Les Misérables
condition attached to Cosette. He accepted it. By dint of discussing
political matters, vaguely and without precision, from the point of
view of the general amelioration of the fate of all men, they came to
say a little more than “yes” and “no.” Once, on the subject of
education, which Marius wished to have free and obligatory, multiplied
under all forms lavished on every one, like the air and the sun in a
word, respirable for the entire population, they were in unison, and
they almost conversed. M. Fauchelevent talked well, and even with a
certain loftiness of language—still he lacked something indescribable.
M. Fauchelevent possessed something less and also something more, than
a man of the world.
Marius, inwardly, and in the depths of his thought, surrounded with all
sorts of mute questions this M. Fauchelevent, who was to him simply
benevolent and cold. There were moments when doubts as to his own
recollections occurred to him. There was a void in his memory, a black
spot, an abyss excavated by four months of agony.—Many things had been
lost therein. He had come to the point of asking himself whether it
were really a fact that he had seen M. Fauchelevent, so serious and so
calm a man, in the barricade.
This was not, however, the only stupor which the apparitions and the
disappearances of the past had left in his mind. It must not be
supposed that he was delivered from all those obsessions of the memory
which force us, even when happy, even when satisfied, to glance sadly
behind us. The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that
have vanished contains neither thought nor love. At times, Marius
clasped his face between his hands, and the vague and tumultuous past
traversed the twilight which reigned in his brain. Again he beheld
Mabeuf fall, he heard Gavroche singing amid the grape-shot, he felt
beneath his lips the cold brow of Éponine; Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean
Prouvaire, Combeferre, Bossuet, Grantaire, all his friends rose erect
before him, then dispersed into thin air. Were all those dear,
sorrowful, valiant, charming or tragic beings merely dreams? had they
actually existed? The revolt had enveloped everything in its smoke.
These great fevers create great dreams. He questioned himself; he felt
himself; all these vanished realities made him dizzy. Where were they
all then? was it really true that all were dead? A fall into the
shadows had carried off all except himself. It all seemed to him to
have disappeared as though behind the curtain of a theatre. There are
curtains like this which drop in life. God passes on to the following
act.
And he himself—was he actually the same man? He, the poor man, was
rich; he, the abandoned, had a family; he, the despairing, was to marry
Cosette. It seemed to him that he had traversed a tomb, and that he had
entered into it black and had emerged from it white, and in that tomb
the others had remained. At certain moments, all these beings of the
past, returned and present, formed a circle around him, and
overshadowed him; then he thought of Cosette, and recovered his
serenity; but nothing less than this felicity could have sufficed to
efface that catastrophe.
M. Fauchelevent almost occupied a place among these vanished beings.
Marius hesitated to believe that the Fauchelevent of the barricade was
the same as this Fauchelevent in flesh and blood, sitting so gravely
beside Cosette. The first was, probably, one of those nightmares
occasioned and brought back by his hours of delirium. However, the
natures of both men were rigid, no question from Marius to M.
Fauchelevent was possible. Such an idea had not even occurred to him.
We have already indicated this characteristic detail.
Two men who have a secret in common, and who, by a sort of tacit
agreement, exchange not a word on the subject, are less rare than is
commonly supposed.
Once only, did Marius make the attempt. He introduced into the
conversation the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and, turning to M. Fauchelevent,
he said to him:
“Of course, you are acquainted with that street?”
“What street?”
“The Rue de la Chanvrerie.”
“I have no idea of the name of that street,” replied M. Fauchelevent,
in the most natural manner in the world.
The response which bore upon the name of the street and not upon the
street itself, appeared to Marius to be more conclusive than it really
was.
“Decidedly,” thought he, “I have been dreaming. I have been subject to
a hallucination. It was some one who resembled him. M. Fauchelevent was
not there.”’
CHAPTER VIII—TWO MEN IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND
Marius’ enchantment, great as it was, could not efface from his mind
other pre-occupations.
While the wedding was in preparation, and while awaiting the date fixed
upon, he caused difficult and scrupulous retrospective researches to be
made.
He owed gratitude in various quarters; he owed it on his father’s
account, he owed it on his own.
There was Thénardier; there was the unknown man who had brought him,
Marius, back to M. Gillenormand.
Marius endeavored to find these two men, not intending to marry, to be
happy, and to forget them, and fearing that, were these debts of
gratitude not discharged, they would leave a shadow on his life, which
promised so brightly for the future.
It was impossible for him to leave all these arrears of suffering
behind him, and he wished, before entering joyously into the future, to
obtain a quittance from the past.
That Thénardier was a villain detracted nothing from the fact that he
had saved Colonel Pontmercy. Thénardier was a ruffian in the eyes of
all the world except Marius.
And Marius, ignorant of the real scene in the battle field of Waterloo,
was not aware of the peculiar detail, that his father, so far as
Thénardier was concerned was in the strange position of being indebted
to the latter for his life, without being indebted to him for any
gratitude.
None of the various agents whom Marius employed succeeded in
discovering any trace of Thénardier. Obliteration appeared to be
complete in that quarter. Madame Thénardier had died in prison pending
the trial. Thénardier and his daughter Azelma, the only two remaining
of that lamentable group, had plunged back into the gloom. The gulf of
the social unknown had silently closed above those beings. On the
surface there was not visible so much as that quiver, that trembling,
those obscure concentric circles which announce that something has
fallen in, and that the plummet may be dropped.
Madame Thénardier being dead, Boulatruelle being eliminated from the
case, Claquesous having disappeared, the principal persons accused
having escaped from prison, the trial connected with the ambush in the
Gorbeau house had come to nothing.
That affair had remained rather obscure. The bench of Assizes had been
obliged to content themselves with two subordinates. Panchaud, alias
Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, and Demi-Liard, alias Deux-Milliards,
who had been inconsistently condemned, after a hearing of both sides of
the case, to ten years in the galleys. Hard labor for life had been the
sentence pronounced against the escaped and contumacious accomplices.
Thénardier, the head and leader, had been, through contumacy, likewise
condemned to death.
This sentence was the only information remaining about Thénardier,
casting upon that buried name its sinister light like a candle beside a
bier.
Moreover, by thrusting Thénardier back into the very remotest depths,
through a fear of being re-captured, this sentence added to the density
of the shadows which enveloped this man.
As for the other person, as for the unknown man who had saved Marius,
the researches were at first to some extent successful, then came to an
abrupt conclusion. They succeeded in finding the carriage which had
brought Marius to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire on the evening of the
6th of June.
The coachman declared that, on the 6th of June, in obedience to the
commands of a police-agent, he had stood from three o’clock in the
afternoon until nightfall on the Quai des Champs-Élysées, above the
outlet of the Grand Sewer; that, towards nine o’clock in the evening,
the grating of the sewer, which abuts on the bank of the river, had
opened; that a man had emerged therefrom, bearing on his shoulders
another man, who seemed to be dead; that the agent, who was on the
watch at that point, had arrested the living man and had seized the
dead man; that, at the order of the police-agent, he, the coachman, had
taken “all those folks” into his carriage; that they had first driven
to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; that they had there deposited the
dead man; that the dead man was Monsieur Marius, and that he, the
coachman, recognized him perfectly, although he was alive “this time”;
that afterwards, they had entered the vehicle again, that he had
whipped up his horses; a few paces from the gate of the Archives, they
had called to him to halt; that there, in the street, they had paid him
and left him, and that the police-agent had led the other man away;
that he knew nothing more; that the night had been very dark.
Marius, as we have said, recalled nothing. He only remembered that he
had been seized from behind by an energetic hand at the moment when he
was falling backwards into the barricade; then, everything vanished so
far as he was concerned.
He had only regained consciousness at M. Gillenormand’s.
He was lost in conjectures.
He could not doubt his own identity. Still, how had it come to pass
that, having fallen in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, he had been picked up
by the police-agent on the banks of the Seine, near the Pont des
Invalides?
Some one had carried him from the Quartier des Halles to the
Champs-Élysées. And how? Through the sewer. Unheard-of devotion!
Some one? Who?
This was the man for whom Marius was searching.
Of this man, who was his savior, nothing; not a trace; not the faintest
indication.
Marius, although forced to preserve great reserve, in that direction,
pushed his inquiries as far as the prefecture of police. There, no more
than elsewhere, did the information obtained lead to any enlightenment.
The prefecture knew less about the matter than did the
hackney-coachman. They had no knowledge of any arrest having been made
on the 6th of June at the mouth of the Grand Sewer.
No report of any agent had been received there upon this matter, which
was regarded at the prefecture as a fable. The invention of this fable
was attributed to the coachman.
A coachman who wants a gratuity is capable of anything, even of
imagination. The fact was assured, nevertheless, and Marius could not
doubt it, unless he doubted his own identity, as we have just said.
Everything about this singular enigma was inexplicable.
What had become of that man, that mysterious man, whom the coachman had
seen emerge from the grating of the Grand Sewer bearing upon his back
the unconscious Marius, and whom the police-agent on the watch had
arrested in the very act of rescuing an insurgent? What had become of
the agent himself?
Why had this agent preserved silence? Had the man succeeded in making
his escape? Had he bribed the agent? Why did this man give no sign of
life to Marius, who owed everything to him? His disinterestedness was
no less tremendous than his devotion. Why had not that man appeared
again? Perhaps he was above compensation, but no one is above
gratitude. Was he dead? Who was the man? What sort of a face had he? No
one could tell him this.
The coachman answered: “The night was very dark.” Basque and Nicolette,
all in a flutter, had looked only at their young master all covered
with blood.
The porter, whose candle had lighted the tragic arrival of Marius, had