness, but there are no secrets. Each thing has its true form, or

at least its definitive form. The pile of ordure has this in its favor,

that it tells no falsehood, and simplicity has taken refuge there.

Basile's mask is found there, but you see the pasteboard, the threads,

the inside and out, and it is marked with honest filth. Scapin's false

nose is lying close by. All the uncleanlinesses of civilization, where

no longer of service, fall into this pit of truth; they are swallowed

up, but display themselves in it. This pell-mell is a confession:

there no false appearance nor any plastering is possible, order takes

off its shirt, there is an absolute nudity, a rout of illusions and

mirage, and there nothing but what is assuming the gloomy face of what

is finishing. Reality and disappearance. There a bottle-heel confesses

intoxication, and a basket-handle talks about domesticity; there, the

apple-core which has had literary opinions becomes once again the

apple-core, the effigy on the double son grows frankly vert-de-grised,

the saliva of Caiaphas meets the vomit of Falstaff, the louis-d'or

which comes from the gambling-hell dashes against the nail whence hangs

the end of the suicide's rope, a livid fœtus rolls along wrapped

in spangles, which danced last Shrove Tuesday at the opera, a wig

which has judged men wallows by the side of a rottenness which was

Margotton's petticoat: it is more than fraternity, it is the extremest

familiarity. All that painted itself is bedaubed, and the last veil is

torn away. The sewer is a cynic and says everything. This sincerity of

uncleanliness pleases us and reposes the mind. When a man has spent

his time upon the earth in enduring the great airs assumed by state

reasons, the oath, political wisdom, human justice, professional

probity, the austerities of the situation, and incorruptible robes, it

relieves him to enter a sewer and see there the mire which suits it.

It is instructive at the same time, for, as we said just now, history

passes through the sewer. St. Bartholomew filters there drop by

drop through the paving-stones, and great public assassinations,

political and religious butcheries, traverse this subterranean way of

civilization, and thrust their corpses into it. For the eye of the

dreamer all historical murderers are there, in the hideous gloom,

on their knees, with a bit of their winding-sheet for an apron, and

mournfully sponging their task. Louis XI. is there with Tristan,

Francis I. is there with Duprat, Charles IX. is there with his mother,

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

there, Hubert and Maillard are there, scratching the stones, and trying

to efface the trace of their deeds. The brooms of these spectres can

be heard under these vaults, and the enormous fetidness of social

catastrophes is breathed there. You see in corners red flashes, and

a terrible water flows there in which blood-stained hands have been

washed.

The social observer should enter these shadows, for they form part of

his laboratory. Philosophy is the microscope of thought; everything

strives to fly from it, but nothing escapes it. Tergiversation is

useless, for what side of himself does a man show in tergiversating?

His ashamed side. Philosophy pursues evil with its upright glance, and

does not allow it to escape into nothingness. It recognizes everything

in the effacement of disappearing things, and in the diminution of

vanishing things. It reconstructs the purple after the rags, and the

woman after the tatters. With the sewer it re-makes the town; with the

mud it re-makes manners. It judges from the potsherds whether it were

an amphora or an earthenware jar. It recognizes by a nail-mark on a

parchment the difference which separates the Jewry of the Juden-gasse

from the Jewry of the Ghetto. It finds again in what is left what has

been,--the good, the bad, the false, the true, the patch of blood

in the palace, the ink-stain of the cavern, the tallow-drop of the

brothel, trials undergone, temptations welcome, orgies vomited up, the

wrinkle which characters have formed in abasing themselves, the traces

of prostitution in the souls whose coarseness rendered them capable of

it, and on the jacket of the street-porters of Rome the mark of the

nudge of Messalina.

CHAPTER III.

BRUNESEAU.

The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary. In the sixteenth

century Henry II. attempted soundings which failed, and not a hundred

years ago, as Mercier testifies, the cloaca was abandoned to itself,

and became what it could. Such was that ancient Paris, handed over

to quarrels, indecisions, and groping. It was for a long time thus

stupid, and a later period, '89, showed how cities acquire sense. But

in the good old times the capital had but little head; it did not

know how to transact its business either morally or materially, and

could no more sweep away its ordure than its abuses. Everything was an

obstacle, everything raised a question. The sewer, for instance, was

refractory to any itinerary, and people could no more get on under the

city than they did in it; above, everything was unintelligible; below,

inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues was the confusion of

cellars, and Dædalus duplicated Babel. At times the sewer of Paris

thought proper to overflow, as if this misunderstood Nile had suddenly

fallen into a passion. There were, infamous to relate, inundations of

the sewer. At moments this stomach of civilization digested badly,

the sewer flowed back into the throat of the city, and Paris bad the

after-taste of its ordure. These resemblances of the drain to remorse

had some good about them, for they were warnings, very badly taken

however; for the city was indignant that its mud should have so much

boldness, and did not admit that the ordure should return. Discharge it

better.

The inundation of 1802 is in the memory of Parisians of eighty years

of age. The mud spread across the Place des Victoires, on which is

the statue of Louis XIV.; it entered Rue St. Honoré by the two mouths

of the sewer of the Champs Élysées, Rue St. Florentin by the St.

Florentin sewer, Rue Pierre à Poisson by the sewer of the Sonnerie, Rue

Popincourt by the Chemin-Vert sewer, and Rue de la Roquette by the Rue

de Lappe sewer; it covered the level of the Rue des Champs Élysées to a

height of fourteen inches, and in the south, owing to the vomitory of

the Seine performing its duties contrariwise, it entered Rue Mazarine,

Rue de l'Échaudé, and Rue des Marais, where it stopped after running

on a hundred and twenty yards, just a few yards from the house which

Racine had inhabited, respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet

more than the king. It reached its maximum depth in the Rue St. Pierre,

where it rose three feet above the gutter, and its maximum extent in

the Rue St. Sabin, where it extended over a length of two hundred and

fifty yards.

At the beginning of the present century the sewer of Paris was still

a mysterious spot. Mud can never be well famed, but here the ill

reputation extended almost to terror. Paris knew confusedly that it

had beneath it a grewsome cave; people talked about it as of that

monstrous mud-bed of Thebes, in which centipedes fifteen feet in length

swarmed, and which could have served as a bathing-place for Behemoth.

The great boots of the sewers-men never ventured beyond certain known

points. It was still very close to the time when the scavengers' carts,

from the top of which St. Foix fraternized with the Marquis de Créqui,

were simply unloaded into the sewer. As for the cleansing, the duty

was intrusted to the showers, which choked up rather than swept away.

Rome allowed some poetry to her cloaca, and called it the Gemoniæ, but

Paris insulted its own, and called it the stench-hole. Science and

superstition were agreed as to the horror, and the stench-hole was

quite as repugnant to hygiene as to the legend. The goblin was hatched

under the fetid arches of the Mouffetard sewer: the corpses of the

Marmousets were thrown into the Barillerie sewer: Fagot attributed the

malignant fever of 1685 to the great opening of the Marais sewer, which

remained yawning until 1833 in the Rue St. Louis, nearly opposite the

sign of the Messager Galant. The mouth of the sewer in the Rue de la

Mortellerie was celebrated for the pestilences which issued from it;

with its iron-pointed grating that resembled a row of teeth it yawned

in this fatal street like the throat of a dragon breathing hell on

mankind. The popular imagination seasoned the gloomy Parisian sewer

with some hideous mixture of infinitude: the sewer was bottomless, the

sewer was a Barathrum, and the idea of exploring these leprous regions

never even occurred to the police. Who would have dared to cast a sound

into this darkness, and go on a journey of discovery in this abyss? It

was frightful, and yet some one presented himself at last. The cloaca

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 attended at his master's

_petit lever._ In the court-yard could be heard the clanging sabres

of all the extraordinary soldiers of the great Republic and the great

Empire; there was a swarm of heroes at Napoleon's gates; men of the

Rhine, the Schelde, the Adage, and the Nile; comrades of Joubert, of

Desaix, of Marceau, Hoche, and Kléber, aeronauts of Fleurus, grenadiers

of Mayence, pontooners of Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had gazed

at, artillerymen who had bespattered Junot's cannon-balls, cuirassiers

who had taken by assault the fleet anchored in the Zuyderzee; some had

followed Bonaparte upon the bridge of Lodi, others had accompanied

Murat to the trenches of Mantua, while others had outstripped Lannes

in the hollow way of Montebello. The whole army of that day was in the

court of the Tuileries, represented by a squadron or a company, and

guarding Napoleon, then resting; and it was the splendid period when

the great army had Marengo behind it and Austerlitz before it. "Sire,"

said the Minister of the Interior to Napoleon, "I have seen to-day the

most intrepid man of your Empire." "Who is the man?" the Emperor asked

sharply, "and what has he done?" "He wishes to do something, Sire."

"What is it?" "To visit the sewers of Paris." This man existed, and his

name was Bruneseau.

CHAPTER IV.

CONCEALED DETAILS.

The visit took place, and was a formidable campaign,--a nocturnal

battle against asphyxia and plague. It was at the same time a voyage of

discovery, and one of the survivors of the exploration, an intelligent

workman, very young at that time, used to recount a few years ago the

curious details which Bruneseau thought it right to omit in his report

to the Prefect of Police, as unworthy of the administrative style.

Disinfecting processes were very rudimentary at that day, and Bruneseau

had scarce passed the first articulations of the subterranean network

ere eight workmen out of twenty refused to go farther. The operation

was complicated, for the visit entailed cleansing: it was, therefore,

requisite to cleanse and at the same time take measurements; note the

water entrances, count the traps and mouths, detail the branches,

indicate the currents, recognize the respective dimensions of the

different basins, sound the small sewers grafted on the main, measure

the height under the key-stone of each passage, and the width both

at the bottom and the top, in order to determine the ordinates for

levelling at the right of each entrance of water. They advanced with

difficulty, and it was not rare for the ladders to sink into three

feet of mud. The lanterns would scarce burn in the mephitic atmosphere,

and from time to time a sewer-man was carried away in a fainting state.

At certain spots there was a precipice; the soil had given way, the

stones were swallowed up, and the drain was converted into a lost well;

nothing solid could be found, and they had great difficulty in dragging

out a man who suddenly disappeared. By the advice of Fourcroy large

cages filled with tow saturated with resin were set fire to at regular

distances. The wall was covered in spots with shapeless fungi, which

might have been called tumors, and the stone itself seemed diseased in

this unbreathable medium.

Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded down-hill. At the point where

the two water-pipes of the Grand Hurleur separate he deciphered on a

projecting stone the date 1550; this stone indicated the limit where

Philibert Delorme, instructed by Henri II. to inspect the subways of

Paris, stopped. This stone was the mark of the sixteenth century in

the drain, and Bruneseau found the handiwork of the seventeenth in

the Ponceau conduit and that of the Rue Vieille du Temple, which were

arched between 1600 and 1650, and the mark of the eighteenth in the

west section of the collecting canal, enclosed and arched in 1740.

These two arches, especially the younger one, that of 1740, were more

decrepit and cracked than the masonry of the begirding drain, which

dated from 1412, the period when the Menilmontant stream of running

water was raised to the dignity of the Great Sewer of Paris, a

promotion analogous to that of a peasant who became first valet to the

king; something like Gros Jean transformed into Lébel.

They fancied they recognized here and there, especially under the

Palais du Justice, the form of old dungeons formed in the sewer itself,

hideous _in pace._ An iron collar hung in one of these cells, and they

were all bricked up. A few of the things found were peculiar; among

others the skeleton of an ourang-outang, which disappeared from the

Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance probably connected with

the famous and incontestable apparition of the devil in the Rue des

Bernardins in the last year of the eighteenth century. The poor animal

eventually drowned itself in the sewer. Under the long vaulted passage

leading to the Arche Marion a rag-picker's _hotte_ in a perfect state

of preservation caused the admiration of connoisseurs. Everywhere the

mud, which the sewer-men had come to handle intrepidly, abounded in

precious objects; gold and silver, jewelry, precious stones, and coin.

A giant who had filtered this cloaca would have found in his sieve the

wealth of centuries. At the point where the two branches of the Rue

du Temple and the Rue Sainte Avoye divide, a singular copper Huguenot

medal was picked up, bearing on one side a pig wearing a cardinals hat,

and on the other a wolf with the tiara on its head.

The most surprising discovery was at the entrance of the Great Sewer.

This entrance had been formerly closed by a gate, of which only the

hinges now remained. From one of these hinges hung a filthy shapeless

rag, which doubtless caught there as it passed, floated in the shadow,

and was gradually mouldering away. Bruneseau raised his lantern and

examined this fragment; it was of very fine linen, and at one of the

corners less gnawed than the rest could be distinguished an heraldic

crown embroidered above these seven letters, LAVBESP. The crown was

a Marquis's crown, and the seven letters signified _Laubespine._

What they had under their eyes was no less than a piece of Marat's

winding-sheet. Marat, in his youth, had had amours, at the time when he

was attached to the household of the Comte d'Artois in the capacity of

physician to the stables. Of these amours with a great lady, which are

historically notorious, this sheet had remained to him as a waif or a

souvenir; on his death, as it was the only fine linen at his lodgings,

he was buried in it. Old women wrapped up the tragic friend of the

people for the tomb in this sheet which had known voluptuousness.

Bruneseau passed on; the strip was left where it was. Was it through

contempt or respect? Marat deserved both. And then destiny was so

impressed on it that a hesitation was felt about touching it. Moreover,

things of the sepulchre should be left at the place which they select.

Altogether the relic was a strange one: a Marquise had slept in it,

Marat had rotted in it; and it had passed through the Panthéon to reach

the sewer-rats. This rag from an alcove, every crease in which Watteau

in former days would joyously have painted, ended by becoming worthy

of the intent glance of Dante.

The visit to the subways of Paris lasted for seven years,--from 1805

to 1812. While going along, Bruneseau designed, directed, and carried

out considerable operations. In 1808 he lowered the Ponceau sewer,

and everywhere pushing out new lines, carried the sewer in 1809 under

the Rue St. Denis to the Fountain of the Innocents; in 1810 under the

Rue Froidmanteau and the Salpêtrière; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve des

Petits Pères, under the Rue du Mail, the Rue de l'Écharpe and the Place

Royal; in 1812 under the Rue de la Paix and the Chaussée d'Antin. At

the same time he disinfected and cleansed the entire network, and in

the second year called his son-in-law Nargaud to his assistance. It is

thus that at the beginning of this century the old society flushed its

subway and performed the toilette of its sewer. It was so much cleaned

at any rate. Winding, cracked, unpaved, full of pits, broken by strange

elbows, ascending and descending illogically, fetid, savage, ferocious,

submerged in darkness, with cicatrices on its stones and scars on its

walls, and grewsome,--such was the old sewer of Paris, retrospectively

regarded. Ramifications in all directions, crossings of trenches,

branches, dials and stars as in saps, blind guts and alleys, arches

covered with saltpetre, infected pits, scabby exudations on the walls,

drops falling from the roof, and darkness, nothing equalled the horror

of this old excremental crypt,--the digestive apparatus of Babylon, a

den, a trench, a gulf pierced with streets, a Titanic mole-hill, in

which the mind fancies that it sees crawling through the shadow, amid

the ordure which had been splendor, that enormous blind mole, the Past.

Such, we repeat, was the sewer of the olden time.

CHAPTER V.

PRESENT PROGRESS.

At the present day the sewer is clean, cold, straight, and correct,

and almost realizes the ideal of what is understood in England by the

word "respectable." It is neat and gray, built with the plumb-line,--we

might almost say coquettishly. It resembles a contractor who has

become a Councillor of State. You almost see clearly in it, and the

mud behaves itself decently. At the first glance you might be inclined

to take it for one of those subterranean passages so common formerly,

and so useful for the flights of monarchs and princes in the good

old times "when the people loved its kings." The present sewer is a

handsome sewer; the pure style prevails there,--the classic rectilinear

Alexandrine, which, expelled from poetry, appears to have taken refuge

in architecture, seems blended with all the stones of this long, dark,

and white vault; each vomitory is an arcade, and the Rue de Rivoli

sets the fashion even in the cloaca. However, if the geometric line be

anywhere in its place, it is assuredly so in the stercoraceous trench

of a great city, where everything must be subordinated to the shortest

road. The sewer has at the present day assumed a certain official

aspect, and the police reports of which it is sometimes the object are

no longer deficient in respect to it. The words which characterize it

in the administrative language are lofty and dignified; what used to

be called a gut is now called a gallery, and what used to be a hole is

now a "look." Villon would no longer recognize the ancient lodgings he

used for emergencies. This network of cellars still has its population

of rodents, pullulating more than ever; from time to time a rat, an

old veteran, ventures his head at the window of the drain and examines

the Parisians: but even these vermin are growing tame, as they are

satisfied with their subterranean palace. The cloaca no longer retains

its primitive ferocity, and the rain which sullied the sewer of olden

times, washes that of the present day. Still, do not trust to it too

entirely, for miasmas yet inhabit it, and it is rather hypocritical

than irreproachable. In spite of all the préfecture of police and the

Board of Health have done, it exhales a vague suspicious odor, like

Tartuffe after confession. Still, we must allow that, take it all

together, sweeping is an homage which the sewer pays to civilization,

and as from this point of view Tartuffe's conscience is a progress

upon the Augean stable, it is certain that the sewer of Paris has been

improved. It is more than a progress, it is a transmutation; between

the old and the present sewer there is a revolution. Who effected

this revolution? The man whom every one forgets, and whom we have

named,--Bruneseau.

CHAPTER VI.

FUTURE PROGRESS.

Digging the sewerage of Paris was no small task. The last ten centuries

have toiled at it without being able to finish, any more than they

could finish Paris. The sewer, in fact, receives all the counterstrokes

of the growth of Paris. It is in the ground a species of dark polypus

with a thousand antennæ, which grows below, equally with the city

above. Each time that the city forms a street, the sewer stretches

out an arm. The old monarchy only constructed twenty-three thousand

three hundred metres of sewers, and Paris had reached that point on

Jan. 1, 1806. From this period, to which we shall presently revert,

the work has been usefully and energetically taken up and continued.

Napoleon built--and the figures are curious--four thousand eight

hundred and four metres; 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: all together two

hundred and twenty-six thousand six hundred metres, or sixty leagues,

of sewer,--the enormous entrails of Paris,--an obscure ramification

constantly at work, an unknown and immense construction. As we see,

the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is, at the present day, more than

tenfold what it was at the beginning of the century. It would be

difficult to imagine all the perseverance and efforts required to raise

this cloaca to the point of relative perfection at which it now is. It

was with great trouble that the old monarchical Provostry, and in the

last ten years of the eighteenth century the revolutionary Mayoralty,

succeeded in boring the five leagues of sewers which existed prior to

1806. All sorts of obstacles impeded this operation; some peculiar

to the nature of the soil, others inherent in the prejudices of the

working population of Paris. Paris is built on a stratum strangely

rebellious to the pick, the spade, the borer, and human manipulation.

Nothing is more difficult to pierce and penetrate than this geological

formation on which the marvellous historical formation called Paris

is superposed. So soon as labor in any shape ventures into this layer

of alluvium, subterranean resistances abound. They are liquid clay,

running springs, hard rocks, and that soft and deep mud which the

special science calls "mustard." The pick advances laboriously in

the calcareous layers alternating with very thin veins of clay and

schistose strata incrusted with oyster-shells, which are contemporaries

of the Pre-Adamite oceans. At times a stream suddenly bursts into a

tunnel just commenced, and inundates the workmen, or a slip of chalk

takes place and rushes forward with the fury of a cataract, breaking

like glass the largest supporting shores. Very recently at La Villette,

when it was found necessary to carry the collecting sewer under the

St. Martin canal without stopping the navigation or letting off the

water, a fissure formed in the bed of the canal, and the water poured

into the tunnel deriding the efforts of the draining-pumps. It was

found necessary to employ a diver to seek for the fissure which was in

the mouth of the great basin, and it was only stopped up with great

difficulty. Elsewhere, near the Seine, and even at some distance from

the river, as, for instance, at Belleville, Grande Rue, and Passage

Lunière, bottomless sands are found, in which men have been swallowed

up. Add asphyxia by miasmas, interment by slips and sudden breaking

in of the soil; add typhus, too, with which the workmen are slowly

impregnated. In our days, after having hollowed the gallery of Clichy

with a _banquette_ to convey the mainwater conduit of the Ourque, a

work performed by trenches ten metres in depth; after having arched

the Bièvre from the Boulevard de l'Hôpital to the Seine, in the midst

of earth-slips and by the help of trenching often through putrid

matter, and of shores; after having, in order to deliver Paris from

the torrent-like waters of the Montmartre, and give an outlet to the

fluviatic pond of twenty-three acres which stagnated near the Barrière

des Martyrs; after having, we say, constructed the line of sewers

from the Barrière Blanche to the Aubervilliers road, in four months,

by working day and night at a depth of eleven metres; after having--a

thing unknown before--executed subterraneously a sewer in the Rue Barre

du Bec, without trench, at a depth of six metres, the surveyor Monnot

died. After arching three thousand metres of sewer in all parts of the

city, from the Rue Traversière St. Antoine to the Rue de l'Ourcine;

after having, by the Arbalète branch, freed the Censier-Mouffetard

square from pluvial inundations; after having constructed the St.

George sewer through liquid sand upon rubble and béton, and after

having lowered the formidable pitch of the Nôtre Dame de Nazareth

branch, the engineer Duleau died. There are no bulletins for such acts

of bravery, which are more useful, however, than the brutal butchery of

battle-fields.

The sewers of Paris were in 1832 far from being what they are now.

Bruneseau gave the impulse, but it required the cholera to determine

the vast reconstruction which has taken place since. It is surprising

to say, for instance, that in 1821 a portion of the begirding sewer,

called the Grand Canal, as at Venice, still stagnated in the open air,

in the Rue des Gourdes. It was not till 1823 that the city of Paris

found in its pocket the twenty-six thousand six hundred and eighty

francs, six centimes, needed for covering this turpitude. The three

absorbing wells of the Combat, la Cunette, and St. Mandé, with their

disgorging apparatus, draining-wells, and deodorizing branches, merely

date from 1836. The intestine canal of Paris has been re-made, and,

as we said, augmented more than tenfold during the last quarter of a

century. Thirty years ago, at the period of the insurrection of June 5

and 6, it was still in many parts almost the old sewer. A great number

of streets, now convex, were at that time broken causeways. There

could be frequently seen at the bottom of the water-sheds of streets

and squares, large square gratings, whose iron glistened from the

constant passage of the crowd, dangerous and slippery for vehicles, and

throwing horses down. The official language of the department of the

roads and bridges gave these gratings the expressive name of _Cassis._

In 1832 in a number of streets,--Rue de l'Étoile, Rue St. Louis, Rue

du Temple, Rue Vieille du Temple, Rue Nôtre Dame de Nazareth, Rue

Folie Méricourt, Quai aux Fleurs, Rue du Petit Muse, Rue de Normandie,

Rue Pont aux Biches, Rue des Marais, Faubourg St. Martin, Rue Nôtre

Dame des Victoires, Faubourg Montmartre, Rue Grange Batelière, at the

Champs Élysées, the Rue Jacob, and the Rue de Tournon, the old Gothic

cloaca still cynically displayed its throats. They were enormous

stone orifices, sometimes surrounded with posts, with a monumental

effrontery. Paris in 1806 was much in the same state as regards

sewers as in May, 1663,--five thousand three hundred and twenty-eight

toises. After Bruneseau, on Jan. 1, 1832, there were forty thousand

three hundred metres. From 1806 to 1831 seven hundred and fifty metres

were on the average constructed annually; since then eight and even

ten thousand metres have been made every year in brick-work, with a

coating of concrete on a foundation of b£ton. At two hundred francs the

metre, the sixty leagues of drainage in the Paris of to-day represent

forty-eight million francs.

In addition to the economic progress to which we alluded at the outset,

serious considerations as to the public health are attached to this

immense question,--the drainage of Paris. Paris is situated between

two sheets,--a sheet of water and a sheet of air. The sheet of water,

lying at a very great depth, but already tapped by two borings, is

supplied by the stratum of green sandstone situated between the chalk

and the Jurassic limestone; this stratum may be represented by a

disc with a radius of twenty-five leagues; a multitude of rivers and

streams drip into it, and the Seine, the Marne, the Yonne, the Oisin,

the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne, and the Loire are drunk in a glass of

water from the Grenelle well. The sheet of water is salubrious, for

it comes from the sky first, and then from the earth; but the sheet

of air is unhealthy, for it comes from the sewer. All the miasmas of

the cloaca are mingled with the breathing of the city; hence this bad

breath. The atmosphere taken from above a dungheap, it has been proved

scientifically, is purer than the atmosphere taken from over Paris.

Within a given time, by the aid of progress, improvements in machinery,

and enlightenment, the sheet of water will be employed to purify the

sheet of air, that is to say, to wash the sewer. It is known that by

washing the sewer we mean restoring the ordure to the earth by sending

dung to the arable lands and manure to the grass lands. Through this

simple fact there will be for the whole social community a diminution

of wretchedness and an augmentation of health. At the present hour the

radiation of the diseases of Paris extends for fifty leagues round the

Louvre, taken as the axle of this pestilential wheel.

We might say that for the last ten centuries the cloaca has been the

misery of Paris, and the sewer is the viciousness which the city has

in its blood. The popular instinct has never been deceived, and the

trade of the sewer-man was formerly almost as dangerous and almost as

repulsive to the people as that of the horse-slaughterer, which so

long was regarded with horror and left to the hangman. Great wages

were required to induce a bricklayer to disappear in this fetid

sap; the ladder of the well-digger hesitated to plunge into it. It

was said proverbially, "Going into the sewer is entering the tomb;"

and all sorts of hideous legends, as we said, covered this colossal

cesspool with terrors. It is a formidable fosse which bears traces of

the revolutions of the globe as well as the revolutions of men; and

vestiges may be found there of every cataclysm from the shells of the

Deluge to the ragged sheet of Marat.

BOOK III.

MUD, BUT SOUL.

CHAPTER I.

THE CLOACA AND THE SURPRISES.

It was in the sewer of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself. This is

a further resemblance of Paris with the sea, as in the ocean the diver

can disappear there. It was an extraordinary transition, in the very

heart of the city. Jean Valjean had left the city, and in a twinkling,

the time required to lift a trap and let it fall again, he had passed

from broad daylight to complete darkness, from midday to midnight, from

noise to silence, from the uproar of thunder to the stagnation of the

tomb, and, by an incident far more prodigious even than that of the

Rue Polonceau, from the extremest peril to the most absolute security.

A sudden fall into a cellar, disappearance in the oubliette of Paris,

leaving this street where death was all around for this species of

sepulchre in which was life,--it was a strange moment. He stood for

some minutes as if stunned, listening and amazed. The trap-door of

safety had suddenly opened beneath him, and the Celestial Goodness

had to some extent taken him by treachery. Admirable ambuscades of

Providence! Still, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did

not know whether what he was carrying in this pit were alive or dead.

His first sensation was blindness, for he all at once could see

nothing. He felt too that in a moment he had become deaf, for he could

hear nothing more. The frenzied storm of murder maintained a few yards

above him only reached him confusedly and indistinctly, and like a

noise from a depth. He felt that he had something solid under his feet,

but that was all; still, it was sufficient. He stretched out one arm,

then the other; he touched the wall on both sides and understood that

the passage was narrow; his foot slipped, and he understood that the

pavement was damp. He advanced one foot cautiously, fearing a hole, a

cesspool, or some gulf, and satisfied himself that the pavement went

onwards. A fetid gust warned him of the spot where he was. At the

expiration of a few minutes he was no longer blind, a little light

fell through the trap by which he descended, and his eye grew used to

this vault He began to distinguish something. The passage in which he

had run to earth--no other word expresses the situation better--was

walled up behind him; it was one of those blind alleys called in the

professional language branches. Before him he had another wall,--a wall

of night. The light of the trap expired ten or twelve feet from the

spot where Jean Valjean was, and scarce produced a livid whiteness on

a few yards of the damp wall of the sewer. Beyond that the opaqueness

was massive; to pierce it appeared horrible, and to enter it seemed

like being swallowed up. Yet it was possible to bury one's self in this

wall of fog, and it must be done; and must even be done quickly. Jean

Valjean thought that the grating which he had noticed in the street

might also be noticed by the troops, and that all depended on chance.

They might also come down into the well and search, so he had not a

minute to lose. He had laid Marius on the ground and now picked him

up,--that is again the right expression,--took him on his shoulders,

and set out. He resolutely entered the darkness.

The truth is, that they were less saved than Jean Valjean believed;

perils of another nature, but equally great, awaited them. After the

flashing whirlwind of the combat came the cavern of miasmas and snares;

after the chaos, the cloaca. Jean Valjean had passed from one circle of

the Inferno into another. When he had gone fifty yards he was obliged

to stop, for a question occurred to him; the passage ran into another,

which it intersected, and two roads offered themselves. Which should

he take? Ought he to turn to the left, or right? How was he to find

his way in this black labyrinth? This labyrinth, we have said, has a

clew in its slope, and following the slope leads to the river. Jean

Valjean understood this immediately; he said to himself that he was

probably in the sewer of the markets; that if he turned to the left and

followed the incline he would arrive in a quarter of an hour at some

opening on the Seine between the Pont au Change and the Pont Neuf,

that is to say, appear in broad daylight in the busiest part of Paris.

Perhaps he might come out at some street opening, and passers-by would

be stupefied at seeing two blood-stained men emerge from the ground at

their feet. The police would come up and they would be carried off to

the nearest guard-room; they would be prisoners before they had come

out. It would be better, therefore, to bury himself in the labyrinth,

confide in the darkness, and leave the issue to Providence.

He went up the incline and turned to the right; when he had gone round

the corner of the gallery the distant light from the trap disappeared,

the curtain of darkness fell on him again, and he became blind once

more. For all that he advanced as rapidly as he could; Marius's arms

were passed round life neck, and his feet hung down behind. He held

the two arms with one hand and felt the wall with the other. Marius's

cheek touched his and was glued to it, as it was bloody, and he felt

a warm stream which came from Marius drip on him and penetrate his

clothing. Still, a warm breath in his ear, which touched the wounded

man's mouth, indicated respiration, and consequently life. The passage

in which Jean Valjean was now walking was not so narrow as the former,

and he advanced with some difficulty. The rain of the previous night

had not yet passed off, and formed a small torrent in the centre,

and he was forced to hug the wall in order not to lave his feet in

the water. He went on thus darkly, like a creature of the night

groping in the invisible, and subterraneously lost in the veins of

gloom. Still, by degrees, either that a distant grating sent a little

floating light into this opaque mist, or that his eyes grew accustomed

to the obscurity, he regained some vague vision, and began to notice

confusedly, at one moment the wall he was touching, at another the

vault under which he was passing. The pupil is dilated at night and

eventually finds daylight in it, in the same way as the soul is dilated

in misfortune and eventually finds God in it.

To direct himself was difficult, for the sewers represent, so to speak,

the outline of the streets standing over them. There were in the Paris

of that day two thousand two hundred streets, and imagine beneath them

that forest of dark branches called the sewer. The system of sewers

existing at that day, if placed end on end, would have given a length

of eleven leagues. We have already said that the present network, owing

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

leagues. Jean Valjean began by deceiving himself; he fancied that he

was under the Rue St. Denis, and it was unlucky that he was not so.

There is under that street an old stone drain, dating from Louis XIII.,

which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the Great Sewer,

with only one turn on the right, by the old Cour des Miracles, and a

single branch, the St. Martin sewer, whose four arms cut each other at

right angles. But the passage of the Little Truanderie, whose entrance

was near the Corinth wine-shop, never communicated with the sewer of

the Rue St. Denis; it falls into the Montmartre sewer, and that is

where Jean Valjean now was. There opportunities for losing himself were

abundant, for the Montmartre drain is one of the most labyrinthian

of the old network. Luckily Jean Valjean had left behind him the

sewer of the markets, whose geometrical plan represents a number of

entangled top-gallant-masts; but he had before him more than one

embarrassing encounter, and more than one street corner--for they are

streets--offering itself in the obscurity as a note of interrogation.

In the first place on his left, the vast Plâtrière sewer, a sort of

Chinese puzzle, thrusting forth and intermingling its chaos of T and Z

under the Post Office, and the rotunda of the grain-markets, as far as

the Seine, where it terminates in Y; secondly, on his right the curved

passage of the Rue du Cadran, with its three teeth, which are so many

blind alleys; thirdly, on his left the Mail branch, complicated almost

at the entrance by a species of fork, and running with repeated zigzags

to the great cesspool of the Louvre, which ramifies in every direction;

and lastly, on his right the blind alley of the Rue des Jeûneurs,

without counting other pitfalls, ere he reached the engirdling sewer,

which alone could lead him to some issue sufficiently distant to be

safe.

Had Jean Valjean had any notion of all we have just stated he would

have quickly perceived, merely by feeling the wall, that he was not

in the subterranean gallery of the Rue St. Denis. Instead of the old

freestone, instead of the old architecture, haughty and royal even

in the sewer, with its arches and continuous courses of granite,

which cost eight hundred livres the fathom, he would feel under his

hand modern cheapness, the economic expedient, brick-work supported

on a layer of béton, which costs two hundred francs the metre,--that

bourgeois masonry known as _à petits matériaux_; but he knew nothing

of all this. He advanced anxiously but calmly, seeing nothing,

hearing nothing, plunged into chance, that is to say, swallowed up in

Providence. By degrees, however, we are bound to state that a certain

amount of horror beset him, and the shadow which enveloped him entered

his mind. He was walking in an enigma. This aqueduct of the cloaca is

formidable, for it intersects itself in a vertiginous manner, and it is

a mournful thing to be caught in this Paris of darkness. Jean Valjean

was obliged to find, and almost invent, his road without seeing it. In

this unknown region each step that he ventured might be his last. How

was he to get out of it? Would he find an issue? Would he find it in

time? Could he pierce and penetrate this colossal subterranean sponge

with its passages of stone? Would he meet there some unexpected knot

of darkness? Would he arrive at something inextricable and impassable?

Would Marius die of hemorrhage, and himself of hunger? Would they both

end by being lost there, and form two skeletons in a corner of this

night? He did not know; he asked himself all this and could not find an

answer. The intestines of Paris are a precipice, and like the prophet

he was in the monster's belly.

He suddenly had a surprise; at the most unexpected moment, and without

ceasing to walk in a straight line, he perceived that he was no longer

ascending; the water of the gutter plashed against his heels instead

of coming to his toes. The sewer was now descending; why? Was he about

to reach the Seine suddenly? That danger was great, but the peril of

turning back was greater still, and he continued to advance. He was

not proceeding toward the Seine; the shelving ridge which the soil of

Paris makes on the right bank empties one of its water-sheds into the

Seine and the other into the Great Sewer. The crest of this ridge,

which determines the division of the waters, designs a most capricious

line; the highest point is in the Sainte Avoye sewer, beyond the Rue

Michel-le-comte, in the Louvre sewer, near the boulevards, and in the

Montmartre drain, near the markets. This highest point Jean Valjean

had reached, and he was proceeding toward the engirdling sewer, or in

the right direction, but he knew it not. Each time that he reached a

branch he felt the corners, and if he found the opening narrower than

the passage in which he was he did not enter, but continued his march,

correctly judging that any narrower way must end in a blind alley, and

could only take him from his object, that is to say, an outlet. He thus

avoided the fourfold snare laid for him in the darkness by the four

labyrinths which we have enumerated. At a certain moment he recognized

that he was getting from under that part of Paris petrified by the

riot, where the barricades had suppressed circulation, and returning

under living and normal Paris. He suddenly heard above his head a

sound like thunder, distant but continuous; it was the rolling of

vehicles.

He had been walking about half an hour, at least that was the

calculation he made, and had not thought of resting; he had merely

changed the hand which held Marius up. The darkness was more profound

than ever, but this darkness reassured him. All at once he saw his

shadow before him; it stood out upon a faint and almost indistinct

redness, which vaguely impurpled the roadway at his feet and the vault

above his head, and glided along the greasy walls of the passage.

Stupefied, he turned around.

Behind him, in the part of the passage he had come from, at a distance

which appeared immense, shone a sort of horrible star, obliterating

the dark density, which seemed to be looking at him. It was the

gloomy police star rising in the sewer. Behind this star there moved

confusedly nine or ten black, upright, indistinct, and terrible forms.

CHAPTER II.

EXPLANATION.

On the day of June 6 a battue of the sewers was ordered, for it was

feared lest the conquered should fly to them as a refuge, and Prefect

Gisquet ordered occult Paris to be searched, while General Bugeaud

swept public Paris,--a double connected operation, which required a

double strategy of the public force, represented above by the army and

beneath by the police. Three squads of agents and sewer-men explored

the subway of Paris,--the first the right bank, the second the left

bank, and the third the Cité. The agents were armed with carbines,

bludgeons, swords, and daggers, and what was at this moment pointed at

Jean Valjean was the lantern of the round of the right bank. This round

had just inspected the winding gallery and three blind alleys which

are under the Rue du Cadran. While the lantern was moved about at the

bottom of these blind alleys, Jean Valjean in his progress came to the

entrance of the gallery, found it narrower than the main gallery, and

had not entered it. The police, on coming out of the Cadran gallery,

fancied that they could hear the sound of footsteps in the direction of

the engirdling sewer, and they were really Jean Valjean's footsteps.

The head sergeant of the round raised his lantern, and the squad began

peering into the mist in the direction whence the noise had come.

It was an indescribable moment for Jean Valjean; luckily, if he saw the

lantern well the lantern saw him badly, for it was the light and he

was the darkness. He was too far off, and blended with the blackness

of the spot, so he drew himself up against the wall and stopped.

However, he did not explain to himself what was moving behind him, want

of sleep and food and emotion having made him pass into a visionary

state. He saw a flash, and round this flash, spectres. What was it?

He did not understand. When Jean Valjean stopped the noise ceased;

the police listened and heard nothing, they looked and saw nothing,

and hence consulted together. There was at that period at that point

in the Montmartre sewer a sort of square called _de service_, which

has since been done away with, owing to the small internal lake which

the torrents of rain formed there, and the squad assembled on this

square. Jean Valjean saw them make a sort of circle, and then bull-dog

heads came together and whispered. The result of this council held by

the watch-dogs was that they were mistaken, that there had been no

noise, that there was nobody there, that it was useless to enter the

surrounding sewer, that it would be time wasted, but that they must

hasten to the St. Merry drain; for if there were anything to be done

and any "boussingot" to track, it would be there. From time to time

parties new-sole their old insults. In 1832 the word "boussingot"

formed the transition between the word "jacobin," no longer current,

and the word "demagogue," at that time almost unused, and which

has since done such excellent service. The sergeant gave orders to

left-wheel toward the watershed of the Seine. Had they thought of

dividing into two squads and going in both directions, Jean Valjean

would have been caught. It is probable that the instructions of

the Préfecture, fearing the chance of a fight with a large body of

insurgents, forbade the round from dividing. The squad set out again,

leaving Jean Valjean behind; and in all this movement he perceived

nothing except the eclipse of the lantern, which was suddenly turned

away.

Before starting, the sergeant, to satisfy his police conscience,

discharged his carbine in the direction where Jean Valjean was. The

detonation rolled echoing along the crypt, like the rumbling of these

Titanic bowels. A piece of plaster which fell into the gutter and

plashed up the water a few yards from Jean Valjean warned him that the

bullet had struck the vault above his head. Measured and slow steps

echoed for some time along the wooden causeway, growing more and more

deadened by the growing distance; the group of black forms disappeared;

a light oscillated and floated, forming on the vault a ruddy circle,

which decreased and disappeared; the silence again became profound, the

obscurity again became complete, and blindness and deafness again took

possession of the gloom; Jean Valjean, not daring yet to stir, remained

leaning for a long time against the wall, with outstretched ear and

dilated eyeballs, watching the vanishing of this patrol of phantoms.

CHAPTER III

THE TRACKED MAN.

We must do the police of that day the justice of saying that even in

the gravest public conjunctures they imperturbably accomplished their

duties of watching the highways and of inspectorship. A riot was not in

their eyes a pretext to leave the bridle to malefactors, and to neglect

society for the reason that the Government was in danger. The ordinary

duties were performed correctly in addition to the extraordinary

duties, and were in no way disturbed. In the midst of an incalculable

political event, under the pressure of a possible revolution, an

agent, not allowing himself to be affected by the insurrection and the

barricade, would track a robber. Something very like this occurred

on the afternoon of June 6, on the right bank of the Seine, a little

beyond the Pont des Invalides. There is no bank there at the present

day, and the appearance of the spot has been altered. On this slope

two men, a certain distance apart, were observing each other; the one

in front seemed to be trying to get away, while the one behind wanted

to catch him up. It was like a game of chess played at a distance and

silently; neither of them seemed to be in a hurry, and both walked

slowly, as if they were afraid that increased speed on the part of one

would be imitated by the other. It might have been called an appetite

following a prey, without appearing to do so purposely; the prey was

crafty, and kept on guard.

The proportions required between the tracked marten and the tracking

dog were observed. The one trying to escape was thin and mean looking;

the one trying to capture was a tall determined fellow, of rugged

aspect, and a rough one to meet. The first, feeling himself the

weaker, avoided the second, but did so in a deeply furious way; any

one who could have observed him would have seen in his eyes the gloomy

hostility of flight, and all the threat which there is in fear; the

slope was deserted, there were no passers-by, not even a boatman or

raftsman in the boats moored here and there. They could only be noticed

easily from the opposite quay, and any one who had watched them at that

distance would have seen that the man in front appeared a bristling,

ragged, and shambling fellow, anxious and shivering under a torn

blouse, while the other was a classic and official personage, wearing

the frock-coat of authority buttoned up to the chin. The reader would

probably recognize these two men, were he to see them more closely.

What was the object of the last one? Probably he wished to clothe the

other man more warmly. When a man dressed by the State pursues a man

in rags, it is in order to make him also a man dressed by the State.

The difference of color is the sole question; to be dressed in blue is

glorious, to be dressed in red is disagreeable, for there is a purple

of the lower classes. It was probably some disagreeable thing, and

some purple of this sort, which the first man desired to avoid.

If the other allowed him to go on ahead, and did not yet arrest him,

it was, in all appearance, in the hope of seeing him arrive at some

significative rendezvous and some group worth capturing. This delicate

operation is called tracking. What renders this conjecture highly

probable, is the fact that the buttoned-up man, perceiving from the

slope an empty fiacre passing, made a sign to the driver; the driver

understood, evidently perceived with whom he had to deal, turned

round, and began following the two men along the quay. This was not

perceived by the ragged, shambling fellow in front. The hackney coach

rolled along under the trees of the Champs Élysées, and over the

parapet could be seen the bust of the driver, whip in hand. One of

the secret instructions of the police to the agents is, "Always have

a hackney coach at hand in case of need." While each of these men

manœuvred with irreproachable strategy, they approached an incline

in the quay, which allowed drivers coming from Passy to water their

horses in the river. This incline has since been suppressed for the

sake of symmetry,--horses die of thirst, but the eye is gratified. It

was probable that the man in the blouse would ascend by this incline

in order to try to escape in the Champs Élysées, a place adorned with

trees, but, in return, much frequented by police agents, where the

other could easily procure assistance. This point of the quay is a very

little distance from the house brought from Moret to Paris in 1824 by

Colonel Brack, and called the house of Francis I. A guard is at hand

there. To the great surprise of his watcher, the tracked man did not

turn up the road to the watering-place, but continued to advance along

the bank parallel with the quay. His position was evidently becoming

critical, for unless he threw himself into the Seine, what could he do?

There were no means now left him of returning to the quay, no incline

and no steps, and they were close to the spot marked by the turn in the

Seine, near the Pont de Jéna, where the bank, gradually contracting,

ended in a narrow strip, and was lost in the water. There he must

inevitably find himself blockaded between the tall wall on his right,

the river on his left and facing him, and authority at his heels. It is

true that this termination of the bank was masked from sight by a pile

of rubbish seven feet high, the result of some demolition. But did this

man hope to conceal himself profitably behind this heap? The expedient

would have been puerile. He evidently did not dream of that, for the

innocence of robbers does not go so far. The pile of rubbish formed on

the water-side a sort of eminence extending in a promontory to the quay

wall; the pursued man reached this small mound and went round it, so

that he was no longer seen by the other. The latter, not seeing, was

not seen, and he took advantage of this to give up all dissimulation

and walk very fast. In a few minutes he reached the heap and turned it,

but there stood stupefied. The man he was pursuing was not there; it

was a total eclipse of the man in the blouse. The bank did not run more

than thirty yards beyond the heap, and then plunged under the water

which washed the quay wall. The fugitive could not have thrown himself

into the Seine, or have climbed up the quay wall, without being seen by

his pursuer. What had become of him?

The man in the buttoned-up coat walked to the end of the bank and stood

there for a moment, thoughtfully, with clenched fists and scowling

eye. All at once he smote his forehead; he had just perceived, at the

point where the ground ended and the water began, a wide, low, arched

iron grating, provided with a heavy lock and three massive hinges. This

grating, a sort of gate pierced at the bottom of the quay, opened on

the river as much as on the bank, and a black stream poured from under

it into the Seine. Beyond the heavy rusty bars could be distinguished a

sort of arched and dark passage. The man folded his arms and looked at

the grating reproachfully, and this look not being sufficient, he tried

to push it open, he shook it, but it offered a sturdy resistance. It

was probable that it had just been opened, although no sound had been

heard,-a singular thing with so rusty a gate,--but it was certain that

it had been closed again. This indicated that the man who had opened

the gate had not a pick-lock but a key. This evidence at once burst on

the mind of the man who was trying to open the grating, and drew from

him this indignant apostrophe,--

"That is strong! A government key!"

Then calming himself immediately, he expressed a whole internal world

of ideas by this outburst of monosyllables, marked by an almost

ironical accent,--

"Well! Well! Well! Well!"

This said, hoping we know not what, either to see the man come out

or others enter, he posted himself on the watch behind the heap of

rubbish, with the patient rage of a yard-mastiff. On its side, the

hackney coach, which regulated itself by all his movements, stopped

above him near the parapet. The driver, foreseeing a long halt, put

on his horses the nose-bag full of damp oats so well known to the

Parisians, upon whom the Government, we may remark parenthetically,

sometimes puts it. The few passers over the Pont de Jéna, before

going on, turned their heads to look for a moment at these motionless

objects,--the man on the bank and the hackney coach on the quay.

CHAPTER IV.

HE TOO BEARS HIS CROSS.

Jean Valjean had resumed his march, and had not stopped again. This

march grew more and more laborious, for the level of these passages

varies; the average height is about five feet six inches, and was

calculated for a man's stature. Jean Valjean was compelled to stoop

so as not to dash Marius against the roof, and was forced at each

moment to bend down, then draw himself up and incessantly feel the

wall. The dampness of the stones and of the flooring rendered them

bad supports, either for the hand or the foot, and he tottered in the

hideous dungheap of the city. The intermittent flashes of the street

gratings only appeared at lengthened intervals, and were so faint

that the bright sunshine seemed to be moonlight; all the rest was

fog, miasma, opaqueness, and blackness. Jean Valjean was hungry and

thirsty, the latter most, and it was like the sea; there was "water,

water everywhere, but not a drop to drink." His strength, which, as we

know, was prodigious, and but slightly diminished by age, owing to his

chaste and sober life, was, however, beginning to give way; fatigue

assailed him, and his decreasing strength increased the weight of his

burden. Marius, who was perhaps dead, was heavy, like all inert bodies;

but Jean Valjean held him so that his chest was not affected, and he

could breathe as easily as possible. He felt between his legs the rapid

gliding of rats, and one was so startled as to bite him. From time to

time a gush of fresh air came through the gratings, which revived him.

It might be about 3 P.M. when he reached the engirdling sewer, and

he was at first amazed by the sudden widening. He unexpectedly found

himself in a gallery whose two walk his outstretched arms did not

reach, and under an arch which his head did not touch. The Great Sewer,

in fact, is eight feet in width by seven high. At the point where

the Montmartre drain joins the Great Sewer two other subterranean

galleries, that of the Rue de Provence and that of the Abattoir, form

cross-roads. Between these four ways a less sagacious man would have

been undecided; but Jean Valjean selected the widest, that is to say,

the engirdling sewer. But here the question came back again, "Should

he ascend or descend?" He thought that the situation was pressing,

and that he must at all risks now reach the Seine, in other words,

descend, so he turned to the left. It was fortunate that he did so,

for it would be an error to suppose that the engirdling sewer has two

issues, one toward Bercy, the other toward Passy, and that it is, as

its name indicates, the subterranean belt of Paris on the right bank.

The Great Sewer, which is nought else, it must be borne in mind, than

the old Menilmontant stream, leads, if you ascend it, to a blind alley,

that is to say, to its old starting-point, a spring at the foot

of the Menilmontant mound. It has no direct communication with the

branch which collects the waters of Paris after leaving the Popincourt

quarter, and which falls into the Seine by the Amelot sewer above the

old isle of Louviers. This branch, which completes the collecting

sewer, is separated from it under the Rue Menilmontant by masonry-work,

which marks the point of the division of the waters into up-stream and

down-stream. If Jean Valjean had remounted the gallery he would have

arrived, exhausted by fatigue and dying, at a wall; he would have been

lost.

Strictly speaking, by going back a little way, entering the passage

of the Filles du Calvaire, on condition that he did not hesitate at

the subterranean point of junction of the Boucherat cross-roads, by

taking the St. Louis passage, then on the left the St. Gilles trench,

then by turning to the right and avoiding the St. Sebastian gallery,

Jean Valjean might have reached the Amelot sewer; and then if he did

not lose his way in the species of F which is under the Bastille,

he would have reached the outlet on the Seine near the Arsenal. But

for that he must have thoroughly known, in all its ramifications and

piercings, the enormous madrepore of the sewer. Now, we dwell on the

fact that he knew nothing of this frightful labyrinth in which he was

marching, and had he been asked where he was he would have replied,

"In night." His instinct served him well; going down, in fact, was

the only salvation possible. He left on his right the two passages

which ramify in the shape of a claw under the Rues Laffitte and St.

Georges, and the long bifurcate corridor of the Chaussée d'Antin. A

little beyond an affluent, which was likely the Madeleine branch, he

stopped, for he was very weary. A large grating, probably the one in

the Rue d'Anjou, produced an almost bright light. Jean Valjean, with

the gentle movements which a brother would bestow on a wounded brother,

laid Marius on the banquette of the sewer, and his white face gleamed

under the white light of the air-hole as from the bottom of a tomb. His

eyes were closed, his hair stuck to his forehead like paint-brushes on

which the red paint had dried, his hands were hanging and dead, his

limbs cold, and blood was clotted at the corner of his lips. Coagulated

blood had collected in his cravat knot, his shirt entered the wounds,

and the cloth of his coat rubbed the gaping edges of the quivering

flesh. Jean Valjean, removing the clothes with the tips of his fingers,

laid his hand on his chest; the heart still beat. Jean Valjean tore up

his shirt, bandaged the wounds as well as he could, and stopped the

blood that was flowing; then, stooping down in this half daylight over

Marius, who was still unconscious and almost breathless, he looked at

him with indescribable hatred.

In moving Marius's clothes he had found in his pockets two things,--the

loaf, which he had forgotten the previous evening, and his pocket-book.

He ate the bread and opened the pocket-book. On the first page he read

the lines written by Marius, as will be remembered,--

"My name is Marius Pontmercy. Carry my body to my grandfather, M.

Gillenormand, No. 6, Rue des Filles du Calvaire, in the Marais."

Jean Valjean read by the light of the grating these lines, and remained

for a time as it were absorbed in himself, and repeating in a low

voice, M. Gillenormand, No. 6, Rue des Filles du Calvaire. He returned

the portfolio to Marius's pocket; he had eaten, and his strength had

come back to him. He raised Marius again, carefully laid his head on

his right shoulder, and began descending the sewer. The Great Sewer,

running along the roadway of the valley of Menilmontant, is nearly

two leagues in length, and is paved for a considerable portion of the

distance. This torch of names of Paris streets, with which we enlighten

for the reader Jean Valjean's subterranean march, he did not possess.

Nothing informed him what zone of the city he was traversing, nor

what distance he had gone; still, the growing paleness of the flakes

of light which he met from time to time indicated to him that the sun

was retiring from the pavement, and that day would be soon ended, and

the rolling of vehicles over his head, which had become intermittent

instead of continuous, and then almost ceased, proved to him that he

was no longer under central Paris, and was approaching some solitary

region, near the external boulevards or most distant quays, where there

are fewer houses and streets, and the drain has fewer gratings. The

obscurity thickened around Jean Valjean; still he continued to advance,

groping his way in the shadow.

This shadow suddenly became terrible.

CHAPTER V.

SAND, LIKE WOMAN, AS A FINENESS THAT IS PERFIDIOUS.

He felt that he was entering water, and that he had under his feet no

longer stone but mud. It often happens on certain coasts of Brittany

or Scotland that a man, whether traveller or fisherman, walking at low

tide on the sand, some distance from the shore, suddenly perceives that

during the last few minutes he has found some difficulty in walking.

The shore beneath his feet is like pitch, his heels are attached to

it, it is no longer sand but bird-lime; the sand is perfectly dry,

but at every step taken, so soon as the foot is raised the imprint it

leaves fills with water. The eye, however, has perceived no change,

the immense expanse is smooth and calm, all the sand seems alike,

nothing distinguishes the soil which is solid from that which is no

longer so, and the little merry swarm of water-fleas continue to leap

tumultuously round the feet of the wayfarer. The man follows his road,

turns toward the land, and tries to approach the coast, not that he is

alarmed; alarmed at what? Still, he feels as if the heaviness of his

feet increased at every step that he takes; all at once he sinks in,

sinks in two or three inches. He is decidedly not on the right road,

and stops to look about him. Suddenly he looks at his feet, but they

have disappeared, the sand covers them. He draws his feet out of the

sand and tries to turn back, but he sinks in deeper still. The sand

comes up to his ankle; he pulls it out and turns to his left, when the

sand comes to his knee; he turns to the right, and the sand comes up

to his thigh; then he recognizes with indescribable terror that he is

caught in a quicksand, and has under him the frightful medium in which

a man can no more walk than a fish can swim. He throws away his load,

if he have one, and lightens himself like a ship in distress; but it

is too late, for the sand is already above his knees. He calls out,

waves his hat or handkerchief, but the sand gains on him more and more.

If the shore is deserted, if land is too distant, if the sand-bank is

too ill-famed, if there is no hero in the vicinity, it is all over

with him, and he is condemned to be swallowed by the quicksands. He is

doomed to that long, awful, implacable interment, impossible to delay

or hasten, which lasts hours; which never ends; which seizes you when

erect, free, and in perfect health; which drags you by the feet; which,

at every effort you attempt, every cry you utter, drags you a little

deeper; which seems to punish you for your resistance by a redoubled

clutch; which makes a man slowly enter the ground while allowing him

ample time to regard the houses, the trees, the green fields, the

smoke from the villages on the plain, the sails of the vessels on the

sea, the birds that fly and sing, the sun, and the sky. A quicksand

is a sepulchre that converts itself into a tide, and ascends from

the bottom of the earth toward a living man. Each moment inexorably

wraps grave-clothes about him. The wretch tries to sit, to lie down,

to walk, to crawl; all the movements that he makes bury him; he draws

himself up, and only sinks deeper; he feels himself being swallowed up;

he yells, implores, cries to the clouds, writhes his arms, and grows

desperate. Then he is in the sand up to his waist; the sand reaches his

chest, he is but a bust. He raises his hands, utters furious groans,

digs his nails into the sand, tries to hold by this dust, raises

himself on his elbows to tear himself from this soft sheath, and sobs

frenziedly. The sand mounts, the sand reaches his shoulders, the sand

reaches his neck, the face alone is visible now. The mouth cries, the

sand fills it; silence. The eyes still look, the sand closes them;

night. Then the forehead sinks, and a little hair waves above the

sand; a hand emerges, digs up the sand, is waved, and disappears,--a

sinister effacement of a man.

At times the rider is swallowed up with his horse, at times the carter

with his cart. It is a shipwreck otherwhere than in the water; it is

the land drowning man. The land penetrated by the ocean becomes a

snare; it offers itself as a plain, and opens like a wave. The abyss

has its acts of treachery.

Such a mournful adventure, always possible on some seashore, was also

possible some thirty years ago in the sewer of Paris. Before the

important works began in 1833 the subway of Paris was subject to sudden

breakings-in. The water filtered through a subjacent and peculiarly

friable soil; and the roadway, if made of paving-stones, as in the old

drains, or of concrete upon béton, as in the new galleries, having no

support, bent. A bend in a planking of this nature is a crevice, and a

crevice is a bursting-in. The roadway broke away for a certain length,

and such a gap, a gulf of mud, was called in professional language

_fontis._ What is a fontis? It is the quicksand of the seashore

suddenly met with underground; it is the strand of Mont St. Michel in

a sewer. The moistened soil is in a state of fusion, all its particles

are held in suspense in a shifting medium; it is not land and it is not

water. The depth is at times very great. Nothing can be more formidable

than meeting with such a thing; if water predominate death is quick,

for a man is drowned; if earth predominate death is slow, for he is

sucked down.

Can our readers imagine such a death? If it be frightful to sink in the

sea-strand, what is it in a cloaca? Instead of fresh air, daylight,

a clear horizon, vast sounds, the free clouds from which life rains,

the barque perceived in the distance, that hope under every form, of

possible passers-by, of possible help up to the last minute,--instead

of all this, deafness, blindness, a black archway, the interior of a

tomb already made, death in the mud under a tombstone! Slow asphyxia

by uncleanliness, a sarcophagus where asphyxia opens its claws in

the filth and clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the

death-rattle, mud instead of the sand, sulphuretted hydrogen in lieu

of the hurricane, ordure instead of the ocean! And to call and gnash

the teeth, and writhe and struggle and expire, with this enormous city

which knows nothing of it above one's head.

Inexpressible the horror of dying thus! Death sometimes expiates its

atrocity by a certain terrible dignity. On the pyre, in shipwreck, a

man may be great; in the flames, as in the foam, a superb attitude

is possible, and a man transfigures himself. But in this case it is

not so, for the death is unclean. It is humiliating to expire in such

a way, and the last floating visions are abject. Mud is the synonym

of shame, and is little, ugly, and infamous. To die in a butt of

Malmsey like Clarence,--very well; but in a sewer like d'Escoubleau is

horrible. To struggle in it is hideous, for at the same time as a man

is dying, he is dabbling. There is enough darkness for it to be Hell,

and enough mud for it to be merely a slough, and the dying man does not

know whether he is about to become a spectre or a frog. Everywhere else

the sepulchre is sinister, but here it is deformed.

The depth of the fontis varied, as did the length and density,

according to the nature of the subsoil. At times a fontis was three or

four feet deep, at times eight or ten, and sometimes it was bottomless.

In one the mud was almost solid, in another nearly liquid. In the

Lunière fontis, a man would have taken a day in disappearing, while he

would have been devoured in five minutes by the Phélippeaux slough. The

mud bears more or less well according to its degree of density, and a

lad escapes where a man is lost. The first law of safety is to throw

away every sort of loading, and every sewer-man who felt the ground

giving way under him began by getting rid of his basket of tools. The

fontis had various causes,--friability of soil, some convulsion at a

depth beyond a man's reach, violent summer showers, the incessant

winter rain, and long drizzling rains. At times the weight of the

surrounding houses upon a marshy or sandy soil broke the roofs of the

subterranean galleries and made them shrink, or else it happened that

the roadway broke and slit up under the terrific pressure. The pile of

the Panthéon destroyed in this way about a century ago a portion of

the cellars in Mont Sainte Geneviève. When a sewer gave way under the

weight of the houses, the disorder was expressed above in the street by

a sort of saw-toothed parting between the paving-stones. This rent was

developed in a serpentine line, along the whole length of the cracked

vault, and in such a case, the evil being visible, the remedy might

be prompt. It often happened also that the internal ravage was not

revealed by any scar outside, and in that case, woe to the sewer-men.

Entering the injured drain incautiously, they might be lost in it The

old registers mention several night-men buried in this manner in the

fontis. They mention several names, among others that of the sewer-man

swallowed up in a slough under the opening on the Rue Carême Prenant,

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

Poutrain, who was the last sexton of the cemetery called the Charnier

des Innocents in 1785, when that cemetery expired. There was also the

young and charming Vicomte d'Escoubleau, to whom we have alluded, one

of the heroes of the siege of Lerida, where the assault was made in

silk stockings and with violins at their head. D'Escoubleau, surprised

one night with his cousin, the Duchesse de Sourdis, drowned himself

in a cesspool of the Beautreillis sewer, where he had taken refuge to

escape the Duc. Madame de Sourdis, when told the story of this death,

asked for her smelling-bottle, and forgot to weep through inhaling

her salts. In such a case there is no love that holds out; the cloaca

extinguishes it. Hero refuses to wash the corpse of Leander. Thisbe

holds her nose in the presence of Pyramus, and says, Pah!

CHAPTER VI.

THE FONTIS.

Jean Valjean found himself in presence of a fontis: this sort of

breaking-in was frequent at that day in the subsoil of the Champs

Élysées, which was difficult to manage in hydraulic works, and not

preservative of subterranean constructions, owing to its extreme

fluidity. This fluidity exceeds even the inconsistency of the sands

of the Quartier St. Georges, which could only be overcome by laying

rubble on béton, and of the gas-infected clay strata in the Quartier

des Martyrs, which are so liquid that a passage could be effected under

the gallery only by means of an iron tube. When in 1836 the authorities

demolished and rebuilt under the Faubourg St. Honoré the old stone

sewer in which Jean Valjean is now engaged, the shifting sand which is

the subsoil of the Champs Élysées as far as the Seine offered such an

obstacle that the operation lasted six months, to the great annoyance

of those living on the water-side, especially such as had mansions

and coaches. The works were more than difficult, they were dangerous;

but we must allow that it rained for four and a half months, and the

Seine overflowed thrice. The fontis which Jean Valjean came across was

occasioned by the shower of the previous evening. A giving way of the

pavement, which was badly supported by the subjacent sand, had produced

a deposit of rain-water, and when the filtering had taken place the

ground broke in, and the roadway, being dislocated, fell into the mud.

How far? It was impossible to say, for the darkness was denser there

than anywhere else; it was a slough of mud in a cavern of night. Jean

Valjean felt the pavement depart from under him as he entered the

slough; there was water at top and mud underneath. He must pass it, for

it was impossible to turn back; Marius was dying, and Jean Valjean worn

out. Where else could he go? Jean Valjean advanced; the slough appeared

but of slight depth at the first few steps, but as he advanced his legs

sank in. He soon had mud up to the middle of the leg, and water up to

the middle of the knee. He walked along, raising Marius with both arms

as high as he could above the surface of the water; the mud now came up

to his knees and the water to his waist. He could no longer draw back,

and he sank in deeper and deeper. This mud, dense enough for the weight

of one man, could not evidently bear two; Marius and Jean Valjean might

have had a chance of getting out separately; but, for all that, Jean

Valjean continued to advance, bearing the dying man, who was perhaps a

corpse. The water came up to his armpits, and he felt himself drowning;

he could scarce move in the depth of mud in which he was standing, for

the density which was the support was also the obstacle. He still kept

Marius up, and advanced with an extraordinary expenditure of strength,

but he was sinking. He had only his head out of water and his two arms

sustaining Marius. In the old paintings of the Deluge there is a mother

holding her child in the same way. As he still sank he threw back his

face to escape the water and be able to breathe; any one who saw him in

this darkness would have fancied he saw a mask floating on the gloomy

waters; he vaguely perceived above him Marius's hanging head and livid

face; he made a desperate effort and advanced his foot, which struck

against something solid,--a resting-place. It was high time.

He drew himself up, and writhed and rooted himself with a species of

fury upon this support. It produced on him the effect of the first

step of a staircase reascending to life. This support, met with in the

mud at the supreme moment, was the beginning of the other side of the

roadway, which had fallen in without breaking, and bent under the water

like a plank in a single piece. A well-constructed pavement forms a

curve, and possesses such firmness. This fragment of roadway, partly

submerged, but solid, was a real incline, and once upon it they were

saved. Jean Valjean ascended it, and attained the other side of the

slough. On leaving the water his foot caught against a stone and he

fell on his knees. He found that this was just, and remained on them

for some time, with his soul absorbed in words addressed to God.

He rose, shivering, chilled, polluted, bent beneath the dying man he

carried, all dripping with filth, but with his soul full of a strange

brightness.

CHAPTER VII.

SOMETIMES ONE IS STRANDED WHERE HE THINKS TO LAND.

He set out once again; still, if he had not left his life in the

fontis, he seemed to have left his strength there. This supreme effort

had exhausted him, and his fatigue was now so great that he was obliged

to rest every three or four paces to take breath, and leaned against

the wall. Once he was obliged to sit down on the banquette in order to

alter Marius's position, and believed that he should remain there. But

if his vigor were dead his energy was not so, and he rose again. He

walked desperately, almost quickly, went thus one hundred yards without

raising his head, almost without breathing, and all at once ran against

the wall. He had reached an elbow of the drain, and on arriving head

down at the turning, came against the wall. He raised his eyes, and

at the end of the passage down there, far, very far away, perceived a

light. But this time it was no terrible light, but white, fair light.

It was daylight. Jean Valjean saw the outlet. A condemned soul that

suddenly saw from the middle of the furnace the issue from Gehenna

would feel what Jean Valjean felt. It would fly wildly with the stumps

of its burnt wings toward the radiant gate. Jean Valjean no longer

felt fatigue, he no longer felt Marius's weight, he found again his

muscles of steel, and ran rather than walked. As he drew nearer, the

outlet became more distinctly designed; it was an arch, not so tall as

the roof, which gradually contracted, and not so wide as the gallery,

which grew narrower at the same time as the roof became lowered. The

tunnel finished inside in the shape of a funnel,--a faulty reduction,

imitated from the wickets of houses of correction, logical in a prison,

but illogical in a drain, and which has since been corrected.

Jean Valjean reached the issue and then stopped; it was certainly the

outlet, but they could not get out. The arch was closed by a strong

grating, and this grating, which apparently rarely turned on its

oxidized hinges, was fastened to the stone wall by a heavy lock, which,

red with rust, seemed an enormous brick. The key-hole was visible,

as well as the bolt deeply plunged into its iron box. It was one of

those Bastille locks of which ancient Paris was so prodigal. Beyond

the grating were the open air, the river, daylight, the bank,--very

narrow but sufficient to depart,--the distant quays, Paris,--that gulf

in which a man hides himself so easily,--the wide horizon, and liberty.

On the right could be distinguished, down the river, the Pont de Jéna,

and at the left, up stream, the Pont des Invalides; the spot would

have been a favorable one to await night and escape. It was one of

the most solitary points in Paris, the bank facing the Gros-Caillou.

The flies went in and out through the grating bars. It might be about

half-past eight in the evening, and day was drawing in: Jean Valjean

laid Marius along the wall on the dry part of the way, then walked

up to the grating and seized the bars with both hands; the shock was

frenzied, but the effect _nil._ The grating did not stir. Jean Valjean

seized the bars one after the other, hoping he might be able to break

out the least substantial one and employ it as a lever to lift, the

gate off the hinges or break the lock, but not a bar stirred. A tiger's

teeth are not more solidly set in their sockets. Without a lever it was

impossible to open the grating, and the obstacle was invincible.

Must he finish, then, there? What should he do? What would become of

him? He had not the strength to turn back and recommence the frightful

journey which he had already made. Moreover, how was he to cross again

that slough from which he had only escaped by a miracle? And after the

slough, was there not the police squad, which he assuredly would not

escape twice; and then where should he go, and what direction take?

Following the slope would not lead to his object, for if he reached

another outlet he would find it obstructed by an iron plate or a

grating. All the issues were indubitably closed in that way; accident

had left the grating by which they entered open, but it was plain that

all the other mouths of the sewer were closed. They had only succeeded

in escaping into a prison.

It was all over, and all that Jean Valjean had done was useless: God

opposed it. They were both caught in the dark and immense web of death,

and Jean Valjean felt the fearful spider already running along the

black threads in the darkness. He turned his hack to the grating and

fell on the pavement near Marius, who was still motionless, and whose

head had fallen between his knees. There was no outlet; that was the

last drop of agony. Of whom did he think in this profound despondency?

Neither of himself nor of Marius! He thought of Cosette.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE TORN COAT-SKIRT.

In the midst of his annihilation a hand was laid on his shoulder, and a

low voice said,--

"Half shares."

Some one in this shadow? As nothing so resembles a dream as despair,

Jean Valjean fancied that he was dreaming. He had not heard a footstep.

Was it possible? He raised his eyes, and a man was standing before him.

This man was dressed in a blouse, his feet were naked, and he held his

shoes in his hand; he had evidently taken them off in order to be able

to reach Jean Valjean without letting his footsteps be heard. Jean

Valjean had not a moment's hesitation: however unexpected the meeting

might be, the man was known to him: it was Thénardier. Although, so to

speak, aroused with a start, Jean Valjean, accustomed to alarms and

to unexpected blows which it is necessary to parry quickly, at once

regained possession of all his presence of mind. Besides, the situation

could not be worse; a certain degree of distress is not capable of any

crescendo, and Thénardier himself could not add any blackness to this

night. There was a moment's expectation. Thénardier, raising his right

hand to the level of his forehead, made a screen of it; then he drew

his eyebrows together with a wink, which, with a slight pinching of the

lips, characterizes the sagacious attention of a man who is striving

to recognize another. He did not succeed. Jean Valjean, as we said,

was turning his back to the light, and was besides so disfigured, so

filthy, and blood-stained that he could not have been recognized in

broad daylight. On the other hand, Thénardier, with his face lit up by

the light from the grating,--a cellar brightness, it is true,--livid

but precise in his lividness, leaped at once into Jean Valjean's eyes,

to employ the energetic popular metaphor. This inequality of conditions

sufficed to insure some advantage to Jean Valjean in the mysterious

duel which was about to begin between the two situations and the two

men. The meeting took place between Jean Valjean masked and Thénardier

unmasked. Jean Valjean at once perceived that Thénardier did not

recognize him; and they looked at each other silently in this gloom, as

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

silence.

"How do you mean to get out?"

Jean Valjean not replying, Thénardier continued:

"It is impossible to pick the lock: and yet you must get out of here."

"That is true," said Jean Valjean.

"Well, then, half shares."

"What do you mean?"

"You have killed the man; very good, and I have the key."

Thénardier pointed to Marius, and continued,--

"I do not know you, but you must be a friend, and I wish to help you."

Jean Valjean began to understand. Thénardier took him for an assassin.

The latter continued,--

"Listen, mate; you did not kill this man without looking to see what he

had in his pockets. Give me my half and I open the gate."

And half drawing a heavy key from under his ragged blouse, he added,--

"Would you like to see how the key to liberty is made? Look here."

Jean Valjean was so dazed that he doubted whether what he saw was real.

It was Providence appearing in a horrible form, and the good angel

issuing from the ground in the shape of Thénardier. The latter thrust

his hand into a wide pocket hidden under his blouse, drew out a rope,

and handed it to Jean Valjean.

"There," he said, "I give you the rope into the bargain."

"What am I to do with the rope?"

"You also want a stone, but you will find that outside, as there is a

heap of them."

"What am I to do with a stone?"

"Why, you ass, as you are going to throw the stiff into the river, you

want a rope and a stone, or else the body will float on the water."

Jean Valjean took the rope mechanically, and Thénardier snapped his

fingers as if a sudden idea had occurred to him.

"Hilloh, mate! how did you manage to get through that slough? I did

not dare venture into it. Peuh! you do not smell pleasant."

After a pause he added,--

"I ask you questions, but you are right not to answer: it is an

apprenticeship for the examining magistrate's ugly quarter of an hour.

And then, by not speaking at all a man runs no risk of speaking too

loud. No matter, though I cannot see your face and do not know your

name, you would do wrong in supposing that I do not know who you are

and what you want. I know all about it: you have rather split this

gentleman, and now want to get rid of him somewhere. You prefer the

river, that great nonsense-hider, and I will help you out of the

hobble. It is my delight to aid a good fellow when in trouble."

While commending Jean Valjean for his silence it was plain that he was

trying to make him speak. He pushed his shoulder, so as to be able to

see his profile, and exclaimed, though without raising the pitch of his

voice,--

"Talking of the slough, you are a precious ass. Why did you not throw

the man into it?"

Jean Valjean preserved silence. Thénardier continued, raising his rag

of a cravat to the Adam's apple,--a gesture which completes the capable

air of a serious man.

"Really, you may have acted sensibly, for the workmen who will come

to-morrow to stop up the hole would certainly have found the swell,

and your trail would be followed up. Some one has passed through the

sewer. Who? How did he get out? Was he seen to do so? The police are

full of sense; the drain is a traitor, and denounces you. Such a find

is a rarity; it attracts attention; for few people employ the sewer for

their little business, while the river belongs to everybody, and is the

real grave. At the end of a month your man is fished up at the nets of

St. Cloud. Well, who troubles himself about that? It's carrion, that's

all. Who killed the man? Paris. And justice makes no inquiries. You

acted wisely."

The more loquacious Thénardier became, the more silent Jean Valjean

was. Thénardier shook his shoulder again.

"And now, let's settle our business. You have Been my key, so show me

your money."

Thénardier was haggard, firm, slightly menacing, but remarkably

friendly. There was one strange fact: Thénardier's manner was not

simple; he did not appear entirely at his ease. While not affecting

any mysterious air, he spoke in a low voice. From time to time he laid

his finger on his lip, and muttered "Chut!" It was difficult to guess

why, for there were only themselves present. Jean Valjean thought that

other bandits were probably hidden in some corner no great distance

off, and that Thénardier was not anxious to share with them. The latter

continued,--

"Now for a finish. How much had the swell about him?"

Jean Valjean felt in his pockets. It was, as will be remembered, always

his rule to have money about him for the gloomy life of expedients to

which he was condemned rendered it a law for him. This time, however,

he was unprovided. In putting on upon the previous evening his National

Guard uniform, he forgot, mournfully absorbed as he was, to take out

his pocket-book, and he had only some change in his waistcoat-pocket.

He turned out his pocket, which was saturated with slime, and laid on

the banquette a louis d'or, two five-franc pieces, and five or six

double sous. Thénardier thrust out his lower lip with a significant

twist of the neck.

"You did not kill him for much," he said.

He began most familiarly feeling in Jean Valjean and Marius's pockets,

and Jean Valjean, who was most anxious to keep his back to the light,

allowed him to do so. While feeling in Marius's coat, Thénardier, with

the dexterity of a conjurer, managed to tear off, without Jean Valjean

perceiving the fact, a strip, which he concealed under his blouse;

probably thinking that this piece of cloth might help him to recognize

hereafter the assassinated man and the assassin. However, he found no

more than the thirty francs.

"It is true," he said; "one with the other, you have no more than that."

And forgetting his phrase, half-shares, he took all. He hesitated a

little at the double sous, but on reflection he took them too, while

grumbling, "I don't care, it is killing people too cheaply."

This done, he again took the key from under his blouse.

"Now, my friend, you must be off. It is here as at the fairs; you pay

when you go out. You have paid, so you can go."

And he began laughing. We may be permitted to doubt whether he had the

pure and disinterested intention of saving an assassin, when he gave a

stranger the help of this key, and allowed any one but himself to pass

through this gate. Thénardier helped Jean Valjean to replace Marius on

his back, and then proceeded to the grating on the tips of his naked

feet. After making Jean Valjean a sign to follow him, he placed his

finger on his lip, and remained for some seconds as if in suspense; but

when the inspection was over he put the key in the lock. The bolt slid,

and the gate turned on its hinges without either grinding or creaking.

It was plain that this grating and these hinges, carefully oiled,

opened more frequently than might be supposed. This smoothness was

ill-omened; it spoke of furtive comings and goings, of the mysterious

entrances and exits of night-men, and the crafty foot-fall of crime.

The sewer was evidently an accomplice of some dark band, and this

taciturn grating was a receiver. Thénardier held the door ajar, left

just room for Jean Valjean to pass, relocked the gate, and plunged

back into the darkness, making no more noise than a breath; he seemed

to walk with the velvety pads of a tiger. A moment later this hideous

providence had disappeared, and Jean Valjean was outside.

CHAPTER IX.

MARIUS APPEARS DEAD TO A CONNAISSEUR.

He let Marius slip down on to the bank. They were outside: the

miasmas, the darkness, the horror, were behind him; the healthy, pure,

living, joyous, freely respirable air inundated him. All around him

was silence, but it was the charming silence of the sun setting in

the full azure. Twilight was passing, and night, the great liberator,

the friend of all those who need a cloak of darkness to escape from

an agony, was at hand. The sky presented itself on all sides like an

enormous calm, and the river rippled up 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, faintly

studding the pale blue of the zenith, formed in the immensity little

imperceptible flashes. Night unfolded over Jean Valjean's head all the

sweetness of infinitude. It was the undecided and exquisite hour which

says neither yes nor no. There was already sufficient night for a man

to lose himself in it a short distance off, and yet sufficient daylight

to recognize any one close by. Jean Valjean was for a few seconds

irresistibly overcome by all this august and caressing serenity. There

are minutes of oblivion in which suffering gives up harassing the

wretch; all is eclipsed in the thought; peace covers the dreamer like

night, and under the gleaming twilight the soul is lit with stars in

imitation of the sky which is becoming illumined. Jean Valjean could

not refrain from contemplating the vast clear night above him, and

pensively took a bath of ecstasy and prayer in the majestic silence

of the eternal heavens. Then, as if the feeling of duty returned to

him, he eagerly bent down over Marius, and lifting some water in the

hollow of his hand, softly threw a few drops into his face. Marius's

eyelids did not move, but he still breathed through his parted lips.

Jean Valjean was again about to plunge his hand into the river, when

he suddenly felt an indescribable uneasiness, as when we feel there is

some one behind us without seeing him. He turned round, and there was

really some one behind him, as there had been just before.

A man of tall stature, dressed in a long coat, with folded arms, and

carrying in his right hand a "life-preserver," whose leaden knob

could be seen, was standing a few paces behind Jean Valjean, who was

leaning over Marius. It was with the help of the darkness a species of

apparition; a simple man would have been frightened at it owing to the

twilight, and a thoughtful one on account of the bludgeon. Jean Valjean

recognized Javert. The reader has doubtless guessed that the tracker

of Thénardier was no other than Javert. Javert, after his unhoped-for

escape from the barricade, went to the Préfecture of Police, made a

verbal report to the prefect in person in a short audience, and then

immediately returned to duty, which implied--the note found on him

will be remembered--a certain surveillance of the right bank of the

river at the Champs Élysées, which had for some time past attracted the

attention of the police. There he perceived Thénardier and followed

him. The rest is known.

It will be also understood that the grating so obligingly opened for

Jean Valjean was a clever trick on the part of Thénardier. He felt

that Javert was still there,--the watched man has a scent which never

deceives him,--and it was necessary to throw a bone to this greyhound.

An assassin,--what a chance! he could not let it slip. Thénardier,

on putting Jean Valjean outside in his place, offered a prey to the

policeman, made him loose his hold, caused himself to be forgotten in

a greater adventure, recompensed Javert for his loss of time,--which

always flatters a spy,--gained thirty francs, and fully intended for

his own part to escape by the help of this diversion.

Jean Valjean had passed from one reef to another.

These two meetings one upon the other, felling from Thénardier on

Javert, were rude. Javert did not recognize Jean Valjean, who, as we

have said, no longer resembled himself. He did not unfold his arms, but

made sure his "life-preserver" by an imperceptible movement, and said,

in a sharp, calm voice,--

"Who are you?"

"Myself."

"What do you mean?"

"I am Jean Valjean."

Javert placed his life-preserver between his teeth, bent his knees,

bowed his back, laid his two powerful hands on Jean Valjean's

shoulders, which they held as in two vises, examined and recognized

him. Their faces almost touched, and Javert's glance was terrific. Jean

Valjean remained inert under Javert's gripe, like a lion enduring the

claw of a lynx.

"Inspector Javert," he said, "you have me. Besides, since this morning

I have considered myself your prisoner. I did not give you my address

in order to try to escape you. Take me, but grant me one thing."

Javert did not seem to hear, but kept his eyeballs fixed on Jean

Valjean. His wrinkled chin thrust up his lips toward his nose, a sign

of stern reverie. At length he loosed his hold of Jean Valjean, drew

himself up, clutched his cudgel, and, as if in a dream, muttered rather

than asked this question,--

"What are you doing here, and who is that man?"

Jean Valjean replied, and the sound of his voice seemed to awaken

Javert,--

"It is of him that I wished to speak. Do with me as you please, but

help me first to carry him home. I only ask this of you."

Javert's face was contracted in the same way as it always was when any

one believed him capable of a concession; still he did not say no. He

stopped again, took from his pocket a handkerchief, which he dipped in

the water, and wiped Marius's ensanguined forehead.

"This man was at the barricade," he said in a low voice, and as if

speaking to himself; "he was the one whom they called Marius."

He was a first-class spy, who had observed everything, listened to

everything, heard everything, and picked up everything, when he

believed himself a dead man; who spied even in his death agony, and,

standing on the first step of the sepulchre, took notes. He seized

Marius's hand, and felt his pulse.

"He is wounded," said Jean Valjean.

"He is a dead man," said Javert.

Jean Valjean replied,--

"No; not yet."

"Then you brought him from the barricade here?" Javert observed.

His preoccupation must have been great for him not to dwell on this

alarming escape through the sewers, and not even remark Jean Valjean's

silence after his question. Jean Valjean, on his side, seemed to have a

sole thought; he continued,--

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

grandfather. I do not know his name."

Jean Valjean felt in Marius's pocket, took out the portfolio, opened

it at the page on which Marius had written in pencil, and offered

it to Javert. There was still sufficient floating light in the air

to be able to read, and Javert, besides, had in his eyes the feline

phosphorescence of night-birds. He deciphered the few lines written by

Marius, and growled, "Gillenormand, No. 6, Rue des Filles du Calvaire."

Then he cried, "Driver!"