Les Miserables
by Victor Hugo
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
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In the moat of Vincennes a sepulchral shaft sprang from the earth,
recalling the fact that the Duc d'Enghien had perished in the
very month when Napoleon was crowned. Pope Pius VII., who had
performed the coronation very near this death, tranquilly bestowed
his blessing on the fall as he had bestowed it on the elevation.
At Schoenbrunn there was a little shadow, aged four, whom it was
seditious to call the King of Rome. And these things took place,
and the kings resumed their thrones, and the master of Europe
was put in a cage, and the old regime became the new regime,
and all the shadows and all the light of the earth changed place,
because, on the afternoon of a certain summer's day, a shepherd
said to a Prussian in the forest, "Go this way, and not that!"

This 1815 was a sort of lugubrious April. Ancient unhealthy
and poisonous realities were covered with new appearances.
A lie wedded 1789; the right divine was masked under a charter;
fictions became constitutional; prejudices, superstitions and
mental reservations, with Article 14 in the heart, were varnished
over with liberalism. It was the serpent's change of skin.

Man had been rendered both greater and smaller by Napoleon.
Under this reign of splendid matter, the ideal had received the
strange name of ideology! It is a grave imprudence in a great man
to turn the future into derision. The populace, however, that food
for cannon which is so fond of the cannoneer, sought him with
its glance. Where is he? What is he doing? "Napoleon is dead,"
said a passer-by to a veteran of Marengo and Waterloo. "He dead!"
cried the soldier; "you don't know him."  Imagination distrusted
this man, even when overthrown. The depths of Europe were full
of darkness after Waterloo. Something enormous remained long empty
through Napoleon's disappearance.

The kings placed themselves in this void. Ancient Europe
profited by it to undertake reforms. There was a Holy Alliance;
Belle-Alliance, Beautiful Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo
had said in advance.

In presence and in face of that antique Europe reconstructed,
the features of a new France were sketched out. The future,
which the Emperor had rallied, made its entry. On its brow it bore
the star, Liberty. The glowing eyes of all young generations were
turned on it. Singular fact! people were, at one and the same time,
in love with the future, Liberty, and the past, Napoleon. Defeat had
rendered the vanquished greater. Bonaparte fallen seemed more
lofty than Napoleon erect. Those who had triumphed were alarmed.
England had him guarded by Hudson Lowe, and France had him watched
by Montchenu. His folded arms became a source of uneasiness
to thrones. Alexander called him "my sleeplessness."  This terror
was the result of the quantity of revolution which was contained
in him. That is what explains and excuses Bonapartist liberalism.
This phantom caused the old world to tremble. The kings reigned,
but ill at their ease, with the rock of Saint Helena on the horizon.

While Napoleon was passing through the death struggle at Longwood,
the sixty thousand men who had fallen on the field of Waterloo
were quietly rotting, and something of their peace was shed abroad
over the world. The Congress of Vienna made the treaties in 1815,
and Europe called this the Restoration.

This is what Waterloo was.

But what matters it to the Infinite? all that tempest, all that cloud,
that war, then that peace? All that darkness did not trouble
for a moment the light of that immense Eye before which a grub
skipping from one blade of grass to another equals the eagle
soaring from belfry to belfry on the towers of Notre Dame.

CHAPTER XIX

THE BATTLE-FIELD AT NIGHT

Let us return--it is a necessity in this book--to that fatal
battle-field.

On the 18th of June the moon was full. Its light favored
Blucher's ferocious pursuit, betrayed the traces of the fugitives,
delivered up that disastrous mass to the eager Prussian cavalry,
and aided the massacre. Such tragic favors of the night do occur
sometimes during catastrophes.

After the last cannon-shot had been fired, the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean
remained deserted.

The English occupied the encampment of the French; it is the
usual sign of victory to sleep in the bed of the vanquished.
They established their bivouac beyond Rossomme. The Prussians,
let loose on the retreating rout, pushed forward. Wellington went
to the village of Waterloo to draw up his report to Lord Bathurst.

If ever the sic vos non vobis was applicable, it certainly is
to that village of Waterloo. Waterloo took no part, and lay half
a league from the scene of action. Mont-Saint-Jean was cannonaded,
Hougomont was burned, La Haie-Sainte was taken by assault,
Papelotte was burned, Plancenoit was burned, La Belle-Alliance beheld
the embrace of the two conquerors; these names are hardly known,
and Waterloo, which worked not in the battle, bears off all the honor.

We are not of the number of those who flatter war; when the occasion
presents itself, we tell the truth about it. War has frightful
beauties which we have not concealed; it has also, we acknowledge,
some hideous features. One of the most surprising is the prompt
stripping of the bodies of the dead after the victory. The dawn
which follows a battle always rises on naked corpses.

Who does this? Who thus soils the triumph? What hideous,
furtive hand is that which is slipped into the pocket of victory?
What pickpockets are they who ply their trade in the rear of glory?
Some philosophers--Voltaire among the number--affirm that it is
precisely those persons have made the glory. It is the same men,
they say; there is no relief corps; those who are erect pillage
those who are prone on the earth. The hero of the day is the
vampire of the night. One has assuredly the right, after all,
to strip a corpse a bit when one is the author of that corpse.
For our own part, we do not think so; it seems to us impossible
that the same hand should pluck laurels and purloin the shoes from a
dead man.

One thing is certain, which is, that generally after conquerors
follow thieves. But let us leave the soldier, especially the
contemporary soldier, out of the question.

Every army has a rear-guard, and it is that which must be blamed.
Bat-like creatures, half brigands and lackeys; all the sorts
of vespertillos that that twilight called war engenders; wearers
of uniforms, who take no part in the fighting; pretended invalids;
formidable limpers; interloping sutlers, trotting along in little carts,
sometimes accompanied by their wives, and stealing things which they
sell again; beggars offering themselves as guides to officers;
soldiers' servants; marauders; armies on the march in days gone by,--
we are not speaking of the present,--dragged all this behind them,
so that in the special language they are called "stragglers."  No army,
no nation, was responsible for those beings; they spoke Italian and
followed the Germans, then spoke French and followed the English.
It was by one of these wretches, a Spanish straggler who spoke French,
that the Marquis of Fervacques, deceived by his Picard jargon,
and taking him for one of our own men, was traitorously slain
and robbed on the battle-field itself, in the course of the night
which followed the victory of Cerisoles. The rascal sprang
from this marauding. The detestable maxim, Live on the enemy!
produced this leprosy, which a strict discipline alone could heal.
There are reputations which are deceptive; one does not always know why
certain generals, great in other directions, have been so popular.
Turenne was adored by his soldiers because he tolerated pillage;
evil permitted constitutes part of goodness. Turenne was so good that
he allowed the Palatinate to be delivered over to fire and blood.
The marauders in the train of an army were more or less in number,
according as the chief was more or less severe. Hoche and Marceau
had no stragglers; Wellington had few, and we do him the justice to
mention it.

Nevertheless, on the night from the 18th to the 19th of June,
the dead were robbed. Wellington was rigid; he gave orders that any
one caught in the act should be shot; but rapine is tenacious.
The marauders stole in one corner of the battlefield while others
were being shot in another.

The moon was sinister over this plain.

Towards midnight, a man was prowling about, or rather, climbing in
the direction of the hollow road of Ohain. To all appearance he
was one of those whom we have just described,--neither English
nor French, neither peasant nor soldier, less a man than a ghoul
attracted by the scent of the dead bodies having theft for
his victory, and come to rifle Waterloo. He was clad in a blouse
that was something like a great coat; he was uneasy and audacious;
he walked forwards and gazed behind him. Who was this man?
The night probably knew more of him than the day. He had no sack,
but evidently he had large pockets under his coat. From time to
time he halted, scrutinized the plain around him as though to see
whether he were observed, bent over abruptly, disturbed something
silent and motionless on the ground, then rose and fled.
His sliding motion, his attitudes, his mysterious and rapid gestures,
caused him to resemble those twilight larvae which haunt ruins,
and which ancient Norman legends call the Alleurs.

Certain nocturnal wading birds produce these silhouettes among
the marshes.

A glance capable of piercing all that mist deeply would have
perceived at some distance a sort of little sutler's wagon
with a fluted wicker hood, harnessed to a famished nag which was
cropping the grass across its bit as it halted, hidden, as it were,
behind the hovel which adjoins the highway to Nivelles,
at the angle of the road from Mont-Saint-Jean to Braine l'Alleud;
and in the wagon, a sort of woman seated on coffers and packages.
Perhaps there was some connection between that wagon and that prowler.

The darkness was serene. Not a cloud in the zenith. What matters it
if the earth be red! the moon remains white; these are the indifferences
of the sky. In the fields, branches of trees broken by grape-shot,
but not fallen, upheld by their bark, swayed gently in the breeze
of night. A breath, almost a respiration, moved the shrubbery.
Quivers which resembled the departure of souls ran through the grass.

In the distance the coming and going of patrols and the general
rounds of the English camp were audible.

Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte continued to burn, forming, one in
the west, the other in the east, two great flames which were joined
by the cordon of bivouac fires of the English, like a necklace
of rubies with two carbuncles at the extremities, as they extended
in an immense semicircle over the hills along the horizon.

We have described the catastrophe of the road of Ohain. The heart
is terrified at the thought of what that death must have been
to so many brave men.

If there is anything terrible, if there exists a reality which
surpasses dreams, it is this: to live, to see the sun; to be in full
possession of virile force; to possess health and joy; to laugh valiantly;
to rush towards a glory which one sees dazzling in front of one;
to feel in one's breast lungs which breathe, a heart which beats,
a will which reasons; to speak, think, hope, love; to have a mother,
to have a wife, to have children; to have the light--and all at once,
in the space of a shout, in less than a minute, to sink into an abyss;
to fall, to roll, to crush, to be crushed; to see ears of wheat,
flowers, leaves, branches; not to be able to catch hold of anything;
to feel one's sword useless, men beneath one, horses on top of one;
to struggle in vain, since one's bones have been broken by some
kick in the darkness; to feel a heel which makes one's eyes start
from their sockets; to bite horses' shoes in one's rage; to stifle,
to yell, to writhe; to be beneath, and to say to one's self,
"But just a little while ago I was a living man!"

There, where that lamentable disaster had uttered its death-rattle,
all was silence now. The edges of the hollow road were encumbered
with horses and riders, inextricably heaped up. Terrible entanglement!
There was no longer any slope, for the corpses had levelled the road
with the plain, and reached the brim like a well-filled bushel
of barley. A heap of dead bodies in the upper part, a river of
blood in the lower part--such was that road on the evening of the
18th of June, 1815. The blood ran even to the Nivelles highway,
and there overflowed in a large pool in front of the abatis
of trees which barred the way, at a spot which is still pointed out.

It will be remembered that it was at the opposite point,
in the direction of the Genappe road, that the destruction
of the cuirassiers had taken place. The thickness of the layer
of bodies was proportioned to the depth of the hollow road.
Towards the middle, at the point where it became level,
where Delort's division had passed, the layer of corpses was thinner.

The nocturnal prowler whom we have just shown to the reader
was going in that direction. He was searching that vast tomb.
He gazed about. He passed the dead in some sort of hideous review.
He walked with his feet in the blood.

All at once he paused.

A few paces in front of him, in the hollow road, at the point
where the pile of dead came to an end, an open hand, illumined by
the moon, projected from beneath that heap of men. That hand
had on its finger something sparkling, which was a ring of gold.

The man bent over, remained in a crouching attitude for a moment,
and when he rose there was no longer a ring on the hand.

He did not precisely rise; he remained in a stooping and
frightened attitude, with his back turned to the heap of dead,
scanning the horizon on his knees, with the whole upper portion
of his body supported on his two forefingers, which rested on
the earth, and his head peering above the edge of the hollow road.
The jackal's four paws suit some actions.

Then coming to a decision, he rose to his feet.

At that moment, he gave a terrible start. He felt some one clutch
him from behind.

He wheeled round; it was the open hand, which had closed, and had
seized the skirt of his coat.

An honest man would have been terrified; this man burst into a laugh.

"Come," said he, "it's only a dead body. I prefer a spook
to a gendarme."

But the hand weakened and released him. Effort is quickly exhausted
in the grave.

"Well now," said the prowler, "is that dead fellow alive?
Let's see."

He bent down again, fumbled among the heap, pushed aside everything
that was in his way, seized the hand, grasped the arm, freed the head,
pulled out the body, and a few moments later he was dragging
the lifeless, or at least the unconscious, man, through the shadows
of hollow road. He was a cuirassier, an officer, and even an officer
of considerable rank; a large gold epaulette peeped from beneath
the cuirass; this officer no longer possessed a helmet. A furious
sword-cut had scarred his face, where nothing was discernible but blood.

However, he did not appear to have any broken limbs, and, by some
happy chance, if that word is permissible here, the dead had been vaulted
above him in such a manner as to preserve him from being crushed.
His eyes were still closed.

On his cuirass he wore the silver cross of the Legion of Honor.

The prowler tore off this cross, which disappeared into one
of the gulfs which he had beneath his great coat.

Then he felt of the officer's fob, discovered a watch there,
and took possession of it. Next he searched his waistcoat,
found a purse and pocketed it.

When he had arrived at this stage of succor which he was administering
to this dying man, the officer opened his eyes.

"Thanks," he said feebly.

The abruptness of the movements of the man who was manipulating him,
the freshness of the night, the air which he could inhale freely,
had roused him from his lethargy.

The prowler made no reply. He raised his head. A sound of footsteps
was audible in the plain; some patrol was probably approaching.

The officer murmured, for the death agony was still in his voice:--

"Who won the battle?"

"The English," answered the prowler.

The officer went on:--

"Look in my pockets; you will find a watch and a purse. Take them."

It was already done.

The prowler executed the required feint, and said:--

"There is nothing there."

"I have been robbed," said the officer; "I am sorry for that.
You should have had them."

The steps of the patrol became more and more distinct.

"Some one is coming," said the prowler, with the movement of a man
who is taking his departure.

The officer raised his arm feebly, and detained him.

"You have saved my life. Who are you?"

The prowler answered rapidly, and in a low voice:--

"Like yourself, I belonged to the French army. I must leave you.
If they were to catch me, they would shoot me. I have saved your life.
Now get out of the scrape yourself."

"What is your rank?"

"Sergeant."

"What is your name?"

"Thenardier."

"I shall not forget that name," said the officer; "and do you
remember mine. My name is Pontmercy."

BOOK SECOND.--THE SHIP ORION

CHAPTER I

NUMBER 24,601 BECOMES NUMBER 9,430

Jean Valjean had been recaptured.

The reader will be grateful to us if we pass rapidly over
the sad details. We will confine ourselves to transcribing
two paragraphs published by the journals of that day, a few
months after the surprising events which had taken place at M. sur M.

These articles are rather summary. It must be remembered, that at
that epoch the Gazette des Tribunaux was not yet in existence.

We borrow the first from the Drapeau Blanc. It bears the date
of July 25, 1823.

An arrondissement of the Pas de Calais has just been the
theatre of an event quite out of the ordinary course. A man,
who was a stranger in the Department, and who bore the name of
M. Madeleine, had, thanks to the new methods, resuscitated some
years ago an ancient local industry, the manufacture of jet and of
black glass trinkets. He had made his fortune in the business,
and that of the arrondissement as well, we will admit. He had been
appointed mayor, in recognition of his services. The police discovered
that M. Madeleine was no other than an ex-convict who had broken
his ban, condemned in 1796 for theft, and named Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean has been recommitted to prison. It appears that previous
to his arrest he had succeeded in withdrawing from the hands of
M. Laffitte, a sum of over half a million which he had lodged there,
and which he had, moreover, and by perfectly legitimate means,
acquired in his business. No one has been able to discover where Jean
Valjean has concealed this money since his return to prison at Toulon.

The second article, which enters a little more into detail,
is an extract from the Journal de Paris, of the same date.
A former convict, who had been liberated, named Jean Valjean,
has just appeared before the Court of Assizes of the Var,
under circumstances calculated to attract attention. This wretch
had succeeded in escaping the vigilance of the police, he had changed
his name, and had succeeded in getting himself appointed mayor
of one of our small northern towns; in this town he had established
a considerable commerce. He has at last been unmasked and arrested,
thanks to the indefatigable zeal of the public prosecutor.
He had for his concubine a woman of the town, who died of a shock
at the moment of his arrest. This scoundrel, who is endowed with
Herculean strength, found means to escape; but three or four days
after his flight the police laid their hands on him once more,
in Paris itself, at the very moment when he was entering one of
those little vehicles which run between the capital and the village
of Montfermeil (Seine-et-Oise). He is said to have profited
by this interval of three or four days of liberty, to withdraw a
considerable sum deposited by him with one of our leading bankers.
This sum has been estimated at six or seven hundred thousand francs.
If the indictment is to be trusted, he has hidden it in some place
known to himself alone, and it has not been possible to lay hands
on it. However that may be, the said Jean Valjean has just been
brought before the Assizes of the Department of the Var as accused
of highway robbery accompanied with violence, about eight years ago,
on the person of one of those honest children who, as the patriarch
of Ferney has said, in immortal verse,

          ". . . Arrive from Savoy every year,
           And who, with gentle hands, do clear
           Those long canals choked up with soot."

This bandit refused to defend himself. It was proved by the
skilful and eloquent representative of the public prosecutor,
that the theft was committed in complicity with others, and that
Jean Valjean was a member of a band of robbers in the south.
Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty and was condemned to the death
penalty in consequence. This criminal refused to lodge an appeal.
The king, in his inexhaustible clemency, has deigned to commute
his penalty to that of penal servitude for life. Jean Valjean was
immediately taken to the prison at Toulon.

The reader has not forgotten that Jean Valjean had religious
habits at M. sur M. Some papers, among others the Constitutional,
presented this commutation as a triumph of the priestly party.

Jean Valjean changed his number in the galleys. He was called 9,430.

However, and we will mention it at once in order that we may not be
obliged to recur to the subject, the prosperity of M. sur M. vanished
with M. Madeleine; all that he had foreseen during his night
of fever and hesitation was realized; lacking him, there actually
was a soul lacking. After this fall, there took place at M. sur
M. that egotistical division of great existences which have fallen,
that fatal dismemberment of flourishing things which is accomplished
every day, obscurely, in the human community, and which history has
noted only once, because it occurred after the death of Alexander.
Lieutenants are crowned kings; superintendents improvise manufacturers
out of themselves. Envious rivalries arose. M. Madeleine's vast
workshops were shut; his buildings fell to ruin, his workmen
were scattered. Some of them quitted the country, others abandoned
the trade. Thenceforth, everything was done on a small scale,
instead of on a grand scale; for lucre instead of the general good.
There was no longer a centre; everywhere there was competition
and animosity. M. Madeleine had reigned over all and directed all.
No sooner had he fallen, than each pulled things to himself;
the spirit of combat succeeded to the spirit of organization,
bitterness to cordiality, hatred of one another to the benevolence
of the founder towards all; the threads which M. Madeleine had set
were tangled and broken, the methods were adulterated, the products
were debased, confidence was killed; the market diminished,
for lack of orders; salaries were reduced, the workshops stood still,
bankruptcy arrived. And then there was nothing more for the poor.
All had vanished.

The state itself perceived that some one had been crushed somewhere.
Less than four years after the judgment of the Court of Assizes
establishing the identity of Jean Valjean and M. Madeleine,
for the benefit of the galleys, the cost of collecting taxes had
doubled in the arrondissement of M. sur M.; and M. de Villele called
attention to the fact in the rostrum, in the month of February, 1827.

CHAPTER II

IN WHICH THE READER WILL PERUSE TWO VERSES, WHICH ARE OF THE
DEVIL'S COMPOSITION, POSSIBLY

Before proceeding further, it will be to the purpose to narrate
in some detail, a singular occurrence which took place at about the
same epoch, in Montfermeil, and which is not lacking in coincidence
with certain conjectures of the indictment.

There exists in the region of Montfermeil a very ancient superstition,
which is all the more curious and all the more precious, because a popular
superstition in the vicinity of Paris is like an aloe in Siberia.
We are among those who respect everything which is in the nature
of a rare plant. Here, then, is the superstition of Montfermeil:
it is thought that the devil, from time immemorial, has selected
the forest as a hiding-place for his treasures. Goodwives affirm
that it is no rarity to encounter at nightfall, in secluded nooks
of the forest, a black man with the air of a carter or a wood-chopper,
wearing wooden shoes, clad in trousers and a blouse of linen,
and recognizable by the fact, that, instead of a cap or hat,
he has two immense horns on his head. This ought, in fact, to render
him recognizable. This man is habitually engaged in digging a hole.
There are three ways of profiting by such an encounter. The first is
to approach the man and speak to him. Then it is seen that the man
is simply a peasant, that he appears black because it is nightfall;
that he is not digging any hole whatever, but is cutting grass
for his cows, and that what had been taken for horns is nothing
but a dung-fork which he is carrying on his back, and whose teeth,
thanks to the perspective of evening, seemed to spring from his head.
The man returns home and dies within the week. The second way is
to watch him, to wait until he has dug his hole, until he has filled
it and has gone away; then to run with great speed to the trench,
to open it once more and to seize the "treasure" which the black
man has necessarily placed there. In this case one dies within
the month. Finally, the last method is not to speak to the black man,
not to look at him, and to flee at the best speed of one's legs.
One then dies within the year.

As all three methods are attended with their special inconveniences,
the second, which at all events, presents some advantages,
among others that of possessing a treasure, if only for a month,
is the one most generally adopted. So bold men, who are tempted
by every chance, have quite frequently, as we are assured, opened the
holes excavated by the black man, and tried to rob the devil.
The success of the operation appears to be but moderate. At least,
if the tradition is to be believed, and in particular the two
enigmatical lines in barbarous Latin, which an evil Norman monk,
a bit of a sorcerer, named Tryphon has left on this subject.
This Tryphon is buried at the Abbey of Saint-Georges de Bocherville,
near Rouen, and toads spawn on his grave.

Accordingly, enormous efforts are made. Such trenches are
ordinarily extremely deep; a man sweats, digs, toils all night--
for it must be done at night; he wets his shirt, burns out his candle,
breaks his mattock, and when he arrives at the bottom of the hole,
when he lays his hand on the "treasure," what does he find?
What is the devil's treasure? A sou, sometimes a crown-piece,
a stone, a skeleton, a bleeding body, sometimes a spectre folded
in four like a sheet of paper in a portfolio, sometimes nothing.
This is what Tryphon's verses seem to announce to the indiscreet
and curious:--

          "Fodit, et in fossa thesauros condit opaca,
           As, nummas, lapides, cadaver, simulacra, nihilque."

It seems that in our day there is sometimes found a powder-horn
with bullets, sometimes an old pack of cards greasy and worn,
which has evidently served the devil. Tryphon does not record
these two finds, since Tryphon lived in the twelfth century,
and since the devil does not appear to have had the wit to invent
powder before Roger Bacon's time, and cards before the time of Charles VI.

Moreover, if one plays at cards, one is sure to lose all that
one possesses! and as for the powder in the horn, it possesses
the property of making your gun burst in your face.

Now, a very short time after the epoch when it seemed to the prosecuting
attorney that the liberated convict Jean Valjean during his flight
of several days had been prowling around Montfermeil, it was remarked
in that village that a certain old road-laborer, named Boulatruelle,
had "peculiar ways" in the forest. People thereabouts thought
they knew that this Boulatruelle had been in the galleys.
He was subjected to certain police supervision, and, as he could
find work nowhere, the administration employed him at reduced
rates as a road-mender on the cross-road from Gagny to Lagny.

This Boulatruelle was a man who was viewed with disfavor by the
inhabitants of the district as too respectful, too humble, too prompt
in removing his cap to every one, and trembling and smiling in the
presence of the gendarmes,--probably affiliated to robber bands,
they said; suspected of lying in ambush at verge of copses at nightfall.
The only thing in his favor was that he was a drunkard.

This is what people thought they had noticed:--

Of late, Boulatruelle had taken to quitting his task of stone-breaking
and care of the road at a very early hour, and to betaking himself
to the forest with his pickaxe. He was encountered towards
evening in the most deserted clearings, in the wildest thickets;
and he had the appearance of being in search of something,
and sometimes he was digging holes. The goodwives who passed took
him at first for Beelzebub; then they recognized Boulatruelle,
and were not in the least reassured thereby. These encounters seemed
to cause Boulatruelle a lively displeasure. It was evident that he
sought to hide, and that there was some mystery in what he was doing.

It was said in the village: "It is clear that the devil has appeared.
Boulatruelle has seen him, and is on the search. In sooth, he is
cunning enough to pocket Lucifer's hoard."

The Voltairians added, "Will Boulatruelle catch the devil,
or will the devil catch Boulatruelle?"  The old women made a great
many signs of the cross.

In the meantime, Boulatruelle's manoeuvres in the forest ceased;
and he resumed his regular occupation of roadmending; and people
gossiped of something else.

Some persons, however, were still curious, surmising that in all
this there was probably no fabulous treasure of the legends,
but some fine windfall of a more serious and palpable sort than
the devil's bank-bills, and that the road-mender had half discovered
the secret. The most "puzzled" were the school-master and Thenardier,
the proprietor of the tavern, who was everybody's friend,
and had not disdained to ally himself with Boulatruelle.

"He has been in the galleys," said Thenardier. "Eh! Good God!
no one knows who has been there or will be there."

One evening the schoolmaster affirmed that in former times the law
would have instituted an inquiry as to what Boulatruelle did in
the forest, and that the latter would have been forced to speak,
and that he would have been put to the torture in case of need,
and that Boulatruelle would not have resisted the water test,
for example. "Let us put him to the wine test," said Thenardier.

They made an effort, and got the old road-mender to drinking.
Boulatruelle drank an enormous amount, but said very little.
He combined with admirable art, and in masterly proportions,
the thirst of a gormandizer with the discretion of a judge.
Nevertheless, by dint of returning to the charge and of comparing
and putting together the few obscure words which he did allow to
escape him, this is what Thenardier and the schoolmaster imagined
that they had made out:--

One morning, when Boulatruelle was on his way to his work, at daybreak,
he had been surprised to see, at a nook of the forest in the underbrush,
a shovel and a pickaxe, concealed, as one might say.

However, he might have supposed that they were probably the shovel
and pick of Father Six-Fours, the water-carrier, and would have
thought no more about it. But, on the evening of that day, he saw,
without being seen himself, as he was hidden by a large tree,
"a person who did not belong in those parts, and whom he, Boulatruelle,
knew well," directing his steps towards the densest part of
the wood. Translation by Thenardier: A comrade of the galleys.
Boulatruelle obstinately refused to reveal his name. This person
carried a package--something square, like a large box or a small trunk.
Surprise on the part of Boulatruelle. However, it was only
after the expiration of seven or eight minutes that the idea of
following that "person" had occurred to him. But it was too late;
the person was already in the thicket, night had descended,
and Boulatruelle had not been able to catch up with him. Then he
had adopted the course of watching for him at the edge of the woods.
"It was moonlight."  Two or three hours later, Boulatruelle had seen
this person emerge from the brushwood, carrying no longer the coffer,
but a shovel and pick. Boulatruelle had allowed the person to pass,
and had not dreamed of accosting him, because he said to himself
that the other man was three times as strong as he was, and armed
with a pickaxe, and that he would probably knock him over the head
on recognizing him, and on perceiving that he was recognized.
Touching effusion of two old comrades on meeting again. But the
shovel and pick had served as a ray of light to Boulatruelle; he had
hastened to the thicket in the morning, and had found neither shovel
nor pick. From this he had drawn the inference that this person,
once in the forest, had dug a hole with his pick, buried the coffer,
and reclosed the hole with his shovel. Now, the coffer was too small
to contain a body; therefore it contained money. Hence his researches.
Boulatruelle had explored, sounded, searched the entire forest
and the thicket, and had dug wherever the earth appeared to him
to have been recently turned up. In vain.

He had "ferreted out" nothing. No one in Montfermeil thought
any more about it. There were only a few brave gossips, who said,
"You may be certain that the mender on the Gagny road did not take
all that trouble for nothing; he was sure that the devil had come."

CHAPTER III

THE ANKLE-CHAIN MUST HAVE UNDERGONE A CERTAIN PREPARATORY MANIPULATION
TO BE THUS BROKEN WITH A BLOW FROM A HAMMER

Towards the end of October, in that same year, 1823, the inhabitants
of Toulon beheld the entry into their port, after heavy weather,
and for the purpose of repairing some damages, of the ship Orion,
which was employed later at Brest as a school-ship, and which then
formed a part of the Mediterranean squadron.

This vessel, battered as it was,--for the sea had handled it roughly,--
produced a fine effect as it entered the roads. It flew some
colors which procured for it the regulation salute of eleven guns,
which it returned, shot for shot; total, twenty-two. It has been
calculated that what with salvos, royal and military politenesses,
courteous exchanges of uproar, signals of etiquette, formalities of
roadsteads and citadels, sunrises and sunsets, saluted every day
by all fortresses and all ships of war, openings and closings
of ports, etc., the civilized world, discharged all over the earth,
in the course of four and twenty hours, one hundred and fifty
thousand useless shots. At six francs the shot, that comes to nine
hundred thousand francs a day, three hundred millions a year,
which vanish in smoke. This is a mere detail. All this time the
poor were dying of hunger.

The year 1823 was what the Restoration called "the epoch of the
Spanish war."

This war contained many events in one, and a quantity of peculiarities.
A grand family affair for the house of Bourbon; the branch of France
succoring and protecting the branch of Madrid, that is to say,
performing an act devolving on the elder; an apparent return to our
national traditions, complicated by servitude and by subjection to the
cabinets of the North; M. le Duc d'Angouleme, surnamed by the liberal
sheets the hero of Andujar, compressing in a triumphal attitude
that was somewhat contradicted by his peaceable air, the ancient
and very powerful terrorism of the Holy Office at variance with the
chimerical terrorism of the liberals; the sansculottes resuscitated,
to the great terror of dowagers, under the name of descamisados;
monarchy opposing an obstacle to progress described as anarchy;
the theories of '89 roughly interrupted in the sap; a European halt,
called to the French idea, which was making the tour of the world;
beside the son of France as generalissimo, the Prince de Carignan,
afterwards Charles Albert, enrolling himself in that crusade of kings
against people as a volunteer, with grenadier epaulets of red worsted;
the soldiers of the Empire setting out on a fresh campaign, but aged,
saddened, after eight years of repose, and under the white cockade;
the tricolored standard waved abroad by a heroic handful of Frenchmen,
as the white standard had been thirty years earlier at Coblentz;
monks mingled with our troops; the spirit of liberty and of novelty
brought to its senses by bayonets; principles slaughtered by cannonades;
France undoing by her arms that which she had done by her mind;
in addition to this, hostile leaders sold, soldiers hesitating,
cities besieged by millions; no military perils, and yet possible
explosions, as in every mine which is surprised and invaded;
but little bloodshed, little honor won, shame for some, glory for no one.
Such was this war, made by the princes descended from Louis XIV.,
and conducted by generals who had been under Napoleon. Its sad fate
was to recall neither the grand war nor grand politics.

Some feats of arms were serious; the taking of the Trocadero,
among others, was a fine military action; but after all, we repeat,
the trumpets of this war give back a cracked sound, the whole
effect was suspicious; history approves of France for making a
difficulty about accepting this false triumph. It seemed evident
that certain Spanish officers charged with resistance yielded
too easily; the idea of corruption was connected with the victory;
it appears as though generals and not battles had been won,
and the conquering soldier returned humiliated. A debasing war,
in short, in which the Bank of France could be read in the folds
of the flag.

Soldiers of the war of 1808, on whom Saragossa had fallen in
formidable ruin, frowned in 1823 at the easy surrender of citadels,
and began to regret Palafox. It is the nature of France to prefer
to have Rostopchine rather than Ballesteros in front of her.

From a still more serious point of view, and one which it is also
proper to insist upon here, this war, which wounded the military
spirit of France, enraged the democratic spirit. It was an enterprise
of inthralment. In that campaign, the object of the French soldier,
the son of democracy, was the conquest of a yoke for others.
A hideous contradiction. France is made to arouse the soul of nations,
not to stifle it. All the revolutions of Europe since 1792 are
the French Revolution: liberty darts rays from France. That is a
solar fact. Blind is he who will not see! It was Bonaparte who said it.

The war of 1823, an outrage on the generous Spanish nation,
was then, at the same time, an outrage on the French Revolution.
It was France who committed this monstrous violence; by foul means,
for, with the exception of wars of liberation, everything that armies
do is by foul means. The words passive obedience indicate this.
An army is a strange masterpiece of combination where force results
from an enormous sum of impotence. Thus is war, made by humanity
against humanity, despite humanity, explained.

As for the Bourbons, the war of 1823 was fatal to them. They took it
for a success. They did not perceive the danger that lies in having
an idea slain to order. They went astray, in their innocence,
to such a degree that they introduced the immense enfeeblement of a
crime into their establishment as an element of strength. The spirit
of the ambush entered into their politics. 1830 had its germ in 1823.
The Spanish campaign became in their counsels an argument for force
and for adventures by right Divine. France, having re-established
elrey netto in Spain, might well have re-established the absolute king
at home. They fell into the alarming error of taking the obedience
of the soldier for the consent of the nation. Such confidence
is the ruin of thrones. It is not permitted to fall asleep,
either in the shadow of a machineel tree, nor in the shadow of an army.

Let us return to the ship Orion.

During the operations of the army commanded by the prince generalissimo,
a squadron had been cruising in the Mediterranean. We have just
stated that the Orion belonged to this fleet, and that accidents
of the sea had brought it into port at Toulon.

The presence of a vessel of war in a port has something about it
which attracts and engages a crowd. It is because it is great,
and the crowd loves what is great.

A ship of the line is one of the most magnificent combinations
of the genius of man with the powers of nature.

A ship of the line is composed, at the same time, of the heaviest
and the lightest of possible matter, for it deals at one and the same
time with three forms of substance,--solid, liquid, and fluid,--
and it must do battle with all three. It has eleven claws of
iron with which to seize the granite on the bottom of the sea,
and more wings and more antennae than winged insects, to catch
the wind in the clouds. Its breath pours out through its hundred
and twenty cannons as through enormous trumpets, and replies
proudly to the thunder. The ocean seeks to lead it astray in the
alarming sameness of its billows, but the vessel has its soul,
its compass, which counsels it and always shows it the north.
In the blackest nights, its lanterns supply the place of the stars.
Thus, against the wind, it has its cordage and its canvas;
against the water, wood; against the rocks, its iron, brass, and lead;
against the shadows, its light; against immensity, a needle.

If one wishes to form an idea of all those gigantic proportions which,
taken as a whole, constitute the ship of the line, one has only to
enter one of the six-story covered construction stocks, in the ports
of Brest or Toulon. The vessels in process of construction are
under a bell-glass there, as it were. This colossal beam is a yard;
that great column of wood which stretches out on the earth as far
as the eye can reach is the main-mast. Taking it from its root
in the stocks to its tip in the clouds, it is sixty fathoms long,
and its diameter at its base is three feet. The English main-mast rises
to a height of two hundred and seventeen feet above the water-line.
The navy of our fathers employed cables, ours employs chains.
The simple pile of chains on a ship of a hundred guns is four feet high,
twenty feet in breadth, and eight feet in depth. And how much
wood is required to make this ship? Three thousand cubic metres.
It is a floating forest.

And moreover, let this be borne in mind, it is only a question
here of the military vessel of forty years ago, of the simple
sailing-vessel; steam, then in its infancy, has since added
new miracles to that prodigy which is called a war vessel.
At the present time, for example, the mixed vessel with a screw
is a surprising machine, propelled by three thousand square
metres of canvas and by an engine of two thousand five hundred horse-power.

Not to mention these new marvels, the ancient vessel of Christopher
Columbus and of De Ruyter is one of the masterpieces of man.
It is as inexhaustible in force as is the Infinite in gales;
it stores up the wind in its sails, it is precise in the immense
vagueness of the billows, it floats, and it reigns.

There comes an hour, nevertheless, when the gale breaks that sixty-foot
yard like a straw, when the wind bends that mast four hundred feet tall,
when that anchor, which weighs tens of thousands, is twisted in the
jaws of the waves like a fisherman's hook in the jaws of a pike,
when those monstrous cannons utter plaintive and futile roars,
which the hurricane bears forth into the void and into night,
when all that power and all that majesty are engulfed in a power
and majesty which are superior.

Every time that immense force is displayed to culminate
in an immense feebleness it affords men food for thought,
Hence in the ports curious people abound around these marvellous
machines of war and of navigation, without being able to explain
perfectly to themselves why. Every day, accordingly, from morning
until night, the quays, sluices, and the jetties of the port
of Toulon were covered with a multitude of idlers and loungers,
as they say in Paris, whose business consisted in staring at the Orion.

The Orion was a ship that had been ailing for a long time;
in the course of its previous cruises thick layers of barnacles
had collected on its keel to such a degree as to deprive it of half
its speed; it had gone into the dry dock the year before this,
in order to have the barnacles scraped off, then it had put to
sea again; but this cleaning had affected the bolts of the keel:
in the neighborhood of the Balearic Isles the sides had been
strained and had opened; and, as the plating in those days was not
of sheet iron, the vessel had sprung a leak. A violent equinoctial
gale had come up, which had first staved in a grating and a porthole
on the larboard side, and damaged the foretop-gallant-shrouds;
in consequence of these injuries, the Orion had run back to Toulon.

It anchored near the Arsenal; it was fully equipped, and repairs
were begun. The hull had received no damage on the starboard,
but some of the planks had been unnailed here and there,
according to custom, to permit of air entering the hold.

One morning the crowd which was gazing at it witnessed an accident.

The crew was busy bending the sails; the topman, who had to
take the upper corner of the main-top-sail on the starboard,
lost his balance; he was seen to waver; the multitude thronging
the Arsenal quay uttered a cry; the man's head overbalanced his body;
the man fell around the yard, with his hands outstretched towards
the abyss; on his way he seized the footrope, first with one hand,
then with the other, and remained hanging from it: the sea lay
below him at a dizzy depth; the shock of his fall had imparted
to the foot-rope a violent swinging motion; the man swayed back
and forth at the end of that rope, like a stone in a sling.

It was incurring a frightful risk to go to his assistance; not one of
the sailors, all fishermen of the coast, recently levied for the service,
dared to attempt it. In the meantime, the unfortunate topman was
losing his strength; his anguish could not be discerned on his face,
but his exhaustion was visible in every limb; his arms were contracted
in horrible twitchings; every effort which he made to re-ascend served
but to augment the oscillations of the foot-rope; he did not shout,
for fear of exhausting his strength. All were awaiting the minute
when he should release his hold on the rope, and, from instant
to instant, heads were turned aside that his fall might not be seen.
There are moments when a bit of rope, a pole, the branch of a tree,
is life itself, and it is a terrible thing to see a living being
detach himself from it and fall like a ripe fruit.

All at once a man was seen climbing into the rigging with the agility
of a tiger-cat; this man was dressed in red; he was a convict;
he wore a green cap; he was a life convict. On arriving on a level
with the top, a gust of wind carried away his cap, and allowed
a perfectly white head to be seen: he was not a young man.

A convict employed on board with a detachment from the galleys had,
in fact, at the very first instant, hastened to the officer of
the watch, and, in the midst of the consternation and the hesitation
of the crew, while all the sailors were trembling and drawing back,
he had asked the officer's permission to risk his life to save
the topman; at an affirmative sign from the officer he had
broken the chain riveted to his ankle with one blow of a hammer,
then he had caught up a rope, and had dashed into the rigging:
no one noticed, at the instant, with what ease that chain had
been broken; it was only later on that the incident was recalled.

In a twinkling he was on the yard; he paused for a few seconds
and appeared to be measuring it with his eye; these seconds,
during which the breeze swayed the topman at the extremity
of a thread, seemed centuries to those who were looking on.
At last, the convict raised his eyes to heaven and advanced a step:
the crowd drew a long breath. He was seen to run out along the yard:
on arriving at the point, he fastened the rope which he had brought
to it, and allowed the other end to hang down, then he began
to descend the rope, hand over hand, and then,--and the anguish
was indescribable,--instead of one man suspended over the gulf,
there were two.

One would have said it was a spider coming to seize a fly,
only here the spider brought life, not death. Ten thousand glances
were fastened on this group; not a cry, not a word; the same tremor
contracted every brow; all mouths held their breath as though they
feared to add the slightest puff to the wind which was swaying
the two unfortunate men.

In the meantime, the convict had succeeded in lowering himself
to a position near the sailor. It was high time; one minute more,
and the exhausted and despairing man would have allowed himself
to fall into the abyss. The convict had moored him securely with
the cord to which he clung with one hand, while he was working
with the other. At last, he was seen to climb back on the yard,
and to drag the sailor up after him; he held him there a moment
to allow him to recover his strength, then he grasped him in his
arms and carried him, walking on the yard himself to the cap,
and from there to the main-top, where he left him in the hands
of his comrades.

At that moment the crowd broke into applause: old convict-sergeants
among them wept, and women embraced each other on the quay,
and all voices were heard to cry with a sort of tender rage,
"Pardon for that man!"

He, in the meantime, had immediately begun to make his descent
to rejoin his detachment. In order to reach them the more speedily,
he dropped into the rigging, and ran along one of the lower yards;
all eyes were following him. At a certain moment fear assailed them;
whether it was that he was fatigued, or that his head turned,
they thought they saw him hesitate and stagger. All at once the crowd
uttered a loud shout: the convict had fallen into the sea.

The fall was perilous. The frigate Algesiras was anchored alongside
the Orion, and the poor convict had fallen between the two vessels:
it was to be feared that he would slip under one or the other of them.
Four men flung themselves hastily into a boat; the crowd cheered
them on; anxiety again took possession of all souls; the man had not
risen to the surface; he had disappeared in the sea without leaving
a ripple, as though he had fallen into a cask of oil: they sounded,
they dived. In vain. The search was continued until the evening:
they did not even find the body.

On the following day the Toulon newspaper printed these lines:--

"Nov. 17, 1823. Yesterday, a convict belonging to the detachment on
board of the Orion, on his return from rendering assistance to a sailor,
fell into the sea and was drowned. The body has not yet been found; it is
supposed that it is entangled among the piles of the Arsenal point: this
man was committed under the number 9,430, and his name was Jean Valjean."

BOOK THIRD.--ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PROMISE MADE TO THE DEAD WOMAN

CHAPTER I

THE WATER QUESTION AT MONTFERMEIL

Montfermeil is situated between Livry and Chelles, on the southern edge
of that lofty table-land which separates the Ourcq from the Marne.
At the present day it is a tolerably large town, ornamented all the year
through with plaster villas, and on Sundays with beaming bourgeois.
In 1823 there were at Montfermeil neither so many white houses nor
so many well-satisfied citizens: it was only a village in the forest.
Some pleasure-houses of the last century were to be met with there,
to be sure, which were recognizable by their grand air, their balconies
in twisted iron, and their long windows, whose tiny panes cast all
sorts of varying shades of green on the white of the closed shutters;
but Montfermeil was none the less a village. Retired cloth-merchants
and rusticating attorneys had not discovered it as yet; it was a
peaceful and charming place, which was not on the road to anywhere:
there people lived, and cheaply, that peasant rustic life which is
so bounteous and so easy; only, water was rare there, on account
of the elevation of the plateau.

It was necessary to fetch it from a considerable distance;
the end of the village towards Gagny drew its water from the
magnificent ponds which exist in the woods there. The other end,
which surrounds the church and which lies in the direction of Chelles,
found drinking-water only at a little spring half-way down the slope,
near the road to Chelles, about a quarter of an hour from Montfermeil.

Thus each household found it hard work to keep supplied with water.
The large houses, the aristocracy, of which the Thenardier tavern
formed a part, paid half a farthing a bucketful to a man who made a
business of it, and who earned about eight sous a day in his enterprise
of supplying Montfermeil with water; but this good man only worked
until seven o'clock in the evening in summer, and five in winter;
and night once come and the shutters on the ground floor once closed,
he who had no water to drink went to fetch it for himself or did
without it.

This constituted the terror of the poor creature whom the reader
has probably not forgotten,--little Cosette. It will be remembered
that Cosette was useful to the Thenardiers in two ways:
they made the mother pay them, and they made the child serve them.
So when the mother ceased to pay altogether, the reason for which we
have read in preceding chapters, the Thenardiers kept Cosette.
She took the place of a servant in their house. In this capacity she
it was who ran to fetch water when it was required. So the child,
who was greatly terrified at the idea of going to the spring at night,
took great care that water should never be lacking in the house.

Christmas of the year 1823 was particularly brilliant at Montfermeil.
The beginning of the winter had been mild; there had been neither snow
nor frost up to that time. Some mountebanks from Paris had obtained
permission of the mayor to erect their booths in the principal street
of the village, and a band of itinerant merchants, under protection
of the same tolerance, had constructed their stalls on the Church Square,
and even extended them into Boulanger Alley, where, as the reader
will perhaps remember, the Thenardiers' hostelry was situated.
These people filled the inns and drinking-shops, and communicated
to that tranquil little district a noisy and joyous life. In order
to play the part of a faithful historian, we ought even to add that,
among the curiosities displayed in the square, there was a menagerie,
in which frightful clowns, clad in rags and coming no one knew whence,
exhibited to the peasants of Montfermeil in 1823 one of those
horrible Brazilian vultures, such as our Royal Museum did not
possess until 1845, and which have a tricolored cockade for an eye.
I believe that naturalists call this bird Caracara Polyborus;
it belongs to the order of the Apicides, and to the family of
the vultures. Some good old Bonapartist soldiers, who had retired
to the village, went to see this creature with great devotion.
The mountebanks gave out that the tricolored cockade was a unique
phenomenon made by God expressly for their menagerie.

On Christmas eve itself, a number of men, carters, and peddlers,
were seated at table, drinking and smoking around four or five
candles in the public room of Thenardier's hostelry. This room
resembled all drinking-shop rooms,--tables, pewter jugs, bottles,
drinkers, smokers; but little light and a great deal of noise.
The date of the year 1823 was indicated, nevertheless, by two
objects which were then fashionable in the bourgeois class: to wit,
a kaleidoscope and a lamp of ribbed tin. The female Thenardier was
attending to the supper, which was roasting in front of a clear fire;
her husband was drinking with his customers and talking politics.

Besides political conversations which had for their principal subjects
the Spanish war and M. le Duc d'Angouleme, strictly local parentheses,
like the following, were audible amid the uproar:--

"About Nanterre and Suresnes the vines have flourished greatly.
When ten pieces were reckoned on there have been twelve.
They have yielded a great deal of juice under the press."
"But the grapes cannot be ripe?"  "In those parts the grapes
should not be ripe; the wine turns oily as soon as spring comes."
"Then it is very thin wine?"  "There are wines poorer even than these.
The grapes must be gathered while green."  Etc.

Or a miller would call out:--

"Are we responsible for what is in the sacks? We find in them
a quantity of small seed which we cannot sift out, and which we
are obliged to send through the mill-stones; there are tares,
fennel, vetches, hempseed, fox-tail, and a host of other weeds,
not to mention pebbles, which abound in certain wheat, especially in
Breton wheat. I am not fond of grinding Breton wheat, any more than
long-sawyers like to saw beams with nails in them. You can judge
of the bad dust that makes in grinding. And then people complain
of the flour. They are in the wrong. The flour is no fault of ours."

In a space between two windows a mower, who was seated at table
with a landed proprietor who was fixing on a price for some meadow
work to be performed in the spring, was saying:--

"It does no harm to have the grass wet. It cuts better.
Dew is a good thing, sir. It makes no difference with that grass.
Your grass is young and very hard to cut still. It's terribly tender.
It yields before the iron."  Etc.

Cosette was in her usual place, seated on the cross-bar of the kitchen
table near the chimney. She was in rags; her bare feet were thrust
into wooden shoes, and by the firelight she was engaged in knitting
woollen stockings destined for the young Thenardiers. A very young
kitten was playing about among the chairs. Laughter and chatter were
audible in the adjoining room, from two fresh children's voices:
it was Eponine and Azelma.

In the chimney-corner a cat-o'-nine-tails was hanging on a nail.

At intervals the cry of a very young child, which was somewhere
in the house, rang through the noise of the dram-shop. It was
a little boy who had been born to the Thenardiers during one
of the preceding winters,--"she did not know why," she said,
"the result of the cold,"--and who was a little more than three
years old. The mother had nursed him, but she did not love him.
When the persistent clamor of the brat became too annoying,
"Your son is squalling," Thenardier would say; "do go and see
what he wants."  "Bah!" the mother would reply, "he bothers me."
And the neglected child continued to shriek in the dark.

CHAPTER II

TWO COMPLETE PORTRAITS

So far in this book the Thenardiers have been viewed only in profile;
the moment has arrived for making the circuit of this couple,
and considering it under all its aspects.

Thenardier had just passed his fiftieth birthday; Madame Thenardier
was approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman;
so that there existed a balance of age between husband and wife.

Our readers have possibly preserved some recollection of this
Thenardier woman, ever since her first appearance,--tall, blond,
red, fat, angular, square, enormous, and agile; she belonged, as we
have said, to the race of those colossal wild women, who contort
themselves at fairs with paving-stones hanging from their hair.
She did everything about the house,--made the beds, did the washing,
the cooking, and everything else. Cosette was her only servant;
a mouse in the service of an elephant. Everything trembled at
the sound of her voice,--window panes, furniture, and people.
Her big face, dotted with red blotches, presented the appearance
of a skimmer. She had a beard. She was an ideal market-porter
dressed in woman's clothes. She swore splendidly; she boasted
of being able to crack a nut with one blow of her fist. Except for
the romances which she had read, and which made the affected lady
peep through the ogress at times, in a very queer way, the idea would
never have occurred to any one to say of her, "That is a woman."
This Thenardier female was like the product of a wench engrafted
on a fishwife. When one heard her speak, one said, "That is
a gendarme"; when one saw her drink, one said, "That is a carter";
when one saw her handle Cosette, one said, "That is the hangman."
One of her teeth projected when her face was in repose.

Thenardier was a small, thin, pale, angular, bony, feeble man, who had
a sickly air and who was wonderfully healthy. His cunning began here;
he smiled habitually, by way of precaution, and was almost polite
to everybody, even to the beggar to whom he refused half a farthing.
He had the glance of a pole-cat and the bearing of a man of letters.
He greatly resembled the portraits of the Abbe Delille.
His coquetry consisted in drinking with the carters. No one had
ever succeeded in rendering him drunk. He smoked a big pipe.
He wore a blouse, and under his blouse an old black coat. He made
pretensions to literature and to materialism. There were certain
names which he often pronounced to support whatever things he
might be saying,--Voltaire, Raynal, Parny, and, singularly enough,
Saint Augustine. He declared that he had "a system."  In addition,
he was a great swindler. A filousophe [philosophe], a scientific thief.
The species does exist. It will be remembered that he pretended
to have served in the army; he was in the habit of relating
with exuberance, how, being a sergeant in the 6th or the 9th light
something or other, at Waterloo, he had alone, and in the presence
of a squadron of death-dealing hussars, covered with his body and saved
from death, in the midst of the grape-shot, "a general, who had been
dangerously wounded."  Thence arose for his wall the flaring sign,
and for his inn the name which it bore in the neighborhood, of "the
cabaret of the Sergeant of Waterloo."  He was a liberal, a classic,
and a Bonapartist. He had subscribed for the Champ d'Asile. It was
said in the village that he had studied for the priesthood.

We believe that he had simply studied in Holland for an inn-keeper.
This rascal of composite order was, in all probability,
some Fleming from Lille, in Flanders, a Frenchman in Paris,
a Belgian at Brussels, being comfortably astride of both frontiers.
As for his prowess at Waterloo, the reader is already acquainted
with that. It will be perceived that he exaggerated it a trifle.
Ebb and flow, wandering, adventure, was the leven of his existence;
a tattered conscience entails a fragmentary life, and, apparently at
the stormy epoch of June 18, 1815, Thenardier belonged to that
variety of marauding sutlers of which we have spoken, beating about
the country, selling to some, stealing from others, and travelling
like a family man, with wife and children, in a rickety cart,
in the rear of troops on the march, with an instinct for always
attaching himself to the victorious army. This campaign ended,
and having, as he said, "some quibus," he had come to Montfermeil
and set up an inn there.

This quibus, composed of purses and watches, of gold rings and
silver crosses, gathered in harvest-time in furrows sown with corpses,
did not amount to a large total, and did not carry this sutler
turned eating-house-keeper very far.

Thenardier had that peculiar rectilinear something about his
gestures which, accompanied by an oath, recalls the barracks,
and by a sign of the cross, the seminary. He was a fine talker.
He allowed it to be thought that he was an educated man. Nevertheless,
the schoolmaster had noticed that he pronounced improperly.[12]

[12] Literally "made cuirs"; i. e., pronounced a t or an s at
the end of words where the opposite letter should occur, or used
either one of them where neither exists.

He composed the travellers' tariff card in a superior manner,
but practised eyes sometimes spied out orthographical errors in it.
Thenardier was cunning, greedy, slothful, and clever. He did not
disdain his servants, which caused his wife to dispense with them.
This giantess was jealous. It seemed to her that that thin and yellow
little man must be an object coveted by all.

Thenardier, who was, above all, an astute and well-balanced man,
was a scamp of a temperate sort. This is the worst species;
hypocrisy enters into it.

It is not that Thenardier was not, on occasion, capable of wrath
to quite the same degree as his wife; but this was very rare, and at
such times, since he was enraged with the human race in general,
as he bore within him a deep furnace of hatred. And since he
was one of those people who are continually avenging their wrongs,
who accuse everything that passes before them of everything
which has befallen them, and who are always ready to cast upon
the first person who comes to hand, as a legitimate grievance,
the sum total of the deceptions, the bankruptcies, and the
calamities of their lives,--when all this leaven was stirred up
in him and boiled forth from his mouth and eyes, he was terrible.
Woe to the person who came under his wrath at such a time!

In addition to his other qualities, Thenardier was attentive
and penetrating, silent or talkative, according to circumstances,
and always highly intelligent. He had something of the look
of sailors, who are accustomed to screw up their eyes to gaze
through marine glasses. Thenardier was a statesman.

Every new-comer who entered the tavern said, on catching sight
of Madame Thenardier, "There is the master of the house."
A mistake. She was not even the mistress. The husband was
both master and mistress. She worked; he created. He directed
everything by a sort of invisible and constant magnetic action.
A word was sufficient for him, sometimes a sign; the mastodon obeyed.
Thenardier was a sort of special and sovereign being in Madame
Thenardier's eyes, though she did not thoroughly realize it.
She was possessed of virtues after her own kind; if she had ever had
a disagreement as to any detail with "Monsieur Thenardier,"--which was
an inadmissible hypothesis, by the way,--she would not have blamed
her husband in public on any subject whatever. She would never have
committed "before strangers" that mistake so often committed by women,
and which is called in parliamentary language, "exposing the crown."
Although their concord had only evil as its result, there was
contemplation in Madame Thenardier's submission to her husband.
That mountain of noise and of flesh moved under the little finger
of that frail despot. Viewed on its dwarfed and grotesque side,
this was that grand and universal thing, the adoration of mind
by matter; for certain ugly features have a cause in the very depths
of eternal beauty. There was an unknown quantity about Thenardier;
hence the absolute empire of the man over that woman. At certain
moments she beheld him like a lighted candle; at others she felt him
like a claw.

This woman was a formidable creature who loved no one except
her children, and who did not fear any one except her husband.
She was a mother because she was mammiferous. But her maternity
stopped short with her daughters, and, as we shall see, did not extend
to boys. The man had but one thought,--how to enrich himself.

He did not succeed in this. A theatre worthy of this great talent
was lacking. Thenardier was ruining himself at Montfermeil,
if ruin is possible to zero; in Switzerland or in the Pyrenees this
penniless scamp would have become a millionaire; but an inn-keeper
must browse where fate has hitched him.

It will be understood that the word inn-keeper is here employed
in a restricted sense, and does not extend to an entire class.

In this same year, 1823, Thenardier was burdened with about fifteen
hundred francs' worth of petty debts, and this rendered him anxious.

Whatever may have been the obstinate injustice of destiny in
this case, Thenardier was one of those men who understand best,
with the most profundity and in the most modern fashion, that thing
which is a virtue among barbarous peoples and an object of
merchandise among civilized peoples,--hospitality. Besides, he was
an admirable poacher, and quoted for his skill in shooting. He had
a certain cold and tranquil laugh, which was particularly dangerous.

His theories as a landlord sometimes burst forth in lightning flashes.
He had professional aphorisms, which he inserted into his wife's mind.
"The duty of the inn-keeper," he said to her one day, violently,
and in a low voice, "is to sell to the first comer, stews, repose,
light, fire, dirty sheets, a servant, lice, and a smile; to stop
passers-by, to empty small purses, and to honestly lighten heavy ones;
to shelter travelling families respectfully: to shave the man,
to pluck the woman, to pick the child clean; to quote the window open,
the window shut, the chimney-corner, the arm-chair, the chair,
the ottoman, the stool, the feather-bed, the mattress and the
truss of straw; to know how much the shadow uses up the mirror,
and to put a price on it; and, by five hundred thousand devils,
to make the traveller pay for everything, even for the flies
which his dog eats!"

This man and this woman were ruse and rage wedded--a hideous
and terrible team.

While the husband pondered and combined, Madame Thenardier thought
not of absent creditors, took no heed of yesterday nor of to-morrow,
and lived in a fit of anger, all in a minute.

Such were these two beings. Cosette was between them, subjected to
their double pressure, like a creature who is at the same time being
ground up in a mill and pulled to pieces with pincers. The man
and the woman each had a different method: Cosette was overwhelmed
with blows--this was the woman's; she went barefooted in winter--
that was the man's doing.

Cosette ran up stairs and down, washed, swept, rubbed, dusted, ran,
fluttered about, panted, moved heavy articles, and weak as she was,
did the coarse work. There was no mercy for her; a fierce mistress
and venomous master. The Thenardier hostelry was like a spider's web,
in which Cosette had been caught, and where she lay trembling.
The ideal of oppression was realized by this sinister household.
It was something like the fly serving the spiders.

The poor child passively held her peace.

What takes place within these souls when they have but just
quitted God, find themselves thus, at the very dawn of life,
very small and in the midst of men all naked!

CHAPTER III

MEN MUST HAVE WINE, AND HORSES MUST HAVE WATER

Four new travellers had arrived.

Cosette was meditating sadly; for, although she was only eight years old,
she had already suffered so much that she reflected with the lugubrious
air of an old woman. Her eye was black in consequence of a blow
from Madame Thenardier's fist, which caused the latter to remark
from time to time, "How ugly she is with her fist-blow on her eye!"

Cosette was thinking that it was dark, very dark, that the pitchers
and caraffes in the chambers of the travellers who had arrived must
have been filled and that there was no more water in the cistern.

She was somewhat reassured because no one in the Thenardier establishment
drank much water. Thirsty people were never lacking there;
but their thirst was of the sort which applies to the jug rather
than to the pitcher. Any one who had asked for a glass of water
among all those glasses of wine would have appeared a savage to
all these men. But there came a moment when the child trembled;
Madame Thenardier raised the cover of a stew-pan which was boiling
on the stove, then seized a glass and briskly approached the cistern.
She turned the faucet; the child had raised her head and was following
all the woman's movements. A thin stream of water trickled from
the faucet, and half filled the glass. "Well," said she, "there is
no more water!"  A momentary silence ensued. The child did not breathe.

"Bah!" resumed Madame Thenardier, examining the half-filled glass,
"this will be enough."

Cosette applied herself to her work once more, but for a quarter
of an hour she felt her heart leaping in her bosom like a big
snow-flake.

She counted the minutes that passed in this manner, and wished it
were the next morning.

From time to time one of the drinkers looked into the street,
and exclaimed, "It's as black as an oven!" or, "One must needs
be a cat to go about the streets without a lantern at this hour!"
And Cosette trembled.

All at once one of the pedlers who lodged in the hostelry entered,
and said in a harsh voice:--

"My horse has not been watered."

"Yes, it has," said Madame Thenardier.

"I tell you that it has not," retorted the pedler.

Cosette had emerged from under the table.

"Oh, yes, sir!" said she, "the horse has had a drink; he drank
out of a bucket, a whole bucketful, and it was I who took the water
to him, and I spoke to him."

It was not true; Cosette lied.

"There's a brat as big as my fist who tells lies as big as the house,"
exclaimed the pedler. "I tell you that he has not been watered,
you little jade! He has a way of blowing when he has had no water,
which I know well."

Cosette persisted, and added in a voice rendered hoarse with anguish,
and which was hardly audible:--

"And he drank heartily."

"Come," said the pedler, in a rage, "this won't do at all,
let my horse be watered, and let that be the end of it!"

Cosette crept under the table again.

"In truth, that is fair!" said Madame Thenardier, "if the beast
has not been watered, it must be."

Then glancing about her:--

"Well, now! Where's that other beast?"

She bent down and discovered Cosette cowering at the other end
of the table, almost under the drinkers' feet.

"Are you coming?" shrieked Madame Thenardier.

Cosette crawled out of the sort of hole in which she had hidden herself.
The Thenardier resumed:--

"Mademoiselle Dog-lack-name, go and water that horse."

"But, Madame," said Cosette, feebly, "there is no water."

The Thenardier threw the street door wide open:--

"Well, go and get some, then!"

Cosette dropped her head, and went for an empty bucket which stood
near the chimney-corner.

This bucket was bigger than she was, and the child could have set
down in it at her ease.

The Thenardier returned to her stove, and tasted what was
in the stewpan, with a wooden spoon, grumbling the while:--

"There's plenty in the spring. There never was such a malicious
creature as that. I think I should have done better to strain
my onions."

Then she rummaged in a drawer which contained sous, pepper, and shallots.

"See here, Mam'selle Toad," she added, "on your way back, you will
get a big loaf from the baker. Here's a fifteen-sou piece."

Cosette had a little pocket on one side of her apron; she took
the coin without saying a word, and put it in that pocket.

Then she stood motionless, bucket in hand, the open door before her.
She seemed to be waiting for some one to come to her rescue.

"Get along with you!" screamed the Thenardier.

Cosette went out. The door closed behind her.

CHAPTER IV

ENTRANCE ON THE SCENE OF A DOLL

The line of open-air booths starting at the church, extended, as the
reader will remember, as far as the hostelry of the Thenardiers.
These booths were all illuminated, because the citizens would
soon pass on their way to the midnight mass, with candles burning
in paper funnels, which, as the schoolmaster, then seated at the
table at the Thenardiers' observed, produced "a magical effect."
In compensation, not a star was visible in the sky.

The last of these stalls, established precisely opposite the Thenardiers'
door, was a toy-shop all glittering with tinsel, glass, and magnificent
objects of tin. In the first row, and far forwards, the merchant had
placed on a background of white napkins, an immense doll, nearly two
feet high, who was dressed in a robe of pink crepe, with gold wheat-ears
on her head, which had real hair and enamel eyes. All that day,
this marvel had been displayed to the wonderment of all passers-by
under ten years of age, without a mother being found in Montfermeil
sufficiently rich or sufficiently extravagant to give it to her child.
Eponine and Azelma had passed hours in contemplating it, and Cosette
herself had ventured to cast a glance at it, on the sly, it is true.

At the moment when Cosette emerged, bucket in hand, melancholy and
overcome as she was, she could not refrain from lifting her eyes
to that wonderful doll, towards the lady, as she called it.
The poor child paused in amazement. She had not yet beheld
that doll close to. The whole shop seemed a palace to her:
the doll was not a doll; it was a vision. It was joy, splendor,
riches, happiness, which appeared in a sort of chimerical halo
to that unhappy little being so profoundly engulfed in gloomy and
chilly misery. With the sad and innocent sagacity of childhood,
Cosette measured the abyss which separated her from that doll.
She said to herself that one must be a queen, or at least a princess,
to have a "thing" like that. She gazed at that beautiful pink dress,
that beautiful smooth hair, and she thought, "How happy that doll
must be!"  She could not take her eyes from that fantastic stall.
The more she looked, the more dazzled she grew. She thought she
was gazing at paradise. There were other dolls behind the large one,
which seemed to her to be fairies and genii. The merchant, who was
pacing back and forth in front of his shop, produced on her somewhat
the effect of being the Eternal Father.

In this adoration she forgot everything, even the errand with
which she was charged.

All at once the Thenardier's coarse voice recalled her to reality:
"What, you silly jade! you have not gone? Wait! I'll give it
to you! I want to know what you are doing there! Get along,
you little monster!"

The Thenardier had cast a glance into the street, and had caught
sight of Cosette in her ecstasy.

Cosette fled, dragging her pail, and taking the longest strides
of which she was capable.

CHAPTER V

THE LITTLE ONE ALL ALONE

As the Thenardier hostelry was in that part of the village which is
near the church, it was to the spring in the forest in the direction
of Chelles that Cosette was obliged to go for her water.

She did not glance at the display of a single other merchant. So long
as she was in Boulanger Lane and in the neighborhood of the church,
the lighted stalls illuminated the road; but soon the last light from
the last stall vanished. The poor child found herself in the dark.
She plunged into it. Only, as a certain emotion overcame her,
she made as much motion as possible with the handle of the bucket
as she walked along. This made a noise which afforded her company.

The further she went, the denser the darkness became. There was no
one in the streets. However, she did encounter a woman, who turned
around on seeing her, and stood still, muttering between her teeth:
"Where can that child be going? Is it a werewolf child?"  Then the
woman recognized Cosette. "Well," said she, "it's the Lark!"

In this manner Cosette traversed the labyrinth of tortuous and
deserted streets which terminate in the village of Montfermeil
on the side of Chelles. So long as she had the houses or even
the walls only on both sides of her path, she proceeded with
tolerable boldness. From time to time she caught the flicker of
a candle through the crack of a shutter--this was light and life;
there were people there, and it reassured her. But in proportion
as she advanced, her pace slackened mechanically, as it were.
When she had passed the corner of the last house, Cosette paused.
It had been hard to advance further than the last stall;
it became impossible to proceed further than the last house.
She set her bucket on the ground, thrust her hand into her hair,
and began slowly to scratch her head,--a gesture peculiar to children
when terrified and undecided what to do. It was no longer Montfermeil;
it was the open fields. Black and desert space was before her.
She gazed in despair at that darkness, where there was no longer
any one, where there were beasts, where there were spectres, possibly.
She took a good look, and heard the beasts walking on the grass,
and she distinctly saw spectres moving in the trees. Then she seized
her bucket again; fear had lent her audacity. "Bah!" said she;
"I will tell him that there was no more water!"  And she resolutely
re-entered Montfermeil.

Hardly had she gone a hundred paces when she paused and began to scratch
her head again. Now it was the Thenardier who appeared to her,
with her hideous, hyena mouth, and wrath flashing in her eyes.
The child cast a melancholy glance before her and behind her.
What was she to do? What was to become of her? Where was she to go?
In front of her was the spectre of the Thenardier; behind her all
the phantoms of the night and of the forest. It was before the
Thenardier that she recoiled. She resumed her path to the spring,
and began to run. She emerged from the village, she entered the
forest at a run, no longer looking at or listening to anything.
She only paused in her course when her breath failed her;
but she did not halt in her advance. She went straight before her
in desperation.

As she ran she felt like crying.

The nocturnal quivering of the forest surrounded her completely.

She no longer thought, she no longer saw. The immensity of night
was facing this tiny creature. On the one hand, all shadow;
on the other, an atom.

It was only seven or eight minutes' walk from the edge of the woods
to the spring. Cosette knew the way, through having gone over it
many times in daylight. Strange to say, she did not get lost.
A remnant of instinct guided her vaguely. But she did not turn
her eyes either to right or to left, for fear of seeing things
in the branches and in the brushwood. In this manner she reached
the spring.

It was a narrow, natural basin, hollowed out by the water in a
clayey soil, about two feet deep, surrounded with moss and with
those tall, crimped grasses which are called Henry IV.'s frills,
and paved with several large stones. A brook ran out of it,
with a tranquil little noise.

Cosette did not take time to breathe. It was very dark, but she
was in the habit of coming to this spring. She felt with her left
hand in the dark for a young oak which leaned over the spring,
and which usually served to support her, found one of its branches,
clung to it, bent down, and plunged the bucket in the water.
She was in a state of such violent excitement that her strength
was trebled. While thus bent over, she did not notice that the pocket
of her apron had emptied itself into the spring. The fifteen-sou
piece fell into the water. Cosette neither saw nor heard it fall.
She drew out the bucket nearly full, and set it on the grass.

That done, she perceived that she was worn out with fatigue.
She would have liked to set out again at once, but the effort required
to fill the bucket had been such that she found it impossible to take
a step. She was forced to sit down. She dropped on the grass,
and remained crouching there.

She shut her eyes; then she opened them again, without knowing why,
but because she could not do otherwise. The agitated water
in the bucket beside her was describing circles which resembled
tin serpents.

Overhead the sky was covered with vast black clouds, which were
like masses of smoke. The tragic mask of shadow seemed to bend
vaguely over the child.

Jupiter was setting in the depths.

The child stared with bewildered eyes at this great star, with which
she was unfamiliar, and which terrified her. The planet was,
in fact, very near the horizon and was traversing a dense layer
of mist which imparted to it a horrible ruddy hue. The mist,
gloomily empurpled, magnified the star. One would have called it
a luminous wound.

A cold wind was blowing from the plain. The forest was dark,
not a leaf was moving; there were none of the vague, fresh gleams
of summertide. Great boughs uplifted themselves in frightful wise.
Slender and misshapen bushes whistled in the clearings. The tall
grasses undulated like eels under the north wind. The nettles
seemed to twist long arms furnished with claws in search of prey.
Some bits of dry heather, tossed by the breeze, flew rapidly by, and had
the air of fleeing in terror before something which was coming after.
On all sides there were lugubrious stretches.

The darkness was bewildering. Man requires light. Whoever buries
himself in the opposite of day feels his heart contract. When the eye
sees black, the heart sees trouble. In an eclipse in the night,
in the sooty opacity, there is anxiety even for the stoutest of hearts.
No one walks alone in the forest at night without trembling.
Shadows and trees--two formidable densities. A chimerical
reality appears in the indistinct depths. The inconceivable is
outlined a few paces distant from you with a spectral clearness.
One beholds floating, either in space or in one's own brain,
one knows not what vague and intangible thing, like the dreams
of sleeping flowers. There are fierce attitudes on the horizon.
One inhales the effluvia of the great black void. One is afraid to
glance behind him, yet desirous of doing so. The cavities of night,
things grown haggard, taciturn profiles which vanish when one advances,
obscure dishevelments, irritated tufts, livid pools, the lugubrious
reflected in the funereal, the sepulchral immensity of silence,
unknown but possible beings, bendings of mysterious branches,
alarming torsos of trees, long handfuls of quivering plants,--
against all this one has no protection. There is no hardihood which
does not shudder and which does not feel the vicinity of anguish.
One is conscious of something hideous, as though one's soul were
becoming amalgamated with the darkness. This penetration of the
shadows is indescribably sinister in the case of a child.

Forests are apocalypses, and the beating of the wings of a tiny
soul produces a sound of agony beneath their monstrous vault.

Without understanding her sensations, Cosette was conscious
that she was seized upon by that black enormity of nature;
it was no longer terror alone which was gaining possession of her;
it was something more terrible even than terror; she shivered.
There are no words to express the strangeness of that shiver which
chilled her to the very bottom of her heart; her eye grew wild;
she thought she felt that she should not be able to refrain from
returning there at the same hour on the morrow.

Then, by a sort of instinct, she began to count aloud,
one, two, three, four, and so on up to ten, in order to escape
from that singular state which she did not understand, but which
terrified her, and, when she had finished, she began again;
this restored her to a true perception of the things about her.
Her hands, which she had wet in drawing the water, felt cold;
she rose; her terror, a natural and unconquerable terror,
had returned: she had but one thought now,--to flee at full speed
through the forest, across the fields to the houses, to the windows,
to the lighted candles. Her glance fell upon the water which stood
before her; such was the fright which the Thenardier inspired
in her, that she dared not flee without that bucket of water:
she seized the handle with both hands; she could hardly lift the pail.

In this manner she advanced a dozen paces, but the bucket was full;
it was heavy; she was forced to set it on the ground once more.
She took breath for an instant, then lifted the handle of the bucket
again, and resumed her march, proceeding a little further this time,
but again she was obliged to pause. After some seconds of repose
she set out again. She walked bent forward, with drooping head,
like an old woman; the weight of the bucket strained and stiffened
her thin arms. The iron handle completed the benumbing and freezing
of her wet and tiny hands; she was forced to halt from time to time,
and each time that she did so, the cold water which splashed from
the pail fell on her bare legs. This took place in the depths
of a forest, at night, in winter, far from all human sight;
she was a child of eight: no one but God saw that sad thing at
the moment.

And her mother, no doubt, alas!

For there are things that make the dead open their eyes in their graves.

She panted with a sort of painful rattle; sobs contracted her throat,
but she dared not weep, so afraid was she of the Thenardier,
even at a distance: it was her custom to imagine the Thenardier
always present.

However, she could not make much headway in that manner, and she went
on very slowly. In spite of diminishing the length of her stops,
and of walking as long as possible between them, she reflected
with anguish that it would take her more than an hour to return to
Montfermeil in this manner, and that the Thenardier would beat her.
This anguish was mingled with her terror at being alone in the woods
at night; she was worn out with fatigue, and had not yet emerged from
the forest. On arriving near an old chestnut-tree with which she
was acquainted, made a last halt, longer than the rest, in order
that she might get well rested; then she summoned up all her strength,
picked up her bucket again, and courageously resumed her march,
but the poor little desperate creature could not refrain from crying,
"O my God! my God!"

At that moment she suddenly became conscious that her bucket no longer
weighed anything at all: a hand, which seemed to her enormous,
had just seized the handle, and lifted it vigorously. She raised
her head. A large black form, straight and erect, was walking beside
her through the darkness; it was a man who had come up behind her,
and whose approach she had not heard. This man, without uttering
a word, had seized the handle of the bucket which she was carrying.

There are instincts for all the encounters of life.

The child was not afraid.

CHAPTER VI

WHICH POSSIBLY PROVES BOULATRUELLE'S INTELLIGENCE

On the afternoon of that same Christmas Day, 1823, a man had walked
for rather a long time in the most deserted part of the Boulevard
de l'Hopital in Paris. This man had the air of a person who is
seeking lodgings, and he seemed to halt, by preference, at the most
modest houses on that dilapidated border of the faubourg Saint-Marceau.

We shall see further on that this man had, in fact, hired a chamber
in that isolated quarter.

This man, in his attire, as in all his person, realized the type
of what may be called the well-bred mendicant,--extreme wretchedness
combined with extreme cleanliness. This is a very rare mixture which
inspires intelligent hearts with that double respect which one feels
for the man who is very poor, and for the man who is very worthy.
He wore a very old and very well brushed round hat; a coarse coat,
worn perfectly threadbare, of an ochre yellow, a color that was
not in the least eccentric at that epoch; a large waistcoat with
pockets of a venerable cut; black breeches, worn gray at the knee,
stockings of black worsted; and thick shoes with copper buckles.
He would have been pronounced a preceptor in some good family,
returned from the emigration. He would have been taken for more than
sixty years of age, from his perfectly white hair, his wrinkled brow,
his livid lips, and his countenance, where everything breathed
depression and weariness of life. Judging from his firm tread,
from the singular vigor which stamped all his movements,
he would have hardly been thought fifty. The wrinkles on his brow
were well placed, and would have disposed in his favor any one
who observed him attentively. His lip contracted with a strange
fold which seemed severe, and which was humble. There was in
the depth of his glance an indescribable melancholy serenity.
In his left hand he carried a little bundle tied up in a handkerchief;
in his right he leaned on a sort of a cudgel, cut from some hedge.
This stick had been carefully trimmed, and had an air that was not
too threatening; the most had been made of its knots, and it had
received a coral-like head, made from red wax: it was a cudgel,
and it seemed to be a cane.

There are but few passers-by on that boulevard, particularly in
the winter. The man seemed to avoid them rather than to seek them,
but this without any affectation.

At that epoch, King Louis XVIII. went nearly every day to
Choisy-le-Roi: it was one of his favorite excursions. Towards two
o'clock, almost invariably, the royal carriage and cavalcade
was seen to pass at full speed along the Boulevard de l'Hopital.

This served in lieu of a watch or clock to the poor women of the quarter
who said, "It is two o'clock; there he is returning to the Tuileries."

And some rushed forward, and others drew up in line, for a passing king
always creates a tumult; besides, the appearance and disappearance
of Louis XVIII. produced a certain effect in the streets of Paris.
It was rapid but majestic. This impotent king had a taste for a
fast gallop; as he was not able to walk, he wished to run: that cripple
would gladly have had himself drawn by the lightning. He passed,
pacific and severe, in the midst of naked swords. His massive couch,
all covered with gilding, with great branches of lilies painted on
the panels, thundered noisily along. There was hardly time to cast
a glance upon it. In the rear angle on the right there was visible
on tufted cushions of white satin a large, firm, and ruddy face,
a brow freshly powdered a l'oiseau royal, a proud, hard, crafty eye,
the smile of an educated man, two great epaulets with bullion
fringe floating over a bourgeois coat, the Golden Fleece, the cross
of Saint Louis, the cross of the Legion of Honor, the silver
plaque of the Saint-Esprit, a huge belly, and a wide blue ribbon:
it was the king. Outside of Paris, he held his hat decked with white
ostrich plumes on his knees enwrapped in high English gaiters;
when he re-entered the city, he put on his hat and saluted rarely;
he stared coldly at the people, and they returned it in kind.
When he appeared for the first time in the Saint-Marceau quarter,
the whole success which he produced is contained in this remark of an
inhabitant of the faubourg to his comrade, "That big fellow yonder is
the government."

This infallible passage of the king at the same hour was, therefore,
the daily event of the Boulevard de l'Hopital.

The promenader in the yellow coat evidently did not belong in
the quarter, and probably did not belong in Paris, for he was ignorant
as to this detail. When, at two o'clock, the royal carriage,
surrounded by a squadron of the body-guard all covered with
silver lace, debouched on the boulevard, after having made the turn
of the Salpetriere, he appeared surprised and almost alarmed.
There was no one but himself in this cross-lane. He drew
up hastily behind the corner of the wall of an enclosure,
though this did not prevent M. le Duc de Havre from spying him out.

M. le Duc de Havre, as captain of the guard on duty that day,
was seated in the carriage, opposite the king. He said to his
Majesty, "Yonder is an evil-looking man."  Members of the police,
who were clearing the king's route, took equal note of him:
one of them received an order to follow him. But the man plunged
into the deserted little streets of the faubourg, and as twilight
was beginning to fall, the agent lost trace of him, as is stated
in a report addressed that same evening to M. le Comte d'Angles,
Minister of State, Prefect of Police.

When the man in the yellow coat had thrown the agent off his track,
he redoubled his pace, not without turning round many a time to assure
himself that he was not being followed. At a quarter-past four,
that is to say, when night was fully come, he passed in front of the
theatre of the Porte Saint-Martin, where The Two Convicts was being
played that day. This poster, illuminated by the theatre lanterns,
struck him; for, although he was walking rapidly, he halted to read it.
An instan