The gang had recovered from this first surprise.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Bigrenaille to Thénardier. ‘He’s still tied by one leg, and I guarantee he won’t get out of that. I tied it myself.’
The prisoner now addressed them.
‘You’re a poor lot,’ he said, ‘but my own life is not much worth defending. As for making me talk – or making me write anything I don’t want to write, or say anything I don’t want to say … Well, look!’
He drew up the sleeve covering his left arm and, holding it out, pressed the red-hot chisel against the bare skin.
The hiss of burnt flesh was audible, and a smell associated with torture-chambers spread through the room. Marius was sickened with horror, and even the ruffians gasped. But the expression of this remarkable elderly man scarcely altered. There was no hatred in the impassive gaze he directed at Thénardier, and no trace of physical agony in its serene nobility. In great and lofty natures the anguish of the flesh merely exalts the spirit, just as a soldiers’ mutiny obliges the commander to show himself in his true colours.
‘Poor fools,’ he said, ‘you need no more fear me than I fear you.’ Withdrawing the chisel from his arm, he flung it through the open window, and the horrid implement vanished in the darkness, to fall hissing into the snow. ‘Now you can do what you like with me.’
He was quite defenceless.
‘Get hold of him,’ said Thénardier.
Two of the men grasped him by the shoulders, and the masked man with a ventriloquist’s voice took up his position in front of him, ready at the slightest movement to stun him with a blow of the huge key he carried.
Marius heard a sound of whispering immediately below him, so close to the partition that he could not see the speakers.
‘There’s only one thing for it –’
‘Slit his throat!’
‘That’s it!’
Husband and wife were taking counsel together. Thénardier walked slowly over to the table and got out the knife.
Marius’s hand was playing with the pistol-butt; his dilemma was now at its crisis. For an hour or more he had been tormented by the two voices of his conscience, one urging him to respect his father’s wishes and the other insisting that he must save the prisoner. Both voices still clamoured within him, and his anguish was extreme. Until that moment he had clung to the faint hope that something would happen to reconcile those opposing impulses, but there had been nothing. Now the peril was imminent and he could delay no longer. Thénardier, knife in hand, stood hesitating a few paces from the prisoner.
Marius gazed wildly about him in the extremity of despair and suddenly he started. A brighter ray of moonlight, falling on the writing-table immediately behind him, shone upon a sheet of paper as though to bring it to his notice. It bore the sentence scrawled by the Thénardier girl that morning to prove that she could write. He could make out the bold, ill-written words:
‘Watch out, the bogies are around.’
Instantly he saw what he must do. This was the solution of his problem, the means of saving both victim and assassin. Kneeling down, he reached for the paper. He softly detached a piece of plaster from the partition, wrapped the page round it, and flung it through the aperture so that it landed in the middle of the Thénardiers’ room.
He was just in time. Thénardier, having overcome his last misgivings or scruples, was advancing upon the prisoner when he was checked by a sudden exclamation from his wife:
‘Something fell!’ she cried.
‘What do you mean?’
She darted forward, picked up the small missive, and handed it to her husband.
‘How did this get here?’ he asked.
‘How do you think? Through the window, of course!’
‘That’s right,’ said Bigrenaille. ‘I saw it.’
Thénardier hastily unfolded the paper and studied it by the light of the candle.
‘It’s Éponine’s handwriting, by God!’ He signed to his wife to read the message and said in a hoarse voice: ‘Quick. The ladder. We’ll leave the mouse in the trap and clear out!’
‘Without cutting his throat?’ his wife demanded.
‘No time.’
‘How do we go?’ asked Bigrenaille.
‘Through the window. If Ponine threw the message in that way it means that side of the house isn’t guarded.’
The masked ventriloquist dropped his key and, raising his arms above his head, rapidly clapped his hands three times without speaking. It was a call to action. The men holding the prisoner let go of him; the rope ladder was swiftly unrolled and let down from the window, with its hooks secured to the window-ledge. The prisoner paid no attention to what was going on, seeming plunged in thought, or in prayer.
Directly the ladder was ready Thénardier called to his wife, ‘Come on!’ and made a dash for the window; but as he was about to climb through Bigrenaille grabbed him roughly by the collar.
‘Not so fast, my old joker. We go first.’
‘We go first,’ the other men shouted.
‘You’re being childish,’ said Thénardier. ‘We’re wasting time. They can’t be far off.’
‘Then,’ said one of the men, ‘we’ll draw lots for who’s to go first.’
‘Are you crazy?’ spluttered Thénardier. ‘Are you raving mad? We’ve got the law on our heels and you want to stand round drawing lots out of a hat!’
‘Perhaps you would like to borrow my hat,’ said a voice from the doorway.
They swung round and saw that it was Javert. He stood there holding out his hat with a smile.
XXI
‘The best of the lot!’
Javert had posted his men at nightfall and had taken up his own position behind the trees in the Rue de la Barrière-des-Gobelins, facing the Gorbeau tenement on the other side of the boulevard. He had intended to commence operations by ‘pocketing’ the two girls who were supposed to be on watch, but he had only succeeded in picking up Azelma. Éponine had deserted her post and they could not find her. Javert, waiting for the signal, had been considerably perturbed by the coming and going of the fiacre. Finally he lost patience, and being now convinced that he had uncovered a hornet’s nest and that his luck was in – for he had recognized several of the men who entered the house – he had decided to go in without waiting for the pistol-shot, using Marius’s key.
He had arrived at the crucial moment. The startled desperadoes snatched up the weapons they had just let fall and clustered together in readiness to defend themselves – seven men of terrifying aspect, armed with pole-axe and cudgel, shears, pincers and hammers, and Thénardier brandishing his knife. His wife had snatched up a huge slab of paving stone lying by the window which their daughters used as a stool.
Javert replaced his hat on his head and advanced two paces into the room with his stick under his arm and his sword still in its sheath.
‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘You can’t escape through the window. Better go out through the door, you’ll find it less unhealthy. There are seven of you and fifteen of us. No point in turning it into a brawl. Let’s all be sensible.’
Bigrenaille produced a pistol from under his smock and thrust it into Thénardier’s hand, murmuring as he did so:
‘That’s Javert, a man I’m afraid to shoot at. Will you dare?’
‘By God I will!’ said Thénardier.
He levelled the weapon at Javert, who was not more than three paces away from him. Javert looked steadily at him and simply said:
‘Better not. It won’t fire anyway.’
Thénardier pulled the trigger. The pistol did not fire.
‘What did I tell you?’ said Javert.
Bigrenaille flung down the bludgeon he was carrying.
‘You’re the king of devils!’ he cried. ‘I give in.’
Javert looked round at the others.
‘And the rest of you?’
They nodded.
‘Good,’ said Javert calmly. ‘Now we’re being sensible,
like I said.’
‘There’s just one thing I ask,’ said Bigrenaille, ‘that I’ll be allowed tobacco while I’m in solitary.’
‘Agreed,’ said Javert, and, turning, he shouted: ‘You can come in now.’
A party consisting of sergents de ville armed with swords and policemen with truncheons entered the garret. They seized hold of the gangsters, and that dense assembly of bodies by the light of a single candle plunged the place in shadow.
‘Handcuff the lot of them,’ ordered Javert.
And as this was being done a voice which was not a man’s, but was scarcely recognizable as that of a woman, shouted:
‘Try to come near me!’
The Thénardier woman had taken up her stand in the corner by the window. She had shrugged off her shawl but still had on her hat. Her husband was crouched behind her, half-hidden by the cast-off shawl, and she was covering him with her body, standing with the paving-stone raised above her head like a giantess about to hurl a rock.
‘Take care!’ she cried.
They drew back towards the door, leaving a cleared space in the middle of the garret. The woman glanced at the men who had allowed themselves to be overpowered and muttered with an oath:
‘Cowardly swine!’
Javert walked across the empty space while she glared at him.
‘If you come any nearer I’ll smash you!’
‘A warrior,’ said Javert, ‘You bear yourself like a man, Mistress, but I have a woman’s claws.’ And he continued to advance.
Hair disordered and eyes blazing, she spread her legs, bent backwards and flung the slab of stone. Javert ducked and it passed over his head. It crashed against the wall, bringing down a shower of plaster, and rebounding, came to rest behind him. At the same moment Javert reached the couple. He clapped one heavy hand on the woman’s shoulder and the other on her husband’s head.
‘Handcuffs!’ he shouted.
The police in a body poured back into the room and within moments the order had been carried out. The woman, defeated at last, stared down at her manacled hands and those of her husband, and sank weeping to her knees.
‘My daughters!’ she cried.
‘We’ve got them,’ said Javert.
Meanwhile the police, having discovered the drunken man prostrate behind the door, were shaking him into life. He opened his eyes and stammered:
‘Is it over, Jondrette?’
‘Over and done with,’ said Javert.
The handcuffed men, three with masks and three with blackened faces, still had the look of ghosts.
‘Leave the masks on,’ said Javert. Looking them over like Frederick the Great reviewing his troops at Potsdam, he greeted them in turn: ‘Good evening to you, Bigrenaille – Brujon – Deux-Milliards …’ And to the masked men, ‘How nice to see you, Gueulemer – Babet – Claquesous.’
He then noticed the prisoner, who from the time the police had entered the room had stood with his head bowed and without speaking a word.
‘Untie the gentleman,’ he said. ‘But no one’s to leave until I give the order.’
After which he seated himself at the table, methodically wiped the pen and trimmed the candle, and taking a sheet of official paper from his pocket set to work on his preliminary report. But after writing the opening lines, which were no more than a routine formula, he looked up.
‘Ask the gentleman to step forward.’
The police stared about them.
‘Well, where is he?’ Javert demanded.
He was gone. The prisoner – Monsieur Leblanc, Monsieur Urbain Fabre, the father of Ursula or the Lark – had disappeared.
The door was guarded, but the window was not. Directly his leg was untied, and while Javert was otherwise engaged, he had taken advantage of the confusion, the darkness, and the crowded state of the room to make his departure by that means. A man rushed to the window and looked out. There was no one to be seen. The rope-ladder was still swinging.
‘Devil take it!’ said Javert with tight lips. ‘He must have been the best of the lot.’
XXII
The child who once cried in a tavern
On the evening following these events a youngster who seemed to have come from the Pont d’Austerlitz hurried along a narrow street in the direction of the Fontainebleau barrier. It was dark. The boy was pale and thin and wretchedly clad, wearing cotton trousers in that month of February, but he was singing at the top of his voice.
At the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier an old woman was ferreting in a garbage-heap by the light of a street lamp. The boy bumped into her and started back.
‘Blimey, I thought it was an enormous – an ENORMOUS dog!’ The emphasis he laid on the word as he sardonically repeated it is best conveyed by capital letters.
The old woman straightened up angrily.
‘Little demon!’ she shouted. ‘If I hadn’t been bending I know where I’d have put my foot.’
‘Now then!’ said the boy, already some way past her. ‘Perhaps I wasn’t all that wrong after all.’
The old woman, spluttering with indignation, seemed about to go after him, and the pale glow of the lamp fell upon her furious, wrinkled face with crowsfeet at the corners of the mouth. Her body was lost in shadow so that only the face was visible, and it was like a mask of decrepitude plucked out of the darkness by a beam of light. The boy considered her.
‘Madame,’ he said, ‘does not possess the style of beauty that attracts me.’
He went on his way and again began to sing:
The merry monarch, Coupdesabot
Was plump and very short, and so –
Here he broke off. He had arrived at the door of No. 50–52, and finding it locked he proceeded to kick it with a vigour more suited to the man’s boots he was wearing than to his child’s feet. The old woman caught up with him, shouting and gesticulating.
‘Now what is it? What are you doing? Are you trying to break down the door?’ He went on kicking and she screeched: ‘That’s no way to treat a respectable house!’
And suddenly she recognized him.
‘So it’s you, you little pest!’
‘Why, it’s the old dame,’ said the boy. ‘Good evening, Ma Bougon. I’ve come to call on my ancestors.’
The old woman responded with a grimace, unfortunately wasted in the darkness, which was a wonderful mixture of malice, decay, and ugliness.
‘There’s no one there, stupid.’
‘Why, where’s my father?’
‘In prison – at La Force.’
‘You don’t say! And my mother?’
‘She’s in the Saint-Lazare.’
‘Well, what about my sisters?’
‘They’re in the Madelonnettes.’
The boy scratched his head, stared at Ma’am Bougon, and whistled.
‘Ah, well!’
Then he turned on his heels and she stood watching on the doorstep while he disappeared beyond the black shapes of the elms shaking in the winter wind, his clear young voice again raised in song.
The merry monarch Coupdesabot
Was plump and very short, and so
He went out shooting on a pair
Of stilts to make the people stare,
And spread his legs to let them through,
And charged the customers deux sous.
PART FOUR
THE IDYLL IN THE RUE PLUMET AND THE EPIC OF THE RUE SAINT-DENIS
Book One
A Few Pages of History
I
Well-tailored
THE YEARS 1831 and 1832, immediately succeeding the July Revolution, are among the most singular and striking in our history. These two years, in the setting of those that preceded and those that followed them, are like two mountains displaying the heights of revolution and also its precipitous depths. The social masses which are the base of civilization, the solid structure of superimposed and related interests, the secular outlines of France’s ancient culture, all these constantly appear and disappe
ar amid the storm-clouds of systems, passions and theories. These appearances and disappearances have been termed movement and resistance. At intervals one may catch a gleam of Truth, that daylight of the human soul.
This remarkable period is sufficiently distinct, and now sufficiently remote from us, for its main outlines to be discernible. We shall seek to depict them.
The Bourbon restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, difficult of definition, in which exhaustion and rumour, mutterings, slumber and tumult all are mingled, and which in fact denote the arrival of a great nation at a staging-point. Such periods are deceptive and baffle the policies of those seeking to exploit them. At the beginning the nation asks for nothing but repose; it has only one desire, which is for peace, and one aspiration, which is to be insignificant. In other words, it longs for tranquillity. We have had enough of great happenings, great risks, great adventures, and more than enough, God save us, of great men. We would exchange Caesar for Prusias and Napoleon for the Roi d’Yvetot – ‘what a good little king he was’, as Béranger sang. The march has gone on since dawn, and we are in the evening of a long, hard day. The first stage was with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre and the third with Bonaparte. Now we are exhausted and each man seeks his bed.
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