Les Misérables
these chambers which, as the reader sees, are not dungeons, is that
they allow the persons who should be at work to think.
So Brujon meditated, and he emerged from the chamber of punishment with
a rope. As he had the name of being very dangerous in the Charlemagne
courtyard, he was placed in the New Building. The first thing he found
in the New Building was Guelemer, the second was a nail; Guelemer, that
is to say, crime; a nail, that is to say, liberty. Brujon, of whom it
is high time that the reader should have a complete idea, was, with an
appearance of delicate health and a profoundly premeditated languor, a
polished, intelligent sprig, and a thief, who had a caressing glance,
and an atrocious smile. His glance resulted from his will, and his
smile from his nature. His first studies in his art had been directed
to roofs. He had made great progress in the industry of the men who
tear off lead, who plunder the roofs and despoil the gutters by the
process called _double pickings_.
The circumstance which put the finishing touch on the moment peculiarly
favorable for an attempt at escape, was that the roofers were re-laying
and re-jointing, at that very moment, a portion of the slates on the
prison. The Saint-Bernard courtyard was no longer absolutely isolated
from the Charlemagne and the Saint-Louis courts. Up above there were
scaffoldings and ladders; in other words, bridges and stairs in the
direction of liberty.
The New Building, which was the most cracked and decrepit thing to be
seen anywhere in the world, was the weak point in the prison. The walls
were eaten by saltpetre to such an extent that the authorities had been
obliged to line the vaults of the dormitories with a sheathing of wood,
because stones were in the habit of becoming detached and falling on
the prisoners in their beds. In spite of this antiquity, the
authorities committed the error of confining in the New Building the
most troublesome prisoners, of placing there “the hard cases,” as they
say in prison parlance.
The New Building contained four dormitories, one above the other, and a
top story which was called the Bel-Air (Fine-Air). A large
chimney-flue, probably from some ancient kitchen of the Dukes de la
Force, started from the ground floor, traversed all four stories, cut
the dormitories, where it figured as a flattened pillar, into two
portions, and finally pierced the roof.
Guelemer and Brujon were in the same dormitory. They had been placed,
by way of precaution, on the lower story. Chance ordained that the
heads of their beds should rest against the chimney.
Thénardier was directly over their heads in the top story known as
Fine-Air. The pedestrian who halts on the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine,
after passing the barracks of the firemen, in front of the
porte-cochère of the bathing establishment, beholds a yard full of
flowers and shrubs in wooden boxes, at the extremity of which spreads
out a little white rotunda with two wings, brightened up with green
shutters, the bucolic dream of Jean Jacques.
Not more than ten years ago, there rose above that rotunda an enormous
black, hideous, bare wall by which it was backed up.
This was the outer wall of La Force.
This wall, beside that rotunda, was Milton viewed through Berquin.
Lofty as it was, this wall was overtopped by a still blacker roof,
which could be seen beyond. This was the roof of the New Building.
There one could descry four dormer-windows, guarded with bars; they
were the windows of the Fine-Air.
A chimney pierced the roof; this was the chimney which traversed the
dormitories.
The Bel-Air, that top story of the New Building, was a sort of large
hall, with a Mansard roof, guarded with triple gratings and double
doors of sheet iron, which were studded with enormous bolts. When one
entered from the north end, one had on one’s left the four
dormer-windows, on one’s right, facing the windows, at regular
intervals, four square, tolerably vast cages, separated by narrow
passages, built of masonry to about the height of the elbow, and the
rest, up to the roof, of iron bars.
Thénardier had been in solitary confinement in one of these cages since
the night of the 3d of February. No one was ever able to discover how,
and by what connivance, he succeeded in procuring, and secreting a
bottle of wine, invented, so it is said, by Desrues, with which a
narcotic is mixed, and which the band of the _Endormeurs_, or
_Sleep-compellers_, rendered famous.
There are, in many prisons, treacherous employees, half-jailers,
half-thieves, who assist in escapes, who sell to the police an
unfaithful service, and who turn a penny whenever they can.
On that same night, then, when Little Gavroche picked up the two lost
children, Brujon and Guelemer, who knew that Babet, who had escaped
that morning, was waiting for them in the street as well as
Montparnasse, rose softly, and with the nail which Brujon had found,
began to pierce the chimney against which their beds stood. The rubbish
fell on Brujon’s bed, so that they were not heard. Showers mingled with
thunder shook the doors on their hinges, and created in the prison a
terrible and opportune uproar. Those of the prisoners who woke,
pretended to fall asleep again, and left Guelemer and Brujon to their
own devices. Brujon was adroit; Guelemer was vigorous. Before any sound
had reached the watcher, who was sleeping in the grated cell which
opened into the dormitory, the wall had been pierced, the chimney
scaled, the iron grating which barred the upper orifice of the flue
forced, and the two redoubtable ruffians were on the roof. The wind and
rain redoubled, the roof was slippery.
“What a good night to leg it!” said Brujon.
An abyss six feet broad and eighty feet deep separated them from the
surrounding wall. At the bottom of this abyss, they could see the
musket of a sentinel gleaming through the gloom. They fastened one end
of the rope which Brujon had spun in his dungeon to the stumps of the
iron bars which they had just wrenched off, flung the other over the
outer wall, crossed the abyss at one bound, clung to the coping of the
wall, got astride of it, let themselves slip, one after the other,
along the rope, upon a little roof which touches the bath-house, pulled
their rope after them, jumped down into the courtyard of the
bath-house, traversed it, pushed open the porter’s wicket, beside which
hung his rope, pulled this, opened the porte-cochère, and found
themselves in the street.
Three-quarters of an hour had not elapsed since they had risen in bed
in the dark, nail in hand, and their project in their heads.
A few moments later they had joined Babet and Montparnasse, who were
prowling about the neighborhood.
They had broken their rope in pulling it after them, and a bit of it
remained attached to the chimney on the roof. They had sustained no
other damage, however, than that of scratching nearly all the skin off
their hands.
That night, Thénardier was warned, without any one being able to
explain how, and was not asleep.
Towards one o’clock in the morning, the night being very dark, he saw
two shadows pass along the roof, in the rain and squalls, in front of
the dormer-window which was opposite his cage. One halted at the
window, long enough to dart in a glance. This was Brujon.
Thénardier recognized him, and understood. This was enough.
Thénardier, rated as a burglar, and detained as a measure of precaution
under the charge of organizing a nocturnal ambush, with armed force,
was kept in sight. The sentry, who was relieved every two hours,
marched up and down in front of his cage with loaded musket. The
Fine-Air was lighted by a skylight. The prisoner had on his feet
fetters weighing fifty pounds. Every day, at four o’clock in the
afternoon, a jailer, escorted by two dogs,—this was still in vogue at
that time,—entered his cage, deposited beside his bed a loaf of black
bread weighing two pounds, a jug of water, a bowl filled with rather
thin bouillon, in which swam a few Mayagan beans, inspected his irons
and tapped the bars. This man and his dogs made two visits during the
night.
Thénardier had obtained permission to keep a sort of iron bolt which he
used to spike his bread into a crack in the wall, “in order to preserve
it from the rats,” as he said. As Thénardier was kept in sight, no
objection had been made to this spike. Still, it was remembered
afterwards, that one of the jailers had said: “It would be better to
let him have only a wooden spike.”
At two o’clock in the morning, the sentinel, who was an old soldier,
was relieved, and replaced by a conscript. A few moments later, the man
with the dogs paid his visit, and went off without noticing anything,
except, possibly, the excessive youth and “the rustic air” of the “raw
recruit.” Two hours afterwards, at four o’clock, when they came to
relieve the conscript, he was found asleep on the floor, lying like a
log near Thénardier’s cage. As for Thénardier, he was no longer there.
There was a hole in the ceiling of his cage, and, above it, another
hole in the roof. One of the planks of his bed had been wrenched off,
and probably carried away with him, as it was not found. They also
seized in his cell a half-empty bottle which contained the remains of
the stupefying wine with which the soldier had been drugged. The
soldier’s bayonet had disappeared.
At the moment when this discovery was made, it was assumed that
Thénardier was out of reach. The truth is, that he was no longer in the
New Building, but that he was still in great danger.
Thénardier, on reaching the roof of the New Building, had found the
remains of Brujon’s rope hanging to the bars of the upper trap of the
chimney, but, as this broken fragment was much too short, he had not
been able to escape by the outer wall, as Brujon and Guelemer had done.
When one turns from the Rue des Ballets into the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile,
one almost immediately encounters a repulsive ruin. There stood on that
spot, in the last century, a house of which only the back wall now
remains, a regular wall of masonry, which rises to the height of the
third story between the adjoining buildings. This ruin can be
recognized by two large square windows which are still to be seen
there; the middle one, that nearest the right gable, is barred with a
worm-eaten beam adjusted like a prop. Through these windows there was
formerly visible a lofty and lugubrious wall, which was a fragment of
the outer wall of La Force.
The empty space on the street left by the demolished house is
half-filled by a fence of rotten boards, shored up by five stone posts.
In this recess lies concealed a little shanty which leans against the
portion of the ruin which has remained standing. The fence has a gate,
which, a few years ago, was fastened only by a latch.
It was the crest of this ruin that Thénardier had succeeded in
reaching, a little after one o’clock in the morning.
How had he got there? That is what no one has ever been able to explain
or understand. The lightning must, at the same time, have hindered and
helped him. Had he made use of the ladders and scaffoldings of the
slaters to get from roof to roof, from enclosure to enclosure, from
compartment to compartment, to the buildings of the Charlemagne court,
then to the buildings of the Saint-Louis court, to the outer wall, and
thence to the hut on the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile? But in that itinerary
there existed breaks which seemed to render it an impossibility. Had he
placed the plank from his bed like a bridge from the roof of the
Fine-Air to the outer wall, and crawled flat, on his belly on the
coping of the outer wall the whole distance round the prison as far as
the hut? But the outer wall of La Force formed a crenellated and