But suddenly the dull eyes flamed; the little man drew himself up and became terrifying. Taking a step towards Monsieur Leblanc, he shouted:
‘But never mind all that! Don’t you know me?’
XX
The trap is sprung
The door of the garret was suddenly flung wide to admit three men in dark smocks wearing black paper masks. The first was thin and carried a long, iron-studded cudgel. The second, a species of colossus, was carrying a butcher’s pole-axe. The third, a square-shouldered man, less lean than the first but less massive than the second, grasped a huge key stolen from some prison-door.
It seemed that this was what Jondrette had been awaiting. There was a rapid exchange of dialogue between him and the man with the cudgel.
‘Is everything ready?’ Jondrette asked.
‘Yes,’ the thin man replied.
‘But where’s Montparnasse?’
‘The pretty boy stopped to chat to your daughter.’
‘Which one?’
‘The older.’
‘The fiacre’s ready?’
‘Yes.’
‘Two good horses?’
‘First-rate.’
‘And it’s waiting where I said?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ said Jondrette.
Monsieur Leblanc had grown pale. He was looking about him in the manner of a man who now knows what he has to contend with, his head slowly turning as, in watchful astonishment but with no sign of fear, he considered the group of men confronting him. He was using the table as an improvised barricade. The man who a few moments before had looked like nothing but an amiable elderly gentleman had suddenly become a sort of athlete, his powerful hand grasping the back of his chair with a gesture that was at once formidable and surprising. His resolute courage in the face of danger was that of a nature to whom fortitude came as readily as goodness, as easily and as simply. The father of a beloved woman can never be wholly remote from us. Marius was filled with pride.
The three bare-armed ruffians whom Jondrette had described as furnace-men had meanwhile gone to the heap of scrap-iron. One had taken up a pair of shears, the second a pair of tongs, and the third a hammer; and now, without speaking a word, they stationed themselves in front of the door. The old man was still reclining on the bed, but with his eyes open. The Jondrette woman was seated beside him.
It seemed to Marius that the time was very near when he must give the alarm, and he raised his right hand with the pistol, pointing it upwards in the general direction of the corridor. Jondrette, having concluded his colloquy with the man with the cudgel, turned back to Monsieur Leblanc and repeated his question, this time accompanying the words with a low, sinister laugh.
‘Don’t you recognize me?’
Monsieur Leblanc looked steadily at him.
‘No.’
Jondrette drew close to the table. Thrusting his fierce, angular countenance as near as he could bring it to the impassive face of Monsieur Leblanc, and crouching like a wild beast about to spring, he cried:
‘My name isn’t Fabantou or Jondrette either. My name is Thénardier! I’m the innkeeper from Montfermeil. Thénardier, d’you hear? Now do you recognize me?’
A slight quiver passed over Monsieur Leblanc’s face, but he answered calmly and without raising his voice:
‘No more than before.’
Marius did not hear this reply. His face at that moment, could anyone have observed him in the darkness, had grown haggard with stupefaction and dismay. At the sound of Thénardier’s name he had trembled so violently as to have to lean against the partition for support, feeling a chill as though a sword-blade had been driven into his heart. His right arm, raised to fire the warning shot, sank slowly to his side, and when the name was repeated his nerveless fingers came near to letting it fall to the floor. Jondrette in disclosing his identity had not shaken Monsieur Leblanc, but he had shattered Marius. Monsieur Leblanc might not know the name, but Marius knew it. We must remember what it meant to him. His father’s solemn injunction was written on his heart – ‘A man called Thénardier saved my life. If my son should meet him he will do him every service in his power.’ It had become for him an article of faith, a name linked with that of his father in his prayers. And now, here he was, Thénardier, the innkeeper of Montfermeil, his father’s rescuer whom Marius had so long and vainly sought – a bandit, a monster in the act of committing an abominable crime, the nature of which was still not fully clear but which looked like murder. And the murder of whom, in God’s name! … Could Fate have played any more scurvy trick than this? For four years Marius had been obsessed with the resolve to acquit the debt laid upon him by his father, to serve this man if he could find him; and now it seemed that instead he would be sending him to the gallows, to public execution on the Place Saint-Jacques, the man who had saved his father at the risk of his life! Yet how could he witness this infamy and not prevent it?– condemn the victim and spare the assassin? Could any debt be valid that was owed to such a man? … With his whole scheme of things collapsed about him, Marius stood and trembled. Everything depended on him; he held these people in the hollow of his hand. If he fired the warning shot Monsieur Leblanc would be saved and Thénardier destroyed; otherwise Monsieur Leblanc would be sacrificed and Thénardier would perhaps escape. One or the other must be on Marius’s conscience. Was he to honour his father’s last wishes, his own filial duty and solemn pledge, or permit the accomplishment of a crime? Two voices seemed to ring in his ears, that of the girl pleading for her father and that of the colonel commending Thénardier to his care. His senses were reeling and he felt his knees grow weak. Nor was there any time for thought, so furiously was the drama unfolding under his gaze. It was as though a whirlwind of which he had thought himself the master were carrying him away. He was on the point of fainting.
Meanwhile Thénardier, whom henceforth – we shall call by no other name, was stalking up and down in a sort of frenzied triumph. Seizing the candlestick he banged it down on the mantelshelf with a gesture so violent that the candle was nearly extinguished and tallow splashed on the wall. Then, turning to Monsieur Leblanc, he spat at him.
‘Your goose is cooked! You’re spitted and roasted, my fine bird!’
He resumed his pacing, fulminating as he did so.
‘So I’ve caught up with you at last, my noble philanthropist, my wealthy buyer of dolls! But you don’t know me, eh? It wasn’t you who came to my tavern in Montfermeil on Christmas Eve eight years ago and took away Fantine’s brat, the Lark, so called? You weren’t wearing a yellow coat, were you? You didn’t come in with a parcel of clothes under your arm, just like you did this morning? Wife, are you listening? It seems he has a passion for calling on people with a bundle of stockings. He’s a man of charity, you see. Perhaps you keep a clothes store, my generous millionaire, and give away your surplus stock to the poor? Charlatan! And so you don’t know me! But I know you, all right. I recognized you the moment you shoved your face inside this door. Well, now you’re going to learn that it isn’t all that rosy, walking into a man’s house which happens to be an inn, fooling him by being dressed like a tramp, taking away his domestic help and afterwards threatening him in the woods – you can’t make it right by just bringing a few old hospital blankets and leaving an overcoat that doesn’t fit! Scoundrel! Kidnapper!’
He paused, seeming to commune with himself as though the torrent of his fury had fallen into a sudden trough; and then, as though summing up the thoughts that were in his mind, he thumped with his fist on the table and cried:
‘As though butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth!’
He turned again to Monsieur Leblanc.
‘You got the better of me once! You’re the cause of all my troubles. For fifteen hundred francs you got hold of a girl who was mine and who certainly had rich connections; she’d brought me in money already, and I reckoned to live on her for the rest of my life. She might have made good my losses in that filthy dram-shop where they
came to drink themselves senseless and where like the sot I was, I swallowed my own substance. By God, I wish all the wine drunk in that place had been poison! You must have thought I was a fine fool when you got away with the brat. You were the stronger that day in the forest. But now it’s my turn. I hold the cards now, and you’re done for, my beauty! It makes me laugh to think of it, the way you swallowed everything. I told you I was an actor, didn’t I? And that I’d played with Mademoiselle Mars, whoever she may be, and that I had to settle up with my landlord by tomorrow, February the fourth! Poor imbecile, not even sense enough to know the date of quarterday! And the beggarly sixty francs he’s brought me – too mean even to make it a hundred! And the high-minded sentiments! It made me laugh. I thought to myself, “All right, my beauty, I’ll lick your boots this morning and cut your heart out tonight!”’
Thénardier stopped for lack of breath, his narrow chest heaving like a bellows. His eyes shone with the ignoble triumph of a weak, cruel, and cowardly nature which at last has the power to humble what it fears: a dwarf setting his foot on the head of Goliath; a jackal sinking its teeth into the flank of an ailing bull, too near death to be able to defend itself but still alive enough to suffer.
Monsieur Leblanc had made no attempt to interrupt him, but now that he had stopped of his own accord he said:
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You seem to be under a delusion. I’m a poor man, very far indeed from being a millionaire. I don’t know you. You’re confusing me with someone else.’
‘Ha!’ bellowed Thénardier. ‘You’re sticking to that, are you, you old mountebank? You don’t remember, eh? You’ve no idea who I am?’
‘None,’ said Monsieur Leblanc, with a cool courtesy that in the circumstances was singularly impressive. ‘But I have a very good idea what you are. You’re a scoundrel.’
As we all know, even the vilest creatures have their susceptibilities, even monsters are ticklish. The word ‘scoundrel’ caused the Thénardier woman to spring up off the bed. Thénardier snatched up a chair as though he meant to break it in pieces. ‘Stay where you are!’ he shouted to his wife, and again faced Monsieur Leblanc.
‘A scoundrel, is it? That’s what you rich call people like me. It’s true I’ve failed in business, I’m in hiding, I’ve no money in my pocket – so that makes me a scoundrel. I haven’t eaten for three days, so I’m a scoundrel! You keep yourselves warm with the best boots money can buy and fur-lined coats fit for an archbishop. You live in a first-floor apartment with a hall-porter, you stuff yourselves with truffles and asparagus at forty francs a bunch and green peas in January; and if you think the weather’s cold you look in the paper to see what the temperature is by Chevalier’s newfangled thermometer. But us, we’re our own thermometers, we don’t need to consult the newspaper to know how cold it is. We feel the blood freezing in our veins and we say, “There is no God!” And you come into the pig-sties we live in – pig-sties, that’s what they are – and call us scoundrels. But as under-dogs, we’re going to chew you up, we’re going to make a meal of you! Let me tell you this, my fine-feathered millionaire, I was a man in a good way of business, once a licensed innkeeper, an elector, a respectable citizen – and I dare say that’s more than you can say.’ He turned to the group of men by the door and added, quivering: ‘And he talks to me as though I was a pickpocket!’
In a fresh burst of fury, he turned back to Monsieur Leblanc.
‘And here’s something else for you, my noble philanthropist. I’m not just a nobody, a man without a name who goes about stealing children. I’m an ex-soldier of France. I should have had a medal. I fought at Waterloo, and I saved the life of a general called Count Something-or-other. He told me his name, but his infernal voice was so weak that I couldn’t hear it. I’d have sooner had his name than his thanks, because it would have helped me to find him again. That picture I’ve just shown you, painted by David, the famous artist, do you know what it is? It’s my portrait. He wanted to immortalize my feat of arms. I carried the general to safety on my back through the hail of musket-fire. That’s the story. Not that the general ever did anything for me, he was no better than the rest of you. All the same, I saved his life and I’ve got documents to prove it. I’m a veteran of Waterloo, hell and damnation! And now that I’ve had the politeness to tell you, let’s get this business over. I want money, a lot of money, the devil of a lot, or else by God, I’ll do for you!’
Marius had had time to bring his feelings under some control, and he was still listening. There could no longer be the least doubt that this was the Thénardier of his father’s message, and at the reference to the latter’s ingratitude, which he was on the point of so fatally justifying, he flinched, for it added to his uncertainties. In all Thénardier’s outpourings, the words and gestures, the fury blazing in his eyes; this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado and abjectness, arrogance, pettiness, rage, absurdity; the hodge-podge of genuine distress, and lying sentiment, the shamelessness of a vicious man rejoicing in viciousness, the bare crudity of an ugly soul – in this eruption of all suffering and all hatred there was something which was hideous as evil itself and still as poignant as truth.
As the reader will have realized, the picture, supposedly by David, which he was asking Monsieur Leblanc to buy, was in fact nothing but the inn-sign he himself had painted, the sole relic he had preserved of his disaster in Montfermeil. Now that he was no longer standing in the way, Marius was able to study it, and he saw that the uncouth daub did indeed represent a battle, a man carrying another against a smoky background. Thénardier and Pontmercy, the gallant sergeant and the rescued officer. Marius was seized with a kind of delirium. The picture in some sort brought his father to life; it was no longer an inn-sign but a resurrection, the yawning of a tomb, the rising of a ghost. With throbbing temples Marius heard the sound of the guns at Waterloo, and it seemed to him that the bleeding figure of his father, so crudely depicted, had its eyes fixed upon him.
Thénardier had regained his breath.
‘Well,’ he said tersely, ‘have you anything to say before we go to work on you?’
Monsieur Leblanc said nothing. Amid the ensuing silence a hoarse voice proclaimed:
‘If there’s any chopping to be done, I’m your man!’
A huge, unshaven, and grimy face loomed up by the doorway, the lips parted to display not teeth but a row of stumps. It was the face of the man with the pole-axe.
‘Why have you taken your mask off?’ Thénardier shouted furiously.
For some moments, as it seemed, Monsieur Leblanc had been following Thénardier’s movements as, blind with rage and in the assurance that the door was guarded, and that there were nine of them to deal with a single unarmed man, he stamped up and down the room. In shouting at the man with the pole-axe he turned his back on the prisoner.
Monsieur Leblanc took instant advantage of this. Moving with astonishing speed, he thrust aside the table and chair and with a single bound had reached the window. It took him only a moment to open it and get a foot on the window-ledge. He was halfway through the window when six powerful hands laid hold of him and dragged him back. The three so-called furnace-men had flung themselves upon him. At the same moment the Thénardier woman grabbed him by the hair.
The commotion brought in the rest of the gang, who had been clustered in the corridor. The old man who had been lying on the bed, seemingly half-drunk, got up and staggered across the room with a roadmender’s hammer. One of the furnace-men, whose smeared face was momentarily visible in the candle-light, and whom Marius now recognized as Panchaud (alias Printanier or Bigrenaille) was flourishing a species of bludgeon with an iron knob at either end.
It was too much for Marius. ‘Forgive me, father,’ he murmured and his finger sought the trigger. But as he was about to fire Thénardier cried:
‘Don’t hurt him!’
Far from enraging Thénardier, the prisoner’s desperate bid to escape had sobered him. Ther
e were two men in Thénardier, the brute and the man of cunning. Until that moment, in the intoxication of his triumph, with the prey quiescent and seemingly at his mercy, the brute had prevailed; but now that the victim was showing signs of fight it was the man of cunning who took control.
‘Don’t hurt him,’ he repeated, and in doing so unwittingly scored a success. Marius delayed the firing of the shot, which, with this new development, he no longer felt to be a matter of instant necessity. It might happen, after all, that some chance would occur to spare him the hideous alternatives of allowing the girl’s father to perish or of destroying the saviour of his own father.
Meanwhile a prodigious struggle was in progress. Monsieur Leblanc had sent the old man reeling with a body-blow, and with further blows had felled two of his assailants to the ground. He was now kneeling with a knee on two other men, who lay groaning under the pressure as though it were that of a millstone. But the remaining four, gripping him by the arms and neck, prevented him from rising. Half victor and half vanquished, crushing some and stifled by others, vainly grappling with the men now piling upon him, Monsieur Leblanc vanished in the confusion of bodies like a boar under a baying pack of hounds.
Eventually they managed to drag him on to the bed nearest the window, treating him now with respect. The Thénardier woman had never loosed her grip of his hair.
‘You get out of it,’ Thénardier said. ‘You’ll tear your shawl.’
She obeyed instantly, growling like a she-wolf obeying its mate.
‘You others,’ said Thénardier, ‘search him.’
Monsieur Leblanc made no further resistance. They searched him. He had nothing on him except a leather purse containing six francs and a handkerchief. Thénardier put the handkerchief in his pocket.
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