Les Misérables
“Yes,” said the mother. “I got three large potatoes and some salt. I
took advantage of the fire to cook them.”
“Good,” returned Jondrette. “To-morrow I will take you out to dine with
me. We will have a duck and fixings. You shall dine like Charles the
Tenth; all is going well!”
Then he added:—
“The mouse-trap is open. The cats are there.”
He lowered his voice still further, and said:—
“Put this in the fire.”
Marius heard a sound of charcoal being knocked with the tongs or some
iron utensil, and Jondrette continued:—
“Have you greased the hinges of the door so that they will not squeak?”
“Yes,” replied the mother.
“What time is it?”
“Nearly six. The half-hour struck from Saint-Médard a while ago.”
“The devil!” ejaculated Jondrette; “the children must go and watch.
Come you, do you listen here.”
A whispering ensued.
Jondrette’s voice became audible again:—
“Has old Bougon left?”
“Yes,” said the mother.
“Are you sure that there is no one in our neighbor’s room?”
“He has not been in all day, and you know very well that this is his
dinner hour.”
“You are sure?”
“Sure.”
“All the same,” said Jondrette, “there’s no harm in going to see
whether he is there. Here, my girl, take the candle and go there.”
Marius fell on his hands and knees and crawled silently under his bed.
Hardly had he concealed himself, when he perceived a light through the
crack of his door.
“P’pa,” cried a voice, “he is not in here.”
He recognized the voice of the eldest daughter.
“Did you go in?” demanded her father.
“No,” replied the girl, “but as his key is in the door, he must be
out.”
The father exclaimed:—
“Go in, nevertheless.”
The door opened, and Marius saw the tall Jondrette come in with a
candle in her hand. She was as she had been in the morning, only still
more repulsive in this light.
She walked straight up to the bed. Marius endured an indescribable
moment of anxiety; but near the bed there was a mirror nailed to the
wall, and it was thither that she was directing her steps. She raised
herself on tiptoe and looked at herself in it. In the neighboring room,
the sound of iron articles being moved was audible.
She smoothed her hair with the palm of her hand, and smiled into the
mirror, humming with her cracked and sepulchral voice:—
Nos amours ont duré toute une semaine,
Mais que du bonheur les instants sont courts!
S’adorer huit jours, c’était bien la peine!
Le temps des amours devrait durer toujours!
Devrait durer toujours! devrait durer toujours!28
In the meantime, Marius trembled. It seemed impossible to him that she
should not hear his breathing.
She stepped to the window and looked out with the half-foolish way she
had.
“How ugly Paris is when it has put on a white chemise!” said she.
She returned to the mirror and began again to put on airs before it,
scrutinizing herself full-face and three-quarters face in turn.
“Well!” cried her father, “what are you about there?”
“I am looking under the bed and the furniture,” she replied, continuing
to arrange her hair; “there’s no one here.”
“Booby!” yelled her father. “Come here this minute! And don’t waste any
time about it!”
“Coming! Coming!” said she. “One has no time for anything in this
hovel!”
She hummed:—
Vous me quittez pour aller à la gloire;
Mon triste cœur suivra partout.29
She cast a parting glance in the mirror and went out, shutting the door
behind her.
A moment more, and Marius heard the sound of the two young girls’ bare
feet in the corridor, and Jondrette’s voice shouting to them:—
“Pay strict heed! One on the side of the barrier, the other at the
corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier. Don’t lose sight for a moment of
the door of this house, and the moment you see anything, rush here on
the instant! as hard as you can go! You have a key to get in.”
The eldest girl grumbled:—
“The idea of standing watch in the snow barefoot!”
“To-morrow you shall have some dainty little green silk boots!” said
the father.
They ran downstairs, and a few seconds later the shock of the outer
door as it banged to announced that they were outside.
There now remained in the house only Marius, the Jondrettes and
probably, also, the mysterious persons of whom Marius had caught a
glimpse in the twilight, behind the door of the unused attic.
CHAPTER XVII—THE USE MADE OF MARIUS’ FIVE-FRANC PIECE
Marius decided that the moment had now arrived when he must resume his
post at his observatory. In a twinkling, and with the agility of his
age, he had reached the hole in the partition.
He looked.
The interior of the Jondrette apartment presented a curious aspect, and
Marius found an explanation of the singular light which he had noticed.
A candle was burning in a candlestick covered with verdigris, but that
was not what really lighted the chamber. The hovel was completely
illuminated, as it were, by the reflection from a rather large
sheet-iron brazier standing in the fireplace, and filled with burning
charcoal, the brazier prepared by the Jondrette woman that morning. The
charcoal was glowing hot and the brazier was red; a blue flame
flickered over it, and helped him to make out the form of the chisel
purchased by Jondrette in the Rue Pierre-Lombard, where it had been
thrust into the brazier to heat. In one corner, near the door, and as
though prepared for some definite use, two heaps were visible, which
appeared to be, the one a heap of old iron, the other a heap of ropes.
All this would have caused the mind of a person who knew nothing of
what was in preparation, to waver between a very sinister and a very
simple idea. The lair thus lighted up more resembled a forge than a
mouth of hell, but Jondrette, in this light, had rather the air of a
demon than of a smith.
The heat of the brazier was so great, that the candle on the table was
melting on the side next the chafing-dish, and was drooping over. An
old dark-lantern of copper, worthy of Diogenes turned Cartouche, stood
on the chimney-piece.
The brazier, placed in the fireplace itself, beside the nearly extinct
brands, sent its vapors up the chimney, and gave out no odor.
The moon, entering through the four panes of the window, cast its
whiteness into the crimson and flaming garret; and to the poetic spirit
of Marius, who was dreamy even in the moment of action, it was like a
thought of heaven mingled with the misshapen reveries of earth.
A breath of air which made its way in through the open pane, helped to
dissipate the smell of the charcoal and to conceal the presence of the
brazier.
The Jondrette lair was, if the reader recalls what we have said of the
Gorbeau building, admirably chosen to serve as the theatre of a violent
and sombre deed, and as the envelope for a crime. It was the most
retired chamber in the most isolated house on the most deserted
boulevard in Paris. If the system of ambush and traps had not already
existed, they would have been invented there.
The whole thickness of a house and a multitude of uninhabited rooms
separated this den from the boulevard, and the only window that existed
opened on waste lands enclosed with walls and palisades.
Jondrette had lighted his pipe, seated himself on the seatless chair,
and was engaged in smoking. His wife was talking to him in a low tone.
If Marius had been Courfeyrac, that is to say, one of those men who
laugh on every occasion in life, he would have burst with laughter when
his gaze fell on the Jondrette woman. She had on a black bonnet with
plumes not unlike the hats of the heralds-at-arms at the coronation of
Charles X., an immense tartan shawl over her knitted petticoat, and the
man’s shoes which her daughter had scorned in the morning. It was this
toilette which had extracted from Jondrette the exclamation: “Good! You
have dressed up. You have done well. You must inspire confidence!”
As for Jondrette, he had not taken off the new surtout, which was too
large for him, and which M. Leblanc had given him, and his costume
continued to present that contrast of coat and trousers which
constituted the ideal of a poet in Courfeyrac’s eyes.
All at once, Jondrette lifted up his voice:—
“By the way! Now that I think of it. In this weather, he will come in a
carriage. Light the lantern, take it and go downstairs. You will stand
behind the lower door. The very moment that you hear the carriage stop,
you will open the door, instantly, he will come up, you will light the
staircase and the corridor, and when he enters here, you will go
downstairs again as speedily as possible, you will pay the coachman,
and dismiss the fiacre.”
“And the money?” inquired the woman.
Jondrette fumbled in his trousers pocket and handed her five francs.
“What’s this?” she exclaimed.
Jondrette replied with dignity:—
“That is the monarch which our neighbor gave us this morning.”
And he added:—
“Do you know what? Two chairs will be needed here.”
“What for?”
“To sit on.”
Marius felt a cold chill pass through his limbs at hearing this mild
answer from Jondrette.
“Pardieu! I’ll go and get one of our neighbor’s.”
And with a rapid movement, she opened the door of the den, and went out
into the corridor.
Marius absolutely had not the time to descend from the commode, reach
his bed, and conceal himself beneath it.
“Take the candle,” cried Jondrette.
“No,” said she, “it would embarrass me, I have the two chairs to carry.
There is moonlight.”
Marius heard Mother Jondrette’s heavy hand fumbling at his lock in the
dark. The door opened. He remained nailed to the spot with the shock
and with horror.
The Jondrette entered.
The dormer window permitted the entrance of a ray of moonlight between
two blocks of shadow. One of these blocks of shadow entirely covered
the wall against which Marius was leaning, so that he disappeared
within it.
Mother Jondrette raised her eyes, did not see Marius, took the two
chairs, the only ones which Marius possessed, and went away, letting
the door fall heavily to behind her.
She re-entered the lair.
“Here are the two chairs.”
“And here is the lantern. Go down as quick as you can.”
She hastily obeyed, and Jondrette was left alone.
He placed the two chairs on opposite sides of the table, turned the
chisel in the brazier, set in front of the fireplace an old screen
which masked the chafing-dish, then went to the corner where lay the
pile of rope, and bent down as though to examine something. Marius then
recognized the fact, that what he had taken for a shapeless mass was a
very well-made rope-ladder, with wooden rungs and two hooks with which
to attach it.
This ladder, and some large tools, veritable masses of iron, which were
mingled with the old iron piled up behind the door, had not been in the
Jondrette hovel in the morning, and had evidently been brought thither
in the afternoon, during Marius’ absence.
“Those are the utensils of an edge-tool maker,” thought Marius.
Had Marius been a little more learned in this line, he would have
recognized in what he took for the engines of an edge-tool maker,
certain instruments which will force a lock or pick a lock, and others
which will cut or slice, the two families of tools which burglars call
_cadets_ and _fauchants_.
The fireplace and the two chairs were exactly opposite Marius. The
brazier being concealed, the only light in the room was now furnished
by the candle; the smallest bit of crockery on the table or on the
chimney-piece cast a large shadow. There was something indescribably
calm, threatening, and hideous about this chamber. One felt that there
existed in it the anticipation of something terrible.