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THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES
It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.
Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea.
As in the ocean, the diver may disappear there.
The transition was an unheard-of one.
In the very heart of the city, Jean Valjean had escaped from
the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye, in the time required
to lift the cover and to replace it, he had passed from broad
daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to midnight, from
tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the stagnation
of the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even than
that of the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the
most absolute obscurity.
An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret
trap-door of Paris; to quit that street where death was on every
side, for that sort of sepulchre where there was life, was a strange
instant.
He remained for several seconds as though bewildered; listening,
stupefied.
The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him.
Celestial goodness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery.
Adorable ambuscades of providence!
Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not
know whether that which he was carrying in that grave was a living
being or a dead corpse.
His first sensation was one of blindness.
All of a sudden, he could see nothing.
It seemed to him too, that, in one instant, he had become
deaf.
He no longer heard anything.
The frantic storm of murder which had been let loose a few
feet above his head did not reach him, thanks to the thickness
of the earth which separated him from it, as we have said, otherwise
than faintly and indistinctly, and like a rumbling, in the depths.
He felt that the ground was solid under his feet; that was all;
but that was enough.
He extended one arm and then the other, touched the walls
on both sides, and perceived that the passage was narrow; he slipped,
and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. He cautiously put
forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some gulf; he discovered
that the paving continued.
A gust of fetidness informed him of the place in which he
stood.
After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind.
A little light fell through the man-hole through which he
had descended, and his eyes became accustomed to this cavern.
He began to distinguish something. The passage in which he
had burrowed--no other word can better express the situation--was
walled in behind him.
It was one of those blind alleys, which the special jargon
terms branches. In front of him there was another wall, a wall
like night. The light of the air-hole died out ten or twelve paces
from the point where Jean Valjean stood, and barely cast a wan
pallor on a few metres of the damp walls of the sewer.
Beyond, the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate thither seemed
horrible, an entrance into it appeared like an engulfment.
A man could, however, plunge into that wall of fog and it
was necessary so to do.
Haste was even requisite. It occurred to Jean Valjean that
the grating which he had caught sight of under the flag-stones
might also catch the eye of the soldiery, and that everything
hung upon this chance.
They also might descend into that well and search it.
There was not a minute to be lost. He had deposited Marius
on the ground, he picked him up again,-- that is the real word
for it,--placed him on his shoulders once more, and set out.
He plunged resolutely into the gloom.
The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied.
Perils of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them,
perchance.
After the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the cavern
of miasmas and traps; after chaos, the sewer. Jean Valjean had
fallen from one circle of hell into another.
When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt.
A problem presented itself.
The passage terminated in another gut which he encountered
across his path.
There two ways presented themselves. Which should he take?
Ought he to turn to the left or to the right? How was he to
find his bearings in that black labyrinth? This labyrinth, to
which we have already called the reader's attention, has a clue,
which is its slope.
To follow to the slope is to arrive at the river.
This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.
He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer des Halles;
that if he were to choose the path to the left and follow the
slope, he would arrive, in less than a quarter of an hour, at
some mouth on the Seine between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf,
that is to say, he would make his appearance in broad daylight
on the most densely peopled spot in Paris.
Perhaps he would come out on some man-hole at the intersection
of streets.
Amazement of the passers-by at beholding two bleeding men
emerge from the earth at their feet. Arrival of the police, a
call to arms of the neighboring post of guards.
Thus they would be seized before they had even got out. It
would be better to plunge into that labyrinth, to confide themselves
to that black gloom, and to trust to Providence for the outcome.
He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.
When he had turned the angle of the gallery, the distant glimmer
of an air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell upon
him once more, and he became blind again.
Nevertheless, he advanced as rapidly as possible.
Marius' two arms were passed round his neck, and the former's
feet dragged behind him.
He held both these arms with one hand, and groped along the
wall with the other.
Marius' cheek touched his, and clung there, bleeding. He felt
a warm stream which came from Marius trickling down upon him and
making its way under his clothes.
But a humid warmth near his ear, which the mouth of the wounded
man touched, indicated respiration, and consequently, life.
The passage along which Jean Valjean was now proceeding was
not so narrow as the first. Jean Valjean walked through it with
considerable difficulty. The rain of the preceding day had not,
as yet, entirely run off, and it created a little torrent in the
centre of the bottom, and he was forced to hug the wall in order
not to have his feet in the water.
Thus he proceeded in the gloom.
He resembled the beings of the night groping in the invisible
and lost beneath the earth in veins of shadow.
Still, little by little, whether it was that the distant air-holes
emitted a little wavering light in this opaque gloom, or whether
his eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision
returned to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea,
now of the wall which he touched, now of the vault beneath which
he was passing.
The pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune
and ends by finding God there.
It was not easy to direct his course.
The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of
the streets which lie above it.
There were then in Paris two thousand two hundred streets.
Let the reader imagine himself beneath that forest of gloomy
branches which is called the sewer. The system of sewers existing
at that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of
eleven leagues.
We have said above, that the actual net-work, thanks to the
special activity of the last thirty years, was no less than sixty
leagues in extent.
Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder.
He thought that he was beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it
was a pity that it was not so. Under the Rue Saint-Denis there
is an old stone sewer which dates from Louis XIII.
and which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the
Grand Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation
of the ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-Martin
sewer, whose four arms describe a cross.
But the gut of the Petite-Truanderie the entrance to which
was in the vicinity of the Corinthe wine-shop has never communicated
with the sewer of the Rue Saint-Denis; it ended at the Montmartre
sewer, and it was in this that Jean Valjean was entangled.
There opportunities of losing oneself abound.
The Montmartre sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the
ancient network.
Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer of
the markets whose geometrical plan presents the appearance of
a multitude of parrots' roosts piled on top of each other; but
he had before him more than one embarrassing encounter and more
than one street corner--for they are streets-- presenting itself
in the gloom like an interrogation point; first, on his left,
the vast sewer of the Platriere, a sort of Chinese puzzle, thrusting
out and entangling its chaos of Ts and Zs under the Post-Office
and under the rotunda of the Wheat Market, as far as the Seine,
where it terminates in a Y; secondly, on his right, the curving
corridor of the Rue du Cadran with its three teeth, which are
also blind courts; thirdly, on his left, the branch of the Mail,
complicated, almost at its inception, with a sort of fork, and
proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag until it ends in the grand
crypt of the outlet of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in every
direction; and lastly, the blind alley of a passage of the Rue
des Jeuneurs, without counting little ducts here and there, before
reaching the belt sewer, which alone could conduct him to some
issue sufficiently distant to be safe.
Had Jean Valjean had any idea of all that we have here pointed
out, he would speedily have perceived, merely by feeling the wall,
that he was not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis.
Instead of the ancient stone, instead of the antique architecture,
haughty and royal even in the sewer, with pavement and string
courses of granite and mortar costing eight hundred livres the
fathom, he would have felt under his hand contemporary cheapness,
economical expedients, porous stone filled with mortar on a concrete
foundation, which costs two hundred francs the metre, and the
bourgeoise masonry known as a petits materiaux--small stuff; but
of all this he knew nothing.
He advanced with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing,
knowing nothing, buried in chance, that is to say, engulfed in
providence.
By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him.
The gloom which enveloped him penetrated his spirit.
He walked in an enigma.
This aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in
a dizzy fashion.
It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows.
Jean Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route
without seeing it.
In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last.
How was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he
find it in time? would that colossal subterranean sponge with
its stone cavities, allow itself to be penetrated and pierced?
should he there encounter some unexpected knot in the darkness?
should he arrive at the inextricable and the impassable? would
Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of hunger? should they end
by both getting lost, and by furnishing two skeletons in a nook
of that night?
He did not know. He put all these questions to himself without
replying to them. The intestines of Paris form a precipice.
Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.
All at once, he had a surprise.
At the most unforeseen moment, and without having ceased to
walk in a straight line, he perceived that he was no longer ascending;
the water of the rivulet was beating against his heels, instead
of meeting him at his toes. The sewer was now descending.
Why?
Was he about to arrive suddenly at the Seine?
This danger was a great one, but the peril of retreating was
still greater.
He continued to advance.
It was not towards the Seine that he was proceeding.
The ridge which the soil of Paris forms on its right bank
empties one of its water-sheds into the Seine and the other into
the Grand Sewer. The crest of this ridge which determines the
division of the waters describes a very capricious line.
The culminating point, which is the point of separation of
the currents, is in the Sainte-Avoye sewer, beyond the Rue Michelle-Comte,
in the sewer of the Louvre, near the boulevards, and in the Montmartre
sewer, near the Halles. It was this culminating point that Jean
Valjean had reached.
He was directing his course towards the belt sewer; he was
on the right path. But he did not know it.
Every time that he encountered a branch, he felt of its angles,
and if he found that the opening which presented itself was smaller
than the passage in which he was, he did not enter but continued
his route, rightly judging that every narrower way must needs
terminate in a blind alley, and could only lead him further from
his goal, that is to say, the outlet.
Thus he avoided the quadruple trap which was set for him in
the darkness by the four labyrinths which we have just enumerated.
At a certain moment, he perceived that he was emerging from
beneath the Paris which was petrified by the uprising, where the
barricades had suppressed circulation, and that he was entering
beneath the living and normal Paris.
Overhead he suddenly heard a noise as of thunder, distant
but continuous.
It was the rumbling of vehicles.
He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according
to the calculation which he made in his own mind, and he had not
yet thought of rest; he had merely changed the hand with which
he was holding Marius.
The darkness was more profound than ever, but its very depth
reassured him.
All at once, he saw his shadow in front of him.
It was outlined on a faint, almost indistinct reddish glow,
which vaguely empurpled the flooring vault underfoot, and the
vault overhead, and gilded to his right and to his left the two
viscous walls of the passage. Stupefied, he turned round.
Behind him, in the portion of the passage which he had just
passed through, at a distance which appeared to him immense, piercing
the dense obscurity, flamed a sort of horrible star which had
the air of surveying him.
It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the
sewer.
In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about
in a confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible.
THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES
It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.
Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea.
As in the ocean, the diver may disappear there.
The transition was an unheard-of one.
In the very heart of the city, Jean Valjean had escaped from
the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye, in the time required
to lift the cover and to replace it, he had passed from broad
daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to midnight, from
tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the stagnation
of the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even than
that of the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the
most absolute obscurity.
An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret
trap-door of Paris; to quit that street where death was on every
side, for that sort of sepulchre where there was life, was a strange
instant.
He remained for several seconds as though bewildered; listening,
stupefied.
The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him.
Celestial goodness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery.
Adorable ambuscades of providence!
Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not
know whether that which he was carrying in that grave was a living
being or a dead corpse.
His first sensation was one of blindness.
All of a sudden, he could see nothing.
It seemed to him too, that, in one instant, he had become
deaf.
He no longer heard anything.
The frantic storm of murder which had been let loose a few
feet above his head did not reach him, thanks to the thickness
of the earth which separated him from it, as we have said, otherwise
than faintly and indistinctly, and like a rumbling, in the depths.
He felt that the ground was solid under his feet; that was all;
but that was enough.
He extended one arm and then the other, touched the walls
on both sides, and perceived that the passage was narrow; he slipped,
and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. He cautiously put
forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some gulf; he discovered
that the paving continued.
A gust of fetidness informed him of the place in which he
stood.
After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind.
A little light fell through the man-hole through which he
had descended, and his eyes became accustomed to this cavern.
He began to distinguish something. The passage in which he
had burrowed--no other word can better express the situation--was
walled in behind him.
It was one of those blind alleys, which the special jargon
terms branches. In front of him there was another wall, a wall
like night. The light of the air-hole died out ten or twelve paces
from the point where Jean Valjean stood, and barely cast a wan
pallor on a few metres of the damp walls of the sewer.
Beyond, the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate thither seemed
horrible, an entrance into it appeared like an engulfment.
A man could, however, plunge into that wall of fog and it
was necessary so to do.
Haste was even requisite. It occurred to Jean Valjean that
the grating which he had caught sight of under the flag-stones
might also catch the eye of the soldiery, and that everything
hung upon this chance.
They also might descend into that well and search it.
There was not a minute to be lost. He had deposited Marius
on the ground, he picked him up again,-- that is the real word
for it,--placed him on his shoulders once more, and set out.
He plunged resolutely into the gloom.
The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied.
Perils of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them,
perchance.
After the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the cavern
of miasmas and traps; after chaos, the sewer. Jean Valjean had
fallen from one circle of hell into another.
When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt.
A problem presented itself.
The passage terminated in another gut which he encountered
across his path.
There two ways presented themselves. Which should he take?
Ought he to turn to the left or to the right? How was he to
find his bearings in that black labyrinth? This labyrinth, to
which we have already called the reader's attention, has a clue,
which is its slope.
To follow to the slope is to arrive at the river.
This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.
He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer des Halles;
that if he were to choose the path to the left and follow the
slope, he would arrive, in less than a quarter of an hour, at
some mouth on the Seine between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf,
that is to say, he would make his appearance in broad daylight
on the most densely peopled spot in Paris.
Perhaps he would come out on some man-hole at the intersection
of streets.
Amazement of the passers-by at beholding two bleeding men
emerge from the earth at their feet. Arrival of the police, a
call to arms of the neighboring post of guards.
Thus they would be seized before they had even got out. It
would be better to plunge into that labyrinth, to confide themselves
to that black gloom, and to trust to Providence for the outcome.
He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.
When he had turned the angle of the gallery, the distant glimmer
of an air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell upon
him once more, and he became blind again.
Nevertheless, he advanced as rapidly as possible.
Marius' two arms were passed round his neck, and the former's
feet dragged behind him.
He held both these arms with one hand, and groped along the
wall with the other.
Marius' cheek touched his, and clung there, bleeding. He felt
a warm stream which came from Marius trickling down upon him and
making its way under his clothes.
But a humid warmth near his ear, which the mouth of the wounded
man touched, indicated respiration, and consequently, life.
The passage along which Jean Valjean was now proceeding was
not so narrow as the first. Jean Valjean walked through it with
considerable difficulty. The rain of the preceding day had not,
as yet, entirely run off, and it created a little torrent in the
centre of the bottom, and he was forced to hug the wall in order
not to have his feet in the water.
Thus he proceeded in the gloom.
He resembled the beings of the night groping in the invisible
and lost beneath the earth in veins of shadow.
Still, little by little, whether it was that the distant air-holes
emitted a little wavering light in this opaque gloom, or whether
his eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision
returned to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea,
now of the wall which he touched, now of the vault beneath which
he was passing.
The pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune
and ends by finding God there.
It was not easy to direct his course.
The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of
the streets which lie above it.
There were then in Paris two thousand two hundred streets.
Let the reader imagine himself beneath that forest of gloomy
branches which is called the sewer. The system of sewers existing
at that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of
eleven leagues.
We have said above, that the actual net-work, thanks to the
special activity of the last thirty years, was no less than sixty
leagues in extent.
Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder.
He thought that he was beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it
was a pity that it was not so. Under the Rue Saint-Denis there
is an old stone sewer which dates from Louis XIII.
and which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the
Grand Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation
of the ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-Martin
sewer, whose four arms describe a cross.
But the gut of the Petite-Truanderie the entrance to which
was in the vicinity of the Corinthe wine-shop has never communicated
with the sewer of the Rue Saint-Denis; it ended at the Montmartre
sewer, and it was in this that Jean Valjean was entangled.
There opportunities of losing oneself abound.
The Montmartre sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the
ancient network.
Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer of
the markets whose geometrical plan presents the appearance of
a multitude of parrots' roosts piled on top of each other; but
he had before him more than one embarrassing encounter and more
than one street corner--for they are streets-- presenting itself
in the gloom like an interrogation point; first, on his left,
the vast sewer of the Platriere, a sort of Chinese puzzle, thrusting
out and entangling its chaos of Ts and Zs under the Post-Office
and under the rotunda of the Wheat Market, as far as the Seine,
where it terminates in a Y; secondly, on his right, the curving
corridor of the Rue du Cadran with its three teeth, which are
also blind courts; thirdly, on his left, the branch of the Mail,
complicated, almost at its inception, with a sort of fork, and
proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag until it ends in the grand
crypt of the outlet of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in every
direction; and lastly, the blind alley of a passage of the Rue
des Jeuneurs, without counting little ducts here and there, before
reaching the belt sewer, which alone could conduct him to some
issue sufficiently distant to be safe.
Had Jean Valjean had any idea of all that we have here pointed
out, he would speedily have perceived, merely by feeling the wall,
that he was not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis.
Instead of the ancient stone, instead of the antique architecture,
haughty and royal even in the sewer, with pavement and string
courses of granite and mortar costing eight hundred livres the
fathom, he would have felt under his hand contemporary cheapness,
economical expedients, porous stone filled with mortar on a concrete
foundation, which costs two hundred francs the metre, and the
bourgeoise masonry known as a petits materiaux--small stuff; but
of all this he knew nothing.
He advanced with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing,
knowing nothing, buried in chance, that is to say, engulfed in
providence.
By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him.
The gloom which enveloped him penetrated his spirit.
He walked in an enigma.
This aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in
a dizzy fashion.
It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows.
Jean Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route
without seeing it.
In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last.
How was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he
find it in time? would that colossal subterranean sponge with
its stone cavities, allow itself to be penetrated and pierced?
should he there encounter some unexpected knot in the darkness?
should he arrive at the inextricable and the impassable? would
Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of hunger? should they end
by both getting lost, and by furnishing two skeletons in a nook
of that night?
He did not know. He put all these questions to himself without
replying to them. The intestines of Paris form a precipice.
Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.
All at once, he had a surprise.
At the most unforeseen moment, and without having ceased to
walk in a straight line, he perceived that he was no longer ascending;
the water of the rivulet was beating against his heels, instead
of meeting him at his toes. The sewer was now descending.
Why?
Was he about to arrive suddenly at the Seine?
This danger was a great one, but the peril of retreating was
still greater.
He continued to advance.
It was not towards the Seine that he was proceeding.
The ridge which the soil of Paris forms on its right bank
empties one of its water-sheds into the Seine and the other into
the Grand Sewer. The crest of this ridge which determines the
division of the waters describes a very capricious line.
The culminating point, which is the point of separation of
the currents, is in the Sainte-Avoye sewer, beyond the Rue Michelle-Comte,
in the sewer of the Louvre, near the boulevards, and in the Montmartre
sewer, near the Halles. It was this culminating point that Jean
Valjean had reached.
He was directing his course towards the belt sewer; he was
on the right path. But he did not know it.
Every time that he encountered a branch, he felt of its angles,
and if he found that the opening which presented itself was smaller
than the passage in which he was, he did not enter but continued
his route, rightly judging that every narrower way must needs
terminate in a blind alley, and could only lead him further from
his goal, that is to say, the outlet.
Thus he avoided the quadruple trap which was set for him in
the darkness by the four labyrinths which we have just enumerated.
At a certain moment, he perceived that he was emerging from
beneath the Paris which was petrified by the uprising, where the
barricades had suppressed circulation, and that he was entering
beneath the living and normal Paris.
Overhead he suddenly heard a noise as of thunder, distant
but continuous.
It was the rumbling of vehicles.
He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according
to the calculation which he made in his own mind, and he had not
yet thought of rest; he had merely changed the hand with which
he was holding Marius.
The darkness was more profound than ever, but its very depth
reassured him.
All at once, he saw his shadow in front of him.
It was outlined on a faint, almost indistinct reddish glow,
which vaguely empurpled the flooring vault underfoot, and the
vault overhead, and gilded to his right and to his left the two
viscous walls of the passage. Stupefied, he turned round.
Behind him, in the portion of the passage which he had just
passed through, at a distance which appeared to him immense, piercing
the dense obscurity, flamed a sort of horrible star which had
the air of surveying him.
It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the
sewer.
In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about
in a confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible.
THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES
It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.
Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea.
As in the ocean, the diver may disappear there.
The transition was an unheard-of one.
In the very heart of the city, Jean Valjean had escaped from
the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye, in the time required
to lift the cover and to replace it, he had passed from broad
daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to midnight, from
tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the stagnation
of the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even than
that of the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the
most absolute obscurity.
An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret
trap-door of Paris; to quit that street where death was on every
side, for that sort of sepulchre where there was life, was a strange
instant.
He remained for several seconds as though bewildered; listening,
stupefied.
The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him.
Celestial goodness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery.
Adorable ambuscades of providence!
Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not
know whether that which he was carrying in that grave was a living
being or a dead corpse.
His first sensation was one of blindness.
All of a sudden, he could see nothing.
It seemed to him too, that, in one instant, he had become
deaf.
He no longer heard anything.
The frantic storm of murder which had been let loose a few
feet above his head did not reach him, thanks to the thickness
of the earth which separated him from it, as we have said, otherwise
than faintly and indistinctly, and like a rumbling, in the depths.
He felt that the ground was solid under his feet; that was all;
but that was enough.
He extended one arm and then the other, touched the walls
on both sides, and perceived that the passage was narrow; he slipped,
and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. He cautiously put
forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some gulf; he discovered
that the paving continued.
A gust of fetidness informed him of the place in which he
stood.
After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind.
A little light fell through the man-hole through which he
had descended, and his eyes became accustomed to this cavern.
He began to distinguish something. The passage in which he
had burrowed--no other word can better express the situation--was
walled in behind him.
It was one of those blind alleys, which the special jargon
terms branches. In front of him there was another wall, a wall
like night. The light of the air-hole died out ten or twelve paces
from the point where Jean Valjean stood, and barely cast a wan
pallor on a few metres of the damp walls of the sewer.
Beyond, the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate thither seemed
horrible, an entrance into it appeared like an engulfment.
A man could, however, plunge into that wall of fog and it
was necessary so to do.
Haste was even requisite. It occurred to Jean Valjean that
the grating which he had caught sight of under the flag-stones
might also catch the eye of the soldiery, and that everything
hung upon this chance.
They also might descend into that well and search it.
There was not a minute to be lost. He had deposited Marius
on the ground, he picked him up again,-- that is the real word
for it,--placed him on his shoulders once more, and set out.
He plunged resolutely into the gloom.
The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied.
Perils of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them,
perchance.
After the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the cavern
of miasmas and traps; after chaos, the sewer. Jean Valjean had
fallen from one circle of hell into another.
When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt.
A problem presented itself.
The passage terminated in another gut which he encountered
across his path.
There two ways presented themselves. Which should he take?
Ought he to turn to the left or to the right? How was he to
find his bearings in that black labyrinth? This labyrinth, to
which we have already called the reader's attention, has a clue,
which is its slope.
To follow to the slope is to arrive at the river.
This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.
He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer des Halles;
that if he were to choose the path to the left and follow the
slope, he would arrive, in less than a quarter of an hour, at
some mouth on the Seine between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf,
that is to say, he would make his appearance in broad daylight
on the most densely peopled spot in Paris.
Perhaps he would come out on some man-hole at the intersection
of streets.
Amazement of the passers-by at beholding two bleeding men
emerge from the earth at their feet. Arrival of the police, a
call to arms of the neighboring post of guards.
Thus they would be seized before they had even got out. It
would be better to plunge into that labyrinth, to confide themselves
to that black gloom, and to trust to Providence for the outcome.
He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.
When he had turned the angle of the gallery, the distant glimmer
of an air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell upon
him once more, and he became blind again.
Nevertheless, he advanced as rapidly as possible.
Marius' two arms were passed round his neck, and the former's
feet dragged behind him.
He held both these arms with one hand, and groped along the
wall with the other.
Marius' cheek touched his, and clung there, bleeding. He felt
a warm stream which came from Marius trickling down upon him and
making its way under his clothes.
But a humid warmth near his ear, which the mouth of the wounded
man touched, indicated respiration, and consequently, life.
The passage along which Jean Valjean was now proceeding was
not so narrow as the first. Jean Valjean walked through it with
considerable difficulty. The rain of the preceding day had not,
as yet, entirely run off, and it created a little torrent in the
centre of the bottom, and he was forced to hug the wall in order
not to have his feet in the water.
Thus he proceeded in the gloom.
He resembled the beings of the night groping in the invisible
and lost beneath the earth in veins of shadow.
Still, little by little, whether it was that the distant air-holes
emitted a little wavering light in this opaque gloom, or whether
his eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision
returned to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea,
now of the wall which he touched, now of the vault beneath which
he was passing.
The pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune
and ends by finding God there.
It was not easy to direct his course.
The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of
the streets which lie above it.
There were then in Paris two thousand two hundred streets.
Let the reader imagine himself beneath that forest of gloomy
branches which is called the sewer. The system of sewers existing
at that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of
eleven leagues.
We have said above, that the actual net-work, thanks to the
special activity of the last thirty years, was no less than sixty
leagues in extent.
Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder.
He thought that he was beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it
was a pity that it was not so. Under the Rue Saint-Denis there
is an old stone sewer which dates from Louis XIII.
and which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the
Grand Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation
of the ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-Martin
sewer, whose four arms describe a cross.
But the gut of the Petite-Truanderie the entrance to which
was in the vicinity of the Corinthe wine-shop has never communicated
with the sewer of the Rue Saint-Denis; it ended at the Montmartre
sewer, and it was in this that Jean Valjean was entangled.
There opportunities of losing oneself abound.
The Montmartre sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the
ancient network.
Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer of
the markets whose geometrical plan presents the appearance of
a multitude of parrots' roosts piled on top of each other; but
he had before him more than one embarrassing encounter and more
than one street corner--for they are streets-- presenting itself
in the gloom like an interrogation point; first, on his left,
the vast sewer of the Platriere, a sort of Chinese puzzle, thrusting
out and entangling its chaos of Ts and Zs under the Post-Office
and under the rotunda of the Wheat Market, as far as the Seine,
where it terminates in a Y; secondly, on his right, the curving
corridor of the Rue du Cadran with its three teeth, which are
also blind courts; thirdly, on his left, the branch of the Mail,
complicated, almost at its inception, with a sort of fork, and
proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag until it ends in the grand
crypt of the outlet of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in every
direction; and lastly, the blind alley of a passage of the Rue
des Jeuneurs, without counting little ducts here and there, before
reaching the belt sewer, which alone could conduct him to some
issue sufficiently distant to be safe.
Had Jean Valjean had any idea of all that we have here pointed
out, he would speedily have perceived, merely by feeling the wall,
that he was not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis.
Instead of the ancient stone, instead of the antique architecture,
haughty and royal even in the sewer, with pavement and string
courses of granite and mortar costing eight hundred livres the
fathom, he would have felt under his hand contemporary cheapness,
economical expedients, porous stone filled with mortar on a concrete
foundation, which costs two hundred francs the metre, and the
bourgeoise masonry known as a petits materiaux--small stuff; but
of all this he knew nothing.
He advanced with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing,
knowing nothing, buried in chance, that is to say, engulfed in
providence.
By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him.
The gloom which enveloped him penetrated his spirit.
He walked in an enigma.
This aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in
a dizzy fashion.
It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows.
Jean Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route
without seeing it.
In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last.
How was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he
find it in time? would that colossal subterranean sponge with
its stone cavities, allow itself to be penetrated and pierced?
should he there encounter some unexpected knot in the darkness?
should he arrive at the inextricable and the impassable? would
Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of hunger? should they end
by both getting lost, and by furnishing two skeletons in a nook
of that night?
He did not know. He put all these questions to himself without
replying to them. The intestines of Paris form a precipice.
Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.
All at once, he had a surprise.
At the most unforeseen moment, and without having ceased to
walk in a straight line, he perceived that he was no longer ascending;
the water of the rivulet was beating against his heels, instead
of meeting him at his toes. The sewer was now descending.
Why?
Was he about to arrive suddenly at the Seine?
This danger was a great one, but the peril of retreating was
still greater.
He continued to advance.
It was not towards the Seine that he was proceeding.
The ridge which the soil of Paris forms on its right bank
empties one of its water-sheds into the Seine and the other into
the Grand Sewer. The crest of this ridge which determines the
division of the waters describes a very capricious line.
The culminating point, which is the point of separation of
the currents, is in the Sainte-Avoye sewer, beyond the Rue Michelle-Comte,
in the sewer of the Louvre, near the boulevards, and in the Montmartre
sewer, near the Halles. It was this culminating point that Jean
Valjean had reached.
He was directing his course towards the belt sewer; he was
on the right path. But he did not know it.
Every time that he encountered a branch, he felt of its angles,
and if he found that the opening which presented itself was smaller
than the passage in which he was, he did not enter but continued
his route, rightly judging that every narrower way must needs
terminate in a blind alley, and could only lead him further from
his goal, that is to say, the outlet.
Thus he avoided the quadruple trap which was set for him in
the darkness by the four labyrinths which we have just enumerated.
At a certain moment, he perceived that he was emerging from
beneath the Paris which was petrified by the uprising, where the
barricades had suppressed circulation, and that he was entering
beneath the living and normal Paris.
Overhead he suddenly heard a noise as of thunder, distant
but continuous.
It was the rumbling of vehicles.
He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according
to the calculation which he made in his own mind, and he had not
yet thought of rest; he had merely changed the hand with which
he was holding Marius.
The darkness was more profound than ever, but its very depth
reassured him.
All at once, he saw his shadow in front of him.
It was outlined on a faint, almost indistinct reddish glow,
which vaguely empurpled the flooring vault underfoot, and the
vault overhead, and gilded to his right and to his left the two
viscous walls of the passage. Stupefied, he turned round.
Behind him, in the portion of the passage which he had just
passed through, at a distance which appeared to him immense, piercing
the dense obscurity, flamed a sort of horrible star which had
the air of surveying him.
It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the
sewer.
In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about
in a confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible.
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