After the man, whoever he aright be, who decreed the "protest of corpses," had spokes, sad given the formula of the common soul, a strangely satisfied and terrible cry issued from every mouth, funereal in its meaning and triumphal in its accent.
"Long live death! Let us all remain here."
"Why all?" Enjolras asked.
"All, all!"
Enjolras continued,—
"The position is good and the barricade fine. Thirty men are sufficient, then why sacrifice forty?"
They replied,—
"Because not one of us will go away."
"Citizens," Enjolras cried, and there was in his voice an almost irritated vibration, "the republic is not rich enough in men to make an unnecessary outlay. If it be the duty of some to go away, that duty must be performed like any other."
Enjolras, the man-principle, had over his co-religionists that kind of omnipotence which is evolved from the absolute. Still, however great that omnipotence might be, they murmured. A chief to the tips of his fingers, Enjolras, on seeing that they murmured, insisted. He continued haughtily,—
"Let those who are afraid to be only thirty say so."
The murmurs were redoubled.
"Besides," a voice in the throng remarked, "it is easy to say, 'Go away,' but the barricade is surrounded."
"Not on the side of the markets," said Enjolras. "The Rue Mondétour is free, and the Marché des Innocents can be reached by the Rue des Prêcheurs."
"And then," another voice in the group remarked, "we should be caught by falling in with some grand rounds of the line or the National Guard. They will see a man passing in blouse and cap: 'Where do you come from? Don't you belong to the barricade?' and they will look at your hands; you smell of powder, and will be shot."
Enjolras, without answering, touched Combeferre's shoulder, and both entered the ground-floor room. They came out again a moment after, Enjolras holding in his outstretched hands the four uniforms which he had laid on one side, and Combeferre followed him carrying the cross-belts and shakos.
"In this uniform," Enjolras said, "it is easy to enter the ranks and escape. Here are four at any rate."
And he threw the four uniforms on the unpaved ground; but as no one moved in the stoical audience, Combeferre resolved to make an appeal.
"Come," he said, "you must show a little pity. Do you know what the question is here? It is about women. Look you, are there wives,—yes or no? Are there children,—yes or no? Are these nothing, who rock a cradle with their foot, and have a heap of children around them? Let him among you who has never seen a nurse's breast hold up his hand. Ah! you wish to be killed. I wish it too, I who am addressing you; but I do not wish to feel the ghosts of women twining their arms around me. Die,—very good; but do not cause people to die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime; but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension, and so soon as it affects your relations, suicide is called murder. Think of the little fair heads, and think too of the white hair. Listen to me! Enjolras tells me that just now he saw at the corner of the Rue du Cygne a candle at a poor window on the fifth floor, and on the panes the shaking shadow of an old woman who appeared to have spent the night in watching at the window; she is perhaps the mother of one of you. Well, let that man go, and hasten to say to his mother, 'Mother, here I am!' Let him be easy in his mind, for the work will be done here all the same. When a man supports his relatives by his toil, he has no longer any right to sacrifice himself, for that is deserting his family. And then, too, those who have daughters, and those who have sisters! Only think of them. You let yourselves be killed, you are dead, very good; and to-morrow? It is terrible when girls have no bread, for man begs, but woman sells. Oh, those charming, graceful, and gentle creatures with flowers in their caps, who fill the house with chastity, who sing, who prattle, who are like a living perfume, who prove the existence of angels in heaven by the purity of virgins on earth; that Jeanne, that Lise, that Mimi, those adorable and honest creatures, who are your blessing and your pride,—ah, my God! they will starve. What would you have me say to you? There is a human flesh-market, and you will not prevent them entering it with your shadowy hands trembling around them. Think of the street; think of the pavement covered with strollers; think of the shops before which women in low-necked dresses come and go in the mud. Those women, too, were pure. Think of your sisters, you who have any; misery, prostitution, the police. St Lazare, that is what these delicate maidens, these fragile marvels of chastity, modesty, and beauty, fresher than the lilies in May, will fall to. Ah, you have let yourselves be killed! Ah, you are no longer there! That is,—very good,—you have wished to withdraw the people from royalty, and you give your daughters to the police. My friends, take care and have compassion; we are not wont to think much about women, hapless women; we trust to the fact that women have not received the education of men. They are prevented reading, thinking, or occupying themselves with politics; but will you prevent them going to-night to the Morgue and recognizing your corpses? Come, those who have families must be good fellows, and shake our hand and go away, leaving us to do the job here all alone. I am well aware that courage is needed to go away, and that it is difficult; but the more difficult the more meritorious it is. Ton say, 'I have a gun and am at the barricade; all the worse, I remain.' 'All the worse' is easily said. My friends, there is a morrow, and that morrow you will not see; but your families will see it. And what sufferings! Stay; do you know what becomes of a healthy child with cheeks like an apple, who chatters, prattles, laughs, and smiles as fresh as a kiss, when he is abandoned? I saw one, quite little, about so high; his father was dead, and poor people had taken him in through charity; but they had not bread for themselves. The child was always hungry; it was winter-time, but though he was always hungry he did not cry. He was seen to go close to the stove, whose pipe was covered with yellow earth. The boy detached with his fingers a piece of this earth and ate it; his breathing was hoarse, his face livid, his legs soft, and his stomach swollen. He said nothing, and when spoken to made no answer. He is dead, and was brought to die at the Necker Hospital, where I saw him, for I was a student there. Now, if there be any fathers among you, fathers who delight in taking a walk on Sunday, holding in their powerful hand a child's small fingers, let each of these fathers fancy this lad his own. The poor brat I can remember perfectly; I fancy I see him now, and when he lay on the dissecting table, his bones stood out under his skin like the tombs under the grass of a cemetery. We found a sort of mud in his stomach, and he had ashes between his teeth. Come, let us examine our conscience and take the advice of our heart; statistics prove that the mortality among deserted children is fifty-five per cent. I repeat, it is a question of wives, of mothers, of daughters, and babes. Am I saying anything about you? I know very well what you are. I know that you are all brave. I know that you have all in your hearts the joy and glory of laying down your lives for the great cause. I know very well that you feel yourselves chosen to die usefully and magnificently, and that each of you clings to his share of the triumph. Very good. But you are not alone in this world, and there are other beings of whom you must think; you should not be selfish."
All hung their heads with a gloomy air. Strange contradictions of the human heart in the sublimest moments! Combeferre, who spoke thus, was not an orphan; he remembered the mothers of others and forgot his own; he was going to let himself be killed, and was "selfish." Marius, fasting and feverish, who had successively given up all hope, cast ashore on grief, the most mournful of shipwrecks, saturated with violent emotions, and feeling the end coming, had buried himself deeper and deeper in that visionary stupor which ever precedes the fatal and voluntarily accepted hour. A physiologist might have studied in him the growing symptoms of that febrile absorption which is known and classified by science, and which is to suffering what voluptuousness is to pleasure, for despair also has its ecstasy. Marius had attained that stage; as we have said, things which occurred before him appeared to him remote, he distinguished the ensemble, but did not perceive the details. He saw people coming and going before him in a flash, and he heard voices speaking as if from the bottom of an abyss. Still this affected him, for there was in this scene a point which pierced to him and aroused him. He had but one idea, to die, and he did not wish to avert his attention from it; but he thought in his gloomy somnambulism that in destroying himself he was not prohibited from saving somebody. He raked his voice,—
"Enjolras and Combeferre are right," he said: "let us have no useless sacrifice. I join them, and we must make haste. Combeferre has told you decisive things: there are men among you who have families, mothers, sisters, wives, and children. Such must leave the ranks."
Not a soul stirred.
"Married men and supporters of families will leave the ranks," Marius repeated.
His authority was great, for though Enjolras was really the chief of the barricade, Marius was its savior.
"I order it," Enjolras cried.
"I implore it," Marius said.
Then these heme men, stirred up by Combeferre's speech, shaken by Enjolras's order, and moved by Marius's entreaty, began denouncing one another. "It is true," a young man said to a grown-up man, "you are a father of a family: begone!" "No! you ought to do so rather," the man replied, "for you have two sisters to support;" and an extraordinary contest broke out, in which each struggled not to be thrust out of the tomb.
"Make haste," said Combeferre; "in a quarter of an hour there will no longer be time."
"Citizens," Enjolras added, "we have a republic here, and universal suffrage reigns. Point out yourselves the men who are to leave us."
They obeyed, and at the end of a few minutes five were unanimously pointed out and left the ranks.
"There are five of them!" Marius exclaimed.
There were only four uniforms.
"Well," the five replied, "one will have to remain behind."
And then came who should remain, and who should find reasons for others not to remain. The generous quarrel began again.
"You have a wife who loves you.—You have your old mother.—You have neither father nor mother; what will become of your three little brothers?—You are the father of five children.—You have a right to live, for you are only seventeen, and it is too early to die."
These great revolutionary barricades were meeting-places of heroisms. The improbable was simple there, and these men did not astonish one another.
"Make haste," Courfeyrac repeated.
Cries to Marius came from the groups.
"You must point out the one who is to remain."
"Yes," the five said; "do you choose, and we will obey you."
Marius did not believe himself capable of any emotion; still, at this idea of choosing a man for death all the blood flowed back to his heart, and he would have tamed pale could he have grown paler. He walked up to the five, who smiled upon him, and each, with his eye full of that great flame which gleams through history on Thermopylae, cried to him,—
"I! I! I!"
And Marius stupidly counted them. There were still five! Then his eyes settled on the four uniforms. All at once a fifth uniform fell, as if from heaven, on the other four; the fifth man was saved. Marius raised his eyes, and recognized M. Fauchelevent.
Jean Valjean had just entered the barricade; either through information he had obtained, through instinct, or through accident, he arrived by the Mondétour Lane, and, thanks to his National Guard uniform, passed without difficulty. The vedette stationed by the insurgents in the Rue Mondétour had no cause to give the alarm-signal for a single National Guard, and had let him enter the street, saying to himself, "He is probably a reinforcement, or at the worst a prisoner." The moment was too serious for a sentry to turn away from his duty or his post of observation. At the moment when Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, no one noticed him, for all eyes were fixed on the five chosen men and the four uniforms. Jean Valjean, however, had seen and heard, and silently took off his coat and threw it on the pile formed by the other coats. The emotion was indescribable.
"Who is this man?" Bossuet asked.
"He is a man," Combeferre replied, "who saves his fellow-man."
Marius added in a grave voice,—
"I know him."
This bail was sufficient for all, and Enjolras turned to Jean Valjean.
"Citizen, you are welcome."
And he added,—
"You are aware that you will die."
Jean Valjean, without answering, helped the man he was saving to put on his uniform.
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.
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.
Cosette and Marius saw each other again. We will not attempt to describe the interview, for there are things which we must not attempt to paint: the sun is of the number. The whole family, Basque and Nicolette included, were assembled in Marius's chamber at the moment when Cosette entered. She appeared in the doorway, and seemed to be surrounded by a halo: precisely at this moment the grandfather was going to blow his nose, but he stopped short, holding his nose in his handkerchief and looking over it.
"Adorable!" he cried.
And then he blew a sonorous blast. Cosette was intoxicated, ravished, startled, in heaven. She was as timid as a person can be through happiness; she stammered, turned pale and then pink, and wished to throw herself into Marius's arms, but dared not. She was ashamed of loving before so many people; for the world is merciless to happy lovers, and always remains at the very moment when they most long to be alone. And yet they do not want these people at, all. With Cosette, and behind her, had entered a white-haired man, serious, but still smiling, though the smile was wandering and poignant. It was "Monsieur Fauchelevent,"—it was Jean Valjean. He was well-dressed, as the porter had said, in a new black suit and a white cravat. The porter was a thousand leagues from recognizing in this correct citizen, this probable notary, the frightful corpse-bearer who had arrived at the gate on the night of June 7, ragged, filthy, hideous, and haggard, with a mask of blood and mud on his face, supporting in his arms the unconscious Marius; still his porter's instincts were aroused. When M. Fauchelevent arrived with Cosette, the porter could not refrain from confiding this aside to his wife, "I don't know why, but I fancy that I have seen that face before." M. Fauchelevent remained standing by the door of Marius's room, as if afraid; he held under his arm a packet rather like an octavo volume wrapped in paper. The paper was green, apparently from mildew.
"Has this gentleman always got books under his arm like that?" Mademoiselle Gillenormand, who was not fond of books, asked Nicolette in a whisper.
"Well," M. Gillenormand, who had heard her, answered in the same key, "he is a savant; is that his fault? Monsieur Boulard, whom I knew, never went out without a book either, and like him had always had an old book near his heart."
Then bowing, he said in a loud voice,—
"M. Tranchelevent."
Father Gillenormand did not do it purposely, but an inattention to proper names was an aristocratic way of his.
"Monsieur Tranchelevent, I have the honor of requesting this lady's hand for my grandson, M. le Baron Marius Pontmercy."
Monsieur "Tranchelevent" bowed.
"All right," the grandfather said.
And turning to Marius and Cosette, with both arms extended in benediction, he cried,—
"You have leave to adore each other."
They did not let it be said twice, and the prattling began. They talked in a whisper, Marius reclining on his couch and Cosette standing by his side. "Oh, Heaven!" Cosette murmured, "I see you again: it is you. To go and fight like that! But why? It is horrible. For four months I have been dead. Oh, how wicked it was of you to have been at that battle! What had I done to you? I forgive you, but you will not do it again. Just now, when they came to tell me to come to you, I thought again that I was going to die, but it was of joy. I was so sad! I did not take the time to dress myself, and I must look frightful; what will your relation say at seeing me in a tumbled collar? But speak! you let me speak all alone. We are still in the Rue de l'Homme Armé. It seems that your shoulder was terrible, and I was told that I could have put my hand in it, and that your flesh was as if it had been cut with scissors. How frightful that is! I wept so that I have no eyes left. It is strange that a person can suffer like that Your grandfather has a very kind look. Do not disturb yourself, do not rest on your elbow like that, or you will hurt yourself. Oh, how happy I am! So our misfortunes are all ended! I am quite foolish. There were things I wanted to say to you which I have quite forgotten. Do you love me still? We live in the Rue de l'Homme Armé. There is no garden there. I made lint the whole time; look here, sir, it is your fault, my fingers are quite rough."
"Angel!" said Marius.
Angel is the only word in the language which cannot be worn out; no other word would resist the pitiless use which lovers make of it. Then, as there was company present, they broke off, and did not say a word more, contenting themselves with softly clasping hands. M. Gillenormand turned to all the rest in the room, and cried,—
"Speak loudly, good people; make a noise, will you? Come, a little row, hang it all! so that these children may prattle at their ease."
And going up to Marius and Cosette, he whispered to them,—
"Go on; don't put yourselves out of the way."
Aunt Gillenormand witnessed with stupor this irruption of light into her antiquated house. This stupor had nothing aggressive about it; it was not at all the scandalized and envious glance cast by an owl at two ring-doves: it was the stupid eye of a poor innocent of the age of fifty-seven; it was a spoiled life looking at that triumph, love.
"Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder," her father said to her, "I told you that this would happen." He remained silent for a moment, and added,—
"Look at the happiness of others."
Then he turned to Cosette.
"How pretty she is! how pretty she is! she is a Greuze! So you are going to have all that for yourself, scamp? Ah, my boy, you have had a lucky escape from me; for if I were not fifteen years too old we would fight with swords and see who should have her. There, I am in love with you, Mademoiselle; but it is very natural, it is your right. What a famous, charming little wedding we will have! St. Denis du Saint-Sacrament is our parish; but I will procure a dispensation, so that you may be married at St. Paul, for the church is better. It was built for the Jesuits, and more coquettish. It is opposite Cardinal Birague's fountain. The masterpiece of Jesuit architecture is at Namur, and is called St. Loup; you should go and see that when you are married, for it is worth the journey. Mademoiselle, I am entirely of your opinion; I wish girls to marry, for they are made for it. There is a certain Sainte Catharine whom I would always like to see with hair disordered. To remain a maid is fine, but it is cold. Multiply, says the Bible. To save the people a Joan of Arc is wanted; but to make a people we want Mother Gigogne. So marry, my darlings; I really do not see the use of remaining a maid. I know very well that they have a separate chapel in church, and join the confraternity of the Virgin; but, sapristi! a good-looking young husband, and at the end of a year a plump bantling, who sucks at you bravely, and who has rolls of fat on his thighs, and who clutches your bosom with his pink little paws, are a good deal better than holding a candle at vespers and singing Turris Eburnea."
The grandfather pirouetted on his nonagenarian heels, and began speaking again, like a spring which had been wound up:—
"Ainsi, bornant le cours de tes rêvasseries,
Alcippe, il est donc vrai, dans peu tu te maries."
"By the bye?"
"What, father?"
"Had you not an intimate friend?"
"Yes, Courfeyrac."
"What has become of him?"
"He is dead."
"That is well."
He sat down by their side, made Cosette take a chair, and took their four hands in his old wrinkled hands.
"This darling is exquisite! This Cosette is a masterpiece! She is a very little girl and a very great lady. She will be only a baroness, and that is a derogation, for she is born to be a marchioness. What eyelashes she has! My children, drive it well into your pates that you are on the right road. Love one another; be foolish over it, for love is the stupidity of men and the cleverness of God. So adore one another. Still," he added, suddenly growing sad, "what a misfortune! More than half I possess is sunk in annuities; so long as I live it will be all right, but when I am dead, twenty years hence, ah! my poor children, you will not have a farthing! Your pretty white hands, Madame la Baronne, will be wrinkled by work."
Here a serious and calm voice was heard saying:
"Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent has six hundred thousand francs."
It was Jean Valjean's voice. He had not yet uttered a syllable; no one seemed to remember that he was present, and he stood motionless behind all these happy people.
"Who is the Mademoiselle Euphrasie in question?" the startled grandfather asked.
"Myself," said Cosette.
"Six hundred thousand francs!" M. Gillenormand repeated.
"Less fourteen or fifteen thousand, perhaps," Jean Valjean said.
And he laid on the table the parcel which Aunt Gillenormand had taken for a book. Jean Valjean himself opened the packet; it was a bundle of bank-notes. They were turned over and counted; there were six hundred bank-notes for a thousand francs, and one hundred and sixty-eight for five hundred, forming a total of five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.
"That's a famous book," said M. Gillenormand.
"Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!" the aunt murmured.
"That arranges a good many things, does it not, Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder?" the grandfather continued. "That devil of a Marius has found a millionnaire grisette upon the tree of dreams! Now trust to the amourettes of young people! Students find studentesses with six hundred thousand francs. Cherubin works better than Rothschild."
"Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!" Mademoiselle Gillenormand repeated; "five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs! We may as well say six hundred thousand."
As for Marius and Cosette, they were looking at each other during this period, and hardly paid any attention to this detail.
The old formidable struggle, of which we have already seen several phases, began again. Jacob only wrestled with the angel for one night. Alas! how many times have we seen Jean Valjean caught round the waist in the darkness by his conscience, and struggling frantically against it. An extraordinary struggle! At certain moments the foot slips, at others the ground gives way. How many times had that conscience, clinging to the right, strangled and crushed him! How many times had inexorable truth set its foot on his chest! How many times had he, felled by the light, cried for mercy! How many times had that implacable light, illumined within and over him by the Bishop, dazzled him when he wished to be blinded! How many times had he risen again in the contest, clung to the rock, supported himself by sophistry, and been dragged through the dust, at one moment throwing his conscience under him, at another thrown by it! How many times, after an equivocation, after the treacherous and specious reasoning of egotism, had he heard his irritated conscience cry in his ears, "Trickster! wretch!" How many times had his refractory thoughts groaned convulsively under the evidence of duty! What secret wounds he had, which he alone felt bleeding! What excoriations there were in his lamentable existence! How many times had he risen, bleeding, mutilated, crushed, enlightened, with despair in his heart and serenity in his soul! And though vanquished, he felt himself the victor, and after having dislocated, tortured, and broken him, his conscience, erect before him, luminous and tranquil, would say to him,—"Now go in peace!" What a mournful peace, alas! after issuing from such a contest.
This night, however, Jean Valjean felt that he was fighting his last battle. A crushing question presented itself; predestinations are not all straight; they do not develop themselves in a rectilinear avenue before the predestined man; they have blind alleys, zigzags, awkward corners, and perplexing cross-roads. Jean Valjean was halting at this moment at the most dangerous of these cross-roads. He had reached the supreme crossing of good and evil, and had that gloomy intersection before his eyes. This time again, as had already happened in other painful interludes, two roads presented themselves before him, one tempting, the other terrifying; which should he take? The one which frightened him was counselled by the mysterious pointing hand which we all perceive every time that we fix our eyes upon the darkness. Jean Valjean had once again a choice between the terrible haven and the smiling snare. Is it true, then? The soul may be cured, but not destiny. What a frightful thing,—an incurable destiny! The question which presented itself was this: In what way was Jean Valjean going to behave to the happiness of Cosette and Marius? That happiness he had willed, he had made; and at this hour, in gazing upon it, he could have the species of satisfaction which a cutler would have who recognized his trade-mark upon a knife when he drew it all smoking from his chest. Cosette had Marius, Marius possessed Cosette; they possessed everything, even wealth, and it was his doing. But now that this happiness existed and was there, how was he, Jean Valjean, to treat it? Should he force himself upon it and treat it as if belonging to himself? Doubtless Cosette was another man's; but should he, Jean Valjean, retain of Cosette all that he could retain? Should he remain the sort of father, scarce seen but respected, which he had hitherto been? Should he introduce himself quietly into Cosette's house? Should he carry his past to this future without saying a word? Should he present himself there as one having a right, and should he sit down, veiled, at this luminous hearth? Should he smilingly take the hands of these two innocent creatures in his tragic hands? Should he place on the andirons of the Gillenormand drawing-room his feet, which dragged after them the degrading shadow of the law? Should he render the obscurity on his brow and the cloud on theirs denser? Should he join his catastrophe to their two felicities? Should he continue to be silent? In a word, should he be the sinister dumb man of destiny by the side of these two happy beings? We must be accustomed to fatality and to meeting it, to raise our eyes when certain questions appear to us in their terrible nudity. Good and evil are behind this stern note of interrogation. What are you going to do? the Sphinx asks. This habit of trial Jean Valjean had, and he looked at the Sphinx fixedly, and examined the pitiless problem from all sides. Cosette, that charming existence, was the raft of this shipwrecked man; what should he do, cling to it, or let it go? If he clung to it, he issued from disaster, he remounted to the sunshine, he let the bitter water drip off his clothes and hair, he was saved and lived. Suppose he let it go? Then there was an abyss. He thus dolorously held counsel with his thoughts, or, to speak more correctly, he combated; he rushed furiously within himself, at one moment against his will, at another against his convictions. It was fortunate for Jean Valjean that he had been able to weep, for that enlightened him, perhaps. Still, the beginning was stern; a tempest, more furious than that which had formerly forced him to Arras, was let loose within him. The past returned to him in the face of the present; he compared and sobbed. Once the sluice of tears was opened, the despairing man writhed. He felt himself arrested, alas! in the deadly fight between one egotism and one duty. When we thus recoil inch by inch before our ideal, wildly, obstinately, exasperated at yielding, disputing the ground, hoping for a possible flight, and seeking an issue, what a sudden and sinister resistance behind us is the foot of the wall! To feel the holy shadow standing in the way! The inexorable, invisible,—what a pressure!
Hence we have never finished with our conscience. Make up your mind, Brutus; make up your mind, Cato. It is bottomless, for it is God. You cast into this pit the labor of your whole life,—your fortune, your wealth, your success, your liberty, or your country, your comfort, your repose, your joy. More, more, more! Empty the vase, tread over the urn, you must, end by throwing in your heart. There is a barrel like this somewhere in the Hades of old. Is it not pardonable to refuse at last? Can that which is inexhaustible have any claim? Are not endless chains beyond human strength? Who then would blame Sisyphus and Jean Valjean for saying, It is enough! The obedience of matter is limited by friction: is there not a limit to the obedience of the soul? If perpetual motion be impossible, why is perpetual devotion demanded? The first step is nothing, it is the last that is difficult. What was the Champmathieu affair by the side of Cosette's marriage? What did it bring with it? What is returning to the hulks by the side of entering nothingness? Oh, first step to descend, how gloomy thou art! oh, second step, how black thou art! How could he help turning his head away this time? Martyrdom is a sublimation, a corrosive sublimation, it is a torture which consecrates. A man may consent to it for the first hour; he sits on the throne of red-hot iron, the crown of red-hot iron is placed on his head,—he accepts the red-hot globe, he takes the red-hot sceptre, but he still has to don the mantle of flame, and is there not a moment when the miserable flesh revolts and he flies from the punishment? At length Jean Valjean entered the calmness of prostration; he wished, thought over, and considered the alternations, the mysterious balance of light and shadow. Should he force his galleys on these two dazzling children, or consummate his own irremediable destruction? On one side was the sacrifice of Cosette, on the other his own.
On which solution did he decide? What determination did he form? What was in his inner self the definitive reply to the incorruptible interrogatory of fatality? What door did he resolve on opening? Which side of his life did he make up his mind to close and condemn? Amid all those unfathomable precipices that surrounded him, which was his choice? What extremity did he accept? To which of these gulfs did he nod his head? His confusing reverie lasted all night; he remained till daybreak in the same position, leaning over the bed, prostrate beneath the enormity of fate, perhaps crushed, alas! with hands convulsed, and arms extended at a right angle like an unnailed crucified man thrown with his face on the ground. He remained thus for twelve hours,—the twelve hours of a long winter's night, frozen, without raising his head or uttering a syllable. He was motionless as a corpse, while his thoughts rolled on the ground or fled away; sometimes like a hydra, sometimes like the eagle. To see him thus you would have thought him a dead man; but all at once he started convulsively, and his mouth pressed to Cosette's clothes, kissed them; then one saw that he was alive.
What One, since Jean Valjean was alone and nobody was there?
The One who is in the darkness.
During the last months of spring and the early months of summer, 1833, the scanty passers-by in the Marais, the shop-keepers, and the idlers in the door-ways, noticed an old gentleman, decently dressed in black, who every day, at nearly the same hour in the evening, left the Rue de l'Homme Armé, in the direction of the Rue Sainte Croix de la Bretonnerie, passed in front of the Blancs Manteaux, reached the Rue Culture Sainte Catharine, and on coming to the Rue de l'Écharpe, turned to his left and entered the Rue St. Louis. There he walked slowly, with head stretched forward, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, with his eye incessantly fixed on a spot which always seemed his magnet, and which was nought else than the corner of the Rue des Filles du Calvaire. The nearer he came to this corner the more brightly his eye flashed; a sort of joy illumined his eyeballs, like an internal dawn; he had a fascinated and affectionate air, his lips made obscure movements as if speaking to some one whom he could not see, he smiled vaguely, and he advanced as slowly as he could. It seemed as if, while wishing to arrive, he was afraid of the moment when he came quite close. When he had only a few houses between himself and the street which appeared to attract him, his step became so slow that at moments he seemed not to be moving at all. The vacillation of his head and the fixedness of his eye suggested the needle seeking the pole. However he might delay his arrival, he must arrive in the end; when he reached the corner of the Rue des Filles du Calvaire, he trembled, thrust his head with a species of gloomy timidity beyond the corner of the last house, and looked into this street, and there was in this glance something that resembled the bedazzlement of the impossible and the reflection of a closed paradise. Then a tear, which had been gradually collecting in the corner of his eyelashes, having grown large enough to fall, glided down his cheeks, and sometimes stopped at his mouth. The old man tasted its bitter flavor. He stood thus for some minutes as if he were of stone; then returned by the same road, at the same pace, and the farther he got away the more lustreless his eye became.
By degrees this old man ceased going as far as the corner of the Rue des Filles du Calvaire; he stopped half-way in the Rue St. Louis: at times a little farther off, at times a little nearer. One day he stopped at the corner of the Rue Culture Sainte Catharine and gazed at the Rue des Filles du Calvaire from a distance; then he silently shook his head from right to left, as if refusing himself something, and turned back. Ere long he did not reach even the Rue St Louis; he arrived at the Rue Pavie, shook his head, and turned back; then he did not go beyond the Rue des Trois Pavilions; and then he did not pass the Blancs Manteaux. He seemed like a clock which was not wound up, and whose oscillations grow shorter and shorter till they stop. Every day he left his house at the same hour, undertook the same walk but did not finish it, and incessantly shortened it, though probably unconscious of the fact. His whole countenance expressed this sole idea, Of what good is it? His eyes were lustreless, and there was no radiance in them. The tears were also dried up; they no longer collected in the corner of his eyelashes, and this pensive eye was dry. The old man's head was still thrust forward; the chin moved at times, and the creases in his thin neck were painful to look on. At times, when the weather was bad, he had an umbrella under his arm, which he never opened. The good women of the district said, "He is an innocent," and the children followed him with shouts of laughter.
That same day, or, to speak more correctly, that same evening, as Marius was leaving the dinner-table to withdraw to his study, as he had a brief to get up, Basque handed him a letter, saying, "The person who wrote the letter is in the anteroom." Cosette had seized her grandfather's arm, and was taking a turn round the garden. A letter may have an ugly appearance, like a man, and the mere sight of coarse paper and clumsy folding is displeasing. The letter which Basque brought was of that description. Marius took it, and it smelt of tobacco. Nothing arouses a recollection so much as a smell, and Marius recognized the tobacco. He looked at the address, "To Monsieur le Baron Pommerci, At his house." The recognized tobacco made him recognize the handwriting. It might be said that astonishment has its flashes of lightning, and Marius was, as it were, illumined by one of these flashes. The odor, that mysterious aid to memory, had recalled to him a world: it was really the paper, the mode of folding, the pale ink; it was really the well-known handwriting; and, above all, it was the tobacco. The Jondrette garret rose again before him. Hence—strange blow of accident!—one of the two trails which he had so long sought, the one for which he had latterly made so many efforts and believed lost forever, came to offer itself voluntarily to him. He eagerly opened the letter and read:—
"MONSIEUR LE BARON,—If the Supreme Being had endowed me with talents, I might have been Baron Thénard, member of the Institute (academy of ciences), but I am not so. I merely bear the same name with him, and shall be happy if this reminisence recommends me to the excellense of your kindness. The benefits with which you may honor me will be reciprocal, for I am in possession of a secret conserning an individual. This individual conserns you. I hold the secret at your disposal, as I desire to have the honor of being uceful to you. I will give you the simple means for expeling from your honorable family this individual who has no right in it, Madam la Barronne being of high birth. The sanctuary of virtue could no longer coabit with crime without abdicating.
"I await in the anteroom the order of Monsieur le Baron.
"Respectfully."
The letter was signed "THÉNARD." This signature was not false, but only slightly abridged. However, the bombast and the orthography completed the revelation, the certificate of origin was perfect, and no doubt was possible. Marius's emotion was profound; and after the movement of surprise he had a movement of happiness. Let him now find the other man he sought, the man who had saved him, Marius, and he would have nothing more to desire. He opened a drawer in his bureau, took out several bank-notes, which he put in his pocket, closed the drawer again, and rang. Basque opened the door partly.
"Show the man in," said Marius.
Basque announced,—
"M. Thénard."
A man came in, and it was a fresh surprise for Marius, as the man he now saw was a perfect stranger to him. This man, who was old, by the way, had a large nose, his chin in his cravat, green spectacles, with a double shade of green silk over his eyes, and his hair smoothed down and flattened on his forehead over his eyebrows, like the wig of English coachmen of high life. His hair was gray. He was dressed in black from head to foot,—a very seedy but clean black,—and a bunch of seals, emerging from his fob, led to the supposition that he had a watch. He held an old hat in his hand, and walked bent, and the curve in his back augmented the depth of his bow. The thing which struck most at the first glance was that this person's coat, too large, though carefully buttoned, had not been made for him. A short digression is necessary here.
There was at that period in Paris, in an old house situated in the Rue Beautreillis near the arsenal, an old Jew whose trade it was to convert a rogue into an honest man, though not for too long a period, as it might have been troublesome to the rogue. The change was effected at sight, for one day or two, at the rate of thirty sous a day, by means of a costume resembling as closely as possible every-day honesty. This letter-out of suits was called the "exchange-broker." Parisian thieves had given him that name, and knew him by no other. He had a very complete wardrobe, and the clothes in which he invested people suited almost every condition. He had specialties and categories: from each nail of his store hung a social station, worn and threadbare; here the magistrate's coat, there the curé's coat, and the banker's coat; in one corner the coat of an officer on half pay, elsewhere the coat of a man of letters, and further on the statesman's coat. This creature was the costumer of the immense drama which roguery plays in Paris, and his den was the side-scene from which robbery went out or swindling re-entered. A ragged rogue arrived at this wardrobe, deposited thirty sous, and selected, according to the part which he wished to play on that day, the clothes which suited him; and, on going down the stairs again, the rogue was somebody. The next day the clothes were faithfully brought back, and the "exchange-broker," who entirely trusted to the thieves, was never robbed. These garments had one inconvenience,—they did not fit; not being made for the man who wore them, they were tight on one, loose on another, and fitted nobody. Any swindler who exceeded the average mean in height or shortness was uncomfortable in the "exchange-broker's" suits. A man must be neither too stout nor too thin, for the broker had only provided for ordinary mortals, and had taken the measure of the species in the person of the first thief who turned up, and is neither stout nor thin, nor tall nor short. Hence arose at times difficult adaptations, which the broker's customers got over as best they could. All the worse for the exceptions! The statesman's garments, for instance, black from head to foot, would have been too loose for Pitt and too tight for Castelcicala. The statesman's suit was thus described in the broker's catalogue, from which we copied it: "A black cloth coat, black moleskin trousers, a silk waistcoat, boots, and white shirt." There was on the margin "Ex-Ambassador," and a note which we also transcribe: "In a separate box a carefully-dressed peruke, green spectacles, bunch of seals, and two little quills an inch in length, wrapped in cotton." All this belonged to the statesman or ex-ambassador. The whole of this costume was, if we may say so, extenuated. The seams were white, and a small button-hole gaped at one of the elbows; moreover, a button was missing off the front, but that is only a detail, for as the hand of the statesman must always be thrust into the coat, and upon the heart, it had the duty of hiding the absence of the button.
Had Marius been familiar with the occult institutions of Paris, he would at once have recognized in the back of the visitor whom Basque had just shown in, the coat of the statesman borrowed from the Unhook-me-that of the "exchange-broker." Marius's disappointment on seeing a different man from the one whom he expected to enter, turned into disgust with the new-comer. He examined him from head to foot, while the personage was giving him an exaggerated bow, and asked him curtly, "What do you want?"
The man replied with an amiable rictus, of which the caressing smile of a crocodile would supply some idea:—
"It appears to me impossible that I have not already had the honor of seeing Monsieur le Baron in society. I have a peculiar impression of having met him a few years back at the Princess Bagration's, and in the salons of his Excellency Vicomte Dambray, Peer of France."
It is always good tactics in swindling to pretend to recognize a person whom the swindler does not know. Marius paid attention to the man's words, he watched the action and movement, but his disappointment increased; it was a nasal pronunciation, absolutely different from the sharp dry voice he expected. He was utterly routed.
"I do not know," he said, "either Madame Bagration or Monsieur Dambray. I never set foot in the house of either of them."
The answer was rough, but the personage continued with undiminished affability,—
"Then it must have been at Chateaubriand's that I saw Monsieur! I know Chateaubriand intimately, and he is a most affable man. He says to me sometimes, Thénard, my good friend, will you not drink a glass with me?"
Marius's brow became sterner and sterner. "I never had the honor of being received at M. de Chateaubriand's house. Come to the point; what do you want with me?"
The man bowed lower still before this harsh voice.
"Monsieur le Baron, deign to listen to me. There is in America, in a country near Panama, a village called La Joya, and this village is composed of a single house. A large square house three stories high, built of bricks dried in the sun, each side of the square being five hundred feet long, and each story retiring from the one under it for a distance of twelve feet, so as to leave in front of it a terrace which runs all round the house. In the centre is an inner court, in which provisions and ammunition are stored; there are no windows, only loop-holes, no door, only ladders,—ladders to mount from the ground to the first terrace, and from the first to the second, and from the second to the third; ladders to descend into the inner court; no doors to the rooms, only traps; no staircases to the apartments, only ladders. At night the trap-doors are closed, the ladders are drawn up, and blunderbusses and carbines are placed in the loop-holes; there is no way of entering; it is a house by day, a citadel by night. Eight hundred inhabitants,—such is this village. Why such precautions? Because the country is dangerous, and full of man-eaters. Then, why do people go there? Because it is a marvellous country, and gold is found there."
"What are you driving at?" Marius, who had passed from disappointment to impatience, interrupted.
"To this, M. le Baron. I am a worn-out ex-diplomatist. I am sick of our old civilization, and wish to try the savages."
"What next?"
"Monsieur le Baron, egotism is the law of the world. The proletarian peasant-wench who works by the day turns round when the diligence passes, but the peasant-woman who is laboring on her own field does not turn. The poor man's dog barks after the rich, the rich man's dog barks after the poor; each for himself, and self-interest is the object of mankind. Gold is the magnet."
"What next? Conclude."
"I should like to go and settle at La Joya. There are three of us. I have my wife and my daughter, a very lovely girl. The voyage is long and expensive, and I am short of funds."
"How does that concern me?" Marius asked.
The stranger thrust his neck out of his cravat, with a gesture peculiar to the vulture, and said, with a more affable smile than before,—
"Monsieur le Baron cannot have read my letter?"
That was almost true, and the fact is that the contents of the epistle had escaped Marius; he had seen the writing rather than read the letter, and he scarce remembered it. A new hint had just been given him, and he noticed the detail, "My wife and daughter." He fixed a penetrating glance on the stranger,—a magistrate could not have done it better,—but he confined himself to saying,—
"Be more precise."
The stranger thrust his hands in his trousers' pockets, raised his head without straightening his backbone, but on his side scrutinizing Marius through his green spectacles.
"Very good, M. le Baron, I will be precise. I have a secret to sell you."
"Does it concern me?"
"Slightly."
"What is it?"
Marius more and more examined the man while listening.
"I will begin gratis," the stranger said; "you will soon see that it is interesting."
"Speak."
"Monsieur le Baron, you have in your house a robber and an assassin."
Marius gave a start.
"In my house? No," he said.
The stranger imperturbably brushed his hat with his arm, and went on.
"An assassin and a robber. Remark, M. le Baron, that I am not speaking here of old-forgotten facts, which might be effaced by prescription before the law—by repentance before God. I am speaking of recent facts, present facts, of facts still unknown to justice. I continue. This man has crept into your confidence, and almost into your family, under a false name. I am going to tell you his real name, and tell it you for nothing."
"I am listening."
"His name is Jean Valjean."
"I know it."
"I will tell, equally for nothing, who he is." "Speak."
"He is an ex-convict."
"I know it."
"You have known it since I had the honor of telling you."
"No, I was aware of it before."
Marius's cold tone, this double reply, "I know it," and his stubborn shortness in the conversation aroused some latent anger in the stranger, and he gave Marius a furious side-glance, which was immediately extinguished. Rapid though it was, the glance was one of those which are recognized if they have once been seen, and it did not escape Marius. Certain flashes can only come from certain souls; the eyeball, that cellar-door of the soul, is lit up by them, and green spectacles conceal nothing; you might as well put up a glass window to hell. The stranger continued, smiling,—
"I will not venture to contradict M. le Baron, but in any case you will see that I am well informed. Now, what I have to tell you is known to myself alone, and it affects the fortune of Madame la Baronne. It is an extraordinary secret, and is for sale. I offer it you first. Cheap! twenty thousand francs."
"I know that secret as I know the other," said Marius.
The personage felt the necessity of lowering his price a little.
"Monsieur le Baron, let us say ten thousand francs, and I will speak."
"I repeat to you that you have nothing to tell me. I know what you want to say to me."
There was a fresh flash in the man's eye, as he continued,—
"Still, I must dine to-day. It is an extraordinary secret, I tell you. Monsieur, I am going to speak. I am speaking. Give me twenty francs."
Marius looked at him fixedly.
"I know your extraordinary secret, just as I knew Jean Valjean's name, and as I know yours."
"My name?"
"Yes."
"That is not difficult, M. le Baron, for I had the honor of writing it and mentioning it to you. Thénard—"
"—dier."
"What?"
"Thénardier."
"What does this mean?"
In danger the porcupine bristles, the beetle feigns death, the old guard forms a square. This man began laughing. Then he flipped a grain of dust off his coat-sleeve. Marius continued,—
"You are also the workman Jondrette, the actor Fabantou, the poet Genflot, the Spanish Don Alvares, and Madame Balizard."
"Madame who?"
"And you once kept a pot-house at Montfermeil."
"A pot-house! Never."
"And I tell you that you are Thénardier."
"I deny it."
"And that you are a scoundrel. Take that."
And Marius, taking a bank-note from his pocket, threw it in his face.
"Five hundred francs! Monsieur le Baron!"
And the man, overwhelmed and bowing, clutched the note and examined it.
"Five hundred francs!" he continued, quite dazzled. And he stammered half aloud, "No counterfeit;" then suddenly exclaimed, "Well, be it so. Let us be at our ease."
And with monkey-like dexterity, throwing back his hair, tearing off his spectacles, and removing the two quills to which we alluded just now, and which we have seen before in another part of this book, he took off his face as you or I take off our hat. His eye grew bright, the forehead—uneven, gullied, scarred, hideously wrinkled at top—became clear, the nose sharp as a beak, and the ferocious and shrewd profile of the man of prey reappeared.
"Monsieur le Baron is infallible," he said in a sharp voice, from which the nasal twang had entirely disappeared; "I am Thénardier."
And he straightened his curved back.
Thénardier—for it was really he—was strangely surprised, and would have been troubled could he have been so. He had come to bring astonishment, and it was himself who was astonished. This humiliation was paid for with five hundred francs, and he accepted it; but he was not the less stunned. He saw for the first time this Baron Pontmercy, and in spite of his disguise this Baron Pontmercy recognized him, and recognized him thoroughly; and not alone was this Baron acquainted with Thénardier, but he also seemed acquainted with Jean Valjean. Who wad this almost beardless young man, so cold and so generous; who knew people's names, knew all their names, and opened his purse to them; who bullied rogues like a judge, and paid them like a dupe? Thénardier, it will be remembered, though he had been Marius's neighbor, had never seen him, which is frequently the case in Paris. He had formerly vaguely heard his daughter speak of a very poor young man of the name of Marius, who lived in the house, and he had written him, without knowing him, the letter we formerly read. No approximation between this Marius and M. le Baron Pontmercy was possible in his mind. With regard to the name of Pontmercy, we must recollect that on the battle-field of Waterloo he had heard only the last two syllables, for which he had always had the justifiable disdain which one is likely to have for what is merely thanks.
However, he had managed through his daughter Azelma, whom he put on the track of the married couple on February 16, and by his own researches, to learn a good many things, and in his dark den had succeeded in seizing more than one mysterious thread. He had by sheer industry discovered, or at least by the inductive process had divined, who the man was whom he had met on a certain day in the Great Sewer. From the man he had easily arrived at the name, and he knew that Madame la Baronne Pontmercy was Cosette. But on that point he intended to be discreet. Who Cosette was he did not know exactly himself. He certainly got a glimpse of some bastardism, and Fantine's story had always appeared to him doubtful. But what was the good of speaking,—to have his silence paid? He had, or fancied he had, something better to sell than that; and according to all expectation, to go and make to Baron Pontmercy, without further proof, the revelation, "Your wife is only a bastard," would only have succeeded in attracting the husbands boot to the broadest part of his person.
In Thénardier's thoughts the conversation with Marius had not yet begun; he had been obliged to fall back, modify his strategy, leave a position, and make a change of front; but nothing essential was as yet compromised, and he had five hundred francs in his pocket. Moreover, he had something decisive to tell, and he felt himself strong even against this Baron Pontmercy, who was so well-informed and so well-armed. For men of Thénardier's nature every dialogue is a combat, and what was his situation in the one which was about to begin? He did not know to whom he was speaking, but he knew of what he was speaking. He rapidly made this mental review of his forces, and after saying, "I am Thénardier," waited. Marius was in deep thought; he at length held Thénardier, and the man whom he had so eagerly desired to find again was before him. He would be able at last to honor Colonel Pontmercy's recommendation. It humiliated him that this hero owed anything to this bandit, and that the bill of exchange drawn by his father from the tomb upon him, Marius, had remained up to this day protested. It seemed to him, too, in the complex state of his mind as regarded Thénardier, that he was bound to avenge the Colonel for the misfortune of having been saved by such a villain. But, however this might be, he was satisfied; he was at length going to free the Colonel's shadow from this unworthy creditor, and felt as if he were releasing his fathers memory from a debtor's prison. By the side of this duty he had another, clearing up if possible the source of Cosette's fortune. The opportunity appeared to present itself, for Thénardier probably knew something, and it might be useful to see to the bottom of this man; so he began with that. Thénardier put away the "no counterfeit" carefully in his pocket, and looked at Marius with almost tender gentleness. Marius was the first to break the silence.
"Thénardier, I have told you your name, and now do you wish me to tell you the secret which you have come to impart to me? I have my information also, and you shall see that I know more than you do. Jean Valjean, as you said, is an assassin and a robber. A robber, because he plundered a rich manufacturer, M. Madeleine, whose ruin he caused: an assassin, because he murdered Inspector Javert."
"I do not understand you, M. le Baron," said Thénardier.
"I will make you understand; listen. There was in the Pas de Calais district, about the year 1822, a man who had been in some trouble with the authorities, and who had rehabilitated and restored himself under the name of Monsieur Madeleine. This man had become, in the fullest extent of the term, a just man, and he made the fortune of an entire town by a trade, the manufacture of black beads. As for his private fortune, he had made that too, but secondarily, and to some extent as occasion offered. He was the foster-father of the poor, he founded hospitals, opened schools, visited the sick, dowered girls, supported widows, adopted orphans, and was, as it were, guardian of the town. He had refused the cross, and was appointed mayor. A liberated convict knew the secret of a penalty formerly incurred by this man; he denounced and had him arrested, and took advantage of the arrest to come to Paris and draw out of Laffitte's—I have the facts from the cashier himself—by means of a false signature, a sum of half a million and more, which belonged to M. Madeleine. The convict who robbed M. Madeleine was Jean Valjean; as for the other fact, you can tell me no more than I know either. Jean Valjean killed Inspector Javert with a pistol-shot, and I, who am speaking to you, was present."
Thénardier gave Marius the sovereign glance of a beaten man who sets his hand again on the victory, and has regained in a minute all the ground he had lost. But the smile at once returned, for the inferior, when in presence of his superior, must keep his triumph to himself, and Thénardier confined himself to saying to Marius,—
"Monsieur le Baron, we are on the wrong track."
And he underlined this sentence by giving his bunch of seals an expressive twirl.
"What!" Marius replied, "do you dispute it? They are facts."
"They are chimeras. The confidence with which Monsieur le Baron honors me makes it my duty to tell him so. Before all, truth and justice, and I do not like to see people accused wrongfully. Monsieur le Baron, Jean Valjean did not rob M. Madeleine, and Jean Valjean did not kill Javert."
"That is rather strong. Why not?"
"For two reasons."
"What are they? Speak."
"The first is this: he did not rob M. Madeleine, because Jean Valjean himself is M. Madeleine."
"What nonsense are you talking?"
"And this is the second: he did not assassinate Javert, because the man who killed Javert was Javert."
"What do you mean?"
"That Javert committed suicide."
"Prove it, prove it!" Marius cried wildly.
Thénardier repeated slowly, scanning his sentence after the fashion of an ancient Alexandrian,—
"Police-Agent-Javert-was-found-drowned-un-der-a boat-at-Pont-au-Change."
"But prove it, then."
Thénardier drew from his side-pocket a large gray paper parcel which seemed to contain folded papers of various sizes.
"I have my proofs," he said calmly, and he added: "Monsieur le Baron, I wished to know Jean Valjean thoroughly on your behalf. I say that Jean Valjean and Madeleine are the same, and I say that Javert had no other assassin but Javert; and when I say this, I have the proofs, not manuscript proofs, for writing is suspicious and complaisant, but printed proofs."
While speaking, Thénardier extracted from the parcel two newspapers, yellow, faded, and tremendously saturated with tobacco. One of these two papers, broken in all the folds, and falling in square rags, seemed much older than the other.
"Two facts, two proofs," said Thénardier, as he handed Marius the two open newspapers.
These two papers the reader knows; one, the older, a number of the Drapeau Blanc, for July 25, 1823, of which the exact text was given in the second volume of this work, established the identity of M. Madeleine and Jean Valjean. The other, a Moniteur, of June 15, 1832, announced the suicide of Javert, adding that it was found, from a verbal report made by Javert to the Préfet, that he had been made prisoner at the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and owed his life to the magnanimity of an insurgent, who, when holding him under his pistol, instead of blowing out his brains, fired in the air. Marius read; there was evidence, a certain date, irrefragable proof, for these two papers had not been printed expressly to support Thénardier's statement, and the note published in the Moniteur was officially communicated by the Préfecture of Police. Marius could no longer doubt; the cashier's information was false, and he was himself mistaken. Jean Valjean, suddenly growing great, issued from the cloud, and Marius could not restrain a cry of joy.
"What, then, this poor fellow is an admirable man! All this fortune is really his! He is Madeleine, the providence of an entire town! He is Jean Valjean, the savior of Javert! He is a hero! He is a saint!"
"He is not a saint, and he is not a hero," said Thénadier; "he is an assassin and a robber." And he added with the accent of a man beginning to feel himself possessed of some authority, "Let us calm ourselves."
Robber, assassin,—those words which Marius believed had disappeared, and which had returned, fell upon him like a cold shower-bath. "Still—" he said.
"Still," said Thénardier, "Jean Valjean did not rob M. Madeleine, but he is a robber; he did not assassinate Javert, but he is an assassin."
"Are you alluding," Marius continued, "to that wretched theft committed forty years back, and expiated, as is proved from those very papers, by a whole life of repentance, self-denial, and virtue?"
"I say assassination and robbery, M. le Baron, and repeat that I am alluding to recent facts. What I have to reveal to you is perfectly unknown and unpublished, and you may perhaps find in it the source of the fortune cleverly offered by Jean Valjean to Madame la Baronne. I say cleverly, for it would not be a stupid act, by a donation of that nature, to step into an honorable house, whose comforts he would share, and at the same time hide the crime, enjoy his robbery, bury his name, and create a family."
"I could interrupt you here," Marius observed, "but go on."
"Monsieur le Baron, I will tell you all, leaving the reward to your generosity, for the secret is worth its weight in gold. You will say to me, 'Why not apply to Jean Valjean?' For a very simple reason. I know that he has given up all his property in your favor, and I consider the combination ingenious; but he has not a halfpenny left; he would show me his empty hands, and as I want money for my voyage to La Joya, I prefer you, who have everything, to him, who has nothing. As I am rather fatigued, permit me to take a chair."
Marius sat down, and made him a sign to do the same. Thénardier installed himself in an easy-chair, took up the newspapers, put them back in the parcel, and muttered as he dug his nail into the Drapeau Blanc, "It cost me a deal of trouble to procure this." This done, he crossed his legs, threw himself in the chair in the attitude of men who are certain of what they are stating, and then began his narrative gravely, and laying a stress on his words:—
"Monsieur le Baron, on June 6, 1832, about a year ago, and on the day of the riots, a man was in the Great Sewer of Paris, at the point where the sewer falls into the Seine between the Pont des Invalides and the Pont de Jéna."
Marius hurriedly drew his chair closer to Thénardier's. Thénardier noticed this movement, and continued with the slowness of an orator who holds his hearer, and feels his adversary quivering under his words:—
"This man, forced to hide himself, for reasons, however, unconnected with politics, had selected the sewer as his domicile, and had the key of it. It was, I repeat, June 6, and about eight in the evening the man heard a noise in the sewer; feeling greatly surprised, he concealed himself and watched. It was a sound of footsteps; some one was walking in the darkness, and coming in his direction; strange to say, there was another man beside himself in the sewer. As the outlet of the sewer was no great distance off, a little light which passed through enabled him to see the new-comer, and that he was carrying something on his back. He walked in a stooping posture; he was an ex-convict, and what he had on his shoulders was a corpse. A flagrant case of assassination, if there ever was one; as for the robbery, that is a matter of course, for no one kills a man gratis. This convict was going to throw the body into the river, and a fact worth notice is, that, before reaching the outlet, the convict, who had come a long way through the sewer, was obliged to pass a frightful hole, in which it seems as if he might have left the corpse; but the sewer-men who came to effect the repairs next day would have found the murdered man there, and that did not suit the assassin. Hence he preferred carrying the corpse across the slough, and his efforts must have been frightful; it was impossible to risk one's life more perfectly, and I do not understand how he got out of it alive."
Marius's chair came nearer, and Thénardier took advantage of it to draw a long breath; then he continued:—
"Monsieur le Baron, a sewer is not the Champ de Mars; everything is wanting there, even space, and when two men are in it together they must meet. This happened, and the domiciled man and the passer-by were compelled to bid each other good-evening, to their mutual regret. The passer-by said to the domiciled man, 'You see what I have on my back. I must go out; you have the key, so give it to me.' This convict was a man of terrible strength, and there was no chance of refusing him; still, the man who held the key parleyed, solely to gain time. He examined the dead man, but could see nothing, except that he was young, well dressed, had a rich look, and was quite disfigured with blood. While talking, he managed to tear off, without the murderer perceiving it, a piece of the skirt of the victim's coat, as a convincing proof, you understand, a means of getting on the track of the affair, and bringing the crime home to the criminal. He placed the piece of cloth in his pocket; after which he opened the grating, allowed the man with the load on his back to go out, locked the grating again, and ran away, not feeling at all desirous to be mixed up any further in the adventure, or to be present when the assassin threw the corpse into the river. You now understand: the man who carried the corpse was Jean Valjean; the one who had the key is speaking to you at this moment, and the piece of coat-skirt—"
Thénardier completed the sentence by drawing from his pocket and holding level with his eyes a ragged piece of black cloth all covered with dark spots. Marius had risen, pale, scarce breathing, with his eye fixed on the black patch, and, without uttering a syllable, or without taking his eyes off the rag, he fell back, and, with his right hand extended behind him, felt for the key of a wall-cupboard near the mantel-piece. He found this key, opened the cupboard, and thrust in his hand without looking or once taking his eyes off the rag which Thénardier displayed. In the mean while Thénardier continued,—
"Monsieur le Baron, I have the strongest grounds for believing that the assassinated young man was a wealthy foreigner, drawn by Jean Valjean into a trap, and carrying an enormous sum about him."
"I was the young man, and here is the coat!" cried Marius, as he threw on the floor an old black coat all covered with blood. Then, taking the patch from Thénardier's hands, he bent over the coat and put it in its place in the skirt; the rent fitted exactly, and the fragment completed the coat Thénardier was petrified, and thought, "I'm sold." Marius drew himself up, shuddering, desperate, and radiant; he felt in his pocket, and walking furiously towards Thénardier, thrusting almost into his face his hand full of five hundred and thousand franc notes,—
"You are an infamous wretch! You are a liar, a calumniator, and a villain! You came to accuse that man, and you have justified him; you came to ruin him, and have only succeeded in glorifying him. And it is you who are the robber! It is you who are an assassin! I saw you, Thénardier—Jondrette, at that den on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital. I know enough about you to send you to the galleys, and even farther if I liked. There are a thousand francs, ruffian that you are!"
And he threw a thousand-franc note at Thénardier.
"Ah! Jondrette—Thénardier, vile scoundrel, let this serve you as a lesson, you hawker of secrets, you dealer in mysteries, you searcher in the darkness, you villain, take these five hundred francs, and be off. Waterloo protects you."
"Waterloo!" Thénardier growled, as he pocketed the five hundred francs.
"Yes, assassin! You saved there the life of a colonel."
"A general!" Thénardier said, raising his head.
"A colonel!" Marius repeated furiously. "I would not give a farthing for a general. And you come here to commit an infamy! I tell you that you have committed every crime! Begone! Disappear! Be happy, that is all I desire. Ah, monster! Here are three thousand francs more: take them. You will start to-morrow for America with your daughter, for your wife is dead, you abominable liar! I will watch over your departure, bandit, and at the moment when you set sail, pay you twenty thousand francs. Go and get hanged elsewhere."
"Monsieur le Baron," Thénardier answered, bowing to the ground, "accept my eternal gratitude."
And Thénardier left the room, understanding nothing of all this, but stupefied and ravished by this sweet crushing under bags of gold, and this lightning flashing over his head in the shape of bank-notes. Let us finish at once with this man: two days after the events we have just recorded he started for America, under a false name, with his daughter Azelma, and provided with an order on a New York banker for twenty thousand francs. The moral destitution of Thénardier, the spoiled bourgeois, was irremediable, and he was in America what he had been in Europe. The contact with a wicked man is sometimes sufficient to rot a good action, and to make something bad issue from it: with Marius's money Thénardier turned slave dealer.
So soon as Thénardier had departed, Marius ran into the garden where Cosette was still walking.
"Cosette, Cosette!" he cried, "come, come quickly, let us be off! Basque, a hackney coach! Cosette, come! Oh, heavens! It was he who saved my life! Let us not lose a minute! Put on your shawl."
Cosette thought him mad, and obeyed. He could not breathe, and laid his hand on his heart to check its beating. He walked up and down with long strides, and embraced Cosette. "Oh, Cosette!" he said, "I am a wretch." Marius was amazed, for he was beginning to catch a glimpse of some strange, lofty, and sombre figure in this Jean Valjean. An extraordinary virtue appeared to him, supreme and gentle, and humble in its immensity, and the convict was transfigured into Christ. Marius was dazzled by this prodigy, and though he knew not exactly what he saw, it was grand. In an instant the hackney coach was at the gate. Marius helped Cosette in, and followed her.
"Driver," he cried, "No. 7, Rue de l'Homme Armé."
"Oh, how glad I am!" said Cosette. "Rue de l'Homme Armé; I did not dare speak to you about Monsieur Jean, but we are going to see him."
"Your father, Cosette! your father more than ever. Cosette, I see it all. You told me that you never received the letter I sent you by Gavroche. It must have fallen into his hands, Cosette, and he came to the barricade to save me. As it is his sole duty to be an angel, in passing he saved others: he saved Javert. He drew me out of that gulf to give me to you; he carried me on his back through that frightful sewer. Ah! I am a monstrous ingrate! Cosette, after having been your providence, he was mine. Just imagine that there was a horrible pit, in which a man could be drowned a hundred times, drowned in mud, Cosette; and he carried me through it. I had feinted; I saw nothing, I heard nothing, I could not know anything about my own adventures. We are going to bring him back with us, and whether he is willing or not he shall never leave us again. I only hope he is at home! I only hope we shall find him! I will spend the rest of my life in revering him. Yes, it must have been so, Cosette, and Gavroche must have given him my letter. That explains everything. You understand."
Cosette did not understand a word.
"You are right," she said to him.
In the mean while the hackney coach rolled along.