Les Misérables
undulated vaguely, water possessing the power of taking light, no one
knows whence, and converting it into a snake. The light vanished, and
all became indistinct once more. Immensity seemed thrown open there.
What lay below was not water, it was a gulf. The wall of the quay,
abrupt, confused, mingled with the vapors, instantly concealed from
sight, produced the effect of an escarpment of the infinite. Nothing
was to be seen, but the hostile chill of the water and the stale odor
of the wet stones could be felt. A fierce breath rose from this abyss.
The flood in the river, divined rather than perceived, the tragic
whispering of the waves, the melancholy vastness of the arches of the
bridge, the imaginable fall into that gloomy void, into all that shadow
was full of horror.
Javert remained motionless for several minutes, gazing at this opening
of shadow; he considered the invisible with a fixity that resembled
attention. The water roared. All at once he took off his hat and placed
it on the edge of the quay. A moment later, a tall black figure, which
a belated passer-by in the distance might have taken for a phantom,
appeared erect upon the parapet of the quay, bent over towards the
Seine, then drew itself up again, and fell straight down into the
shadows; a dull splash followed; and the shadow alone was in the secret
of the convulsions of that obscure form which had disappeared beneath
the water.
BOOK FIFTH—GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER
CHAPTER I—IN WHICH THE TREE WITH THE ZINC PLASTER APPEARS AGAIN
Some time after the events which we have just recorded, Sieur
Boulatruelle experienced a lively emotion.
Sieur Boulatruelle was that road-mender of Montfermeil whom the reader
has already seen in the gloomy parts of this book.
Boulatruelle, as the reader may, perchance, recall, was a man who was
occupied with divers and troublesome matters. He broke stones and
damaged travellers on the highway.
Road-mender and thief as he was, he cherished one dream; he believed in
the treasures buried in the forest of Montfermeil. He hoped some day to
find the money in the earth at the foot of a tree; in the meanwhile, he
lived to search the pockets of passers-by.
Nevertheless, for an instant, he was prudent. He had just escaped
neatly. He had been, as the reader is aware, picked up in Jondrette’s
garret in company with the other ruffians. Utility of a vice: his
drunkenness had been his salvation. The authorities had never been able
to make out whether he had been there in the quality of a robber or a
man who had been robbed. An order of _nolle prosequi_, founded on his
well authenticated state of intoxication on the evening of the ambush,
had set him at liberty. He had taken to his heels. He had returned to
his road from Gagny to Lagny, to make, under administrative
supervision, broken stone for the good of the state, with downcast
mien, in a very pensive mood, his ardor for theft somewhat cooled; but
he was addicted nonetheless tenderly to the wine which had recently
saved him.
As for the lively emotion which he had experienced a short time after
his return to his road-mender’s turf-thatched cot, here it is:
One morning, Boulatruelle, while on his way as was his wont, to his
work, and possibly also to his ambush, a little before daybreak caught
sight, through the branches of the trees, of a man, whose back alone he
saw, but the shape of whose shoulders, as it seemed to him at that
distance and in the early dusk, was not entirely unfamiliar to him.
Boulatruelle, although intoxicated, had a correct and lucid memory, a
defensive arm that is indispensable to any one who is at all in
conflict with legal order.
“Where the deuce have I seen something like that man yonder?” he said
to himself. But he could make himself no answer, except that the man
resembled some one of whom his memory preserved a confused trace.
However, apart from the identity which he could not manage to catch,
Boulatruelle put things together and made calculations. This man did
not belong in the country-side. He had just arrived there. On foot,
evidently. No public conveyance passes through Montfermeil at that
hour. He had walked all night. Whence came he? Not from a very great
distance; for he had neither haversack, nor bundle. From Paris, no
doubt. Why was he in these woods? why was he there at such an hour?
what had he come there for?
Boulatruelle thought of the treasure. By dint of ransacking his memory,
he recalled in a vague way that he had already, many years before, had
a similar alarm in connection with a man who produced on him the effect
that he might well be this very individual.
“By the deuce,” said Boulatruelle, “I’ll find him again. I’ll discover
the parish of that parishioner. This prowler of Patron-Minette has a
reason, and I’ll know it. People can’t have secrets in my forest if I
don’t have a finger in the pie.”
He took his pick-axe which was very sharply pointed.
“There now,” he grumbled, “is something that will search the earth and
a man.”
And, as one knots one thread to another thread, he took up the line of
march at his best pace in the direction which the man must follow, and
set out across the thickets.
When he had compassed a hundred strides, the day, which was already
beginning to break, came to his assistance. Footprints stamped in the
sand, weeds trodden down here and there, heather crushed, young
branches in the brushwood bent and in the act of straightening
themselves up again with the graceful deliberation of the arms of a
pretty woman who stretches herself when she wakes, pointed out to him a
sort of track. He followed it, then lost it. Time was flying. He
plunged deeper into the woods and came to a sort of eminence. An early
huntsman who was passing in the distance along a path, whistling the
air of Guillery, suggested to him the idea of climbing a tree. Old as
he was, he was agile. There stood close at hand a beech-tree of great
size, worthy of Tityrus and of Boulatruelle. Boulatruelle ascended the
beech as high as he was able.
The idea was a good one. On scrutinizing the solitary waste on the side
where the forest is thoroughly entangled and wild, Boulatruelle
suddenly caught sight of his man.
Hardly had he got his eye upon him when he lost sight of him.
The man entered, or rather, glided into, an open glade, at a
considerable distance, masked by large trees, but with which
Boulatruelle was perfectly familiar, on account of having noticed, near
a large pile of porous stones, an ailing chestnut-tree bandaged with a
sheet of zinc nailed directly upon the bark. This glade was the one
which was formerly called the Blaru-bottom. The heap of stones,
destined for no one knows what employment, which was visible there
thirty years ago, is doubtless still there. Nothing equals a heap of
stones in longevity, unless it is a board fence. They are temporary
expedients. What a reason for lasting!
Boulatruelle, with the rapidity of joy, dropped rather than descended
from the tree. The lair was unearthed, the question now was to seize
the beast. That famous treasure of his dreams was probably there.
It was no small matter to reach that glade. By the beaten paths, which
indulge in a thousand teasing zigzags, it required a good quarter of an
hour. In a bee-line, through the underbrush, which is peculiarly dense,
very thorny, and very aggressive in that locality, a full half hour was
necessary. Boulatruelle committed the error of not comprehending this.
He believed in the straight line; a respectable optical illusion which
ruins many a man. The thicket, bristling as it was, struck him as the
best road.
“Let’s take to the wolves’ Rue de Rivoli,” said he.
Boulatruelle, accustomed to taking crooked courses, was on this
occasion guilty of the fault of going straight.
He flung himself resolutely into the tangle of undergrowth.
He had to deal with holly bushes, nettles, hawthorns, eglantines,
thistles, and very irascible brambles. He was much lacerated.
At the bottom of the ravine he found water which he was obliged to
traverse.
At last he reached the Blaru-bottom, after the lapse of forty minutes,
sweating, soaked, breathless, scratched, and ferocious.
There was no one in the glade. Boulatruelle rushed to the heap of
stones. It was in its place. It had not been carried off.
As for the man, he had vanished in the forest. He had made his escape.
Where? in what direction? into what thicket? Impossible to guess.
And, heartrending to say, there, behind the pile of stones, in front of
the tree with the sheet of zinc, was freshly turned earth, a pick-axe,
abandoned or forgotten, and a hole.
The hole was empty.
“Thief!” shrieked Boulatruelle, shaking his fist at the horizon.
CHAPTER II—MARIUS, EMERGING FROM CIVIL WAR, MAKES READY FOR DOMESTIC
WAR
For a long time, Marius was neither dead nor alive. For many weeks he
lay in a fever accompanied by delirium, and by tolerably grave cerebral
symptoms, caused more by the shocks of the wounds on the head than by
the wounds themselves.
He repeated Cosette’s name for whole nights in the melancholy loquacity
of fever, and with the sombre obstinacy of agony. The extent of some of
the lesions presented a serious danger, the suppuration of large wounds
being always liable to become re-absorbed, and consequently, to kill
the sick man, under certain atmospheric conditions; at every change of
weather, at the slightest storm, the physician was uneasy.
“Above all things,” he repeated, “let the wounded man be subjected to
no emotion.” The dressing of the wounds was complicated and difficult,
the fixation of apparatus and bandages by cerecloths not having been
invented as yet, at that epoch. Nicolette used up a sheet “as big as
the ceiling,” as she put it, for lint. It was not without difficulty
that the chloruretted lotions and the nitrate of silver overcame the
gangrene. As long as there was any danger, M. Gillenormand, seated in
despair at his grandson’s pillow, was, like Marius, neither alive nor
dead.
Every day, sometimes twice a day, a very well dressed gentleman with
white hair,—such was the description given by the porter,—came to
inquire about the wounded man, and left a large package of lint for the
dressings.
Finally, on the 7th of September, four months to a day, after the
sorrowful night when he had been brought back to his grandfather in a
dying condition, the doctor declared that he would answer for Marius.
Convalescence began. But Marius was forced to remain for two months
more stretched out on a long chair, on account of the results called up
by the fracture of his collar-bone. There always is a last wound like
that which will not close, and which prolongs the dressings
indefinitely, to the great annoyance of the sick person.
However, this long illness and this long convalescence saved him from
all pursuit. In France, there is no wrath, not even of a public
character, which six months will not extinguish. Revolts, in the
present state of society, are so much the fault of every one, that they
are followed by a certain necessity of shutting the eyes.
Let us add, that the inexcusable Gisquet order, which enjoined doctors
to lodge information against the wounded, having outraged public
opinion, and not opinion alone, but the King first of all, the wounded
were covered and protected by this indignation; and, with the exception
of those who had been made prisoners in the very act of combat, the
councils of war did not dare to trouble any one. So Marius was left in
peace.
M. Gillenormand first passed through all manner of anguish, and then
through every form of ecstasy. It was found difficult to prevent his
passing every night beside the wounded man; he had his big armchair