Les Misérables
intersection of streets. Amazement of the passers-by at beholding two
bleeding men emerge from the earth at their feet. Arrival of the
police, a call to arms of the neighboring post of guards. Thus they
would be seized before they had even got out. It would be better to
plunge into that labyrinth, to confide themselves to that black gloom,
and to trust to Providence for the outcome.
He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.
When he had turned the angle of the gallery, the distant glimmer of an
air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell upon him once more,
and he became blind again. Nevertheless, he advanced as rapidly as
possible. Marius’ two arms were passed round his neck, and the former’s
feet dragged behind him. He held both these arms with one hand, and
groped along the wall with the other. Marius’ cheek touched his, and
clung there, bleeding. He felt a warm stream which came from Marius
trickling down upon him and making its way under his clothes. But a
humid warmth near his ear, which the mouth of the wounded man touched,
indicated respiration, and consequently, life. The passage along which
Jean Valjean was now proceeding was not so narrow as the first. Jean
Valjean walked through it with considerable difficulty. The rain of the
preceding day had not, as yet, entirely run off, and it created a
little torrent in the centre of the bottom, and he was forced to hug
the wall in order not to have his feet in the water.
Thus he proceeded in the gloom. He resembled the beings of the night
groping in the invisible and lost beneath the earth in veins of shadow.
Still, little by little, whether it was that the distant air-holes
emitted a little wavering light in this opaque gloom, or whether his
eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision returned
to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea, now of the wall
which he touched, now of the vault beneath which he was passing. The
pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune and ends
by finding God there.
It was not easy to direct his course.
The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of the streets
which lie above it. There were then in Paris two thousand two hundred
streets. Let the reader imagine himself beneath that forest of gloomy
branches which is called the sewer. The system of sewers existing at
that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of eleven
leagues. We have said above, that the actual network, thanks to the
special activity of the last thirty years, was no less than sixty
leagues in extent.
Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder. He thought that he was
beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it was a pity that it was not so.
Under the Rue Saint-Denis there is an old stone sewer which dates from
Louis XIII. and which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the
Grand Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation of
the ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-Martin
sewer, whose four arms describe a cross. But the gut of the
Petite-Truanderie the entrance to which was in the vicinity of the
Corinthe wine-shop has never communicated with the sewer of the Rue
Saint-Denis; it ended at the Montmartre sewer, and it was in this that
Jean Valjean was entangled. There opportunities of losing oneself
abound. The Montmartre sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the
ancient network. Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind him the
sewer of the markets whose geometrical plan presents the appearance of
a multitude of parrots’ roosts piled on top of each other; but he had
before him more than one embarrassing encounter and more than one
street corner—for they are streets—presenting itself in the gloom like
an interrogation point; first, on his left, the vast sewer of the
Plâtrière, a sort of Chinese puzzle, thrusting out and entangling its
chaos of Ts and Zs under the Post-Office and under the rotunda of the
Wheat Market, as far as the Seine, where it terminates in a Y;
secondly, on his right, the curving corridor of the Rue du Cadran with
its three teeth, which are also blind courts; thirdly, on his left, the
branch of the Mail, complicated, almost at its inception, with a sort
of fork, and proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag until it ends in the
grand crypt of the outlet of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in
every direction; and lastly, the blind alley of a passage of the Rue
des Jeûneurs, without counting little ducts here and there, before
reaching the belt sewer, which alone could conduct him to some issue
sufficiently distant to be safe.
Had Jean Valjean had any idea of all that we have here pointed out, he
would speedily have perceived, merely by feeling the wall, that he was
not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis. Instead of the
ancient stone, instead of the antique architecture, haughty and royal
even in the sewer, with pavement and string courses of granite and
mortar costing eight hundred livres the fathom, he would have felt
under his hand contemporary cheapness, economical expedients, porous
stone filled with mortar on a concrete foundation, which costs two
hundred francs the metre, and the bourgeoise masonry known as _à petits
matériaux_—small stuff; but of all this he knew nothing.
He advanced with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing, knowing
nothing, buried in chance, that is to say, engulfed in providence.
By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. The gloom
which enveloped him penetrated his spirit. He walked in an enigma. This
aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in a dizzy fashion.
It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows. Jean
Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route without seeing
it. In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last. How
was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he find it in time?
would that colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cavities, allow
itself to be penetrated and pierced? should he there encounter some
unexpected knot in the darkness? should he arrive at the inextricable
and the impassable? would Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of
hunger? should they end by both getting lost, and by furnishing two
skeletons in a nook of that night? He did not know. He put all these
questions to himself without replying to them. The intestines of Paris
form a precipice. Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.
All at once, he had a surprise. At the most unforeseen moment, and
without having ceased to walk in a straight line, he perceived that he
was no longer ascending; the water of the rivulet was beating against
his heels, instead of meeting him at his toes. The sewer was now
descending. Why? Was he about to arrive suddenly at the Seine? This
danger was a great one, but the peril of retreating was still greater.
He continued to advance.
It was not towards the Seine that he was proceeding. The ridge which
the soil of Paris forms on its right bank empties one of its watersheds
into the Seine and the other into the Grand Sewer. The crest of this
ridge which determines the division of the waters describes a very
capricious line. The culminating point, which is the point of
separation of the currents, is in the Sainte-Avoye sewer, beyond the
Rue Michel-le-Comte, in the sewer of the Louvre, near the boulevards,
and in the Montmartre sewer, near the Halles. It was this culminating
point that Jean Valjean had reached. He was directing his course
towards the belt sewer; he was on the right path. But he did not know
it.
Every time that he encountered a branch, he felt of its angles, and if
he found that the opening which presented itself was smaller than the
passage in which he was, he did not enter but continued his route,
rightly judging that every narrower way must needs terminate in a blind
alley, and could only lead him further from his goal, that is to say,
the outlet. Thus he avoided the quadruple trap which was set for him in
the darkness by the four labyrinths which we have just enumerated.
At a certain moment, he perceived that he was emerging from beneath the
Paris which was petrified by the uprising, where the barricades had
suppressed circulation, and that he was entering beneath the living and
normal Paris. Overhead he suddenly heard a noise as of thunder, distant
but continuous. It was the rumbling of vehicles.
He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according to the
calculation which he made in his own mind, and he had not yet thought
of rest; he had merely changed the hand with which he was holding
Marius. The darkness was more profound than ever, but its very depth
reassured him.
All at once, he saw his shadow in front of him. It was outlined on a
faint, almost indistinct reddish glow, which vaguely empurpled the
flooring vault underfoot, and the vault overhead, and gilded to his
right and to his left the two viscous walls of the passage. Stupefied,
he turned round.
Behind him, in the portion of the passage which he had just passed
through, at a distance which appeared to him immense, piercing the
dense obscurity, flamed a sort of horrible star which had the air of
surveying him.
It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the sewer.
In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about in a
confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible.
CHAPTER II—EXPLANATION
On the day of the sixth of June, a battue of the sewers had been
ordered. It was feared that the vanquished might have taken to them for
refuge, and Prefect Gisquet was to search occult Paris while General
Bugeaud swept public Paris; a double and connected operation which
exacted a double strategy on the part of the public force, represented
above by the army and below by the police. Three squads of agents and
sewermen explored the subterranean drain of Paris, the first on the
right bank, the second on the left bank, the third in the city. The
agents of police were armed with carabines, with bludgeons, swords and
poignards.
That which was directed at Jean Valjean at that moment, was the lantern
of the patrol of the right bank.
This patrol had just visited the curving gallery and the three blind
alleys which lie beneath the Rue du Cadran. While they were passing
their lantern through the depths of these blind alleys, Jean Valjean
had encountered on his path the entrance to the gallery, had perceived
that it was narrower than the principal passage and had not penetrated
thither. He had passed on. The police, on emerging from the gallery du
Cadran, had fancied that they heard the sound of footsteps in the
direction of the belt sewer. They were, in fact, the steps of Jean
Valjean. The sergeant in command of the patrol had raised his lantern,
and the squad had begun to gaze into the mist in the direction whence
the sound proceeded.
This was an indescribable moment for Jean Valjean.
Happily, if he saw the lantern well, the lantern saw him but ill. It
was light and he was shadow. He was very far off, and mingled with the
darkness of the place. He hugged the wall and halted. Moreover, he did
not understand what it was that was moving behind him. The lack of
sleep and food, and his emotions had caused him also to pass into the
state of a visionary. He beheld a gleam, and around that gleam, forms.
What was it? He did not comprehend.
Jean Valjean having paused, the sound ceased.
The men of the patrol listened, and heard nothing, they looked and saw
nothing. They held a consultation.
There existed at that epoch at this point of the Montmartre sewer a
sort of crossroads called _de service_, which was afterwards
suppressed, on account of the little interior lake which formed there,