Hardly was M. Leblanc seated, when he turned his eyes towards
the pallets, which were empty.

"How is the poor little wounded girl?" he inquired.

"Bad," replied Jondrette with a heart-broken and grateful smile,
"very bad, my worthy sir. Her elder sister has taken her to the
Bourbe to have her hurt dressed. You will see them presently;
they will be back immediately."

"Madame Fabantou seems to me to be better," went on M. Leblanc,
casting his eyes on the eccentric costume of the Jondrette woman,
as she stood between him and the door, as though already guarding
the exit, and gazed at him in an attitude of menace and almost
of combat.

"She is dying," said Jondrette. "But what do you expect, sir!
She has so much courage, that woman has! She's not a woman,
she's an ox."

The Jondrette, touched by his compliment, deprecated it with the
affected airs of a flattered monster.

"You are always too good to me, Monsieur Jondrette!"

"Jondrette!" said M. Leblanc, "I thought your name was Fabantou?"

"Fabantou, alias Jondrette!" replied the husband hurriedly.
"An artistic sobriquet!"

And launching at his wife a shrug of the shoulders which M. Leblanc
did not catch, he continued with an emphatic and caressing inflection
of voice:--

"Ah! we have had a happy life together, this poor darling and I!
What would there be left for us if we had not that? We are so wretched,
my respectable sir! We have arms, but there is no work! We have
the will, no work! I don't know how the government arranges that,
but, on my word of honor, sir, I am not Jacobin, sir, I am not a
bousingot.[30] I don't wish them any evil, but if I were the ministers,
on my most sacred word, things would be different. Here, for instance,
I wanted to have my girls taught the trade of paper-box makers.
You will say to me: `What! a trade?' Yes! A trade! A simple trade!
A bread-winner! What a fall, my benefactor! What a degradation,
when one has been what we have been! Alas! There is nothing
left to us of our days of prosperity! One thing only, a picture,
of which I think a great deal, but which I am willing to part with,
for I must live! Item, one must live!"

[30] A democrat.

While Jondrette thus talked, with an apparent incoherence which
detracted nothing from the thoughtful and sagacious expression
of his physiognomy, Marius raised his eyes, and perceived at
the other end of the room a person whom he had not seen before.
A man had just entered, so softly that the door had not been heard
to turn on its hinges. This man wore a violet knitted vest,
which was old, worn, spotted, cut and gaping at every fold,
wide trousers of cotton velvet, wooden shoes on his feet, no shirt,
had his neck bare, his bare arms tattooed, and his face smeared
with black. He had seated himself in silence on the nearest bed,
and, as he was behind Jondrette, he could only be indistinctly seen.

That sort of magnetic instinct which turns aside the gaze,
caused M. Leblanc to turn round almost at the same moment as Marius.
He could not refrain from a gesture of surprise which did not
escape Jondrette.

"Ah! I see!" exclaimed Jondrette, buttoning up his coat with an air
of complaisance, "you are looking at your overcoat? It fits me!
My faith, but it fits me!"

"Who is that man?" said M. Leblanc.

"Him?" ejaculated Jondrette, "he's a neighbor of mine. Don't pay
any attention to him."

The neighbor was a singular-looking individual. However, manufactories
of chemical products abound in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Many
of the workmen might have black faces. Besides this, M. Leblanc's
whole person was expressive of candid and intrepid confidence.

He went on:--

"Excuse me; what were you saying, M. Fabantou?"

"I was telling you, sir, and dear protector," replied Jondrette
placing his elbows on the table and contemplating M. Leblanc with
steady and tender eyes, not unlike the eyes of the boa-constrictor,
"I was telling you, that I have a picture to sell."

A slight sound came from the door. A second man had just entered
and seated himself on the bed, behind Jondrette.

Like the first, his arms were bare, and he had a mask of ink
or lampblack.

Although this man had, literally, glided into the room, he had
not been able to prevent M. Leblanc catching sight of him.

"Don't mind them," said Jondrette, "they are people who belong
in the house. So I was saying, that there remains in my possession
a valuable picture. But stop, sir, take a look at it."

He rose, went to the wall at the foot of which stood the panel which we
have already mentioned, and turned it round, still leaving it supported
against the wall. It really was something which resembled a picture,
and which the candle illuminated, somewhat. Marius could make
nothing out of it, as Jondrette stood between the picture and him;
he only saw a coarse daub, and a sort of principal personage colored
with the harsh crudity of foreign canvasses and screen paintings.

"What is that?" asked M. Leblanc.

Jondrette exclaimed:--

"A painting by a master, a picture of great value, my benefactor!
I am as much attached to it as I am to my two daughters; it recalls
souvenirs to me! But I have told you, and I will not take it back,
that I am so wretched that I will part with it."

Either by chance, or because he had begun to feel a dawning uneasiness,
M. Leblanc's glance returned to the bottom of the room as he
examined the picture.

There were now four men, three seated on the bed, one standing near
the door-post, all four with bare arms and motionless, with faces smeared
with black. One of those on the bed was leaning against the wall,
with closed eyes, and it might have been supposed that he was asleep.
He was old; his white hair contrasting with his blackened face
produced a horrible effect. The other two seemed to be young;
one wore a beard, the other wore his hair long. None of them had
on shoes; those who did not wear socks were barefooted.

Jondrette noticed that M. Leblanc's eye was fixed on these men.

"They are friends. They are neighbors," said he. "Their faces
are black because they work in charcoal. They are chimney-builders.
Don't trouble yourself about them, my benefactor, but buy my picture.
Have pity on my misery. I will not ask you much for it. How much
do you think it is worth?"

"Well," said M. Leblanc, looking Jondrette full in the eye,
and with the manner of a man who is on his guard, "it is some
signboard for a tavern, and is worth about three francs."

Jondrette replied sweetly:--

"Have you your pocket-book with you? I should be satisfied
with a thousand crowns."

M. Leblanc sprang up, placed his back against the wall, and cast
a rapid glance around the room. He had Jondrette on his left,
on the side next the window, and the Jondrette woman and the four men
on his right, on the side next the door. The four men did not stir,
and did not even seem to be looking on.

Jondrette had again begun to speak in a plaintive tone, with so vague an
eye, and so lamentable an intonation, that M. Leblanc might have supposed
that what he had before him was a man who had simply gone mad with misery.

"If you do not buy my picture, my dear benefactor," said Jondrette,
"I shall be left without resources; there will be nothing left
for me but to throw myself into the river. When I think that I
wanted to have my two girls taught the middle-class paper-box trade,
the making of boxes for New Year's gifts! Well! A table with a
board at the end to keep the glasses from falling off is required,
then a special stove is needed, a pot with three compartments
for the different degrees of strength of the paste, according as it
is to be used for wood, paper, or stuff, a paring-knife to cut
the cardboard, a mould to adjust it, a hammer to nail the steels,
pincers, how the devil do I know what all? And all that in order
to earn four sous a day! And you have to work fourteen hours a day!
And each box passes through the workwoman's hands thirteen times!
And you can't wet the paper! And you mustn't spot anything! And you
must keep the paste hot. The devil, I tell you! Four sous a day!
How do you suppose a man is to live?"

As he spoke, Jondrette did not look at M. Leblanc, who was observing him.
M. Leblanc's eye was fixed on Jondrette, and Jondrette's eye was fixed on
the door. Marius' eager attention was transferred from one to the other.
M. Leblanc seemed to be asking himself: "Is this man an idiot?"
Jondrette repeated two or three distinct times, with all manner
of varying inflections of the whining and supplicating order:
"There is nothing left for me but to throw myself into the river!
I went down three steps at the side of the bridge of Austerlitz
the other day for that purpose."

All at once his dull eyes lighted up with a hideous flash;
the little man drew himself up and became terrible, took a step
toward M. Leblanc and cried in a voice of thunder: "That has
nothing to do with the question! Do you know me?"

The door of the garret had just opened abruptly, and allowed a view
of three men clad in blue linen blouses, and masked with masks
of black paper. The first was thin, and had a long, iron-tipped cudgel;
the second, who was a sort of colossus, carried, by the middle
of the handle, with the blade downward, a butcher's pole-axe for
slaughtering cattle. The third, a man with thick-set shoulders,
not so slender as the first, held in his hand an enormous key
stolen from the door of some prison.

It appeared that the arrival of these men was what Jondrette had
been waiting for. A rapid dialogue ensued between him and the man
with the cudgel, the thin one.

"Is everything ready?" said Jondrette.

"Yes," replied the thin man.

"Where is Montparnasse?"

"The young principal actor stopped to chat with your girl."

"Which?"

"The eldest."

"Is there a carriage at the door?"

"Yes."

"Is the team harnessed?"

"Yes."

"With two good horses?"

"Excellent."

"Is it waiting where I ordered?"

"Yes."

"Good," said Jondrette.

M. Leblanc was very pale. He was scrutinizing everything around
him in the den, like a man who understands what he has fallen into,
and his head, directed in turn toward all the heads which surrounded him,
moved on his neck with an astonished and attentive slowness,
but there was nothing in his air which resembled fear. He had
improvised an intrenchment out of the table; and the man, who but
an instant previously, had borne merely the appearance of a kindly
old man, had suddenly become a sort of athlete, and placed his robust
fist on the back of his chair, with a formidable and surprising gesture.

This old man, who was so firm and so brave in the presence
of such a danger, seemed to possess one of those natures which
are as courageous as they are kind, both easily and simply.
The father of a woman whom we love is never a stranger to us.
Marius felt proud of that unknown man.

Three of the men, of whom Jondrette had said: "They are
chimney-builders," had armed themselves from the pile of old iron,
one with a heavy pair of shears, the second with weighing-tongs, the third
with a hammer, and had placed themselves across the entrance without
uttering a syllable. The old man had remained on the bed, and had merely
opened his eyes. The Jondrette woman had seated herself beside him.

Marius decided that in a few seconds more the moment for intervention
would arrive, and he raised his right hand towards the ceiling,
in the direction of the corridor, in readiness to discharge his pistol.

Jondrette having terminated his colloquy with the man with the cudgel,
turned once more to M. Leblanc, and repeated his question,
accompanying it with that low, repressed, and terrible laugh
which was peculiar to him:--

"So you do not recognize me?"

M. Leblanc looked him full in the face, and replied:--

"No."

Then Jondrette advanced to the table. He leaned across the candle,
crossing his arms, putting his angular and ferocious jaw close
to M. Leblanc's calm face, and advancing as far as possible without
forcing M. Leblanc to retreat, and, in this posture of a wild beast
who is about to bite, he exclaimed:--

"My name is not Fabantou, my name is not Jondrette,
my name is Thenardier. I am the inn-keeper of Montfermeil!
Do you understand? Thenardier! Now do you know me?"

An almost imperceptible flush crossed M. Leblanc's brow, and he
replied with a voice which neither trembled nor rose above its
ordinary level, with his accustomed placidity:--

"No more than before."

Marius did not hear this reply. Any one who had seen him at
that moment through the darkness would have perceived that he
was haggard, stupid, thunder-struck. At the moment when Jondrette said:
"My name is Thenardier," Marius had trembled in every limb,
and had leaned against the wall, as though he felt the cold of
a steel blade through his heart. Then his right arm, all ready
to discharge the signal shot, dropped slowly, and at the moment
when Jondrette repeated, "Thenardier, do you understand?"
Marius's faltering fingers had come near letting the pistol fall.
Jondrette, by revealing his identity, had not moved M. Leblanc,
but he had quite upset Marius. That name of Thenardier, with which
M. Leblanc did not seem to be acquainted, Marius knew well.
Let the reader recall what that name meant to him! That name
he had worn on his heart, inscribed in his father's testament!
He bore it at the bottom of his mind, in the depths of his memory,
in that sacred injunction: "A certain Thenardier saved my life.
If my son encounters him, he will do him all the good that lies
in his power." That name, it will be remembered, was one of the
pieties of his soul; he mingled it with the name of his father in
his worship. What! This man was that Thenardier, that inn-keeper
of Montfermeil whom he had so long and so vainly sought! He had
found him at last, and how? His father's saviour was a ruffian!
That man, to whose service Marius was burning to devote himself,
was a monster! That liberator of Colonel Pontmercy was on the
point of committing a crime whose scope Marius did not, as yet,
clearly comprehend, but which resembled an assassination!
And against whom, great God! what a fatality! What a bitter mockery
of fate! His father had commanded him from the depths of his coffin
to do all the good in his power to this Thenardier, and for four
years Marius had cherished no other thought than to acquit this
debt of his father's, and at the moment when he was on the eve
of having a brigand seized in the very act of crime by justice,
destiny cried to him: "This is Thenardier!" He could at last repay
this man for his father's life, saved amid a hail-storm of grape-shot
on the heroic field of Waterloo, and repay it with the scaffold!
He had sworn to himself that if ever he found that Thenardier,
he would address him only by throwing himself at his feet; and now
he actually had found him, but it was only to deliver him over to
the executioner! His father said to him: "Succor Thenardier!"
And he replied to that adored and sainted voice by crushing Thenardier!
He was about to offer to his father in his grave the spectacle of
that man who had torn him from death at the peril of his own life,
executed on the Place Saint-Jacques through the means of his son,
of that Marius to whom he had entrusted that man by his will!
And what a mockery to have so long worn on his breast his father's
last commands, written in his own hand, only to act in so horribly
contrary a sense! But, on the other hand, now look on that trap
and not prevent it! Condemn the victim and to spare the assassin!
Could one be held to any gratitude towards so miserable a wretch?
All the ideas which Marius had cherished for the last four years
were pierced through and through, as it were, by this unforeseen
blow.

He shuddered. Everything depended on him. Unknown to themselves,
he held in his hand all those beings who were moving about there
before his eyes. If he fired his pistol, M. Leblanc was saved,
and Thenardier lost; if he did not fire, M. Leblanc would be sacrificed,
and, who knows? Thenardier would escape. Should he dash down the
one or allow the other to fall? Remorse awaited him in either case.

What was he to do? What should he choose? Be false to the most
imperious souvenirs, to all those solemn vows to himself, to the
most sacred duty, to the most venerated text! Should he ignore
his father's testament, or allow the perpetration of a crime!
On the one hand, it seemed to him that he heard "his Ursule"
supplicating for her father and on the other, the colonel commending
Thenardier to his care. He felt that he was going mad. His knees
gave way beneath him. And he had not even the time for deliberation,
so great was the fury with which the scene before his eyes was
hastening to its catastrophe. It was like a whirlwind of which he
had thought himself the master, and which was now sweeping him away.
He was on the verge of swooning.

In the meantime, Thenardier, whom we shall henceforth call by no
other name, was pacing up and down in front of the table in a sort
of frenzy and wild triumph.

He seized the candle in his fist, and set it on the chimney-piece
with so violent a bang that the wick came near being extinguished,
and the tallow bespattered the wall.

Then he turned to M. Leblanc with a horrible look, and spit out
these words:--

"Done for! Smoked brown! Cooked! Spitchcocked!"

And again he began to march back and forth, in full eruption.

"Ah!" he cried, "so I've found you again at last, Mister philanthropist!
Mister threadbare millionnaire! Mister giver of dolls! you old ninny!
Ah! so you don't recognize me! No, it wasn't you who came
to Montfermeil, to my inn, eight years ago, on Christmas eve, 1823!
It wasn't you who carried off that Fantine's child from me!
The Lark! It wasn't you who had a yellow great-coat! No!
Nor a package of duds in your hand, as you had this morning here!
Say, wife, it seems to be his mania to carry packets of woollen
stockings into houses! Old charity monger, get out with you!
Are you a hosier, Mister millionnaire? You give away your stock
in trade to the poor, holy man! What bosh! merry Andrew!
Ah! and you don't recognize me? Well, I recognize you, that I do!
I recognized you the very moment you poked your snout in here.
Ah! you'll find out presently, that it isn't all roses to thrust
yourself in that fashion into people's houses, under the pretext
that they are taverns, in wretched clothes, with the air of a
poor man, to whom one would give a sou, to deceive persons,
to play the generous, to take away their means of livelihood,
and to make threats in the woods, and you can't call things quits
because afterwards, when people are ruined, you bring a coat that is
too large, and two miserable hospital blankets, you old blackguard,
you child-stealer!"

He paused, and seemed to be talking to himself for a moment.
One would have said that his wrath had fallen into some hole,
like the Rhone; then, as though he were concluding aloud the things
which he had been saying to himself in a whisper, he smote the table
with his fist, and shouted:--

"And with his goody-goody air!"

And, apostrophizing M. Leblanc:--

"Parbleu! You made game of me in the past! You are the cause
of all my misfortunes! For fifteen hundred francs you got
a girl whom I had, and who certainly belonged to rich people,
and who had already brought in a great deal of money, and from whom
I might have extracted enough to live on all my life! A girl who
would have made up to me for everything that I lost in that vile
cook-shop, where there was nothing but one continual row, and where,
like a fool, I ate up my last farthing! Oh! I wish all the wine
folks drank in my house had been poison to those who drank it!
Well, never mind! Say, now! You must have thought me ridiculous
when you went off with the Lark! You had your cudgel in the forest.
You were the stronger. Revenge. I'm the one to hold the trumps
to-day! You're in a sorry case, my good fellow! Oh, but I
can laugh! Really, I laugh! Didn't he fall into the trap!
I told him that I was an actor, that my name was Fabantou,
that I had played comedy with Mamselle Mars, with Mamselle Muche,
that my landlord insisted on being paid tomorrow, the 4th of February,
and he didn't even notice that the 8th of January, and not the 4th
of February is the time when the quarter runs out! Absurd idiot!
And the four miserable Philippes which he has brought me! Scoundrel!
He hadn't the heart even to go as high as a hundred francs! And how
he swallowed my platitudes! That did amuse me. I said to myself:
`Blockhead! Come, I've got you! I lick your paws this morning,
but I'll gnaw your heart this evening!'"

Thenardier paused. He was out of breath. His little, narrow chest
panted like a forge bellows. His eyes were full of the ignoble
happiness of a feeble, cruel, and cowardly creature, which finds
that it can, at last, harass what it has feared, and insult what it
has flattered, the joy of a dwarf who should be able to set his heel
on the head of Goliath, the joy of a jackal which is beginning to rend
a sick bull, so nearly dead that he can no longer defend himself,
but sufficiently alive to suffer still.

M. Leblanc did not interrupt him, but said to him when he paused:--

"I do not know what you mean to say. You are mistaken in me. I am
a very poor man, and anything but a millionnaire. I do not know you.
You are mistaking me for some other person."

"Ah!" roared Thenardier hoarsely, "a pretty lie! You stick
to that pleasantry, do you! You're floundering, my old buck!
Ah! You don't remember! You don't see who I am?"

"Excuse me, sir," said M. Leblanc with a politeness of accent,
which at that moment seemed peculiarly strange and powerful, "I see
that you are a villain!"

Who has not remarked the fact that odious creatures possess a
susceptibility of their own, that monsters are ticklish! At this
word "villain," the female Thenardier sprang from the bed, Thenardier
grasped his chair as though he were about to crush it in his hands.
"Don't you stir!" he shouted to his wife; and, turning to M. Leblanc:--

"Villain! Yes, I know that you call us that, you rich gentlemen!
Stop! it's true that I became bankrupt, that I am in hiding, that I
have no bread, that I have not a single sou, that I am a villain!
It's three days since I have had anything to eat, so I'm a villain!
Ah! you folks warm your feet, you have Sakoski boots, you have
wadded great-coats, like archbishops, you lodge on the first floor
in houses that have porters, you eat truffles, you eat asparagus
at forty francs the bunch in the month of January, and green peas,
you gorge yourselves, and when you want to know whether it is cold,
you look in the papers to see what the engineer Chevalier's
thermometer says about it. We, it is we who are thermometers.
We don't need to go out and look on the quay at the corner of the
Tour de l'Horologe, to find out the number of degrees of cold;
we feel our blood congealing in our veins, and the ice forming
round our hearts, and we say: `There is no God!' And you come to
our caverns, yes our caverns, for the purpose of calling us villains!
But we'll devour you! But we'll devour you, poor little things!
Just see here, Mister millionnaire: I have been a solid man,
I have held a license, I have been an elector, I am a bourgeois,
that I am! And it's quite possible that you are not!"

Here Thenardier took a step towards the men who stood near the door,
and added with a shudder:--

"When I think that he has dared to come here and talk to me
like a cobbler!"

Then addressing M. Leblanc with a fresh outburst of frenzy:--

"And listen to this also, Mister philanthropist! I'm not a
suspicious character, not a bit of it! I'm not a man whose name
nobody knows, and who comes and abducts children from houses!
I'm an old French soldier, I ought to have been decorated!
I was at Waterloo, so I was! And in the battle I saved a general
called the Comte of I don't know what. He told me his name,
but his beastly voice was so weak that I didn't hear. All I caught
was Merci [thanks]. I'd rather have had his name than his thanks.
That would have helped me to find him again. The picture that you
see here, and which was painted by David at Bruqueselles,--do you know
what it represents? It represents me. David wished to immortalize
that feat of prowess. I have that general on my back, and I am
carrying him through the grape-shot. There's the history of it!
That general never did a single thing for me; he was no better
than the rest! But none the less, I saved his life at the risk
of my own, and I have the certificate of the fact in my pocket!
I am a soldier of Waterloo, by all the furies! And now that I have
had the goodness to tell you all this, let's have an end of it.
I want money, I want a deal of money, I must have an enormous
lot of money, or I'll exterminate you, by the thunder of the
good God!"

Marius had regained some measure of control over his anguish,
and was listening. The last possibility of doubt had just vanished.
It certainly was the Thenardier of the will. Marius shuddered
at that reproach of ingratitude directed against his father,
and which he was on the point of so fatally justifying. His perplexity
was redoubled.

Moreover, there was in all these words of Thenardier, in his accent,
in his gesture, in his glance which darted flames at every word,
there was, in this explosion of an evil nature disclosing everything,
in that mixture of braggadocio and abjectness, of pride and pettiness,
of rage and folly, in that chaos of real griefs and false sentiments,
in that immodesty of a malicious man tasting the voluptuous
delights of violence, in that shameless nudity of a repulsive soul,
in that conflagration of all sufferings combined with all hatreds,
something which was as hideous as evil, and as heart-rending as
the truth.

The picture of the master, the painting by David which he had
proposed that M. Leblanc should purchase, was nothing else,
as the reader has divined, than the sign of his tavern painted,
as it will be remembered, by himself, the only relic which he
had preserved from his shipwreck at Montfermeil.

As he had ceased to intercept Marius' visual ray, Marius could
examine this thing, and in the daub, he actually did recognize
a battle, a background of smoke, and a man carrying another man.
It was the group composed of Pontmercy and Thenardier; the sergeant
the rescuer, the colonel rescued. Marius was like a drunken man;
this picture restored his father to life in some sort; it was no longer
the signboard of the wine-shop at Montfermeil, it was a resurrection;
a tomb had yawned, a phantom had risen there. Marius heard his heart
beating in his temples, he had the cannon of Waterloo in his ears,
his bleeding father, vaguely depicted on that sinister panel
terrified him, and it seemed to him that the misshapen spectre was
gazing intently at him.

When Thenardier had recovered his breath, he turned his bloodshot
eyes on M. Leblanc, and said to him in a low, curt voice:--

"What have you to say before we put the handcuffs on you?"

M. Leblanc held his peace.

In the midst of this silence, a cracked voice launched this
lugubrious sarcasm from the corridor:--

"If there's any wood to be split, I'm there!"

It was the man with the axe, who was growing merry.

At the same moment, an enormous, bristling, and clayey face made
its appearance at the door, with a hideous laugh which exhibited
not teeth, but fangs.

It was the face of the man with the butcher's axe.

"Why have you taken off your mask?" cried Thenardier in a rage.

"For fun," retorted the man.

For the last few minutes M. Leblanc had appeared to be watching and
following all the movements of Thenardier, who, blinded and dazzled
by his own rage, was stalking to and fro in the den with full
confidence that the door was guarded, and of holding an unarmed
man fast, he being armed himself, of being nine against one,
supposing that the female Thenardier counted for but one man.

During his address to the man with the pole-axe, he had turned
his back to M. Leblanc.

M. Leblanc seized this moment, overturned the chair with his foot and
the table with his fist, and with one bound, with prodigious agility,
before Thenardier had time to turn round, he had reached the window.
To open it, to scale the frame, to bestride it, was the work
of a second only. He was half out when six robust fists seized
him and dragged him back energetically into the hovel. These were
the three "chimney-builders," who had flung themselves upon him.
At the same time the Thenardier woman had wound her hands in his hair.

At the trampling which ensued, the other ruffians rushed up
from the corridor. The old man on the bed, who seemed under the
influence of wine, descended from the pallet and came reeling up,
with a stone-breaker's hammer in his hand.

One of the "chimney-builders," whose smirched face was lighted up by the
candle, and in whom Marius recognized, in spite of his daubing, Panchaud,
alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, lifted above M. Leblanc's head a sort
of bludgeon made of two balls of lead, at the two ends of a bar of iron.

Marius could not resist this sight. "My father," he thought,
"forgive me!"

And his finger sought the trigger of his pistol.

The shot was on the point of being discharged when Thenardier's
voice shouted:--

"Don't harm him!"

This desperate attempt of the victim, far from exasperating Thenardier,
had calmed him. There existed in him two men, the ferocious man
and the adroit man. Up to that moment, in the excess of his triumph
in the presence of the prey which had been brought down, and which did
not stir, the ferocious man had prevailed; when the victim struggled
and tried to resist, the adroit man reappeared and took the upper hand.

"Don't hurt him!" he repeated, and without suspecting it, his first
success was to arrest the pistol in the act of being discharged,
and to paralyze Marius, in whose opinion the urgency of the
case disappeared, and who, in the face of this new phase,
saw no inconvenience in waiting a while longer.

Who knows whether some chance would not arise which would deliver him
from the horrible alternative of allowing Ursule's father to perish,
or of destroying the colonel's saviour?

A herculean struggle had begun. With one blow full in the chest,
M. Leblanc had sent the old man tumbling, rolling in the middle of
the room, then with two backward sweeps of his hand he had overthrown
two more assailants, and he held one under each of his knees;
the wretches were rattling in the throat beneath this pressure
as under a granite millstone; but the other four had seized the
formidable old man by both arms and the back of his neck, and were
holding him doubled up over the two "chimney-builders" on the floor.

Thus, the master of some and mastered by the rest, crushing those
beneath him and stifling under those on top of him, endeavoring in
vain to shake off all the efforts which were heaped upon him,
M. Leblanc disappeared under the horrible group of ruffians
like the wild boar beneath a howling pile of dogs and hounds.

They succeeded in overthrowing him upon the bed nearest the window,
and there they held him in awe. The Thenardier woman had not released
her clutch on his hair.

"Don't you mix yourself up in this affair," said Thenardier.
"You'll tear your shawl."

The Thenardier obeyed, as the female wolf obeys the male wolf,
with a growl.

"Now," said Thenardier, "search him, you other fellows!"

M. Leblanc seemed to have renounced the idea of resistance.

They searched him.

He had nothing on his person except a leather purse containing
six francs, and his handkerchief.

Thenardier put the handkerchief into his own pocket.

"What! No pocket-book?" he demanded.

"No, nor watch," replied one of the "chimney-builders."

"Never mind," murmured the masked man who carried the big key,
in the voice of a ventriloquist, "he's a tough old fellow."

Thenardier went to the corner near the door, picked up a bundle
of ropes and threw them at the men.

"Tie him to the leg of the bed," said he.

And, catching sight of the old man who had been stretched across
the room by the blow from M. Leblanc's fist, and who made no movement,
he added:--

"Is Boulatruelle dead?"

"No," replied Bigrenaille, "he's drunk."

"Sweep him into a corner," said Thenardier.

Two of the "chimney-builders" pushed the drunken man into the corner
near the heap of old iron with their feet.

"Babet," said Thenardier in a low tone to the man with the cudgel,
"why did you bring so many; they were not needed."

"What can you do?" replied the man with the cudgel, "they all wanted
to be in it. This is a bad season. There's no business going on."

The pallet on which M. Leblanc had been thrown was a sort
of hospital bed, elevated on four coarse wooden legs, roughly hewn.

M. Leblanc let them take their own course.

The ruffians bound him securely, in an upright attitude, with his
feet on the ground at the head of the bed, the end which was most
remote from the window, and nearest to the fireplace.

When the last knot had been tied, Thenardier took a chair and seated
himself almost facing M. Leblanc.

Thenardier no longer looked like himself; in the course of a few
moments his face had passed from unbridled violence to tranquil
and cunning sweetness.

Marius found it difficult to recognize in that polished smile
of a man in official life the almost bestial mouth which had
been foaming but a moment before; he gazed with amazement
on that fantastic and alarming metamorphosis, and he felt
as a man might feel who should behold a tiger converted into a lawyer.

"Monsieur--" said Thenardier.

And dismissing with a gesture the ruffians who still kept their
hands on M. Leblanc:--

"Stand off a little, and let me have a talk with the gentleman."

All retired towards the door.

He went on:--

"Monsieur, you did wrong to try to jump out of the window.
You might have broken your leg. Now, if you will permit me,
we will converse quietly. In the first place, I must communicate
to you an observation which I have made which is, that you have not
uttered the faintest cry."

Thenardier was right, this detail was correct, although it had
escaped Marius in his agitation. M. Leblanc had barely pronounced
a few words, without raising his voice, and even during his
struggle with the six ruffians near the window he had preserved
the most profound and singular silence.

Thenardier continued:--

"Mon Dieu! You might have shouted `stop thief' a bit, and I
should not have thought it improper. `Murder!' That, too, is said
occasionally, and, so far as I am concerned, I should not have taken
it in bad part. It is very natural that you should make a little
row when you find yourself with persons who don't inspire you
with sufficient confidence. You might have done that, and no one
would have troubled you on that account. You would not even have
been gagged. And I will tell you why. This room is very private.
That's its only recommendation, but it has that in its favor.
You might fire off a mortar and it would produce about as much noise
at the nearest police station as the snores of a drunken man.
Here a cannon would make a boum, and the thunder would make a pouf.
It's a handy lodging. But, in short, you did not shout, and it
is better so. I present you my compliments, and I will tell
you the conclusion that I draw from that fact: My dear sir,
when a man shouts, who comes? The police. And after the police?
Justice. Well! You have not made an outcry; that is because you don't
care to have the police and the courts come in any more than we do.
It is because,--I have long suspected it,--you have some interest
in hiding something. On our side we have the same interest.
So we can come to an understanding."

As he spoke thus, it seemed as though Thenardier, who kept his eyes
fixed on M. Leblanc, were trying to plunge the sharp points which
darted from the pupils into the very conscience of his prisoner.
Moreover, his language, which was stamped with a sort of moderated,
subdued insolence and crafty insolence, was reserved and almost choice,
and in that rascal, who had been nothing but a robber a short time
previously, one now felt "the man who had studied for the priesthood."

The silence preserved by the prisoner, that precaution which had
been carried to the point of forgetting all anxiety for his
own life, that resistance opposed to the first impulse of nature,
which is to utter a cry, all this, it must be confessed,
now that his attention had been called to it, troubled Marius,
and affected him with painful astonishment.

Thenardier's well-grounded observation still further obscured for
Marius the dense mystery which enveloped that grave and singular
person on whom Courfeyrac had bestowed the sobriquet of Monsieur Leblanc.

But whoever he was, bound with ropes, surrounded with executioners,
half plunged, so to speak, in a grave which was closing in upon him
to the extent of a degree with every moment that passed, in the
presence of Thenardier's wrath, as in the presence of his sweetness,
this man remained impassive; and Marius could not refrain from
admiring at such a moment the superbly melancholy visage.

Here, evidently, was a soul which was inaccessible to terror,
and which did not know the meaning of despair. Here was one
of those men who command amazement in desperate circumstances.
Extreme as was the crisis, inevitable as was the catastrophe,
there was nothing here of the agony of the drowning man, who opens
his horror-filled eyes under the water.

Thenardier rose in an unpretending manner, went to the fireplace,
shoved aside the screen, which he leaned against the neighboring
pallet, and thus unmasked the brazier full of glowing coals,
in which the prisoner could plainly see the chisel white-hot
and spotted here and there with tiny scarlet stars.

Then Thenardier returned to his seat beside M. Leblanc.

"I continue," said he. "We can come to an understanding.
Let us arrange this matter in an amicable way. I was wrong to lose
my temper just now, I don't know what I was thinking of, I went
a great deal too far, I said extravagant things. For example,
because you are a millionnaire, I told you that I exacted money,
a lot of money, a deal of money. That would not be reasonable.
Mon Dieu, in spite of your riches, you have expenses of your own--
who has not? I don't want to ruin you, I am not a greedy fellow,
after all. I am not one of those people who, because they
have the advantage of the position, profit by the fact to make
themselves ridiculous. Why, I'm taking things into consideration
and making a sacrifice on my side. I only want two hundred
thousand francs."

M. Leblanc uttered not a word.

Thenardier went on:--

"You see that I put not a little water in my wine; I'm very moderate.
I don't know the state of your fortune, but I do know that you don't
stick at money, and a benevolent man like yourself can certainly give
two hundred thousand francs to the father of a family who is out
of luck. Certainly, you are reasonable, too; you haven't imagined
that I should take all the trouble I have to-day and organized
this affair this evening, which has been labor well bestowed,
in the opinion of these gentlemen, merely to wind up by asking you
for enough to go and drink red wine at fifteen sous and eat veal at
Desnoyer's. Two hundred thousand francs--it's surely worth all that.
This trifle once out of your pocket, I guarantee you that that's
the end of the matter, and that you have no further demands to fear.
You will say to me: `But I haven't two hundred thousand francs
about me.' Oh! I'm not extortionate. I don't demand that.
I only ask one thing of you. Have the goodness to write what I am
about to dictate to you."

Here Thenardier paused; then he added, emphasizing his words,
and casting a smile in the direction of the brazier:--

"I warn you that I shall not admit that you don't know how to write."

A grand inquisitor might have envied that smile.

Thenardier pushed the table close to M. Leblanc, and took an inkstand,
a pen, and a sheet of paper from the drawer which he left half open,
and in which gleamed the long blade of the knife.

He placed the sheet of paper before M. Leblanc.

"Write," said he.

The prisoner spoke at last.

"How do you expect me to write? I am bound."

"That's true, excuse me!" ejaculated Thenardier, "you are quite right."

And turning to Bigrenaille:--

"Untie the gentleman's right arm."

Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, executed
Thenardier's order.

When the prisoner's right arm was free, Thenardier dipped the pen
in the ink and presented it to him.

"Understand thoroughly, sir, that you are in our power, at our discretion,
that no human power can get you out of this, and that we shall be really
grieved if we are forced to proceed to disagreeable extremities.
I know neither your name, nor your address, but I warn you, that you
will remain bound until the person charged with carrying the letter which
you are about to write shall have returned. Now, be so good as to write."

"What?" demanded the prisoner.

"I will dictate."

M. Leblanc took the pen.

Thenardier began to dictate:--

"My daughter--"

The prisoner shuddered, and raised his eyes to Thenardier.

"Put down `My dear daughter'--" said Thenardier.

M. Leblanc obeyed.

Thenardier continued:--

"Come instantly--"

He paused:--

"You address her as thou, do you not?"

"Who?" asked M. Leblanc.

"Parbleu!" cried Thenardier, "the little one, the Lark."

M. Leblanc replied without the slightest apparent emotion:--

"I do not know what you mean."

"Go on, nevertheless," ejaculated Thenardier, and he continued
to dictate:--

"Come immediately, I am in absolute need of thee. The person who
will deliver this note to thee is instructed to conduct thee to me.
I am waiting for thee. Come with confidence."

M. Leblanc had written the whole of this.

Thenardier resumed:--

"Ah! erase `come with confidence'; that might lead her to suppose
that everything was not as it should be, and that distrust is possible."

M. Leblanc erased the three words.

"Now," pursued Thenardier, "sign it. What's your name?"

The prisoner laid down the pen and demanded:--

"For whom is this letter?"

"You know well," retorted Thenardier, "for the little one I just
told you so."

It was evident that Thenardier avoided naming the young girl
in question. He said "the Lark," he said "the little one,"
but he did not pronounce her name--the precaution of a clever man
guarding his secret from his accomplices. To mention the name
was to deliver the whole "affair" into their hands, and to tell
them more about it than there was any need of their knowing.

He went on:--

"Sign. What is your name?"

"Urbain Fabre," said the prisoner.

Thenardier, with the movement of a cat, dashed his hand into his pocket
and drew out the handkerchief which had been seized on M. Leblanc.
He looked for the mark on it, and held it close to the candle.

"U. F. That's it. Urbain Fabre. Well, sign it U. F."

The prisoner signed.

"As two hands are required to fold the letter, give it to me,
I will fold it."

That done, Thenardier resumed:--

"Address it, `Mademoiselle Fabre,' at your house. I know that you
live a long distance from here, near Saint-Jacquesdu-Haut-Pas, because
you go to mass there every day, but I don't know in what street.
I see that you understand your situation. As you have not lied about
your name, you will not lie about your address. Write it yourself."

The prisoner paused thoughtfully for a moment, then he took the pen
and wrote:--

"Mademoiselle Fabre, at M. Urbain Fabre's, Rue Saint-Dominique-D'Enfer,
No. 17."

Thenardier seized the letter with a sort of feverish convulsion.

"Wife!" he cried.

The Thenardier woman hastened to him.

"Here's the letter. You know what you have to do. There is
a carriage at the door. Set out at once, and return ditto."

And addressing the man with the meat-axe:--

"Since you have taken off your nose-screen, accompany the mistress.
You will get up behind the fiacre. You know where you left
the team?"

"Yes," said the man.

And depositing his axe in a corner, he followed Madame Thenardier.

As they set off, Thenardier thrust his head through the half-open door,
and shouted into the corridor:--

"Above all things, don't lose the letter! remember that you carry
two hundred thousand francs with you!"

The Thenardier's hoarse voice replied:--

"Be easy. I have it in my bosom."

A minute had not elapsed, when the sound of the cracking of a whip
was heard, which rapidly retreated and died away.

"Good!" growled Thenardier. "They're going at a fine pace.
At such a gallop, the bourgeoise will be back inside three-quarters
of an hour."

He drew a chair close to the fireplace, folding his arms,
and presenting his muddy boots to the brazier.

"My feet are cold!" said he.

Only five ruffians now remained in the den with Thenardier
and the prisoner.

These men, through the black masks or paste which covered their faces,
and made of them, at fear's pleasure, charcoal-burners, negroes,
or demons, had a stupid and gloomy air, and it could be felt that they
perpetrated a crime like a bit of work, tranquilly, without either
wrath or mercy, with a sort of ennui. They were crowded together
in one corner like brutes, and remained silent.

Thenardier warmed his feet.

The prisoner had relapsed into his taciturnity. A sombre calm had
succeeded to the wild uproar which had filled the garret but a few
moments before.

The candle, on which a large "stranger" had formed, cast but a dim
light in the immense hovel, the brazier had grown dull, and all
those monstrous heads cast misshapen shadows on the walls and ceiling.

No sound was audible except the quiet breathing of the old drunken man,
who was fast asleep.

Marius waited in a state of anxiety that was augmented by every trifle.
The enigma was more impenetrable than ever.

Who was this "little one" whom Thenardier had called the Lark?
Was she his "Ursule"? The prisoner had not seemed to be affected
by that word, "the Lark," and had replied in the most natural manner
in the world: "I do not know what you mean." On the other hand,
the two letters U. F. were explained; they meant Urbain Fabre;
and Ursule was no longer named Ursule. This was what Marius perceived
most clearly of all.

A sort of horrible fascination held him nailed to his post,
from which he was observing and commanding this whole scene.
There he stood, almost incapable of movement or reflection, as though
annihilated by the abominable things viewed at such close quarters.
He waited, in the hope of some incident, no matter of what nature,
since he could not collect his thoughts and did not know upon what
course to decide.

"In any case," he said, "if she is the Lark, I shall see her,
for the Thenardier woman is to bring her hither. That will be
the end, and then I will give my life and my blood if necessary,
but I will deliver her! Nothing shall stop me."

Nearly half an hour passed in this manner. Thenardier seemed
to be absorbed in gloomy reflections, the prisoner did not stir.
Still, Marius fancied that at intervals, and for the last few moments,
he had heard a faint, dull noise in the direction of the prisoner.

All at once, Thenardier addressed the prisoner:

"By the way, Monsieur Fabre, I might as well say it to you at once."

These few words appeared to be the beginning of an explanation.
Marius strained his ears.

"My wife will be back shortly, don't get impatient. I think that
the Lark really is your daughter, and it seems to me quite natural
that you should keep her. Only, listen to me a bit. My wife will go
and hunt her up with your letter. I told my wife to dress herself
in the way she did, so that your young lady might make no difficulty
about following her. They will both enter the carriage with my
comrade behind. Somewhere, outside the barrier, there is a trap
harnessed to two very good horses. Your young lady will be taken to it.
She will alight from the fiacre. My comrade will enter the other
vehicle with her, and my wife will come back here to tell us:
`It's done.' As for the young lady, no harm will be done to her;
the trap will conduct her to a place where she will be quiet,
and just as soon as you have handed over to me those little two
hundred thousand francs, she will be returned to you. If you have
me arrested, my comrade will give a turn of his thumb to the Lark,
that's all."

The prisoner uttered not a syllable. After a pause,
Thenardier continued:--

"It's very simple, as you see. There'll be no harm done unless you wish
that there should be harm done. I'm telling you how things stand.
I warn you so that you may be prepared."

He paused: the prisoner did not break the silence, and Thenardier
resumed:--

"As soon as my wife returns and says to me: `The Lark is on the way,'
we will release you, and you will be free to go and sleep at home.
You see that our intentions are not evil."

Terrible images passed through Marius' mind. What! That young
girl whom they were abducting was not to be brought back?
One of those monsters was to bear her off into the darkness?
Whither? And what if it were she!

It was clear that it was she. Marius felt his heart stop beating.

What was he to do? Discharge the pistol? Place all those
scoundrels in the hands of justice? But the horrible man
with the meat-axe would, none the less, be out of reach with
the young girl, and Marius reflected on Thenardier's words,
of which he perceived the bloody significance: "If you
have me arrested, my comrade will give a turn of his thumb to the Lark."

Now, it was not alone by the colonel's testament, it was by his
own love, it was by the peril of the one he loved, that he felt
himself restrained.

This frightful situation, which had already lasted above half an hour,
was changing its aspect every moment.

Marius had sufficient strength of mind to review in succession all
the most heart-breaking conjectures, seeking hope and finding none.

The tumult of his thoughts contrasted with the funereal silence
of the den.

In the midst of this silence, the door at the bottom of the staircase
was heard to open and shut again.

The prisoner made a movement in his bonds.

"Here's the bourgeoise," said Thenardier.

He had hardly uttered the words, when the Thenardier woman did in fact
rush hastily into the room, red, panting, breathless, with flaming eyes,
and cried, as she smote her huge hands on her thighs simultaneously:--

"False address!"

The ruffian who had gone with her made his appearance behind her
and picked up his axe again.

She resumed:--

"Nobody there! Rue Saint-Dominique, No. 17, no Monsieur Urbain Fabre!
They know not what it means!"

She paused, choking, then went on:--

"Monsieur Thenardier! That old fellow has duped you! You are
too good, you see! If it had been me, I'd have chopped the beast
in four quarters to begin with! And if he had acted ugly, I'd have
boiled him alive! He would have been obliged to speak, and say
where the girl is, and where he keeps his shiners! That's the way I
should have managed matters! People are perfectly right when they
say that men are a deal stupider than women! Nobody at No. 17.
It's nothing but a big carriage gate! No Monsieur Fabre in the Rue
Saint-Dominique! And after all that racing and fee to the coachman
and all! I spoke to both the porter and the portress, a fine,
stout woman, and they know nothing about him!"

Marius breathed freely once more.

She, Ursule or the Lark, he no longer knew what to call her,
was safe.

While his exasperated wife vociferated, Thenardier had seated
himself on the table.

For several minutes he uttered not a word, but swung his right foot,
which hung down, and stared at the brazier with an air of savage revery.

Finally, he said to the prisoner, with a slow and singularly
ferocious tone:

"A false address? What did you expect to gain by that?"

"To gain time!" cried the prisoner in a thundering voice,
and at the same instant he shook off his bonds; they were cut.
The prisoner was only attached to the bed now by one leg.

Before the seven men had time to collect their senses and dash forward,
he had bent down into the fireplace, had stretched out his hand
to the brazier, and had then straightened himself up again,
and now Thenardier, the female Thenardier, and the ruffians,
huddled in amazement at the extremity of the hovel, stared at him
in stupefaction, as almost free and in a formidable attitude,
he brandished above his head the red-hot chisel, which emitted
a threatening glow.

The judicial examination to which the ambush in the Gorbeau house
eventually gave rise, established the fact that a large sou piece,
cut and worked in a peculiar fashion, was found in the garret,
when the police made their descent on it. This sou piece was
one of those marvels of industry, which are engendered by the
patience of the galleys in the shadows and for the shadows,
marvels which are nothing else than instruments of escape.
These hideous and delicate products of wonderful art are to jewellers'
work what the metaphors of slang are to poetry. There are Benvenuto
Cellinis in the galleys, just as there are Villons in language.
The unhappy wretch who aspires to deliverance finds means sometimes
without tools, sometimes with a common wooden-handled knife,
to saw a sou into two thin plates, to hollow out these plates without
affecting the coinage stamp, and to make a furrow on the edge
of the sou in such a manner that the plates will adhere again.
This can be screwed together and unscrewed at will; it is a box.
In this box he hides a watch-spring, and this watch-spring,
properly handled, cuts good-sized chains and bars of iron.
The unfortunate convict is supposed to possess merely a sou; not at all,
he possesses liberty. It was a large sou of this sort which,
during the subsequent search of the police, was found under the bed
near the window. They also found a tiny saw of blue steel which would
fit the sou.

It is probable that the prisoner had this sou piece on his person
at the moment when the ruffians searched him, that he contrived
to conceal it in his hand, and that afterward, having his right
hand free, he unscrewed it, and used it as a saw to cut the cords
which fastened him, which would explain the faint noise and almost
imperceptible movements which Marius had observed.

As he had not been able to bend down, for fear of betraying himself,
he had not cut the bonds of his left leg.

The ruffians had recovered from their first surprise.

"Be easy," said Bigrenaille to Thenardier. "He still holds by one leg,
and he can't get away. I'll answer for that. I tied that paw
for him."

In the meanwhile, the prisoner had begun to speak:--

"You are wretches, but my life is not worth the trouble
of defending it. When you think that you can make me speak,
that you can make me write what I do not choose to write,
that you can make me say what I do not choose to say--"

He stripped up his left sleeve, and added:--

"See here."

At the same moment he extended his arm, and laid the glowing chisel
which he held in his left hand by its wooden handle on his bare flesh.

The crackling of the burning flesh became audible, and the odor
peculiar to chambers of torture filled the hovel.

Marius reeled in utter horror, the very ruffians shuddered, hardly a
muscle of the old man's face contracted, and while the red-hot iron
sank into the smoking wound, impassive and almost august, he fixed
on Thenardier his beautiful glance, in which there was no hatred,
and where suffering vanished in serene majesty.

With grand and lofty natures, the revolts of the flesh and the senses
when subjected to physical suffering cause the soul to spring forth,
and make it appear on the brow, just as rebellions among the soldiery
force the captain to show himself.

"Wretches!" said he, "have no more fear of me than I have for you!"

And, tearing the chisel from the wound, he hurled it through the window,
which had been left open; the horrible, glowing tool disappeared
into the night, whirling as it flew, and fell far away on the snow.

The prisoner resumed:--

"Do what you please with me." He was disarmed.

"Seize him!" said Thenardier.

Two of the ruffians laid their hands on his shoulder, and the masked
man with the ventriloquist's voice took up his station in front
of him, ready to smash his skull at the slightest movement.

At the same time, Marius heard below him, at the base of the partition,
but so near that he could not see who was speaking, this colloquy
conducted in a low tone:--

"There is only one thing left to do."

"Cut his throat."

"That's it."

It was the husband and wife taking counsel together.

Thenardier walked slowly towards the table, opened the drawer,
and took out the knife. Marius fretted with the handle of his pistol.
Unprecedented perplexity! For the last hour he had had two
voices in his conscience, the one enjoining him to respect his
father's testament, the other crying to him to rescue the prisoner.
These two voices continued uninterruptedly that struggle which
tormented him to agony. Up to that moment he had cherished a vague
hope that he should find some means of reconciling these two duties,
but nothing within the limits of possibility had presented itself.

However, the peril was urgent, the last bounds of delay had
been reached; Thenardier was standing thoughtfully a few paces
distant from the prisoner.

Marius cast a wild glance about him, the last mechanical resource
of despair. All at once a shudder ran through him.

At his feet, on the table, a bright ray of light from the full
moon illuminated and seemed to point out to him a sheet of paper.
On this paper he read the following line written that very morning,
in large letters, by the eldest of the Thenardier girls:--

"THE BOBBIES ARE HERE."

An idea, a flash, crossed Marius' mind; this was the expedient
of which he was in search, the solution of that frightful problem
which was torturing him, of sparing the assassin and saving the victim.

He knelt down on his commode, stretched out his arm, seized the
sheet of paper, softly detached a bit of plaster from the wall,
wrapped the paper round it, and tossed the whole through the crevice
into the middle of the den.

It was high time. Thenardier had conquered his last fears or his
last scruples, and was advancing on the prisoner.

"Something is falling!" cried the Thenardier woman.

"What is it?" asked her husband.

The woman darted forward and picked up the bit of plaster.
She handed it to her husband.

"Where did this come from?" demanded Thenardier.

"Pardie!" ejaculated his wife, "where do you suppose it came from?
Through the window, of course."

"I saw it pass," said Bigrenaille.

Thenardier rapidly unfolded the paper and held it close to the candle.

"It's in Eponine's handwriting. The devil!"

He made a sign to his wife, who hastily drew near, and showed her the
line written on the sheet of paper, then he added in a subdued voice:--

"Quick! The ladder! Let's leave the bacon in the mousetrap
and decamp!"

"Without cutting that man's throat?" asked, the Thenardier woman.

"We haven't the time."

"Through what?" resumed Bigrenaille.

"Through the window," replied Thenardier. "Since Ponine has
thrown the stone through the window, it indicates that the house
is not watched on that side."

The mask with the ventriloquist's voice deposited his huge key
on the floor, raised both arms in the air, and opened and clenched
his fists, three times rapidly without uttering a word.

This was the signal like the signal for clearing the decks
for action on board ship.

The ruffians who were holding the prisoner released him; in the
twinkling of an eye the rope ladder was unrolled outside the window,
and solidly fastened to the sill by the two iron hooks.

The prisoner paid no attention to what was going on around him.
He seemed to be dreaming or praying.

As soon as the ladder was arranged, Thenardier cried:

"Come! the bourgeoise first!"

And he rushed headlong to the window.

But just as he was about to throw his leg over, Bigrenaille seized
him roughly by the collar.

"Not much, come now, you old dog, after us!"

"After us!" yelled the ruffians.

"You are children," said Thenardier, "we are losing time.
The police are on our heels."

"Well," said the ruffians, "let's draw lots to see who shall go
down first."

Thenardier exclaimed:--

"Are you mad! Are you crazy! What a pack of boobies! You want
to waste time, do you? Draw lots, do you? By a wet finger,
by a short straw! With written names! Thrown into a hat!--"

"Would you like my hat?" cried a voice on the threshold.

All wheeled round. It was Javert.

He had his hat in his hand, and was holding it out to them with
a smile.

At nightfall, Javert had posted his men and had gone into ambush
himself between the trees of the Rue de la Barrieredes-Gobelins
which faced the Gorbeau house, on the other side of the boulevard.
He had begun operations by opening "his pockets," and dropping
into it the two young girls who were charged with keeping a watch
on the approaches to the den. But he had only "caged" Azelma.
As for Eponine, she was not at her post, she had disappeared,
and he had not been able to seize her. Then Javert had made a
point and had bent his ear to waiting for the signal agreed upon.
The comings and goings of the fiacres had greatly agitated him.
At last, he had grown impatient, and, sure that there was a nest there,
sure of being in "luck," having recognized many of the ruffians who
had entered, he had finally decided to go upstairs without waiting for
the pistol-shot.

It will be remembered that he had Marius' pass-key.

He had arrived just in the nick of time.

The terrified ruffians flung themselves on the arms which they
had abandoned in all the corners at the moment of flight. In less
than a second, these seven men, horrible to behold, had grouped
themselves in an attitude of defence, one with his meat-axe, another
with his key, another with his bludgeon, the rest with shears,
pincers, and hammers. Thenardier had his knife in his fist.
The Thenardier woman snatched up an enormous paving-stone which lay
in the angle of the window and served her daughters as an ottoman.

Javert put on his hat again, and advanced a couple of paces into
the room, with arms folded, his cane under one arm, his sword
in its sheath.

"Halt there," said he. "You shall not go out by the window,
you shall go through the door. It's less unhealthy. There are seven
of you, there are fifteen of us. Don't let's fall to collaring
each other like men of Auvergne."

Bigrenaille drew out a pistol which he had kept concealed under his
blouse, and put it in Thenardier's hand, whispering in the latter's ear:--

"It's Javert. I don't dare fire at that man. Do you dare?"

"Parbleu!" replied Thenardier.

"Well, then, fire."

Thenardier took the pistol and aimed at Javert.

Javert, who was only three paces from him, stared intently at him
and contented himself with saying:--

"Come now, don't fire. You'll miss fire."

Thenardier pulled the trigger. The pistol missed fire.

"Didn't I tell you so!" ejaculated Javert.

Bigrenaille flung his bludgeon at Javert's feet.

"You're the emperor of the fiends! I surrender."

"And you?" Javert asked the rest of the ruffians.

They replied:--

"So do we."

Javert began again calmly:--

"That's right, that's good, I said so, you are nice fellows."

"I only ask one thing," said Bigrenaille, "and that is, that I
may not be denied tobacco while I am in confinement."

"Granted," said Javert.

And turning round and calling behind him:--

"Come in now!"

A squad of policemen, sword in hand, and agents armed with bludgeons
and cudgels, rushed in at Javert's summons. They pinioned the ruffians.

This throng of men, sparely lighted by the single candle,
filled the den with shadows.

"Handcuff them all!" shouted Javert.

"Come on!" cried a voice which was not the voice of a man,
but of which no one would ever have said: "It is a woman's voice."

The Thenardier woman had entrenched herself in one of the angles
of the window, and it was she who had just given vent to this roar.

The policemen and agents recoiled.

She had thrown off her shawl, but retained her bonnet;
her husband, who was crouching behind her, was almost hidden under
the discarded shawl, and she was shielding him with her body,
as she elevated the paving-stone above her head with the gesture
of a giantess on the point of hurling a rock.

"Beware!" she shouted.

All crowded back towards the corridor. A broad open space was
cleared in the middle of the garret.

The Thenardier woman cast a glance at the ruffians who had allowed
themselves to be pinioned, and muttered in hoarse and guttural accents:--

"The cowards!"

Javert smiled, and advanced across the open space which the Thenardier
was devouring with her eyes.

"Don't come near me," she cried, "or I'll crush you."

"What a grenadier!" ejaculated Javert; "you've got a beard like
a man, mother, but I have claws like a woman."

And he continued to advance.

The Thenardier, dishevelled and terrible, set her feet far apart,
threw herself backwards, and hurled the paving-stone at Javert's head.
Javert ducked, the stone passed over him, struck the wall behind,
knocked off a huge piece of plastering, and, rebounding from angle
to angle across the hovel, now luckily almost empty, rested at
Javert's feet.

At the same moment, Javert reached the Thenardier couple.
One of his big hands descended on the woman's shoulder; the other
on the husband's head.

"The handcuffs!" he shouted.

The policemen trooped in in force, and in a few seconds Javert's
order had been executed.

The Thenardier female, overwhelmed, stared at her pinioned hands,
and at those of her husband, who had dropped to the floor,
and exclaimed, weeping:--

"My daughters!"

"They are in the jug," said Javert.

In the meanwhile, the agents had caught sight of the drunken man
asleep behind the door, and were shaking him:--

He awoke, stammering:--

"Is it all over, Jondrette?"

"Yes," replied Javert.

The six pinioned ruffians were standing, and still preserved their
spectral mien; all three besmeared with black, all three masked.

"Keep on your masks," said Javert.

And passing them in review with a glance of a Frederick II.
at a Potsdam parade, he said to the three "chimney-builders":--

"Good day, Bigrenaille! good day, Brujon! good day, Deuxmilliards!"

Then turning to the three masked men, he said to the man with
the meat-axe:--

"Good day, Gueulemer!"

And to the man with the cudgel:--

"Good day, Babet!"

And to the ventriloquist:--

"Your health, Claquesous."

At that moment, he caught sight of the ruffians' prisoner. who,
ever since the entrance of the police, had not uttered a word,
and had held his head down.

"Untie the gentleman!" said Javert, "and let no one go out!"

That said, he seated himself with sovereign dignity before the table,
where the candle and the writing-materials still remained, drew a
stamped paper from his pocket, and began to prepare his report.

When he had written the first lines, which are formulas that never vary,
he raised his eyes:--

"Let the gentleman whom these gentlemen bound step forward."

The policemen glanced round them.

"Well," said Javert, "where is he?"

The prisoner of the ruffians, M. Leblanc, M. Urbain Fabre,
the father of Ursule or the Lark, had disappeared.

The door was guarded, but the window was not. As soon as he had
found himself released from his bonds, and while Javert was drawing
up his report, he had taken advantage of confusion, the crowd,
the darkness, and of a moment when the general attention was diverted
from him, to dash out of the window.

An agent sprang to the opening and looked out. He saw no one outside.

The rope ladder was still shaking.

"The devil!" ejaculated Javert between his teeth, "he must have
been the most valuable of the lot."

On the day following that on which these events took place in the
house on the Boulevard de l'Hopital, a child, who seemed to be coming
from the direction of the bridge of Austerlitz, was ascending the
side-alley on the right in the direction of the Barriere de Fontainebleau.

Night had fully come.

This lad was pale, thin, clad in rags, with linen trousers
in the month of February, and was singing at the top of his voice.

At the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, a bent old woman was
rummaging in a heap of refuse by the light of a street lantern;
the child jostled her as he passed, then recoiled, exclaiming:--

"Hello! And I took it for an enormous, enormous dog!"

He pronounced the word enormous the second time with a jeering swell
of the voice which might be tolerably well represented by capitals:
"an enormous, ENORMOUS dog."

The old woman straightened herself up in a fury.

"Nasty brat!" she grumbled. "If I hadn't been bending over,
I know well where I would have planted my foot on you."

The boy was already far away.

"Kisss! kisss!" he cried. "After that, I don't think I was mistaken!"

The old woman, choking with indignation, now rose completely upright,
and the red gleam of the lantern fully lighted up her livid face,
all hollowed into angles and wrinkles, with crow's-feet meeting the
corners of her mouth.

Her body was lost in the darkness, and only her head was visible.
One would have pronounced her a mask of Decrepitude carved out by a
light from the night.

The boy surveyed her.

"Madame," said he, "does not possess that style of beauty which
pleases me."

He then pursued his road, and resumed his song:--

"Le roi Coupdesabot
S'en allait a la chasse,
A la chasse aux corbeaux--"

At the end of these three lines he paused. He had arrived in front
of No. 50-52, and finding the door fastened, he began to assault it
with resounding and heroic kicks, which betrayed rather the man's
shoes that he was wearing than the child's feet which he owned.

In the meanwhile, the very old woman whom he had encountered at
the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier hastened up behind him,
uttering clamorous cries and indulging in lavish and exaggerated gestures.

"What's this? What's this? Lord God! He's battering the door down!
He's knocking the house down."

The kicks continued.

The old woman strained her lungs.

"Is that the way buildings are treated nowadays?"

All at once she paused.

She had recognized the gamin.

"What! so it's that imp!"

"Why, it's the old lady," said the lad. "Good day, Bougonmuche.
I have come to see my ancestors."

The old woman retorted with a composite grimace, and a wonderful
improvisation of hatred taking advantage of feebleness and ugliness,
which was, unfortunately, wasted in the dark:--

"There's no one here."

"Bah!" retorted the boy, "where's my father?"

"At La Force."

"Come, now! And my mother?"

"At Saint-Lazare."

"Well! And my sisters?"

"At the Madelonettes."

The lad scratched his head behind his ear, stared at Ma'am Bougon,
and said:--

"Ah!"

Then he executed a pirouette on his heel; a moment later, the old woman,
who had remained on the door-step, heard him singing in his clear,
young voice, as he plunged under the black elm-trees, in the wintry wind:--

"Le roi Coupdesabot[31]
S'en allait a la chasse,
A la chasse aux corbeaux,
Monte sur deux echasses.
Quand on passait dessous,
On lui payait deux sous."

[31] King Bootkick went a-hunting after crows, mounted on two stilts.
When one passed beneath them, one paid him two sous.

[The end of Volume III. "Marius"]

VOLUME IV.

SAINT-DENIS.

THE IDYL IN THE RUE PLUMET AND THE EPIC IN THE RUE SAINT-DENIS

BOOK FIRST.--A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY

1831 and 1832, the two years which are immediately connected with
the Revolution of July, form one of the most peculiar and striking
moments of history. These two years rise like two mountains midway
between those which precede and those which follow them. They have
a revolutionary grandeur. Precipices are to be distinguished there.
The social masses, the very assizes of civilization, the solid group
of superposed and adhering interests, the century-old profiles of the
ancient French formation, appear and disappear in them every instant,
athwart the storm clouds of systems, of passions, and of theories.
These appearances and disappearances have been designated as movement
and resistance. At intervals, truth, that daylight of the human soul,
can be descried shining there.

This remarkable epoch is decidedly circumscribed and is beginning
to be sufficiently distant from us to allow of our grasping
the principal lines even at the present day.

We shall make the attempt.

The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to define,
in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult, and which
are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at a halting-place.

These epochs are peculiar and mislead the politicians who desire
to convert them to profit. In the beginning, the nation asks nothing
but repose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace; it has but one ambition,
to be small. Which is the translation of remaining tranquil.
Of great events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God,
we have seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads. We would
exchange Caesar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the King of Yvetot.
"What a good little king was he!" We have marched since daybreak,
we have reached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have
made our first change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre,
the third with Bonaparte; we are worn out. Each one demands a bed.

Devotion which is weary, heroism which has grown old, ambitions which
are sated, fortunes which are made, seek, demand, implore, solicit,
what? A shelter. They have it. They take possession of peace,
of tranquillity, of leisure; behold, they are content. But, at the
same time certain facts arise, compel recognition, and knock at
the door in their turn. These facts are the products of revolutions
and wars, they are, they exist, they have the right to install
themselves in society, and they do install themselves therein;
and most of the time, facts are the stewards of the household
and fouriers[32] who do nothing but prepare lodgings for principles.

[32] In olden times, fouriers were the officials who preceded
the Court and allotted the lodgings.

This, then, is what appears to philosophical politicians:--

At the same time that weary men demand repose, accomplished facts
demand guarantees. Guarantees are the same to facts that repose
is to men.

This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector;
this is what France demanded of the Bourbons after the Empire.

These guarantees are a necessity of the times. They must be accorded.
Princes "grant" them, but in reality, it is the force of things
which gives them. A profound truth, and one useful to know,
which the Stuarts did not suspect in 1662 and which the Bourbons
did not even obtain a glimpse of in 1814.

The predestined family, which returned to France when Napoleon fell,
had the fatal simplicity to believe that it was itself which bestowed,
and that what it had bestowed it could take back again; that the House
of Bourbon possessed the right divine, that France possessed nothing,
and that the political right conceded in the charter of Louis XVIII.
was merely a branch of the right divine, was detached by the House
of Bourbon and graciously given to the people until such day as it
should please the King to reassume it. Still, the House of Bourbon
should have felt, from the displeasure created by the gift, that it
did not come from it.

This house was churlish to the nineteenth century. It put on an
ill-tempered look at every development of the nation. To make use
of a trivial word, that is to say, of a popular and a true word,
it looked glum. The people saw this.

It thought it possessed strength because the Empire had been carried
away before it like a theatrical stage-setting. It did not perceive
that it had, itself, been brought in in the same fashion. It did
not perceive that it also lay in that hand which had removed Napoleon.

It thought that it had roots, because it was the past. It was mistaken;
it formed a part of the past, but the whole past was France.
The roots of French society were not fixed in the Bourbons,
but in the nations. These obscure and lively roots constituted,
not the right of a family, but the history of a people.
They were everywhere, except under the throne.

The House of Bourbon was to France the illustrious and bleeding knot
in her history, but was no longer the principal element of her destiny,
and the necessary base of her politics. She could get along without
the Bourbons; she had done without them for two and twenty years;
there had been a break of continuity; they did not suspect the fact.
And how should they have suspected it, they who fancied that Louis XVII.
reigned on the 9th of Thermidor, and that Louis XVIII. was reigning
at the battle of Marengo? Never, since the origin of history,
had princes been so blind in the presence of facts and the portion
of divine authority which facts contain and promulgate. Never had
that pretension here below which is called the right of kings denied
to such a point the right from on high.

A capital error which led this family to lay its hand once more
on the guarantees "granted" in 1814, on the concessions, as it
termed them. Sad. A sad thing! What it termed its concessions
were our conquests; what it termed our encroachments were our rights.

When the hour seemed to it to have come, the Restoration,
supposing itself victorious over Bonaparte and well-rooted in
the country, that is to say, believing itself to be strong and deep,
abruptly decided on its plan of action, and risked its stroke.
One morning it drew itself up before the face of France, and, elevating
its voice, it contested the collective title and the individual
right of the nation to sovereignty, of the citizen to liberty.
In other words, it denied to the nation that which made it a nation,
and to the citizen that which made him a citizen.

This is the foundation of those famous acts which are called
the ordinances of July. The Restoration fell.

It fell justly. But, we admit, it had not been absolutely hostile
to all forms of progress. Great things had been accomplished,
with it alongside.

Under the Restoration, the nation had grown accustomed to calm discussion,
which had been lacking under the Republic, and to grandeur in peace,
which had been wanting under the Empire. France free and strong
had offered an encouraging spectacle to the other peoples of Europe.
The Revolution had had the word under Robespierre; the cannon
had had the word under Bonaparte; it was under Louis XVIII.
and Charles X. that it was the turn of intelligence to have
the word. The wind ceased, the torch was lighted once more.
On the lofty heights, the pure light of mind could be seen flickering.
A magnificent, useful, and charming spectacle. For a space of
fifteen years, those great principles which are so old for the thinker,
so new for the statesman, could be seen at work in perfect peace,
on the public square; equality before the law, liberty of conscience,
liberty of speech, liberty of the press, the accessibility of
all aptitudes to all functions. Thus it proceeded until 1830.
The Bourbons were an instrument of civilization which broke in the
hands of Providence.

The fall of the Bourbons was full of grandeur, not on their side,
but on the side of the nation. They quitted the throne with gravity,
but without authority; their descent into the night was not one of
those solemn disappearances which leave a sombre emotion in history;
it was neither the spectral calm of Charles I., nor the eagle scream
of Napoleon. They departed, that is all. They laid down the crown,
and retained no aureole. They were worthy, but they were not august.
They lacked, in a certain measure, the majesty of their misfortune.
Charles X. during the voyage from Cherbourg, causing a round table
to be cut over into a square table, appeared to be more anxious
about imperilled etiquette than about the crumbling monarchy.
This diminution saddened devoted men who loved their persons, and serious
men who honored their race. The populace was admirable. The nation,
attacked one morning with weapons, by a sort of royal insurrection,
felt itself in the possession of so much force that it did not go
into a rage. It defended itself, restrained itself, restored things
to their places, the government to law, the Bourbons to exile, alas! and
then halted! It took the old king Charles X. from beneath that dais
which had sheltered Louis XIV. and set him gently on the ground.
It touched the royal personages only with sadness and precaution.
It was not one man, it was not a few men, it was France,
France entire, France victorious and intoxicated with her victory,
who seemed to be coming to herself, and who put into practice,
before the eyes of the whole world, these grave words of Guillaume
du Vair after the day of the Barricades:--

"It is easy for those who are accustomed to skim the favors
of the great, and to spring, like a bird from bough to bough,
from an afflicted fortune to a flourishing one, to show themselves
harsh towards their Prince in his adversity; but as for me,
the fortune of my Kings and especially of my afflicted Kings,
will always be venerable to me."

The Bourbons carried away with them respect, but not regret.
As we have just stated, their misfortune was greater than they were.
They faded out in the horizon.

The Revolution of July instantly had friends and enemies throughout
the entire world. The first rushed toward her with joy and enthusiasm,
the others turned away, each according to his nature. At the first blush,
the princes of Europe, the owls of this dawn, shut their eyes,
wounded and stupefied, and only opened them to threaten.
A fright which can be comprehended, a wrath which can be pardoned.
This strange revolution had hardly produced a shock; it had not even
paid to vanquished royalty the honor of treating it as an enemy,
and of shedding its blood. In the eyes of despotic governments,
who are always interested in having liberty calumniate itself,
the Revolution of July committed the fault of being formidable
and of remaining gentle. Nothing, however, was attempted or
plotted against it. The most discontented, the most irritated,
the most trembling, saluted it; whatever our egotism and our rancor
may be, a mysterious respect springs from events in which we are
sensible of the collaboration of some one who is working above man.

The Revolution of July is the triumph of right overthrowing the fact.
A thing which is full of splendor.

Right overthrowing the fact. Hence the brilliancy of the Revolution
of 1830, hence, also, its mildness. Right triumphant has no need
of being violent.

Right is the just and the true.

The property of right is to remain eternally beautiful and pure.
The fact, even when most necessary to all appearances, even when most
thoroughly accepted by contemporaries, if it exist only as a fact,
and if it contain only too little of right, or none at all,
is infallibly destined to become, in the course of time, deformed,
impure, perhaps, even monstrous. If one desires to learn at one blow,
to what degree of hideousness the fact can attain, viewed at the
distance of centuries, let him look at Machiavelli. Machiavelli is
not an evil genius, nor a demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer;
he is nothing but the fact. And he is not only the Italian fact;
he is the European fact, the fact of the sixteenth century.
He seems hideous, and so he is, in the presence of the moral idea
of the nineteenth.

This conflict of right and fact has been going on ever since the origin
of society. To terminate this duel, to amalgamate the pure idea
with the humane reality, to cause right to penetrate pacifically
into the fact and the fact into right, that is the task of sages.

But the task of sages is one thing, the task of clever men is another.
The Revolution of 1830 came to a sudden halt.

As soon as a revolution has made the coast, the skilful make haste
to prepare the shipwreck.

The skilful in our century have conferred on themselves the title
of Statesmen; so that this word, statesmen, has ended by becoming
somewhat of a slang word. It must be borne in mind, in fact,
that wherever there is nothing but skill, there is necessarily pettiness.
To say "the skilful" amounts to saying "the mediocre."

In the same way, to say "statesmen" is sometimes equivalent
to saying "traitors." If, then, we are to believe the skilful,
revolutions like the Revolution of July are severed arteries; a prompt
ligature is indispensable. The right, too grandly proclaimed, is shaken.
Also, right once firmly fixed, the state must be strengthened.
Liberty once assured, attention must be directed to power.

Here the sages are not, as yet, separated from the skilful,
but they begin to be distrustful. Power, very good. But, in the
first place, what is power? In the second, whence comes it?
The skilful do not seem to hear the murmured objection, and they
continue their manoeuvres.

According to the politicians, who are ingenious in putting the
mask of necessity on profitable fictions, the first requirement
of a people after a revolution, when this people forms part
of a monarchical continent, is to procure for itself a dynasty.
In this way, say they, peace, that is to say, time to dress
our wounds, and to repair the house, can be had after a revolution.
The dynasty conceals the scaffolding and covers the ambulance.
Now, it is not always easy to procure a dynasty.

If it is absolutely necessary, the first man of genius or even the first
man of fortune who comes to hand suffices for the manufacturing of
a king. You have, in the first case, Napoleon; in the second, Iturbide.

But the first family that comes to hand does not suffice to make
a dynasty. There is necessarily required a certain modicum of antiquity
in a race, and the wrinkle of the centuries cannot be improvised.

If we place ourselves at the point of view of the "statesmen," after
making all allowances, of course, after a revolution, what are the
qualities of the king which result from it? He may be and it is useful
for him to be a revolutionary; that is to say, a participant in his
own person in that revolution, that he should have lent a hand to it,
that he should have either compromised or distinguished himself therein,
that he should have touched the axe or wielded the sword in it.

What are the qualities of a dynasty? It should be national; that is
to say, revolutionary at a distance, not through acts committed,
but by reason of ideas accepted. It should be composed of past
and be historic; be composed of future and be sympathetic.

All this explains why the early revolutions contented themselves
with finding a man, Cromwell or Napoleon; and why the second
absolutely insisted on finding a family, the House of Brunswick
or the House of Orleans.

Royal houses resemble those Indian fig-trees, each branch of which,
bending over to the earth, takes root and becomes a fig-tree itself.
Each branch may become a dynasty. On the sole condition that it shall
bend down to the people.

Such is the theory of the skilful.

Here, then, lies the great art: to make a little render to success
the sound of a catastrophe in order that those who profit by it may
tremble from it also, to season with fear every step that is taken,
to augment the curve of the transition to the point of retarding progress,
to dull that aurora, to denounce and retrench the harshness of enthusiasm,
to cut all angles and nails, to wad triumph, to muffle up right,
to envelop the giant-people in flannel, and to put it to bed
very speedily, to impose a diet on that excess of health, to put
Hercules on the treatment of a convalescent, to dilute the event
with the expedient, to offer to spirits thirsting for the ideal
that nectar thinned out with a potion, to take one's precautions
against too much success, to garnish the revolution with a shade.

1830 practised this theory, already applied to England by 1688.

1830 is a revolution arrested midway. Half of progress, quasi-right. Now,
logic knows not the "almost," absolutely as the sun knows not the candle.

Who arrests revolutions half-way? The bourgeoisie?

Why?

Because the bourgeoisie is interest which has reached satisfaction.
Yesterday it was appetite, to-day it is plenitude, to-morrow it will
be satiety.

The phenomenon of 1814 after Napoleon was reproduced in 1830 after
Charles X.

The attempt has been made, and wrongly, to make a class of
the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion
of the people. The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down.
A chair is not a caste.

But through a desire to sit down too soon, one may arrest the very march
of the human race. This has often been the fault of the bourgeoisie.

One is not a class because one has committed a fault. Selfishness is
not one of the divisions of the social order.

Moreover, we must be just to selfishness. The state to which
that part of the nation which is called the bourgeoisie aspired
after the shock of 1830 was not the inertia which is complicated
with indifference and laziness, and which contains a little shame;
it was not the slumber which presupposes a momentary forgetfulness
accessible to dreams; it was the halt.

The halt is a word formed of a singular double
and almost contradictory sense: a troop
on the march, that is to say, movement; a stand, that is to say, repose.

The halt is the restoration of forces; it is repose armed and on
the alert; it is the accomplished fact which posts sentinels
and holds itself on its guard.

The halt presupposes the combat of yesterday and the combat of to-morrow.

It is the partition between 1830 and 1848.

What we here call combat may also be designated as progress.

The bourgeoisie then, as well as the statesmen, required a man
who should express this word Halt. An Although-Because.
A composite individuality, signifying revolution and
signifying stability, in other terms, strengthening
the present by the evident compatibility of the past with the future.

This man was "already found." His name was Louis Philippe d'Orleans.

The 221 made Louis Philippe King. Lafayette undertook the coronation.

He called it the best of republics. The town-hall of Paris took
the place of the Cathedral of Rheims.

This substitution of a half-throne for a whole throne was "the work
of 1830."

When the skilful had finished, the immense vice of their
solution became apparent. All this had been accomplished
outside the bounds of absolute right. Absolute right cried:
"I protest!" then, terrible to say, it retired into the darkness.

Revolutions have a terrible arm and a happy hand, they strike firmly
and choose well. Even incomplete, even debased and abused and reduced
to the state of a junior revolution like the Revolution of 1830,
they nearly always retain sufficient providential lucidity to prevent
them from falling amiss. Their eclipse is never an abdication.

Nevertheless, let us not boast too loudly; revolutions also may
be deceived, and grave errors have been seen.

Let us return to 1830. 1830, in its deviation, had good luck.
In the establishment which entitled itself order after the revolution
had been cut short, the King amounted to more than royalty.
Louis Philippe was a rare man.

The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating
circumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been
of blame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues;
careful of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs,
knowing the value of a minute and not always the value of a year;
sober, serene, peaceable, patient; a good man and a good prince;
sleeping with his wife, and having in his palace lackeys charged
with the duty of showing the conjugal bed to the bourgeois,
an ostentation of the regular sleeping-apartment which had become
useful after the former illegitimate displays of the elder branch;
knowing all the languages of Europe, and, what is more rare,
all the languages of all interests, and speaking them; an admirable
representative of the "middle class," but outstripping it, and in every
way greater than it; possessing excellent sense, while appreciating
the blood from which he had sprung, counting most of all on his
intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race, very particular,
declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughly the first
Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a Serene Highness,
but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse in public,
concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser;
at bottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their
own fancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters;
a gentleman, but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong;
adored by his family and his household; a fascinating talker,
an undeceived statesman, inwardly cold, dominated by immediate interest,
always governing at the shortest range, incapable of rancor and
of gratitude, making use without mercy of superiority on mediocrity,
clever in getting parliamentary majorities to put in the wrong
those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully under thrones;
unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, but with
marvellous address in that imprudence; fertile in expedients,
in countenances, in masks; making France fear Europe and Europe France!
Incontestably fond of his country, but preferring his family;
assuming more domination than authority and more authority than dignity,
a disposition which has this unfortunate property, that as it turns
everything to success, it admits of ruse and does not absolutely
repudiate baseness, but which has this valuable side, that it
preserves politics from violent shocks, the state from fractures,
and society from catastrophes; minute, correct, vigilant, attentive,
sagacious, indefatigable; contradicting himself at times and giving
himself the lie; bold against Austria at Ancona, obstinate against
England in Spain, bombarding Antwerp, and paying off Pritchard;
singing the Marseillaise with conviction, inaccessible to despondency,
to lassitude, to the taste for the beautiful and the ideal,
to daring generosity, to Utopia, to chimeras, to wrath, to vanity,
to fear; possessing all the forms of personal intrepidity; a general
at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes; attacked eight times by regicides
and always smiling. Brave as a grenadier, courageous as a thinker;
uneasy only in the face of the chances of a European shaking up,
and unfitted for great political adventures; always ready to risk
his life, never his work; disguising his will in influence, in order
that he might be obeyed as an intelligence rather than as a king;
endowed with observation and not with divination; not very attentive
to minds, but knowing men, that is to say requiring to see in order
to judge; prompt and penetrating good sense, practical wisdom,
easy speech, prodigious memory; drawing incessantly on this memory,
his only point of resemblance with Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon;
knowing deeds, facts, details, dates, proper names, ignorant
of tendencies, passions, the diverse geniuses of the crowd,
the interior aspirations, the hidden and obscure uprisings of souls,
in a word, all that can be designated as the invisible currents
of consciences; accepted by the surface, but little in accord
with France lower down; extricating himself by dint of tact;
governing too much and not enough; his own first minister;
excellent at creating out of the pettiness of realities an obstacle
to the immensity of ideas; mingling a genuine creative faculty
of civilization, of order and organization, an indescribable spirit
of proceedings and chicanery, the founder and lawyer of a dynasty;
having something of Charlemagne and something of an attorney; in short,
a lofty and original figure, a prince who understood how to create
authority in spite of the uneasiness of France, and power in spite
of the jealousy of Europe. Louis Philippe will be classed among
the eminent men of his century, and would be ranked among the most
illustrious governors of history had he loved glory but a little,
and if he had had the sentiment of what is great to the same degree
as the feeling for what is useful.

Louis Philippe had been handsome, and in his old age he remained graceful;
not always approved by the nation, he always was so by the masses;
he pleased. He had that gift of charming. He lacked majesty; he wore
no crown, although a king, and no white hair, although an old man;
his manners belonged to the old regime and his habits to the new;
a mixture of the noble and the bourgeois which suited 1830;
Louis Philippe was transition reigning; he had preserved the
ancient pronunciation and the ancient orthography which he placed
at the service of opinions modern; he loved Poland and Hungary,
but he wrote les Polonois, and he pronounced les Hongrais. He wore
the uniform of the national guard, like Charles X., and the ribbon
of the Legion of Honor, like Napoleon.

He went a little to chapel, not at all to the chase, never to the opera.
Incorruptible by sacristans, by whippers-in, by ballet-dancers;
this made a part of his bourgeois popularity. He had no heart.
He went out with his umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella
long formed a part of his aureole. He was a bit of a mason, a bit
of a gardener, something of a doctor; he bled a postilion who had
tumbled from his horse; Louis Philippe no more went about without
his lancet, than did Henri IV. without his poniard. The Royalists
jeered at this ridiculous king, the first who had ever shed blood
with the object of healing.

For the grievances against Louis Philippe, there is one deduction
to be made; there is that which accuses royalty, that which
accuses the reign, that which accuses the King; three columns
which all give different totals. Democratic right confiscated,
progress becomes a matter of secondary interest, the protests of the
street violently repressed, military execution of insurrections,
the rising passed over by arms, the Rue Transnonain, the counsels
of war, the absorption of the real country by the legal country,
on half shares with three hundred thousand privileged persons,--
these are the deeds of royalty; Belgium refused, Algeria too
harshly conquered, and, as in the case of India by the English,
with more barbarism than civilization, the breach of faith,
to Abd-el-Kader, Blaye, Deutz bought, Pritchard paid,--these are
the doings of the reign; the policy which was more domestic than
national was the doing of the King.

As will be seen, the proper deduction having been made, the King's
charge is decreased.

This is his great fault; he was modest in the name of France.

Whence arises this fault?

We will state it.

Louis Philippe was rather too much of a paternal king; that incubation
of a family with the object of founding a dynasty is afraid
of everything and does not like to be disturbed; hence excessive
timidity, which is displeasing to the people, who have the
14th of July in their civil and Austerlitz in their military tradition.

Moreover, if we deduct the public duties which require to be fulfilled
first of all, that deep tenderness of Louis Philippe towards his
family was deserved by the family. That domestic group was worthy
of admiration. Virtues there dwelt side by side with talents.
One of Louis Philippe's daughters, Marie d'Orleans, placed the name
of her race among artists, as Charles d'Orleans had placed it
among poets. She made of her soul a marble which she named Jeanne
d'Arc. Two of Louis Philippe's daughters elicited from Metternich
this eulogium: "They are young people such as are rarely seen,
and princes such as are never seen."

This, without any dissimulation, and also without any exaggeration,
is the truth about Louis Philippe.

To be Prince Equality, to bear in his own person the contradiction
of the Restoration and the Revolution, to have that disquieting
side of the revolutionary which becomes reassuring in governing
power, therein lay the fortune of Louis Philippe in 1830;
never was there a more complete adaptation of a man to an event;
the one entered into the other, and the incarnation took place.
Louis Philippe is 1830 made man. Moreover, he had in his favor that
great recommendation to the throne, exile. He had been proscribed,
a wanderer, poor. He had lived by his own labor. In Switzerland,
this heir to the richest princely domains in France had sold an old
horse in order to obtain bread. At Reichenau, he gave lessons
in mathematics, while his sister Adelaide did wool work and sewed.
These souvenirs connected with a king rendered the bourgeoisie
enthusiastic. He had, with his own hands, demolished the iron cage
of Mont-Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI, and used by Louis XV.
He was the companion of Dumouriez, he was the friend of Lafayette;
he had belonged to the Jacobins' club; Mirabeau had slapped
him on the shoulder; Danton had said to him: "Young man!"
At the age of four and twenty, in '93, being then M. de Chartres,
he had witnessed, from the depth of a box, the trial of Louis
XVI., so well named that poor tyrant. The blind clairvoyance
of the Revolution, breaking royalty in the King and the King
with royalty, did so almost without noticing the man in the fierce
crushing of the idea, the vast storm of the Assembly-Tribunal,
the public wrath interrogating, Capet not knowing what to reply,
the alarming, stupefied vacillation by that royal head beneath that
sombre breath, the relative innocence of all in that catastrophe,
of those who condemned as well as of the man condemned,--he had looked
on those things, he had contemplated that giddiness; he had seen
the centuries appear before the bar of the Assembly-Convention;
he had beheld, behind Louis XVI., that unfortunate passer-by
who was made responsible, the terrible culprit, the monarchy,
rise through the shadows; and there had lingered in his soul
the respectful fear of these immense justices of the populace,
which are almost as impersonal as the justice of God.

The trace left in him by the Revolution was prodigious. Its memory
was like a living imprint of those great years, minute by minute.
One day, in the presence of a witness whom we are not permitted
to doubt, he rectified from memory the whole of the letter A in the
alphabetical list of the Constituent Assembly.

Louis Philippe was a king of the broad daylight. While he
reigned the press was free, the tribune was free, conscience and
speech were free. The laws of September are open to sight.
Although fully aware of the gnawing power of light on privileges,
he left his throne exposed to the light. History will do justice
to him for this loyalty.

Louis Philippe, like all historical men who have passed from the scene,
is to-day put on his trial by the human conscience. His case is,
as yet, only in the lower court.

The hour when history speaks with its free and venerable accent,
has not yet sounded for him; the moment has not come to pronounce
a definite judgment on this king; the austere and illustrious
historian Louis Blanc has himself recently softened his first verdict;
Louis Philippe was elected by those two almosts which are called
the 221 and 1830, that is to say, by a half-Parliament, and
a half-revolution; and in any case, from the superior point of view
where philosophy must place itself, we cannot judge him here, as the
reader has seen above, except with certain reservations in the name
of the absolute democratic principle; in the eyes of the absolute,
outside these two rights, the right of man in the first place,
the right of the people in the second, all is usurpation; but what we
can say, even at the present day, that after making these reserves is,
that to sum up the whole, and in whatever manner he is considered,
Louis Philippe, taken in himself, and from the point of view
of human goodness, will remain, to use the antique language
of ancient history, one of the best princes who ever sat on a throne.

What is there against him? That throne. Take away Louis Philippe
the king, there remains the man. And the man is good. He is good at
times even to the point of being admirable. Often, in the midst of his
gravest souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy
of the continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there,
exhausted with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do?
He took a death sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit,
considering it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it
was a still greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner.
He obstinately maintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals;
he disputed the ground with the guillotine foot by foot against the
crown attorneys, those chatterers of the law, as he called them.
Sometimes the pile of sentences covered his table; he examined them all;
it was anguish to him to abandon these miserable, condemned heads.
One day, he said to the same witness to whom we have recently referred:
"I won seven last night." During the early years of his reign,
the death penalty was as good as abolished, and the erection of a
scaffold was a violence committed against the King. The Greve having
disappeared with the elder branch, a bourgeois place of execution
was instituted under the name of the Barriere-Saint-Jacques;
"practical men" felt the necessity of a quasi-legitimate guillotine;
and this was one of the victories of Casimir Perier, who represented
the narrow sides of the bourgeoisie, over Louis Philippe,
who represented its liberal sides. Louis Philippe annotated Beccaria
with his own hand. After the Fieschi machine, he exclaimed:
"What a pity that I was not wounded! Then I might have pardoned!"
On another occasion, alluding to the resistance offered by his ministry,
he wrote in connection with a political criminal, who is one of the most
generous figures of our day: "His pardon is granted; it only remains
for me to obtain it." Louis Philippe was as gentle as Louis IX.
and as kindly as Henri IV.

Now, to our mind, in history, where kindness is the rarest of pearls,
the man who is kindly almost takes precedence of the man who is great.

Louis Philippe having been severely judged by some, harshly, perhaps,
by others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at
the present day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his
favor before history; this deposition, whatever else it may be,
is evidently and above all things, entirely disinterested; an epitaph
penned by a dead man is sincere; one shade may console another shade;
the sharing of the same shadows confers the right to praise it;
it is not greatly to be feared that it will ever be said of two
tombs in exile: "This one flattered the other."

At the moment when the drama which we are narrating is on the point
of penetrating into the depths of one of the tragic clouds which
envelop the beginning of Louis Philippe's reign, it was necessary
that there should be no equivoque, and it became requisite that
this book should offer some explanation with regard to this king.

Louis Philippe had entered into possession of his royal authority
without violence, without any direct action on his part, by virtue
of a revolutionary change, evidently quite distinct from the real
aim of the Revolution, but in which he, the Duc d'Orleans,
exercised no personal initiative. He had been born a Prince,
and he believed himself to have been elected King. He had not served
this mandate on himself; he had not taken it; it had been offered
to him, and he had accepted it; convinced, wrongly, to be sure,
but convinced nevertheless, that the offer was in accordance with
right and that the acceptance of it was in accordance with duty.
Hence his possession was in good faith. Now, we say it in
good conscience, Louis Philippe being in possession in perfect
good faith, and the democracy being in good faith in its attack,
the amount of terror discharged by the social conflicts weighs neither
on the King nor on the democracy. A clash of principles resembles
a clash of elements. The ocean defends the water, the hurricane
defends the air, the King defends Royalty, the democracy defends
the people; the relative, which is the monarchy, resists the absolute,
which is the republic; society bleeds in this conflict, but that
which constitutes its suffering to-day will constitute its safety
later on; and, in any case, those who combat are not to be blamed;
one of the two parties is evidently mistaken; the right is not,
like the Colossus of Rhodes, on two shores at once, with one
foot on the republic, and one in Royalty; it is indivisible,
and all on one side; but those who are in error are so sincerely;
a blind man is no more a criminal than a Vendean is a ruffian.
Let us, then, impute to the fatality of things alone these
formidable collisions. Whatever the nature of these tempests may be,
human irresponsibility is mingled with them.

Let us complete this exposition.

The government of 1840 led a hard life immediately. Born yesterday,
it was obliged to fight to-day.

Hardly installed, it was already everywhere conscious of vague
movements of traction on the apparatus of July so recently laid,
and so lacking in solidity.

Resistance was born on the morrow; perhaps even, it was born on
the preceding evening. From month to month the hostility increased,
and from being concealed it became patent.

The Revolution of July, which gained but little acceptance outside
of France by kings, had been diversely interpreted in France,
as we have said.

God delivers over to men his visible will in events, an obscure text
written in a mysterious tongue. Men immediately make translations
of it; translations hasty, incorrect, full of errors, of gaps,
and of nonsense. Very few minds comprehend the divine language.
The most sagacious, the calmest, the most profound, decipher slowly,
and when they arrive with their text, the task has long been completed;
there are already twenty translations on the public place.
From each remaining springs a party, and from each misinterpretation
a faction; and each party thinks that it alone has the true text,
and each faction thinks that it possesses the light.

Power itself is often a faction.

There are, in revolutions, swimmers who go against the current;
they are the old parties.

For the old parties who clung to heredity by the grace of God,
think that revolutions, having sprung from the right to revolt,
one has the right to revolt against them. Error. For in these
revolutions, the one who revolts is not the people; it is the king.
Revolution is precisely the contrary of revolt. Every revolution,
being a normal outcome, contains within itself its legitimacy,
which false revolutionists sometimes dishonor, but which remains even
when soiled, which survives even when stained with blood.

Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity.
A revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real. It is
because it must be that it is.

None the less did the old legitimist parties assail the Revolution
of 1830 with all the vehemence which arises from false reasoning.
Errors make excellent projectiles. They strike it cleverly in its
vulnerable spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic;
they attacked this revolution in its royalty. They shouted to it:
"Revolution, why this king?" Factions are blind men who aim correctly.

This cry was uttered equally by the republicans. But coming from them,
this cry was logical. What was blindness in the legitimists was
clearness of vision in the democrats. 1830 had bankrupted the people.
The enraged democracy reproached it with this.

Between the attack of the past and the attack of the future,
the establishment of July struggled. It represented the minute
at loggerheads on the one hand with the monarchical centuries,
on the other hand with eternal right.

In addition, and beside all this, as it was no longer revolution and had
become a monarchy, 1830 was obliged to take precedence of all Europe.
To keep the peace, was an increase of complication. A harmony
established contrary to sense is often more onerous than a war.
From this secret conflict, always muzzled, but always growling,
was born armed peace, that ruinous expedient of civilization which
in the harness of the European cabinets is suspicious in itself.
The Royalty of July reared up, in spite of the fact that it caught
it in the harness of European cabinets. Metternich would gladly
have put it in kicking-straps. Pushed on in France by progress,
it pushed on the monarchies, those loiterers in Europe. After having
been towed, it undertook to tow.

Meanwhile, within her, pauperism, the proletariat, salary,
education, penal servitude, prostitution, the fate of the woman,
wealth, misery, production, consumption, division, exchange,
coin, credit, the rights of capital, the rights of labor,--
all these questions were multiplied above society, a terrible slope.

Outside of political parties properly so called, another movement
became manifest. Philosophical fermentation replied to democratic
fermentation. The elect felt troubled as well as the masses;
in another manner, but quite as much.

Thinkers meditated, while the soil, that is to say, the people,
traversed by revolutionary currents, trembled under them with
indescribably vague epileptic shocks. These dreamers, some isolated,
others united in families and almost in communion, turned over
social questions in a pacific but profound manner; impassive miners,
who tranquilly pushed their galleries into the depths of a volcano,
hardly disturbed by the dull commotion and the furnaces of which they
caught glimpses.

This tranquillity was not the least beautiful spectacle of this
agitated epoch.

These men left to political parties the question of rights,
they occupied themselves with the question of happiness.

The well-being of man, that was what they wanted to extract
from society.

They raised material questions, questions of agriculture, of industry,
of commerce, almost to the dignity of a religion. In civilization,
such as it has formed itself, a little by the command of God, a great
deal by the agency of man, interests combine, unite, and amalgamate in a
manner to form a veritable hard rock, in accordance with a dynamic law,
patiently studied by economists, those geologists of politics.
These men who grouped themselves under different appellations,
but who may all be designated by the generic title of socialists,
endeavored to pierce that rock and to cause it to spout forth the
living waters of human felicity.

From the question of the scaffold to the question of war, their works
embraced everything. To the rights of man, as proclaimed by the French
Revolution, they added the rights of woman and the rights of the child.

The reader will not be surprised if, for various reasons, we do
not here treat in a thorough manner, from the theoretical point
of view, the questions raised by socialism. We confine ourselves
to indicating them.

All the problems that the socialists proposed to themselves,
cosmogonic visions, revery and mysticism being cast aside, can be
reduced to two principal problems.

First problem: To produce wealth.

Second problem: To share it.

The first problem contains the question of work.

The second contains the question of salary.

In the first problem the employment of forces is in question.

In the second, the distribution of enjoyment.

From the proper employment of forces results public power.

From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness.

By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution
must be understood.

From these two things combined, the public power without,
individual happiness within, results social prosperity.

Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

England solves the first of these two problems. She creates
wealth admirably, she divides it badly. This solution which is
complete on one side only leads her fatally to two extremes:
monstrous opulence, monstrous wretchedness. All enjoyments for some,
all privations for the rest, that is to say, for the people;
privilege, exception, monopoly, feudalism, born from toil itself.
A false and dangerous situation, which sates public power or
private misery, which sets the roots of the State in the sufferings
of the individual. A badly constituted grandeur in which are combined
all the material elements and into which no moral element enters.

Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem.
They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition
abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition
made by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is
therefore impossible to pause over these pretended solutions.
Slaying wealth is not the same thing as dividing it.

The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved.
The two problems must be combined and made but one.

Solve only the first of the two problems; you will be Venice,
you will be England. You will have, like Venice, an artificial
power, or, like England, a material power; you will be the wicked
rich man. You will die by an act of violence, as Venice died,
or by bankruptcy, as England will fall. And the world will allow
to die and fall all that is merely selfishness, all that does
not represent for the human race either a virtue or an idea.

It is well understood here, that by the words Venice, England,
we designate not the peoples, but social structures; the oligarchies
superposed on nations, and not the nations themselves. The nations
always have our respect and our sympathy. Venice, as a people,
will live again; England, the aristocracy, will fall, but England,
the nation, is immortal. That said, we continue.

Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor,
suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the
feeble by the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy
of the man who is making his way against the man who has reached
the goal, adjust, mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor,
mingle gratuitous and compulsory education with the growth of childhood,
and make of science the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping
arms busy, be at one and the same time a powerful people and a family
of happy men, render property democratic, not by abolishing it,
but by making it universal, so that every citizen, without exception,
may be a proprietor, an easier matter than is generally supposed;
in two words, learn how to produce wealth and how to distribute it,
and you will have at once moral and material greatness; and you will
be worthy to call yourself France.

This is what socialism said outside and above a few sects
which have gone astray; that is what it sought in facts,
that is what it sketched out in minds.

Efforts worthy of admiration! Sacred attempts!

These doctrines, these theories, these resistances, the unforeseen
necessity for the statesman to take philosophers into account,
confused evidences of which we catch a glimpse, a new system
of politics to be created, which shall be in accord with the old
world without too much disaccord with the new revolutionary ideal,
a situation in which it became necessary to use Lafayette to
defend Polignac, the intuition of progress transparent beneath
the revolt, the chambers and streets, the competitions to be
brought into equilibrium around him, his faith in the Revolution,
perhaps an eventual indefinable resignation born of the vague
acceptance of a superior definitive right, his desire to remain
of his race, his domestic spirit, his sincere respect for the people,
his own honesty, preoccupied Louis Philippe almost painfully,
and there were moments when strong and courageous as he was,
he was overwhelmed by the difficulties of being a king.

He felt under his feet a formidable disaggregation, which was not,
nevertheless, a reduction to dust, France being more France than ever.

Piles of shadows covered the horizon. A strange shade,
gradually drawing nearer, extended little by little over men,
over things, over ideas; a shade which came from wraths and systems.
Everything which had been hastily stifled was moving and fermenting.
At times the conscience of the honest man resumed its breathing,
so great was the discomfort of that air in which sophisms were
intermingled with truths. Spirits trembled in the social anxiety
like leaves at the approach of a storm. The electric tension
was such that at certain instants, the first comer, a stranger,
brought light. Then the twilight obscurity closed in again.
At intervals, deep and dull mutterings allowed a judgment to be formed
as to the quantity of thunder contained by the cloud.

Twenty months had barely elapsed since the Revolution of July,
the year 1832 had opened with an aspect of something impending
and threatening.

The distress of the people, the laborers without bread, the last Prince
de Conde engulfed in the shadows, Brussels expelling the Nassaus
as Paris did the Bourbons, Belgium offering herself to a French
Prince and giving herself to an English Prince, the Russian hatred
of Nicolas, behind us the demons of the South, Ferdinand in Spain,
Miguel in Portugal, the earth quaking in Italy, Metternich extending
his hand over Bologna, France treating Austria sharply at Ancona,
at the North no one knew what sinister sound of the hammer nailing up
Poland in her coffin, irritated glances watching France narrowly all
over Europe, England, a suspected ally, ready to give a push to that
which was tottering and to hurl herself on that which should fall,
the peerage sheltering itself behind Beccaria to refuse four heads
to the law, the fleurs-de-lys erased from the King's carriage,
the cross torn from Notre Dame, Lafayette lessened, Laffitte ruined,
Benjamin Constant dead in indigence, Casimir Perier dead in the
exhaustion of his power; political and social malady breaking
out simultaneously in the two capitals of the kingdom, the one
in the city of thought, the other in the city of toil; at Paris
civil war, at Lyons servile war; in the two cities, the same glare
of the furnace; a crater-like crimson on the brow of the people;
the South rendered fanatic, the West troubled, the Duchesse
de Berry in la Vendee, plots, conspiracies, risings, cholera,
added the sombre roar of tumult of events to the sombre roar of ideas.

Towards the end of April, everything had become aggravated.
The fermentation entered the boiling state. Ever since 1830,
petty partial revolts had been going on here and there,
which were quickly suppressed, but ever bursting forth afresh,
the sign of a vast underlying conflagration. Something terrible
was in preparation. Glimpses could be caught of the features still
indistinct and imperfectly lighted, of a possible revolution.
France kept an eye on Paris; Paris kept an eye on the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which was in a dull glow, was beginning
its ebullition.

The wine-shops of the Rue de Charonne were, although the union
of the two epithets seems singular when applied to wine-shops,
grave and stormy.

The government was there purely and simply called in question.
There people publicly discussed the question of fighting or of
keeping quiet. There were back shops where workingmen were made to
swear that they would hasten into the street at the first cry of alarm,
and "that they would fight without counting the number of the enemy."
This engagement once entered into, a man seated in the corner of the
wine-shop "assumed a sonorous tone," and said, "You understand!
You have sworn!"

Sometimes they went up stairs, to a private room on the first floor,
and there scenes that were almost masonic were enacted. They made
the initiated take oaths to render service to himself as well as
to the fathers of families. That was the formula.

In the tap-rooms, "subversive" pamphlets were read. They treated
the government with contempt, says a secret report of that time.

Words like the following could be heard there:--

"I don't know the names of the leaders. We folks shall not
know the day until two hours beforehand." One workman said:
"There are three hundred of us, let each contribute ten sous,
that will make one hundred and fifty francs with which to procure
powder and shot."

Another said: "I don't ask for six months, I don't ask for even two.
In less than a fortnight we shall be parallel with the government.
With twenty-five thousand men we can face them." Another said:
"I don't sleep at night, because I make cartridges all night."
From time to time, men "of bourgeois appearance, and in good coats"
came and "caused embarrassment," and with the air of "command,"
shook hands with the most important, and then went away. They never
stayed more than ten minutes. Significant remarks were exchanged
in a low tone: "The plot is ripe, the matter is arranged." "It was
murmured by all who were there," to borrow the very expression of one
of those who were present. The exaltation was such that one day,
a workingman exclaimed, before the whole wine-shop: "We have no arms!"
One of his comrades replied: "The soldiers have!" thus parodying
without being aware of the fact, Bonaparte's proclamation to the army
in Italy: "When they had anything of a more secret nature on hand,"
adds one report, "they did not communicate it to each other."
It is not easy to understand what they could conceal after what they
said.

These reunions were sometimes periodical. At certain ones of them,
there were never more than eight or ten persons present, and they
were always the same. In others, any one entered who wished,
and the room was so full that they were forced to stand.
Some went thither through enthusiasm and passion; others because
it was on their way to their work. As during the Revolution,
there were patriotic women in some of these wine-shops who embraced
new-comers.

Other expressive facts came to light.

A man would enter a shop, drink, and go his way with the remark:
"Wine-merchant, the revolution will pay what is due to you."

Revolutionary agents were appointed in a wine-shop facing the Rue
de Charonne. The balloting was carried on in their caps.

Workingmen met at the house of a fencing-master who gave lessons
in the Rue de Cotte. There there was a trophy of arms formed of
wooden broadswords, canes, clubs, and foils. One day, the buttons
were removed from the foils.

A workman said: "There are twenty-five of us, but they don't
count on me, because I am looked upon as a machine." Later on,
that machine became Quenisset.

The indefinite things which were brewing gradually acquired a strange
and indescribable notoriety. A woman sweeping off her doorsteps said
to another woman: "For a long time, there has been a strong force
busy making cartridges." In the open street, proclamation could
be seen addressed to the National Guard in the departments.
One of these proclamations was signed: Burtot, wine-merchant.

One day a man with his beard worn like a collar and with an Italian
accent mounted a stone post at the door of a liquor-seller in the
Marche Lenoir, and read aloud a singular document, which seemed
to emanate from an occult power. Groups formed around him,
and applauded.

The passages which touched the crowd most deeply were collected and
noted down. "--Our doctrines are trammelled, our proclamations torn,
our bill-stickers are spied upon and thrown into prison."--"The
breakdown which has recently taken place in cottons has converted
to us many mediums."--"The future of nations is being worked out in
our obscure ranks."--" Here are the fixed terms: action or reaction,
revolution or counter-revolution. For, at our epoch, we no longer
believe either in inertia or in immobility. For the people
against the people, that is the question. There is no other."--"On
the day when we cease to suit you, break us, but up to that day,
help us to march on." All this in broad daylight.

Other deeds, more audacious still, were suspicious in the eyes of the
people by reason of their very audacity. On the 4th of April, 1832,
a passer-by mounted the post on the corner which forms the angle
of the Rue Sainte-Marguerite and shouted: "I am a Babouvist!"
But beneath Babeuf, the people scented Gisquet.

Among other things, this man said:--

"Down with property! The opposition of the left is cowardly
and treacherous. When it wants to be on the right side,
it preaches revolution, it is democratic in order to escape
being beaten, and royalist so that it may not have to fight.
The republicans are beasts with feathers. Distrust the republicans,
citizens of the laboring classes."

"Silence, citizen spy!" cried an artisan.

This shout put an end to the discourse.

Mysterious incidents occurred.

At nightfall, a workingman encountered near the canal a "very
well dressed man," who said to him: "Whither are you bound,
citizen?" "Sir," replied the workingman, "I have not the honor
of your acquaintance." "I know you very well, however." And the
man added: "Don't be alarmed, I am an agent of the committee.
You are suspected of not being quite faithful. You know that if you
reveal anything, there is an eye fixed on you." Then he shook hands
with the workingman and went away, saying: "We shall meet again soon."

The police, who were on the alert, collected singular dialogues,
not only in the wine-shops, but in the street.

"Get yourself received very soon," said a weaver to a cabinet-maker.

"Why?"

"There is going to be a shot to fire."

Two ragged pedestrians exchanged these remarkable replies,
fraught with evident Jacquerie:--

"Who governs us?"

"M. Philippe."

"No, it is the bourgeoisie."

The reader is mistaken if he thinks that we take the word Jacquerie
in a bad sense. The Jacques were the poor.

On another occasion two men were heard to say to each other as they
passed by: "We have a good plan of attack."

Only the following was caught of a private conversation between four
men who were crouching in a ditch of the circle of the Barriere
du Trone:--

"Everything possible will be done to prevent his walking about Paris
any more."

Who was the he? Menacing obscurity.

"The principal leaders," as they said in the faubourg, held themselves
apart. It was supposed that they met for consultation in a wine-shop
near the point Saint-Eustache. A certain Aug--, chief of the Society
aid for tailors, Rue Mondetour, had the reputation of serving
as intermediary central between the leaders and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

Nevertheless, there was always a great deal of mystery about
these leaders, and no certain fact can invalidate the singular
arrogance of this reply made later on by a man accused before
the Court of Peers:--

"Who was your leader?"

"I knew of none and I recognized none."

There was nothing but words, transparent but vague; sometimes
idle reports, rumors, hearsay. Other indications cropped up.

A carpenter, occupied in nailing boards to a fence around
the ground on which a house was in process of construction,
in the Rue de Reuilly found on that plot the torn fragment
of a letter on which were still legible the following lines:--

The committee must take measures to prevent recruiting in the
sections for the different societies.

And, as a postscript:--

We have learned that there are guns in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere,
No. 5 [bis], to the number of five or six thousand, in the house
of a gunsmith in that court. The section owns no arms.

What excited the carpenter and caused him to show this thing to his
neighbors was the fact, that a few paces further on he picked up
another paper, torn like the first, and still more significant,
of which we reproduce a facsimile, because of the historical interest
attaching to these strange documents:--

+------------------------------------------------------------+ | Q
| C | D | E | Learn this list by heart. After so doing | | | | |
| you will tear it up. The men admitted | | | | | | will do the
same when you have transmitted | | | | | | their orders to them.
| | | | | | Health and Fraternity, | | | | | | u og a fe L. |
+------------------------------------------------------------+

It was only later on that the persons who were in the secret
of this find at the time, learned the significance of those four
capital letters: quinturions, centurions, decurions, eclaireurs
[scouts], and the sense of the letters: u og a fe, which was a date,
and meant April 15th, 1832. Under each capital letter were inscribed
names followed by very characteristic notes. Thus: Q. Bannerel.
8 guns, 83 cartridges. A safe man.--C. Boubiere. 1 pistol,
40 cartridges.--D. Rollet. 1 foil, 1 pistol, 1 pound of powder.--
E. Tessier. 1 sword, 1 cartridge-box. Exact.--Terreur. 8 guns.
Brave, etc.

Finally, this carpenter found, still in the same enclosure,
a third paper on which was written in pencil, but very legibly,
this sort of enigmatical list:--

Unite: Blanchard: Arbre-Sec. 6.
Barra. Soize. Salle-au-Comte.
Kosciusko. Aubry the Butcher?
J. J. R.
Caius Gracchus.
Right of revision. Dufond. Four.
Fall of the Girondists. Derbac. Maubuee.
Washington. Pinson. 1 pistol, 86 cartridges.
Marseillaise.
Sovereignty of the people. Michel. Quincampoix. Sword.
Hoche.
Marceau. Plato. Arbre-Sec.
Warsaw. Tilly, crier of the Populaire.

The honest bourgeois into whose hands this list fell knew
its significance. It appears that this list was the complete nomenclature
of the sections of the fourth arondissement of the Society of the Rights
of Man, with the names and dwellings of the chiefs of sections.
To-day, when all these facts which were obscure are nothing more than
history, we may publish them. It should be added, that the foundation
of the Society of the Rights of Man seems to have been posterior to
the date when this paper was found. Perhaps this was only a rough draft.

Still, according to all the remarks and the words, according to
written notes, material facts begin to make their appearance.

In the Rue Popincourt, in the house of a dealer in bric-abrac, there
were seized seven sheets of gray paper, all folded alike lengthwise
and in four; these sheets enclosed twenty-six squares of this
same gray paper folded in the form of a cartridge, and a card,
on which was written the following:--

Saltpetre . . . . . . . . . . . 12 ounces.
Sulphur . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces.
Charcoal . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces and a half.
Water . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces.

The report of the seizure stated that the drawer exhaled a strong
smell of powder.

A mason returning from his day's work, left behind him a little
package on a bench near the bridge of Austerlitz. This package
was taken to the police station. It was opened, and in it were
found two printed dialogues, signed Lahautiere, a song entitled:
"Workmen, band together," and a tin box full of cartridges.

One artisan drinking with a comrade made the latter feel him to see
how warm he was; the other man felt a pistol under his waistcoat.

In a ditch on the boulevard, between Pere-Lachaise and the Barriere
du Trone, at the most deserted spot, some children, while playing,
discovered beneath a mass of shavings and refuse bits of wood,
a bag containing a bullet-mould, a wooden punch for the preparation
of cartridges, a wooden bowl, in which there were grains of
hunting-powder, and a little cast-iron pot whose interior presented
evident traces of melted lead.

Police agents, making their way suddenly and unexpectedly at five
o'clock in the morning, into the dwelling of a certain Pardon,
who was afterwards a member of the Barricade-Merry section and got
himself killed in the insurrection of April, 1834, found him standing
near his bed, and holding in his hand some cartridges which he
was in the act of preparing.

Towards the hour when workingmen repose, two men were seen to meet
between the Barriere Picpus and the Barriere Charenton in a little
lane between two walls, near a wine-shop, in front of which there
was a "Jeu de Siam."[33] One drew a pistol from beneath his blouse
and handed it to the other. As he was handing it to him, he noticed
that the perspiration of his chest had made the powder damp.
He primed the pistol and added more powder to what was already
in the pan. Then the two men parted.

[33] A game of ninepins, in which one side of the ball is smaller
than the other, so that it does not roll straight, but describes
a curve on the ground.

A certain Gallais, afterwards killed in the Rue Beaubourg in the
affair of April, boasted of having in his house seven hundred
cartridges and twenty-four flints.

The government one day received a warning that arms and two hundred
thousand cartridges had just been distributed in the faubourg.
On the following week thirty thousand cartridges were distributed.
The remarkable point about it was, that the police were not able to
seize a single one.

An intercepted letter read: "The day is not far distant when,
within four hours by the clock, eighty thousand patriots will be
under arms."

All this fermentation was public, one might almost say tranquil.
The approaching insurrection was preparing its storm calmly in the
face of the government. No singularity was lacking to this still
subterranean crisis, which was already perceptible. The bourgeois
talked peaceably to the working-classes of what was in preparation.
They said: "How is the rising coming along?" in the same tone in
which they would have said: "How is your wife?"

A furniture-dealer, of the Rue Moreau, inquired: "Well, when are
you going to make the attack?"

Another shop-keeper said:--

"The attack will be made soon."

"I know it. A month ago, there were fifteen thousand of you,
now there are twenty-five thousand." He offered his gun,
and a neighbor offered a small pistol which he was willing to sell
for seven francs.

Moreover, the revolutionary fever was growing. Not a point in Paris
nor in France was exempt from it. The artery was beating everywhere.
Like those membranes which arise from certain inflammations and form
in the human body, the network of secret societies began to spread
all over the country. From the associations of the Friends
of the People, which was at the same time public and secret,
sprang the Society of the Rights of Man, which also dated from one
of the orders of the day: Pluviose, Year 40 of the republican era,
which was destined to survive even the mandate of the Court of
Assizes which pronounced its dissolution, and which did not hesitate
to bestow on its sections significant names like the following:--

Pikes.
Tocsin.
Signal cannon.
Phrygian cap.
January 21.
The beggars.
The vagabonds.
Forward march.
Robespierre.
Level.
Ca Ira.

The Society of the Rights of Man engendered the Society of Action.
These were impatient individuals who broke away and hastened ahead.
Other associations sought to recruit themselves from the great
mother societies. The members of sections complained that they
were torn asunder. Thus, the Gallic Society, and the committee
of organization of the Municipalities. Thus the associations for the
liberty of the press, for individual liberty, for the instruction
of the people against indirect taxes. Then the Society of Equal
Workingmen which was divided into three fractions, the levellers,
the communists, the reformers. Then the Army of the Bastilles,
a sort of cohort organized on a military footing, four men commanded
by a corporal, ten by a sergeant, twenty by a sub-lieutenant, forty by
a lieutenant; there were never more than five men who knew each other.
Creation where precaution is combined with audacity and which seemed
stamped with the genius of Venice.

The central committee, which was at the head, had two arms,
the Society of Action, and the Army of the Bastilles.

A legitimist association, the Chevaliers of Fidelity, stirred about
among these the republican affiliations. It was denounced
and repudiated there.

The Parisian societies had ramifications in the principal cities,
Lyons, Nantes, Lille, Marseilles, and each had its Society
of the Rights of Man, the Charbonniere, and The Free Men.
All had a revolutionary society which was called the Cougourde.
We have already mentioned this word.

In Paris, the Faubourg Saint-Marceau kept up an equal buzzing with
the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the schools were no less moved than
the faubourgs. A cafe in the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe and the wine-shop
of the Seven Billiards, Rue des Mathurins-Saint-Jacques, served
as rallying points for the students. The Society of the Friends
of the A B C affiliated to the Mutualists of Angers, and to the
Cougourde of Aix, met, as we have seen, in the Cafe Musain.
These same young men assembled also, as we have stated already, in a
restaurant wine-shop of the Rue Mondetour which was called Corinthe.
These meetings were secret. Others were as public as possible,
and the reader can judge of their boldness from these fragments
of an interrogatory undergone in one of the ulterior prosecutions:
"Where was this meeting held?" "In the Rue de la Paix."
"At whose house?" "In the street." "What sections were there?"
"Only one." "Which?" "The Manuel section." "Who was its leader?"
"I." "You are too young to have decided alone upon the bold course
of attacking the government. Where did your instructions come from?"
"From the central committee."

The army was mined at the same time as the population, as was proved
subsequently by the operations of Beford, Luneville, and Epinard.
They counted on the fifty-second regiment, on the fifth, on the eighth,
on the thirty-seventh, and on the twentieth light cavalry.
In Burgundy and in the southern towns they planted the liberty tree;
that is to say, a pole surmounted by a red cap.

Such was the situation.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, more than any other group of the population,
as we stated in the beginning, accentuated this situation and made
it felt. That was the sore point. This old faubourg, peopled like
an ant-hill, laborious, courageous, and angry as a hive of bees,
was quivering with expectation and with the desire for a tumult.
Everything was in a state of agitation there, without any interruption,
however, of the regular work. It is impossible to convey an idea
of this lively yet sombre physiognomy. In this faubourg exists
poignant distress hidden under attic roofs; there also exist rare
and ardent minds. It is particularly in the matter of distress
and intelligence that it is dangerous to have extremes meet.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine had also other causes to tremble;
for it received the counter-shock of commercial crises, of failures,
strikes, slack seasons, all inherent to great political disturbances.
In times of revolution misery is both cause and effect. The blow
which it deals rebounds upon it. This population full of proud virtue,
capable to the highest degree of latent heat, always ready to fly
to arms, prompt to explode, irritated, deep, undermined, seemed to
be only awaiting the fall of a spark. Whenever certain sparks
float on the horizon chased by the wind of events, it is impossible
not to think of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and of the formidable
chance which has placed at the very gates of Paris that powder-house
of suffering and ideas.

The wine-shops of the Faubourg Antoine, which have been more than
once drawn in the sketches which the reader has just perused,
possess historical notoriety. In troublous times people grow
intoxicated there more on words than on wine. A sort of prophetic
spirit and an afflatus of the future circulates there, swelling hearts
and enlarging souls. The cabarets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine
resemble those taverns of Mont Aventine erected on the cave of
the Sibyl and communicating with the profound and sacred breath;
taverns where the tables were almost tripods, and where was drunk
what Ennius calls the sibylline wine.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine is a reservoir of people.
Revolutionary agitations create fissures there, through which
trickles the popular sovereignty. This sovereignty may do evil;
it can be mistaken like any other; but, even when led astray,
it remains great. We may say of it as of the blind cyclops, Ingens.

In '93, according as the idea which was floating about was good
or evil, according as it was the day of fanaticism or of enthusiasm,
there leaped forth from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine now savage legions,
now heroic bands.

Savage. Let us explain this word. When these bristling men,
who in the early days of the revolutionary chaos, tattered, howling,
wild, with uplifted bludgeon, pike on high, hurled themselves
upon ancient Paris in an uproar, what did they want? They wanted
an end to oppression, an end to tyranny, an end to the sword,
work for men, instruction for the child, social sweetness for
the woman, liberty, equality, fraternity, bread for all, the idea
for all, the Edenizing of the world. Progress; and that holy,
sweet, and good thing, progress, they claimed in terrible wise,
driven to extremities as they were, half naked, club in fist, a roar
in their mouths. They were savages, yes; but the savages of civilization.

They proclaimed right furiously; they were desirous, if only
with fear and trembling, to force the human race to paradise.
They seemed barbarians, and they were saviours. They demanded
light with the mask of night.

Facing these men, who were ferocious, we admit, and terrifying,
but ferocious and terrifying for good ends, there are other men,
smiling, embroidered, gilded, beribboned, starred, in silk stockings,
in white plumes, in yellow gloves, in varnished shoes, who, with their
elbows on a velvet table, beside a marble chimney-piece, insist gently
on demeanor and the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages,
of divine right, of fanaticism, of innocence, of slavery, of the
death penalty, of war, glorifying in low tones and with politeness,
the sword, the stake, and the scaffold. For our part, if we were
forced to make a choice between the barbarians of civilization
and the civilized men of barbarism, we should choose the barbarians.

But, thank Heaven, still another choice is possible. No perpendicular
fall is necessary, in front any more than in the rear.

Neither despotism nor terrorism. We desire progress with a gentle slope.

God takes care of that. God's whole policy consists in rendering
slopes less steep.

It was about this epoch that Enjolras, in view of a possible catastrophe,
instituted a kind of mysterious census.

All were present at a secret meeting at the Cafe Musain.

Enjolras said, mixing his words with a few half-enigmatical
but significant metaphors:--

"It is proper that we should know where we stand and on whom we
may count. If combatants are required, they must be provided.
It can do no harm to have something with which to strike.
Passers-by always have more chance of being gored when there are
bulls on the road than when there are none. Let us, therefore,
reckon a little on the herd. How many of us are there?
There is no question of postponing this task until to-morrow.
Revolutionists should always be hurried; progress has no time to lose.
Let us mistrust the unexpected. Let us not be caught unprepared.
We must go over all the seams that we have made and see whether they
hold fast. This business ought to be concluded to-day. Courfeyrac,
you will see the polytechnic students. It is their day to go out.
To-day is Wednesday. Feuilly, you will see those of the Glaciere,
will you not? Combeferre has promised me to go to Picpus.
There is a perfect swarm and an excellent one there. Bahorel will
visit the Estrapade. Prouvaire, the masons are growing lukewarm;
you will bring us news from the lodge of the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honore.
Joly will go to Dupuytren's clinical lecture, and feel the pulse
of the medical school. Bossuet will take a little turn in the court
and talk with the young law licentiates. I will take charge of the
Cougourde myself."

"That arranges everything," said Courfeyrac.

"No."

"What else is there?"

"A very important thing."

"What is that?" asked Courfeyrac.

"The Barriere du Maine," replied Enjolras.

Enjolras remained for a moment as though absorbed in reflection,
then he resumed:--

"At the Barriere du Maine there are marble-workers, painters,
and journeymen in the studios of sculptors. They are an enthusiastic
family, but liable to cool off. I don't know what has been the matter
with them for some time past. They are thinking of something else.
They are becoming extinguished. They pass their time playing dominoes.
There is urgent need that some one should go and talk with them a little,
but with firmness. They meet at Richefeu's. They are to be found
there between twelve and one o'clock. Those ashes must be fanned into
a glow. For that errand I had counted on that abstracted Marius,
who is a good fellow on the whole, but he no longer comes to us.
I need some one for the Barriere du Maine. I have no one."

"What about me?" said Grantaire. "Here am I."

"You?"

"I."

"You indoctrinate republicans! you warm up hearts that have grown
cold in the name of principle!"

"Why not?"

"Are you good for anything?"

"I have a vague ambition in that direction," said Grantaire.

"You do not believe in everything."

"I believe in you."

"Grantaire will you do me a service?"

"Anything. I'll black your boots."

"Well, don't meddle with our affairs. Sleep yourself sober from
your absinthe."

"You are an ingrate, Enjolras."

"You the man to go to the Barriere du Maine! You capable of it!"

"I am capable of descending the Rue de Gres, of crossing the Place
Saint-Michel, of sloping through the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, of taking
the Rue de Vaugirard, of passing the Carmelites, of turning into the
Rue d'Assas, of reaching the Rue du Cherche-Midi, of leaving behind
me the Conseil de Guerre, of pacing the Rue des Vielles Tuileries,
of striding across the boulevard, of following the Chaussee du Maine,
of passing the barrier, and entering Richefeu's. I am capable of that.
My shoes are capable of that."

"Do you know anything of those comrades who meet at Richefeu's?"

"Not much. We only address each other as thou."

"What will you say to them?"

"I will speak to them of Robespierre, pardi! Of Danton.
Of principles."

"You?"

"I. But I don't receive justice. When I set about it, I am terrible.
I have read Prudhomme, I know the Social Contract, I know my
constitution of the year Two by heart. `The liberty of one citizen
ends where the liberty of another citizen begins.' Do you take me
for a brute? I have an old bank-bill of the Republic in my drawer.
The Rights of Man, the sovereignty of the people, sapristi! I am
even a bit of a Hebertist. I can talk the most superb twaddle
for six hours by the clock, watch in hand."

"Be serious," said Enjolras.

"I am wild," replied Grantaire.

Enjolras meditated for a few moments, and made the gesture of a man
who has taken a resolution.

"Grantaire," he said gravely, "I consent to try you. You shall go
to the Barriere du Maine."

Grantaire lived in furnished lodgings very near the Cafe Musain.
He went out, and five minutes later he returned. He had gone home
to put on a Robespierre waistcoat.

"Red," said he as he entered, and he looked intently at Enjolras.
Then, with the palm of his energetic hand, he laid the two scarlet
points of the waistcoat across his breast.

And stepping up to Enjolras, he whispered in his ear:--

"Be easy."

He jammed his hat on resolutely and departed.

A quarter of an hour later, the back room of the Cafe Musain
was deserted. All the friends of the A B C were gone, each in his
own direction, each to his own task. Enjolras, who had reserved
the Cougourde of Aix for himself, was the last to leave.

Those members of the Cougourde of Aix who were in Paris then met
on the plain of Issy, in one of the abandoned quarries which are
so numerous in that side of Paris.

As Enjolras walked towards this place, he passed the whole situation
in review in his own mind. The gravity of events was self-evident.
When facts, the premonitory symptoms of latent social malady,
move heavily, the slightest complication stops and entangles them.
A phenomenon whence arises ruin and new births. Enjolras descried
a luminous uplifting beneath the gloomy skirts of the future.
Who knows? Perhaps the moment was at hand. The people were
again taking possession of right, and what a fine spectacle!
The revolution was again majestically taking possession of France and
saying to the world: "The sequel to-morrow!" Enjolras was content.
The furnace was being heated. He had at that moment a powder train
of friends scattered all over Paris. He composed, in his own mind,
with Combeferre's philosophical and penetrating eloquence,
Feuilly's cosmopolitan enthusiasm, Courfeyrac's dash, Bahorel's smile,
Jean Prouvaire's melancholy, Joly's science, Bossuet's sarcasms,
a sort of electric spark which took fire nearly everywhere at once.
All hands to work. Surely, the result would answer to the effort.
This was well. This made him think of Grantaire.

"Hold," said he to himself, "the Barriere du Maine will not take me
far out of my way. What if I were to go on as far as Richefeu's?
Let us have a look at what Grantaire is about, and see how he
is getting on."

One o'clock was striking from the Vaugirard steeple when Enjolras
reached the Richefeu smoking-room.

He pushed open the door, entered, folded his arms, letting the door
fall to and strike his shoulders, and gazed at that room filled
with tables, men, and smoke.

A voice broke forth from the mist of smoke, interrupted by another voice.
It was Grantaire holding a dialogue with an adversary.

Grantaire was sitting opposite another figure, at a marble Saint-Anne
table, strewn with grains of bran and dotted with dominos. He was
hammering the table with his fist, and this is what Enjolras heard:--

"Double-six."

"Fours."

"The pig! I have no more."

"You are dead. A two."

"Six."

"Three."

"One."

"It's my move."

"Four points."

"Not much."

"It's your turn."

"I have made an enormous mistake."

"You are doing well."

"Fifteen."

"Seven more."

"That makes me twenty-two." [Thoughtfully, "Twenty-two!"]

"You weren't expecting that double-six. If I had placed it
at the beginning, the whole play would have been changed."

"A two again."

"One."

"One! Well, five."

"I haven't any."

"It was your play, I believe?"

"Yes."

"Blank."

"What luck he has! Ah! You are lucky! [Long revery.] Two."

"One."

"Neither five nor one. That's bad for you."

"Domino."

"Plague take it!"

BOOK SECOND.--EPONINE

Marius had witnessed the unexpected termination of the ambush upon
whose track he had set Javert; but Javert had no sooner quitted
the building, bearing off his prisoners in three hackney-coaches,
than Marius also glided out of the house. It was only nine
o'clock in the evening. Marius betook himself to Courfeyrac.
Courfeyrac was no longer the imperturbable inhabitant of the
Latin Quarter, he had gone to live in the Rue de la Verrerie "for
political reasons"; this quarter was one where, at that epoch,
insurrection liked to install itself. Marius said to Courfeyrac:
"I have come to sleep with you." Courfeyrac dragged a mattress off
his bed, which was furnished with two, spread it out on the floor,
and said: "There."

At seven o'clock on the following morning, Marius returned to
the hovel, paid the quarter's rent which he owed to Ma'am Bougon,
had his books, his bed, his table, his commode, and his two chairs
loaded on a hand-cart and went off without leaving his address,
so that when Javert returned in the course of the morning,
for the purpose of questioning Marius as to the events of the
preceding evening, he found only Ma'am Bougon, who answered:
"Moved away!"

Ma'am Bougon was convinced that Marius was to some extent an
accomplice of the robbers who had been seized the night before.
"Who would ever have said it?" she exclaimed to the portresses
of the quarter, "a young man like that, who had the air of a girl!"

Marius had two reasons for this prompt change of residence.
The first was, that he now had a horror of that house, where he
had beheld, so close at hand, and in its most repulsive and most
ferocious development, a social deformity which is, perhaps,
even more terrible than the wicked rich man, the wicked poor man.
The second was, that he did not wish to figure in the lawsuit
which would insue in all probability, and be brought in to testify
against Thenardier.

Javert thought that the young man, whose name he had forgotten,
was afraid, and had fled, or perhaps, had not even returned home
at the time of the ambush; he made some efforts to find him,
however, but without success.

A month passed, then another. Marius was still with Courfeyrac.
He had learned from a young licentiate in law, an habitual frequenter
of the courts, that Thenardier was in close confinement. Every Monday,
Marius had five francs handed in to the clerk's office of La Force
for Thenardier.

As Marius had no longer any money, he borrowed the five francs
from Courfeyrac. It was the first time in his life that he had ever
borrowed money. These periodical five francs were a double riddle
to Courfeyrac who lent and to Thenardier who received them. "To whom
can they go?" thought Courfeyrac. "Whence can this come to me?"
Thenardier asked himself.

Moreover, Marius was heart-broken. Everything had plunged through
a trap-door once more. He no longer saw anything before him;
his life was again buried in mystery where he wandered fumblingly.
He had for a moment beheld very close at hand, in that obscurity,
the young girl whom he loved, the old man who seemed to be her father,
those unknown beings, who were his only interest and his only hope
in this world; and, at the very moment when he thought himself on
the point of grasping them, a gust had swept all these shadows away.
Not a spark of certainty and truth had been emitted even in the
most terrible of collisions. No conjecture was possible. He no
longer knew even the name that he thought he knew. It certainly
was not Ursule. And the Lark was a nickname. And what was he to
think of the old man? Was he actually in hiding from the police?
The white-haired workman whom Marius had encountered in the vicinity
of the Invalides recurred to his mind. It now seemed probable that
that workingman and M. Leblanc were one and the same person. So he
disguised himself? That man had his heroic and his equivocal sides.
Why had he not called for help? Why had he fled? Was he,
or was he not, the father of the young girl? Was he, in short,
the man whom Thenardier thought that he recognized? Thenardier might
have been mistaken. These formed so many insoluble problems.
All this, it is true, detracted nothing from the angelic charms
of the young girl of the Luxembourg. Heart-rending distress;
Marius bore a passion in his heart, and night over his eyes.
He was thrust onward, he was drawn, and he could not stir.
All had vanished, save love. Of love itself he had lost the instincts
and the sudden illuminations. Ordinarily, this flame which burns
us lights us also a little, and casts some useful gleams without.
But Marius no longer even heard these mute counsels of passion.
He never said to himself: "What if I were to go to such a place?
What if I were to try such and such a thing?" The girl whom he could
no longer call Ursule was evidently somewhere; nothing warned Marius
in what direction he should seek her. His whole life was now summed
up in two words; absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.
To see her once again; he still aspired to this, but he no longer
expected it.

To crown all, his poverty had returned. He felt that icy breath
close to him, on his heels. In the midst of his torments, and long
before this, he had discontinued his work, and nothing is more
dangerous than discontinued work; it is a habit which vanishes.
A habit which is easy to get rid of, and difficult to take up again.

A certain amount of dreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses.
It lulls to sleep the fevers of the mind at labor, which are
sometimes severe, and produces in the spirit a soft and fresh
vapor which corrects the over-harsh contours of pure thought,
fills in gaps here and there, binds together and rounds off the
angles of the ideas. But too much dreaming sinks and drowns.
Woe to the brain-worker who allows himself to fall entirely from
thought into revery! He thinks that he can re-ascend with equal ease,
and he tells himself that, after all, it is the same thing. Error!

Thought is the toil of the intelligence, revery its voluptuousness.
To replace thought with revery is to confound a poison with a food.

Marius had begun in that way, as the reader will remember.
Passion had supervened and had finished the work of precipitating
him into chimaeras without object or bottom. One no longer emerges
from one's self except for the purpose of going off to dream.
Idle production. Tumultuous and stagnant gulf. And, in proportion
as labor diminishes, needs increase. This is a law. Man, in a state
of revery, is generally prodigal and slack; the unstrung mind cannot
hold life within close bounds.

There is, in that mode of life, good mingled with evil,
for if enervation is baleful, generosity is good and healthful.
But the poor man who is generous and noble, and who does not work,
is lost. Resources are exhausted, needs crop up.

Fatal declivity down which the most honest and the firmest as well
as the most feeble and most vicious are drawn, and which ends
in one of two holds, suicide or crime.

By dint of going outdoors to think, the day comes when one goes
out to throw one's self in the water.

Excess of revery breeds men like Escousse and Lebras.

Marius was descending this declivity at a slow pace, with his eyes
fixed on the girl whom he no longer saw. What we have just written
seems strange, and yet it is true. The memory of an absent being
kindles in the darkness of the heart; the more it has disappeared,
the more it beams; the gloomy and despairing soul sees this light
on its horizon; the star of the inner night. She--that was Marius'
whole thought. He meditated of nothing else; he was confusedly
conscious that his old coat was becoming an impossible coat, and that
his new coat was growing old, that his shirts were wearing out,
that his hat was wearing out, that his boots were giving out,
and he said to himself: "If I could but see her once again before
I die!"

One sweet idea alone was left to him, that she had loved him,
that her glance had told him so, that she did not know his name,
but that she did know his soul, and that, wherever she was,
however mysterious the place, she still loved him perhaps.
Who knows whether she were not thinking of him as he was thinking
of her? Sometimes, in those inexplicable hours such as are experienced
by every heart that loves, though he had no reasons for anything but
sadness and yet felt an obscure quiver of joy, he said to himself:
"It is her thoughts that are coming to me!" Then he added:
"Perhaps my thoughts reach her also."

This illusion, at which he shook his head a moment later,
was sufficient, nevertheless, to throw beams, which at times
resembled hope, into his soul. From time to time, especially at
that evening hour which is the most depressing to even the dreamy,
he allowed the purest, the most impersonal, the most ideal
of the reveries which filled his brain, to fall upon a notebook
which contained nothing else. He called this "writing to her."

It must not be supposed that his reason was deranged.
Quite the contrary. He had lost the faculty of working and of
moving firmly towards any fixed goal, but he was endowed with
more clear-sightedness and rectitude than ever. Marius surveyed
by a calm and real, although peculiar light, what passed before
his eyes, even the most indifferent deeds and men; he pronounced
a just criticism on everything with a sort of honest dejection
and candid disinterestedness. His judgment, which was almost
wholly disassociated from hope, held itself aloof and soared on high.

In this state of mind nothing escaped him, nothing deceived him,
and every moment he was discovering the foundation of life,
of humanity, and of destiny. Happy, even in the midst of anguish,
is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of unhappiness!
He who has not viewed the things of this world and the heart of man
under this double light has seen nothing and knows nothing of
the true.

The soul which loves and suffers is in a state of sublimity.

However, day followed day, and nothing new presented itself.
It merely seemed to him, that the sombre space which still remained
to be traversed by him was growing shorter with every instant.
He thought that he already distinctly perceived the brink of the
bottomless abyss.

"What!" he repeated to himself, "shall I not see her again before then!"

When you have ascended the Rue Saint-Jacques, left the barrier on
one side and followed the old inner boulevard for some distance,
you reach the Rue de la Sante, then the Glaciere, and, a little
while before arriving at the little river of the Gobelins, you come
to a sort of field which is the only spot in the long and monotonous
chain of the boulevards of Paris, where Ruysdeel would be tempted
to sit down.

There is something indescribable there which exhales grace, a green
meadow traversed by tightly stretched lines, from which flutter
rags drying in the wind, and an old market-gardener's house,
built in the time of Louis XIII., with its great roof oddly
pierced with dormer windows, dilapidated palisades, a little
water amid poplar-trees, women, voices, laughter; on the horizon
the Pantheon, the pole of the Deaf-Mutes, the Val-de-Grace, black,
squat, fantastic, amusing, magnificent, and in the background,
the severe square crests of the towers of Notre Dame.

As the place is worth looking at, no one goes thither. Hardly one
cart or wagoner passes in a quarter of an hour.

It chanced that Marius' solitary strolls led him to this plot of ground,
near the water. That day, there was a rarity on the boulevard,
a passer-by. Marius, vaguely impressed with the almost savage beauty
of the place, asked this passer-by:--"What is the name of this spot?"

The person replied: "It is the Lark's meadow."

And he added: "It was here that Ulbach killed the shepherdess
of Ivry."

But after the word "Lark" Marius heard nothing more. These sudden
congealments in the state of revery, which a single word suffices
to evoke, do occur. The entire thought is abruptly condensed around
an idea, and it is no longer capable of perceiving anything else.

The Lark was the appellation which had replaced Ursule in the depths
of Marius' melancholy.--"Stop," said he with a sort of unreasoning
stupor peculiar to these mysterious asides, "this is her meadow.
I shall know where she lives now."

It was absurd, but irresistible.

And every day he returned to that meadow of the Lark.

Javert's triumph in the Gorbeau hovel seemed complete, but had
not been so.

In the first place, and this constituted the principal anxiety,
Javert had not taken the prisoner prisoner. The assassinated man
who flees is more suspicious than the assassin, and it is probable that
this personage, who had been so precious a capture for the ruffians,
would be no less fine a prize for the authorities.

And then, Montparnasse had escaped Javert.

Another opportunity of laying hands on that "devil's dandy"
must be waited for. Montparnasse had, in fact, encountered Eponine
as she stood on the watch under the trees of the boulevard, and had
led her off, preferring to play Nemorin with the daughter rather
than Schinderhannes with the father. It was well that he did so.
He was free. As for Eponine, Javert had caused her to be seized;
a mediocre consolation. Eponine had joined Azelma at Les Madelonettes.

And finally, on the way from the Gorbeau house to La Force, one of
the principal prisoners, Claquesous, had been lost. It was not known
how this had been effected, the police agents and the sergeants "could
not understand it at all." He had converted himself into vapor,
he had slipped through the handcuffs, he had trickled through the
crevices of the carriage, the fiacre was cracked, and he had fled;
all that they were able to say was, that on arriving at the prison,
there was no Claquesous. Either the fairies or the police had had a
hand in it. Had Claquesous melted into the shadows like a snow-flake
in water? Had there been unavowed connivance of the police agents?
Did this man belong to the double enigma of order and disorder?
Was he concentric with infraction and repression? Had this
sphinx his fore paws in crime and his hind paws in authority?
Javert did not accept such comminations, and would have bristled up
against such compromises; but his squad included other inspectors
besides himself, who were more initiated than he, perhaps, although they
were his subordinates in the secrets of the Prefecture, and Claquesous
had been such a villain that he might make a very good agent.
It is an excellent thing for ruffianism and an admirable thing for
the police to be on such intimate juggling terms with the night.
These double-edged rascals do exist. However that may be,
Claquesous had gone astray and was not found again. Javert appeared
to be more irritated than amazed at this.

As for Marius, "that booby of a lawyer," who had probably become
frightened, and whose name Javert had forgotten, Javert attached
very little importance to him. Moreover, a lawyer can be hunted
up at any time. But was he a lawyer after all?

The investigation had begun.

The magistrate had thought it advisable not to put one of these men
of the band of Patron Minette in close confinement, in the hope that he
would chatter. This man was Brujon, the long-haired man of the Rue du
Petit-Banquier. He had been let loose in the Charlemagne courtyard,
and the eyes of the watchers were fixed on him.

This name of Brujon is one of the souvenirs of La Force.
In that hideous courtyard, called the court of the Batiment-Neuf (New
Building), which the administration called the court Saint-Bernard,
and which the robbers called the Fosseaux-Lions (The Lion's Ditch),
on that wall covered with scales and leprosy, which rose on the
left to a level with the roofs, near an old door of rusty iron
which led to the ancient chapel of the ducal residence of La Force,
then turned in a dormitory for ruffians, there could still be seen,
twelve years ago, a sort of fortress roughly carved in the stone
with a nail, and beneath it this signature:--

BRUJON, 1811.

The Brujon of 1811 was the father of the Brujon of 1832.

The latter, of whom the reader caught but a glimpse at the
Gorbeau house, was a very cunning and very adroit young spark,
with a bewildered and plaintive air. It was in consequence of this
plaintive air that the magistrate had released him, thinking him
more useful in the Charlemagne yard than in close confinement.

Robbers do not interrupt their profession because they are in the hands
of justice. They do not let themselves be put out by such a trifle
as that. To be in prison for one crime is no reason for not beginning
on another crime. They are artists, who have one picture in the salon,
and who toil, none the less, on a new work in their studios.

Brujon seemed to be stupefied by prison. He could sometimes
be seen standing by the hour together in front of the sutler's
window in the Charlemagne yard, staring like an idiot at the
sordid list of prices which began with: garlic, 62 centimes,
and ended with: cigar, 5 centimes. Or he passed his time in trembling,
chattering his teeth, saying that he had a fever, and inquiring
whether one of the eight and twenty beds in the fever ward was vacant.

All at once, towards the end of February, 1832, it was discovered
that Brujon, that somnolent fellow, had had three different
commissions executed by the errand-men of the establishment,
not under his own name, but in the name of three of his comrades;
and they had cost him in all fifty sous, an exorbitant outlay
which attracted the attention of the prison corporal.

Inquiries were instituted, and on consulting the tariff of
commissions posted in the convict's parlor, it was learned that
the fifty sous could be analyzed as follows: three commissions;
one to the Pantheon, ten sous; one to Val-de-Grace, fifteen sous;
and one to the Barriere de Grenelle, twenty-five sous. This last
was the dearest of the whole tariff. Now, at the Pantheon,
at the Val-de-Grace, and at the Barriere de Grenelle were situated
the domiciles of the three very redoubtable prowlers of the barriers,
Kruideniers, alias Bizarre, Glorieux, an ex-convict, and Barre-Carosse,
upon whom the attention of the police was directed by this incident.
It was thought that these men were members of Patron Minette;
two of those leaders, Babet and Gueulemer, had been captured.
It was supposed that the messages, which had been addressed,
not to houses, but to people who were waiting for them in the street,
must have contained information with regard to some crime that
had been plotted. They were in possession of other indications;
they laid hand on the three prowlers, and supposed that they had
circumvented some one or other of Brujon's machinations.

About a week after these measures had been taken, one night,
as the superintendent of the watch, who had been inspecting the lower
dormitory in the Batiment-Neuf, was about to drop his chestnut in
the box--this was the means adopted to make sure that the watchmen
performed their duties punctually; every hour a chestnut must be
dropped into all the boxes nailed to the doors of the dormitories--
a watchman looked through the peep-hole of the dormitory and beheld
Brujon sitting on his bed and writing something by the light of the
hall-lamp. The guardian entered, Brujon was put in a solitary cell
for a month, but they were not able to seize what he had written.
The police learned nothing further about it.

What is certain is, that on the following morning, a "postilion"
was flung from the Charlemagne yard into the Lions' Ditch, over the
five-story building which separated the two court-yards.

What prisoners call a "postilion" is a pallet of bread
artistically moulded, which is sent into Ireland, that is to say,
over the roofs of a prison, from one courtyard to another.
Etymology: over England; from one land to another; into Ireland.
This little pellet falls in the yard. The man who picks it up opens
it and finds in it a note addressed to some prisoner in that yard.
If it is a prisoner who finds the treasure, he forwards the note to
its destination; if it is a keeper, or one of the prisoners secretly
sold who are called sheep in prisons and foxes in the galleys,
the note is taken to the office and handed over to the police.

On this occasion, the postilion reached its address,
although the person to whom it was addressed was, at that moment,
in solitary confinement. This person was no other than Babet,
one of the four heads of Patron Minette.

The postilion contained a roll of paper on which only these two
lines were written:--

"Babet. There is an affair in the Rue Plumet. A gate on a garden."

This is what Brujon had written the night before.

In spite of male and female searchers, Babet managed to pass
the note on from La Force to the Salpetriere, to a "good friend"
whom he had and who was shut up there. This woman in turn transmitted
the note to another woman of her acquaintance, a certain Magnon,
who was strongly suspected by the police, though not yet arrested.
This Magnon, whose name the reader has already seen, had relations
with the Thenardier, which will be described in detail later on,
and she could, by going to see Eponine, serve as a bridge between the
Salpetriere and Les Madelonettes.

It happened, that at precisely that moment, as proofs were wanting
in the investigation directed against Thenardier in the matter
of his daughters, Eponine and Azelma were released. When Eponine
came out, Magnon, who was watching the gate of the Madelonettes,
handed her Brujon's note to Babet, charging her to look into
the matter.

Eponine went to the Rue Plumet, recognized the gate and the garden,
observed the house, spied, lurked, and, a few days later,
brought to Magnon, who delivers in the Rue Clocheperce, a biscuit,
which Magnon transmitted to Babet's mistress in the Salpetriere.
A biscuit, in the shady symbolism of prisons, signifies: Nothing to
be done.

So that in less than a week from that time, as Brujon and Babet met
in the circle of La Force, the one on his way to the examination,
the other on his way from it:--

"Well?" asked Brujon, "the Rue P.?"

"Biscuit," replied Babet. Thus did the foetus of crime engendered
by Brujon in La Force miscarry.

This miscarriage had its consequences, however, which were perfectly
distinct from Brujon's programme. The reader will see what they were.

Often when we think we are knotting one thread, we are tying
quite another.

Marius no longer went to see any one, but he sometimes encountered
Father Mabeuf by chance.

While Marius was slowly descending those melancholy steps
which may be called the cellar stairs, and which lead to places
without light, where the happy can be heard walking overhead,
M. Mabeuf was descending on his side.

The Flora of Cauteretz no longer sold at all. The experiments on
indigo had not been successful in the little garden of Austerlitz,
which had a bad exposure. M. Mabeuf could cultivate there only
a few plants which love shade and dampness. Nevertheless, he did
not become discouraged. He had obtained a corner in the Jardin
des Plantes, with a good exposure, to make his trials with indigo "at
his own expense." For this purpose he had pawned his copperplates
of the Flora. He had reduced his breakfast to two eggs, and he left
one of these for his old servant, to whom he had paid no wages for
the last fifteen months. And often his breakfast was his only meal.
He no longer smiled with his infantile smile, he had grown morose
and no longer received visitors. Marius did well not to dream
of going thither. Sometimes, at the hour when M. Mabeuf was on
his way to the Jardin des Plantes, the old man and the young man
passed each other on the Boulevard de l'Hopital. They did not speak,
and only exchanged a melancholy sign of the head. A heart-breaking
thing it is that there comes a moment when misery looses bonds!
Two men who have been friends become two chance passers-by.

Royal the bookseller was dead. M. Mabeuf no longer knew his books,
his garden, or his indigo: these were the three forms which happiness,
pleasure, and hope had assumed for him. This sufficed him for
his living. He said to himself: "When I shall have made my balls
of blueing, I shall be rich, I will withdraw my copperplates from
the pawn-shop, I will put my Flora in vogue again with trickery,
plenty of money and advertisements in the newspapers and I will buy,
I know well where, a copy of Pierre de Medine's Art de Naviguer,
with wood-cuts, edition of 1655." In the meantime, he toiled
all day over his plot of indigo, and at night he returned home
to water his garden, and to read his books. At that epoch,
M. Mabeuf was nearly eighty years of age.

One evening he had a singular apparition.

He had returned home while it was still broad daylight.
Mother Plutarque, whose health was declining, was ill and in bed.
He had dined on a bone, on which a little meat lingered, and a bit
of bread that he had found on the kitchen table, and had seated
himself on an overturned stone post, which took the place of a bench
in his garden.

Near this bench there rose, after the fashion in orchard-gardens,
a sort of large chest, of beams and planks, much dilapidated,
a rabbit-hutch on the ground floor, a fruit-closet on the first.
There was nothing in the hutch, but there were a few apples in
the fruit-closet,--the remains of the winter's provision.

M. Mabeuf had set himself to turning over and reading, with the
aid of his glasses, two books of which he was passionately fond
and in which, a serious thing at his age, he was interested.
His natural timidity rendered him accessible to the acceptance of
superstitions in a certain degree. The first of these books was the
famous treatise of President Delancre, De l'inconstance des Demons;
the other was a quarto by Mutor de la Rubaudiere, Sur les Diables
de Vauvert et les Gobelins de la Bievre. This last-mentioned old
volume interested him all the more, because his garden had been
one of the spots haunted by goblins in former times. The twilight
had begun to whiten what was on high and to blacken all below.
As he read, over the top of the book which he held in his hand,
Father Mabeuf was surveying his plants, and among others
a magnificent rhododendron which was one of his consolations;
four days of heat, wind, and sun without a drop of rain, had passed;
the stalks were bending, the buds drooping, the leaves falling;
all this needed water, the rhododendron was particularly sad.
Father Mabeuf was one of those persons for whom plants have souls.
The old man had toiled all day over his indigo plot, he was worn out
with fatigue, but he rose, laid his books on the bench, and walked,
all bent over and with tottering footsteps, to the well, but when he
had grasped the chain, he could not even draw it sufficiently to
unhook it. Then he turned round and cast a glance of anguish toward
heaven which was becoming studded with stars.

The evening had that serenity which overwhelms the troubles of man
beneath an indescribably mournful and eternal joy. The night
promised to be as arid as the day had been.

"Stars everywhere!" thought the old man; "not the tiniest cloud!
Not a drop of water!"

And his head, which had been upraised for a moment, fell back upon
his breast.

He raised it again, and once more looked at the sky, murmuring:--

"A tear of dew! A little pity!"

He tried again to unhook the chain of the well, and could not.

At that moment, he heard a voice saying:--

"Father Mabeuf, would you like to have me water your garden for you?"

At the same time, a noise as of a wild animal passing became
audible in the hedge, and he beheld emerging from the shrubbery
a sort of tall, slender girl, who drew herself up in front of him
and stared boldly at him. She had less the air of a human being
than of a form which had just blossomed forth from the twilight.

Before Father Mabeuf, who was easily terrified, and who was, as we
have said, quick to take alarm, was able to reply by a single syllable,
this being, whose movements had a sort of odd abruptness in the darkness,
had unhooked the chain, plunged in and withdrawn the bucket,
and filled the watering-pot, and the goodman beheld this apparition,
which had bare feet and a tattered petticoat, running about among
the flower-beds distributing life around her. The sound of the
watering-pot on the leaves filled Father Mabeuf's soul with ecstasy.
It seemed to him that the rhododendron was happy now.

The first bucketful emptied, the girl drew a second, then a third.
She watered the whole garden.

There was something about her, as she thus ran about among paths,
where her outline appeared perfectly black, waving her angular arms,
and with her fichu all in rags, that resembled a bat.

When she had finished, Father Mabeuf approached her with tears
in his eyes, and laid his hand on her brow.

"God will bless you," said he, "you are an angel since you take
care of the flowers."

"No," she replied. "I am the devil, but that's all the same to me."

The old man exclaimed, without either waiting for or hearing
her response:--

"What a pity that I am so unhappy and so poor, and that I can
do nothing for you!"

"You can do something," said she.

"What?"

"Tell me where M. Marius lives."

The old man did not understand. "What Monsieur Marius?"

He raised his glassy eyes and seemed to be seeking something
that had vanished.

"A young man who used to come here."

In the meantime, M. Mabeuf had searched his memory.

"Ah! yes--" he exclaimed. "I know what you mean. Wait!
Monsieur Marius--the Baron Marius Pontmercy, parbleu! He lives,--
or rather, he no longer lives,--ah well, I don't know."

As he spoke, he had bent over to train a branch of rhododendron,
and he continued:--

"Hold, I know now. He very often passes along the boulevard,
and goes in the direction of the Glaciere, Rue Croulebarbe.
The meadow of the Lark. Go there. It is not hard to meet him."

When M. Mabeuf straightened himself up, there was no longer any
one there; the girl had disappeared.

He was decidedly terrified.

"Really," he thought, "if my garden had not been watered, I should
think that she was a spirit."

An hour later, when he was in bed, it came back to him,
and as he fell asleep, at that confused moment when thought,
like that fabulous bird which changes itself into a fish in order
to cross the sea, little by little assumes the form of a dream
in order to traverse slumber, he said to himself in a bewildered way:--

"In sooth, that greatly resembles what Rubaudiere narrates
of the goblins. Could it have been a goblin?"

Some days after this visit of a "spirit" to Farmer Mabeuf, one morning,--
it was on a Monday, the day when Marius borrowed the hundred-sou
piece from Courfeyrac for Thenardier--Marius had put this coin
in his pocket, and before carrying it to the clerk's office,
he had gone "to take a little stroll," in the hope that this would
make him work on his return. It was always thus, however. As soon
as he rose, he seated himself before a book and a sheet of paper
in order to scribble some translation; his task at that epoch
consisted in turning into French a celebrated quarrel between Germans,
the Gans and Savigny controversy; he took Savigny, he took Gans,
read four lines, tried to write one, could not, saw a star between him
and his paper, and rose from his chair, saying: "I shall go out.
That will put me in spirits."

And off he went to the Lark's meadow.

There he beheld more than ever the star, and less than ever Savigny
and Gans.

He returned home, tried to take up his work again, and did not succeed;
there was no means of re-knotting a single one of the threads which
were broken in his brain; then he said to himself: "I will not go
out to-morrow. It prevents my working." And he went out every day.

He lived in the Lark's meadow more than in Courfeyrac's lodgings.
That was his real address: Boulevard de la Sante, at the seventh
tree from the Rue Croulebarbe.

That morning he had quitted the seventh tree and had seated himself
on the parapet of the River des Gobelins. A cheerful sunlight
penetrated the freshly unfolded and luminous leaves.

He was dreaming of "Her." And his meditation turning to a reproach,
fell back upon himself; he reflected dolefully on his idleness,
his paralysis of soul, which was gaining on him, and of that night
which was growing more dense every moment before him, to such a point
that he no longer even saw the sun.

Nevertheless, athwart this painful extrication of indistinct ideas
which was not even a monologue, so feeble had action become in him,
and he had no longer the force to care to despair, athwart this
melancholy absorption, sensations from without did reach him.
He heard behind him, beneath him, on both banks of the river,
the laundresses of the Gobelins beating their linen, and above
his head, the birds chattering and singing in the elm-trees.
On the one hand, the sound of liberty, the careless happiness
of the leisure which has wings; on the other, the sound of toil.
What caused him to meditate deeply, and almost reflect, were two
cheerful sounds.

All at once, in the midst of his dejected ecstasy, he heard
a familiar voice saying:--

"Come! Here he is!"

He raised his eyes, and recognized that wretched child who had come to him
one morning, the elder of the Thenardier daughters, Eponine; he knew
her name now. Strange to say, she had grown poorer and prettier,
two steps which it had not seemed within her power to take.
She had accomplished a double progress, towards the light and
towards distress. She was barefooted and in rags, as on the day
when she had so resolutely entered his chamber, only her rags were two
months older now, the holes were larger, the tatters more sordid.
It was the same harsh voice, the same brow dimmed and wrinkled with tan,
the same free, wild, and vacillating glance. She had besides,
more than formerly, in her face that indescribably terrified
and lamentable something which sojourn in a prison adds to wretchedness.

She had bits of straw and hay in her hair, not like Ophelia
through having gone mad from the contagion of Hamlet's madness,
but because she had slept in the loft of some stable.

And in spite of it all, she was beautiful. What a star art thou,
O youth!

In the meantime, she had halted in front of Marius with a trace
of joy in her livid countenance, and something which resembled a smile.

She stood for several moments as though incapable of speech.

"So I have met you at last!" she said at length. "Father Mabeuf
was right, it was on this boulevard! How I have hunted for you!
If you only knew! Do you know? I have been in the jug. A fortnight!
They let me out! seeing that there was nothing against me,
and that, moreover, I had not reached years of discretion. I lack
two months of it. Oh! how I have hunted for you! These six weeks!
So you don't live down there any more?"

"No," said Marius.

"Ah! I understand. Because of that affair. Those take-downs
are disagreeable. You cleared out. Come now! Why do you wear old
hats like this! A young man like you ought to have fine clothes.
Do you know, Monsieur Marius, Father Mabeuf calls you Baron Marius,
I don't know what. It isn't true that you are a baron? Barons are
old fellows, they go to the Luxembourg, in front of the chateau,
where there is the most sun, and they read the Quotidienne for a sou.
I once carried a letter to a baron of that sort. He was over a hundred
years old. Say, where do you live now?"

Marius made no reply.

"Ah!" she went on, "you have a hole in your shirt. I must sew it
up for you."

She resumed with an expression which gradually clouded over:--

"You don't seem glad to see me."

Marius held his peace; she remained silent for a moment, then exclaimed:--

"But if I choose, nevertheless, I could force you to look glad!"

"What?" demanded Marius. "What do you mean?"

"Ah! you used to call me thou," she retorted.

"Well, then, what dost thou mean?"

She bit her lips; she seemed to hesitate, as though a prey to some
sort of inward conflict. At last she appeared to come to a decision.

"So much the worse, I don't care. You have a melancholy air,
I want you to be pleased. Only promise me that you will smile.
I want to see you smile and hear you say: `Ah, well, that's good.'
Poor Mr. Marius! you know? You promised me that you would give me
anything I like--"

"Yes! Only speak!"

She looked Marius full in the eye, and said:--

"I have the address."

Marius turned pale. All the blood flowed back to his heart.

"What address?"

"The address that you asked me to get!"

She added, as though with an effort:--

"The address--you know very well!"

"Yes!" stammered Marius.

"Of that young lady."

This word uttered, she sighed deeply.

Marius sprang from the parapet on which he had been sitting
and seized her hand distractedly.

"Oh! Well! lead me thither! Tell me! Ask of me anything you wish!
Where is it?"

"Come with me," she responded. "I don't know the street or number
very well; it is in quite the other direction from here, but I know
the house well, I will take you to it."

She withdrew her hand and went on, in a tone which could have rent
the heart of an observer, but which did not even graze Marius
in his intoxicated and ecstatic state:--

"Oh! how glad you are!"

A cloud swept across Marius' brow. He seized Eponine by the arm:--

"Swear one thing to me!"

"Swear!" said she, "what does that mean? Come! You want me to swear?"

And she laughed.

"Your father! promise me, Eponine! Swear to me that you will not
give this address to your father!"

She turned to him with a stupefied air.

"Eponine! How do you know that my name is Eponine?"

"Promise what I tell you!"

But she did not seem to hear him.

"That's nice! You have called me Eponine!"

Marius grasped both her arms at once.

"But answer me, in the name of Heaven! pay attention to what I am
saying to you, swear to me that you will not tell your father this
address that you know!"

"My father!" said she. "Ah yes, my father! Be at ease.
He's in close confinement. Besides, what do I care for my father!"

"But you do not promise me!" exclaimed Marius.

"Let go of me!" she said, bursting into a laugh, "how you do shake me!
Yes! Yes! I promise that! I swear that to you! What is that to me?
I will not tell my father the address. There! Is that right?
Is that it?"

"Nor to any one?" said Marius.

"Nor to any one."

"Now," resumed Marius, "take me there."

"Immediately?"

"Immediately."

"Come along. Ah! how pleased he is!" said she.

After a few steps she halted.

"You are following me too closely, Monsieur Marius. Let me go
on ahead, and follow me so, without seeming to do it. A nice
young man like you must not be seen with a woman like me."

No tongue can express all that lay in that word, woman, thus pronounced
by that child.

She proceeded a dozen paces and then halted once more; Marius joined her.
She addressed him sideways, and without turning towards him:--

"By the way, you know that you promised me something?"

Marius fumbled in his pocket. All that he owned in the world
was the five francs intended for Thenardier the father. He took
them and laid them in Eponine's hand.

She opened her fingers and let the coin fall to the ground,
and gazed at him with a gloomy air.

"I don't want your money," said she.

BOOK THIRD.--THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET

About the middle of the last century, a chief justice in the Parliament
of Paris having a mistress and concealing the fact, for at that period
the grand seignors displayed their mistresses, and the bourgeois
concealed them, had "a little house" built in the Faubourg Saint-Germain,
in the deserted Rue Blomet, which is now called Rue Plumet,
not far from the spot which was then designated as Combat des Animaux.

This house was composed of a single-storied pavilion; two rooms
on the ground floor, two chambers on the first floor, a kitchen
down stairs, a boudoir up stairs, an attic under the roof, the whole
preceded by a garden with a large gate opening on the street.
This garden was about an acre and a half in extent. This was all
that could be seen by passers-by; but behind the pavilion there was
a narrow courtyard, and at the end of the courtyard a low building
consisting of two rooms and a cellar, a sort of preparation destined
to conceal a child and nurse in case of need. This building communicated
in the rear by a masked door which opened by a secret spring,
with a long, narrow, paved winding corridor, open to the sky,
hemmed in with two lofty walls, which, hidden with wonderful art,
and lost as it were between garden enclosures and cultivated land,
all of whose angles and detours it followed, ended in another door,
also with a secret lock which opened a quarter of a league away,
almost in another quarter, at the solitary extremity of the Rue
du Babylone.

Through this the chief justice entered, so that even those who were
spying on him and following him would merely have observed that the
justice betook himself every day in a mysterious way somewhere,
and would never have suspected that to go to the Rue de Babylone
was to go to the Rue Blomet. Thanks to clever purchasers of land,
the magistrate had been able to make a secret, sewer-like passage on
his own property, and consequently, without interference. Later on,
he had sold in little parcels, for gardens and market gardens,
the lots of ground adjoining the corridor, and the proprietors
of these lots on both sides thought they had a party wall before
their eyes, and did not even suspect the long, paved ribbon winding
between two walls amid their flower-beds and their orchards.
Only the birds beheld this curiosity. It is probable that the
linnets and tomtits of the last century gossiped a great deal about
the chief justice.

The pavilion, built of stone in the taste of Mansard,
wainscoted and furnished in the Watteau style, rocaille on
the inside, old-fashioned on the outside, walled in with a
triple hedge of flowers, had something discreet, coquettish,
and solemn about it, as befits a caprice of love and magistracy.

This house and corridor, which have now disappeared, were in
existence fifteen years ago. In '93 a coppersmith had purchased
the house with the idea of demolishing it, but had not been able
to pay the price; the nation made him bankrupt. So that it was
the house which demolished the coppersmith. After that, the house
remained uninhabited, and fell slowly to ruin, as does every
dwelling to which the presence of man does not communicate life.
It had remained fitted with its old furniture, was always for sale
or to let, and the ten or a dozen people who passed through
the Rue Plumet were warned of the fact by a yellow and illegible
bit of writing which had hung on the garden wall since 1819.

Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers-by might have
noticed that the bill had disappeared, and even that the shutters
on the first floor were open. The house was occupied, in fact.
The windows had short curtains, a sign that there was a woman about.

In the month of October, 1829, a man of a certain age had presented
himself and had hired the house just as it stood, including, of course,
the back building and the lane which ended in the Rue de Babylone.
He had had the secret openings of the two doors to this passage repaired.
The house, as we have just mentioned, was still very nearly
furnished with the justice's old fitting; the new tenant had
ordered some repairs, had added what was lacking here and there,
had replaced the paving-stones in the yard, bricks in the floors,
steps in the stairs, missing bits in the inlaid floors and the glass
in the lattice windows, and had finally installed himself there
with a young girl and an elderly maid-servant, without commotion,
rather like a person who is slipping in than like a man who is
entering his own house. The neighbors did not gossip about him,
for the reason that there were no neighbors.

This unobtrusive tenant was Jean Valjean, the young girl was Cosette.
The servant was a woman named Toussaint, whom Jean Valjean had
saved from the hospital and from wretchedness, and who was elderly,
a stammerer, and from the provinces, three qualities which had
decided Jean Valjean to take her with him. He had hired the
house under the name of M. Fauchelevent, independent gentleman.
In all that has been related heretofore, the reader has, doubtless,
been no less prompt than Thenardier to recognize Jean Valjean.

Why had Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Petit-Picpus? What
had happened?

Nothing had happened.

It will be remembered that Jean Valjean was happy in the convent,
so happy that his conscience finally took the alarm. He saw
Cosette every day, he felt paternity spring up and develop within
him more and more, he brooded over the soul of that child, he said
to himself that she was his, that nothing could take her from him,
that this would last indefinitely, that she would certainly become
a nun, being thereto gently incited every day, that thus the convent
was henceforth the universe for her as it was for him, that he
should grow old there, and that she would grow up there, that she
would grow old there, and that he should die there; that, in short,
delightful hope, no separation was possible. On reflecting upon this,
he fell into perplexity. He interrogated himself. He asked himself
if all that happiness were really his, if it were not composed of
the happiness of another, of the happiness of that child which he,
an old man, was confiscating and stealing; if that were not theft?
He said to himself, that this child had a right to know life before
renouncing it, that to deprive her in advance, and in some sort
without consulting her, of all joys, under the pretext of saving her
from all trials, to take advantage of her ignorance of her isolation,
in order to make an artificial vocation germinate in her,
was to rob a human creature of its nature and to lie to God.
And who knows if, when she came to be aware of all this some day,
and found herself a nun to her sorrow, Cosette would not come
to hate him? A last, almost selfish thought, and less heroic than
the rest, but which was intolerable to him. He resolved to quit
the convent.

He resolved on this; he recognized with anguish, the fact
that it was necessary. As for objections, there were none.
Five years' sojourn between these four walls and of disappearance
had necessarily destroyed or dispersed the elements of fear.
He could return tranquilly among men. He had grown old,
and all had undergone a change. Who would recognize him now?
And then, to face the worst, there was danger only for himself,
and he had no right to condemn Cosette to the cloister for the reason
that he had been condemned to the galleys. Besides, what is danger
in comparison with the right? Finally, nothing prevented his being
prudent and taking his precautions.

As for Cosette's education, it was almost finished and complete.

His determination once taken, he awaited an opportunity.
It was not long in presenting itself. Old Fauchelevent died.

Jean Valjean demanded an audience with the revered prioress and told
her that, having come into a little inheritance at the death of
his brother, which permitted him henceforth to live without working,
he should leave the service of the convent and take his daughter
with him; but that, as it was not just that Cosette, since she had
not taken the vows, should have received her education gratuitously,
he humbly begged the Reverend Prioress to see fit that he
should offer to the community, as indemnity, for the five years
which Cosette had spent there, the sum of five thousand francs.

It was thus that Jean Valjean quitted the convent
of the Perpetual Adoration.

On leaving the convent, he took in his own arms the little valise
the key to which he still wore on his person, and would permit
no porter to touch it. This puzzled Cosette, because of the odor
of embalming which proceeded from it.

Let us state at once, that this trunk never quitted him more.
He always had it in his chamber. It was the first and only thing
sometimes, that he carried off in his moving when he moved about.
Cosette laughed at it, and called this valise his inseparable, saying:
"I am jealous of it."

Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not reappear in the open air without
profound anxiety.

He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet, and hid himself from
sight there. Henceforth he was in the possession of the name:--
Ultime Fauchelevent.

At the same time he hired two other apartments in Paris, in order
that he might attract less attention than if he were to remain
always in the same quarter, and so that he could, at need,
take himself off at the slightest disquietude which should assail him,
and in short, so that he might not again be caught unprovided
as on the night when he had so miraculously escaped from Javert.
These two apartments were very pitiable, poor in appearance,
and in two quarters which were far remote from each other, the one
in the Rue de l'Ouest, the other in the Rue de l'Homme Arme.

He went from time to time, now to the Rue de l'Homme Arme,
now to the Rue de l'Ouest, to pass a month or six weeks,
without taking Toussaint. He had himself served by the porters,
and gave himself out as a gentleman from the suburbs, living on
his funds, and having a little temporary resting-place in town.
This lofty virtue had three domiciles in Paris for the sake
of escaping from the police.