________________________________________________
_ 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. _
Read next: VOLUME V: BOOK THIRD - MUD BUT THE SOUL: CHAPTER V. In the Case of Sand, as in That of Woman, There Is a Fineness Which Is Treacherous
Read previous: VOLUME V: BOOK THIRD - MUD BUT THE SOUL: CHAPTER III. The "Spun" Man
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