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HE ALSO BEARS HIS CROSS
Jean Valjean had resumed his march and had not again paused.
This march became more and more laborious.
The level of these vaults varies; the average height is about
five feet, six inches, and has been calculated for the stature
of a man; Jean Valjean was forced to bend over, in order not to
strike Marius against the vault; at every step he had to bend,
then to rise, and to feel incessantly of the wall.
The moisture of the stones, and the viscous nature of the
timber framework furnished but poor supports to which to cling,
either for hand or foot.
He stumbled along in the hideous dung-heap of the city.
The intermittent gleams from the air-holes only appeared at
very long intervals, and were so wan that the full sunlight seemed
like the light of the moon; all the rest was mist, miasma, opaqueness,
blackness.
Jean Valjean was both hungry and thirsty; especially thirsty;
and this, like the sea, was a place full of water where a man
cannot drink.
His strength, which was prodigious, as the reader knows, and
which had been but little decreased by age, thanks to his chaste
and sober life, began to give way, nevertheless.
Fatigue began to gain on him; and as his strength decreased,
it made the weight of his burden increase.
Marius, who was, perhaps, dead, weighed him down as inert
bodies weigh.
Jean Valjean held him in such a manner that his chest was
not oppressed, and so that respiration could proceed as well as
possible.
Between his legs he felt the rapid gliding of the rats. One
of them was frightened to such a degree that he bit him. From
time to time, a breath of fresh air reached him through the vent-holes
of the mouths of the sewer, and re-animated him.
It might have been three hours past midday when he reached
the belt-sewer.
He was, at first, astonished at this sudden widening.
He found himself, all at once, in a gallery where his outstretched
hands could not reach the two walls, and beneath a vault which
his head did not touch. The Grand Sewer is, in fact, eight feet
wide and seven feet high.
At the point where the Montmartre sewer joins the Grand Sewer,
two other subterranean galleries, that of the Rue de Provence,
and that of the Abattoir, form a square.
Between these four ways, a less sagacious man would have remained
undecided.
Jean Valjean selected the broadest, that is to say, the belt-sewer.
But here the question again came up--should he descend or ascend?
He thought that the situation required haste, and that he must
now gain the Seine at any risk.
In other terms, he must descend. He turned to the left.
It was well that he did so, for it is an error to suppose
that the belt-sewer has two outlets, the one in the direction
of Bercy, the other towards Passy, and that it is, as its name
indicates, the subterranean girdle of the Paris on the right bank.
The Grand Sewer, which is, it must be remembered, nothing
else than the old brook of Menilmontant, terminates, if one ascends
it, in a blind sack, that is to say, at its ancient point of departure
which was its source, at the foot of the knoll of Menilmontant.
There is no direct communication with the branch which collects
the waters of Paris beginning with the Quartier Popincourt, and
which falls into the Seine through the Amelot sewer above the
ancient Isle Louviers. This branch, which completes the collecting
sewer, is separated from it, under the Rue Menilmontant itself,
by a pile which marks the dividing point of the waters, between
upstream and downstream. If Jean Valjean had ascended the gallery
he would have arrived, after a thousand efforts, and broken down
with fatigue, and in an expiring condition, in the gloom, at a
wall.
He would have been lost.
In case of necessity, by retracing his steps a little way,
and entering the passage of the Filles-du-Calvaire, on condition
that he did not hesitate at the subterranean crossing of the Carrefour
Boucherat, and by taking the corridor Saint-Louis, then the Saint-Gilles
gut on the left, then turning to the right and avoiding the Saint-Sebastian
gallery, he might have reached the Amelot sewer, and thence, provided
that he did not go astray in the sort of F which lies under the
Bastille, he might have attained the outlet on the Seine near
the Arsenal. But in order to do this, he must have been thoroughly
familiar with the enormous madrepore of the sewer in all its ramifications
and in all its openings.
Now, we must again insist that he knew nothing of that frightful
drain which he was traversing; and had any one asked him in what
he was, he would have answered: "In the night."
His instinct served him well.
To descend was, in fact, possible safety.
He left on his right the two narrow passages which branch
out in the form of a claw under the Rue Laffitte and the Rue Saint-Georges
and the long, bifurcated corridor of the Chaussee d'Antin.
A little beyond an affluent, which was, probably, the Madeleine
branch, he halted.
He was extremely weary.
A passably large air-hole, probably the man-hole in the Rue
d'Anjou, furnished a light that was almost vivid. Jean Valjean,
with the gentleness of movement which a brother would exercise
towards his wounded brother, deposited Marius on the banquette
of the sewer.
Marius' blood-stained face appeared under the wan light of
the air-hole like the ashes at the bottom of a tomb. His eyes
were closed, his hair was plastered down on his temples like a
painter's brushes dried in red wash; his hands hung limp and dead.
A clot of blood had collected in the knot of his cravat; his
limbs were cold, and blood was clotted at the corners of his mouth;
his shirt had thrust itself into his wounds, the cloth of his
coat was chafing the yawning gashes in the living flesh. Jean
Valjean, pushing aside the garments with the tips of his fingers,
laid his hand upon Marius' breast; his heart was still beating.
Jean Valjean tore up his shirt, bandaged the young man's wounds
as well as he was able and stopped the flowing blood; then bending
over Marius, who still lay unconscious and almost without breathing,
in that half light, he gazed at him with inexpressible hatred.
On disarranging Marius' garments, he had found two things
in his pockets, the roll which had been forgotten there on the
preceding evening, and Marius' pocketbook.
He ate the roll and opened the pocketbook. On the first page
he found the four lines written by Marius. The reader will recall
them:
"My name is Marius Pontmercy.
Carry my body to my grandfather, M. Gillenormand, Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais."
Jean Valjean read these four lines by the light of the air-hole,
and remained for a moment as though absorbed in thought, repeating
in a low tone:
"Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, number 6, Monsieur Gillenormand."
He replaced the pocketbook in Marius' pocket.
He had eaten, his strength had returned to him; he took Marius
up once more upon his back, placed the latter's head carefully
on his right shoulder, and resumed his descent of the sewer.
The Grand Sewer, directed according to the course of the valley
of Menilmontant, is about two leagues long.
It is paved throughout a notable portion of its extent.
This torch of the names of the streets of Paris, with which
we are illuminating for the reader Jean Valjean's subterranean
march, Jean Valjean himself did not possess.
Nothing told him what zone of the city he was traversing,
nor what way he had made. Only the growing pallor of the pools
of light which he encountered from time to time indicated to him
that the sun was withdrawing from the pavement, and that the day
would soon be over; and the rolling of vehicles overhead, having
become intermittent instead of continuous, then having almost
ceased, he concluded that he was no longer under central Paris,
and that he was approaching some solitary region, in the vicinity
of the outer boulevards, or the extreme outer quays. Where there
are fewer houses and streets, the sewer has fewer air-holes. The
gloom deepened around Jean Valjean.
Nevertheless, he continued to advance, groping his way in
the dark.
Suddenly this darkness became terrible.
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