Les Misérables
the paste, according as it is to be used for wood, paper, or stuff, a
paring-knife to cut the cardboard, a mould to adjust it, a hammer to
nail the steels, pincers, how the devil do I know what all? And all
that in order to earn four sous a day! And you have to work fourteen
hours a day! And each box passes through the workwoman’s hands thirteen
times! And you can’t wet the paper! And you mustn’t spot anything! And
you must keep the paste hot. The devil, I tell you! Four sous a day!
How do you suppose a man is to live?”
As he spoke, Jondrette did not look at M. Leblanc, who was observing
him. M. Leblanc’s eye was fixed on Jondrette, and Jondrette’s eye was
fixed on the door. Marius’ eager attention was transferred from one to
the other. M. Leblanc seemed to be asking himself: “Is this man an
idiot?” Jondrette repeated two or three distinct times, with all manner
of varying inflections of the whining and supplicating order: “There is
nothing left for me but to throw myself into the river! I went down
three steps at the side of the bridge of Austerlitz the other day for
that purpose.”
All at once his dull eyes lighted up with a hideous flash; the little
man drew himself up and became terrible, took a step toward M. Leblanc
and cried in a voice of thunder: “That has nothing to do with the
question! Do you know me?”
CHAPTER XX—THE TRAP
The door of the garret had just opened abruptly, and allowed a view of
three men clad in blue linen blouses, and masked with masks of black
paper. The first was thin, and had a long, iron-tipped cudgel; the
second, who was a sort of colossus, carried, by the middle of the
handle, with the blade downward, a butcher’s pole-axe for slaughtering
cattle. The third, a man with thick-set shoulders, not so slender as
the first, held in his hand an enormous key stolen from the door of
some prison.
It appeared that the arrival of these men was what Jondrette had been
waiting for. A rapid dialogue ensued between him and the man with the
cudgel, the thin one.
“Is everything ready?” said Jondrette.
“Yes,” replied the thin man.
“Where is Montparnasse?”
“The young principal actor stopped to chat with your girl.”
“Which?”
“The eldest.”
“Is there a carriage at the door?”
“Yes.”
“Is the team harnessed?”
“Yes.”
“With two good horses?”
“Excellent.”
“Is it waiting where I ordered?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” said Jondrette.
M. Leblanc was very pale. He was scrutinizing everything around him in
the den, like a man who understands what he has fallen into, and his
head, directed in turn toward all the heads which surrounded him, moved
on his neck with an astonished and attentive slowness, but there was
nothing in his air which resembled fear. He had improvised an
intrenchment out of the table; and the man, who but an instant
previously, had borne merely the appearance of a kindly old man, had
suddenly become a sort of athlete, and placed his robust fist on the
back of his chair, with a formidable and surprising gesture.
This old man, who was so firm and so brave in the presence of such a
danger, seemed to possess one of those natures which are as courageous
as they are kind, both easily and simply. The father of a woman whom we
love is never a stranger to us. Marius felt proud of that unknown man.
Three of the men, of whom Jondrette had said: “They are
chimney-builders,” had armed themselves from the pile of old iron, one
with a heavy pair of shears, the second with weighing-tongs, the third
with a hammer, and had placed themselves across the entrance without
uttering a syllable. The old man had remained on the bed, and had
merely opened his eyes. The Jondrette woman had seated herself beside
him.
Marius decided that in a few seconds more the moment for intervention
would arrive, and he raised his right hand towards the ceiling, in the
direction of the corridor, in readiness to discharge his pistol.
Jondrette having terminated his colloquy with the man with the cudgel,
turned once more to M. Leblanc, and repeated his question, accompanying
it with that low, repressed, and terrible laugh which was peculiar to
him:—
“So you do not recognize me?”
M. Leblanc looked him full in the face, and replied:—
“No.”
Then Jondrette advanced to the table. He leaned across the candle,
crossing his arms, putting his angular and ferocious jaw close to M.
Leblanc’s calm face, and advancing as far as possible without forcing
M. Leblanc to retreat, and, in this posture of a wild beast who is
about to bite, he exclaimed:—
“My name is not Fabantou, my name is not Jondrette, my name is
Thénardier. I am the inn-keeper of Montfermeil! Do you understand?
Thénardier! Now do you know me?”
An almost imperceptible flush crossed M. Leblanc’s brow, and he replied
with a voice which neither trembled nor rose above its ordinary level,
with his accustomed placidity:—
“No more than before.”
Marius did not hear this reply. Any one who had seen him at that moment
through the darkness would have perceived that he was haggard, stupid,
thunder-struck. At the moment when Jondrette said: “My name is
Thénardier,” Marius had trembled in every limb, and had leaned against
the wall, as though he felt the cold of a steel blade through his
heart. Then his right arm, all ready to discharge the signal shot,
dropped slowly, and at the moment when Jondrette repeated, “Thénardier,
do you understand?” Marius’s faltering fingers had come near letting
the pistol fall. Jondrette, by revealing his identity, had not moved M.
Leblanc, but he had quite upset Marius. That name of Thénardier, with
which M. Leblanc did not seem to be acquainted, Marius knew well. Let
the reader recall what that name meant to him! That name he had worn on
his heart, inscribed in his father’s testament! He bore it at the
bottom of his mind, in the depths of his memory, in that sacred
injunction: “A certain Thénardier saved my life. If my son encounters
him, he will do him all the good that lies in his power.” That name, it
will be remembered, was one of the pieties of his soul; he mingled it
with the name of his father in his worship. What! This man was that
Thénardier, that inn-keeper of Montfermeil whom he had so long and so
vainly sought! He had found him at last, and how? His father’s saviour
was a ruffian! That man, to whose service Marius was burning to devote
himself, was a monster! That liberator of Colonel Pontmercy was on the
point of committing a crime whose scope Marius did not, as yet, clearly
comprehend, but which resembled an assassination! And against whom,
great God! what a fatality! What a bitter mockery of fate! His father
had commanded him from the depths of his coffin to do all the good in
his power to this Thénardier, and for four years Marius had cherished
no other thought than to acquit this debt of his father’s, and at the
moment when he was on the eve of having a brigand seized in the very
act of crime by justice, destiny cried to him: “This is Thénardier!” He
could at last repay this man for his father’s life, saved amid a
hail-storm of grape-shot on the heroic field of Waterloo, and repay it
with the scaffold! He had sworn to himself that if ever he found that
Thénardier, he would address him only by throwing himself at his feet;
and now he actually had found him, but it was only to deliver him over
to the executioner! His father said to him: “Succor Thénardier!” And he
replied to that adored and sainted voice by crushing Thénardier! He was
about to offer to his father in his grave the spectacle of that man who
had torn him from death at the peril of his own life, executed on the
Place Saint-Jacques through the means of his son, of that Marius to
whom he had entrusted that man by his will! And what a mockery to have
so long worn on his breast his father’s last commands, written in his
own hand, only to act in so horribly contrary a sense! But, on the
other hand, now look on that trap and not prevent it! Condemn the
victim and to spare the assassin! Could one be held to any gratitude
towards so miserable a wretch? All the ideas which Marius had cherished
for the last four years were pierced through and through, as it were,
by this unforeseen blow.
He shuddered. Everything depended on him. Unknown to themselves, he
held in his hand all those beings who were moving about there before
his eyes. If he fired his pistol, M. Leblanc was saved, and Thénardier
lost; if he did not fire, M. Leblanc would be sacrificed, and, who
knows? Thénardier would escape. Should he dash down the one or allow
the other to fall? Remorse awaited him in either case.
What was he to do? What should he choose? Be false to the most
imperious souvenirs, to all those solemn vows to himself, to the most
sacred duty, to the most venerated text! Should he ignore his father’s
testament, or allow the perpetration of a crime! On the one hand, it
seemed to him that he heard “his Ursule” supplicating for her father
and on the other, the colonel commending Thénardier to his care. He
felt that he was going mad. His knees gave way beneath him. And he had
not even the time for deliberation, so great was the fury with which
the scene before his eyes was hastening to its catastrophe. It was like
a whirlwind of which he had thought himself the master, and which was
now sweeping him away. He was on the verge of swooning.
In the meantime, Thénardier, whom we shall henceforth call by no other
name, was pacing up and down in front of the table in a sort of frenzy
and wild triumph.
He seized the candle in his fist, and set it on the chimney-piece with
so violent a bang that the wick came near being extinguished, and the
tallow bespattered the wall.
Then he turned to M. Leblanc with a horrible look, and spit out these
words:—
“Done for! Smoked brown! Cooked! Spitchcocked!”
And again he began to march back and forth, in full eruption.
“Ah!” he cried, “so I’ve found you again at last, Mister
philanthropist! Mister threadbare millionnaire! Mister giver of dolls!
you old ninny! Ah! so you don’t recognize me! No, it wasn’t you who
came to Montfermeil, to my inn, eight years ago, on Christmas eve,
1823! It wasn’t you who carried off that Fantine’s child from me! The
Lark! It wasn’t you who had a yellow great-coat! No! Nor a package of
duds in your hand, as you had this morning here! Say, wife, it seems to
be his mania to carry packets of woollen stockings into houses! Old
charity monger, get out with you! Are you a hosier, Mister
millionnaire? You give away your stock in trade to the poor, holy man!
What bosh! merry Andrew! Ah! and you don’t recognize me? Well, I
recognize you, that I do! I recognized you the very moment you poked
your snout in here. Ah! you’ll find out presently, that it isn’t all
roses to thrust yourself in that fashion into people’s houses, under
the pretext that they are taverns, in wretched clothes, with the air of
a poor man, to whom one would give a sou, to deceive persons, to play
the generous, to take away their means of livelihood, and to make
threats in the woods, and you can’t call things quits because
afterwards, when people are ruined, you bring a coat that is too large,
and two miserable hospital blankets, you old blackguard, you
child-stealer!”
He paused, and seemed to be talking to himself for a moment. One would
have said that his wrath had fallen into some hole, like the Rhone;
then, as though he were concluding aloud the things which he had been
saying to himself in a whisper, he smote the table with his fist, and
shouted:—
“And with his goody-goody air!”
And, apostrophizing M. Leblanc:—
“Parbleu! You made game of me in the past! You are the cause of all my
misfortunes! For fifteen hundred francs you got a girl whom I had, and