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_ 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. _
Read next: VOLUME V: BOOK THIRD - MUD BUT THE SOUL: CHAPTER II. Explanation
Read previous: VOLUME V: BOOK SECOND - THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN: CHAPTER VI. Future Progress
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