Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Victor Hugo

  She was rising red behind the low dome of La Salpêtrière.

  Marius returned to No. 50-52 with rapid strides. The door was still open, when he arrived. He ascended the stairs on tiptoe, and glided along the wall of the hall as far as his room. This hall, it will be remembered, was lined on both sides by garrets, which were all at that time empty and to let. Ma‘am Burgon usually left the doors open. As he passed by one of these doors, Marius thought he perceived in the unoccupied cell four motionless heads, which were made dimly visible by a remnant of daylight falling through the little window. Marius, not wishing to be seen, did not endeavour to see. He succeeded in getting into his room without being perceived and without any noise. It was time. A moment afterwards, he heard Ma’am Burgon going out and closing the door of the house.

  15 (16)

  IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE SONG SET TO AN ENGLISH AIR IN FASHION IN 1832

  MARIUS sat down on his bed. It might have been half-past five o‘clock. A half-hour only separated him from what was to come. He heard his arteries beat as one hears the ticking of a watch in the dark. He thought of this double march that was going on that moment in the darkness, crime advancing on the one hand, justice coming on the other. He was not afraid, but he could not think without a sort of shudder of the things which were so soon to take place. To him, as to all those whom some surprising adventure has suddenly befallen, this whole day seemed but a dream; and, to assure himself that he was not the prey of a nightmare, he had to feel the chill of the two steel pistols in his vest pockets.

  It was not now snowing; the moon, growing brighter and brighter, was getting clear of the haze, and its light, mingled with the white reflection from the fallen snow, gave the room a twilight appearance.

  There was a light in the Jondrette den. Marius saw the hole in the partition shine with a red gleam which appeared to him bloody.

  He was sure that this gleam could hardly be produced by a candle. However, there was no movement in their room, nobody was stirring there, nobody spoke, not a breath, the stillness was icy and deep, and save for that light he could have believed that he was beside a sepulchre.

  Marius took his boots off softly, and pushed them under his bed.

  Some minutes passed. Marius heard the lower door turn on its hinges; a heavy and rapid step ascended the stairs and passed along the corridor, the latch of the garret was noisily lifted; Jondrette came in.

  Several voices were heard immediately. The whole family was in the garret. Only they kept silence in the absence of the master, like the cubs in the absence of the wolf.

  “It is me,” said he.

  “Good evening, pèremuche,” squeaked the daughters.

  “Well!” said the mother.

  “Everything’s going like a charm,” answered Jondrette, “but my feet are as cold as a dog’s. Good, that is right, you are dressed up. You must be able to inspire confidence.”

  “All ready to go out.”

  “You will forget nothing of what I told you! you will do the whole of it?”

  “Rest assured about that.”

  “Because—” said Jondrette. And he did not finish his sentence. Marius heard him put something heavy on the table, probably the chisel which he had bought.

  “Ah, ha!” said Jondrette, “have you been eating here?”

  “Yes,” said the mother, “I have had three big potatoes and some salt. I took advantage of the fire to cook them.”

  “Well,” replied Jondrette, “to-morrow I will take you to dine with me. There will be a duck and the accompaniments. You shall dine like Charles X; everything is going well?”

  Then he added, lowering his voice:

  “The mouse-trap is open. The cats are ready.”

  He lowered his voice still more, and said:

  “Put that into the fire.”

  Marius heard a sound of charcoal, as if somebody were striking it with pincers or some iron tool, and Jondrette continued:

  “Have you greased the hinges of the door, so that they shall not make any noise?”

  “Yes,” answered the mother.

  “What time is it?”

  “Six o‘clock, almost. The half has just struck on Saint Médard.”

  “The devil!” said Jondrette, “the girls must go and stand watch. Come here, you children, and listen to me.”

  There was a whispering.

  Jondrette’s voice rose again:

  “Has Burgon gone out?”

  “Yes,” said the mother.

  “Are you sure there is nobody at home in our neighbour’s room?”

  “He has not been back to-day, and you know that it is his dinner time.”

  “You are sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “It is all the same,” replied Jondrette; “there is no harm in going to see whether he is at home. Daughter, take the candle and go.”

  Marius dropped on his hands and knees, and crept noiselessly under the bed.

  Hardly had he concealed himself, when he perceived a light through the cracks of his door.

  “P‘pa,” cried a voice, “he has gone out.”

  He recognised the voice of the elder girl.

  “Have you gone in?” asked the father.

  “No,” answered the girl; “but as his key is in the door, he has gone out.”

  The father cried:

  “Go in just the same.”

  The door opened, and Marius saw the tall girl come in with a candle. She had the same appearance as in the morning, except that she was still more horrible in this light.

  She walked straight towards the bed. Marius had a moment of inexpressible anxiety, but there was a mirror nailed on the wall near the bed; it was to that she was going. She stretched up on tiptoe and looked at herself in it. A sound of old iron rattling was heard in the next room.

  She smoothed her hair with the palm of her hand, and smiled at the mirror, singing the while in her broken sepulchral voice:

  Nos amours ont duré tout une semaine,

  Mais que du bonheur les instants sont courts!

  S‘adorer huit jours,’était bien la peine!

  Le temps des amours devrait durer toujours!

  Devrait durer toujours! devrait durer toujours!6

  Meanwhile Marius was trembling. It seemed impossible to him that she should not hear his breathing.

  She went to the window and looked out, speaking aloud in her half-crazy way.

  “How ugly Paris is when he puts a white shirt on!” said she.

  She returned to the mirror and renewed her grimaces, taking alternately front and the three-quarter views of herself.

  “Well,” cried her father, “what are you doing now?”

  “I am looking under the bed and the furniture,” answered she, continuing to arrange her hair; “there is nobody here.”

  “Booby!” howled the father. “Here immediately, and let us lose no time.”

  “I am coming! I am coming!” said she. “One has no time for anything in their shanty.”

  She hummed:

  Vous me quittez pour aller a la gloire,

  Mon triste cœur suivra partout vos pas.

  She cast a last glance at the mirror, and went out, shutting the door after her.

  A moment afterwards, Marius heard the sound of the bare feet of the two young girls in the passage, and the voice of Jondrette crying to them.

  “Pay attention, now! one towards the barrière, the other at the corner of the Rue du Petit Banquier. Don’t lose sight of the house door a minute, and if you see the least thing, here immediately! tumble along! You have a key to come in with.”

  The elder daughter muttered:

  “To stand sentry barefoot in the snow!”

  “To-morrow you shall have boots of scarab colour silk!” said the father.

  They went down the stairs, and, a few seconds afterwards, the sound of the lower door shutting announced that they had gone out.

  There were now in the house only Marius and the Jondrettes,
and probably also the mysterious beings of whom Marius had caught a glimpse in the twilight behind the door of the untenanted garret.

  16 (17)

  USE OF MARIUS’ FIVE-FRANC COIN

  MARIUS judged that the time had come to resume his place at his observatory. In a twinkling, and with the agility of his age, he was at the hole in the partition.

  He looked in.

  The interior of the Jondrette apartment presented a singular appearance, and Marius found the explanation of the strange light which he had noticed. A candle was burning in a verdigrised candlestick, but it was not that which really lighted the room. The entire den was, as it were, illuminated by the reflection of a large sheet iron furnace in the fireplace, which was filled with lighted charcoal. The fire which the female Jondrette had made ready in the daytime. The charcoal was burning and the furnace was red hot, a blue flame danced over it and helped to show the form of the chisel bought by Jondrette in the Rue Pierre Lombard, which was growing ruddy among the coals. In a corner near the door, and arranged as if for anticipated use, were two heaps which appeared to be, one a heap of old iron, the other a heap of ropes. All this would have made one, who had known nothing of what was going forward, waver between a very sinister idea and a very simple idea. The room thus lighted up seemed rather a smithy than a mouth of hell; but Jondrette, in that glare, had rather the appearance of a demon than of a blacksmith.

  The heat of the glowing coals was such that the candle upon the table melted on the side towards the furnace and was burning fastest on that side. An old copper dark lantern, worthy of Diogenes turned Cartouche, stood upon the mantel.

  The furnace, which was set into the fireplace, beside the almost extinguished embers, sent its smoke into the flue of the chimney and exhaled no odour.

  The moon, shining through the four panes of the window, threw its whiteness into the ruddy and flaming garret; and to Marius’ poetic mind, a dreamer even in the moment of action, it was like a thought of heaven mingled with the shapeless nightmares of earth.

  A breath of air, coming through the broken pane, helped to dissipate the charcoal odour and to conceal the furnace.

  The Jondrette lair was, if the reader remembers what we have said of the Gorbeau house, admirably chosen for the theatre of a deed of darkness and violence, and for the concealment of a crime. It was the most retired room of the most isolated house of the most solitary boulevard in Paris. If ambush had not existed, it would have been invented there.

  The whole depth of a house and a multitude of untenanted rooms separated this hole from the boulevard and its only window opened upon waste fields inclosed with walls and palisade fences.

  Jondrette had lighted his pipe, sat down on the dismantled chair, and was smoking. His wife was speaking to him in a low tone.

  Suddenly Jondrette raised his voice:

  “By the way, now, I think of it. In such weather as this he will come in a fiacre. Light the lantern, take it, and go down. You will stay there behind the lower door. The moment you hear the carriage stop, you will open immediately, he will come up, you will light him up the stairs and above the hall, and when he comes in here, you will go down again immediately, pay the driver, and send the fiacre away.”

  “And the money?” asked the woman.

  Jondrette fumbled in his trousers, and handed her five francs.

  “What is that?” she exclaimed.

  Jondrette answered with dignity:

  “It is the monarch which our neighbour gave this morning.”

  And he added:—

  “Do you know? we must have two chairs here.”

  “What for?”

  “To sit in.”

  Marius felt a shiver run down his back on hearing the woman make this quiet reply:—

  “Pardieu ! I will get our neighbour’s.”

  And with rapid movement she opened the door of the den, and went out into the hall.

  Marius physically had not the time to get down from the bureau, and go and hide himself under the bed.

  “Take the candle,” cried Jondrette.

  “No,” said she, “that would bother me; I have two chairs to bring. It is moonlight.”

  Marius heard the heavy hand of mother Jondrette groping after his key in the dark. The door opened. He stood nailed to his place by apprehension and stupor.

  The woman came in.

  The gable window let in a ray of moonlight, between two great sheets of shadow. One of these sheets of shadow entirely covered the wall against which Marius was leaning, so as to conceal him.

  Mother Jondrette raised her eyes, did not see Marius, took the two chairs, the only chairs which Marius had, and went out, slamming the door noisily behind her.

  She went back into the den.

  “Here are the two chairs.”

  “And here is the lantern,” said the husband. “Go down quick.”

  She hastily obeyed, and Jondrette was left alone.

  He arranged the two chairs on the two sides of the table, turned the chisel over in the fire, put an old screen in front of the fireplace, which concealed the furnace, then went to the comer where the heap of ropes was, and stooped down, as if to examine something. Marius then perceived that what he had taken for a shapeless heap, was a rope ladder, very well made, with wooden rounds, and two large hooks to hang it by.

  This ladder and a few big tools, actual masses of iron, which were thrown upon the pile of old iron heaped up behind the door, were not in the Jondrette den in the morning, and had evidently been brought there in the afternoon, during Marius’ absence.

  “Those are metalworkers’ tools,” thought Marius.

  Had Marius been a little better informed in this line, he would have recognised, in what he took for metalworkers’ tools, certain instruments capable of picking a lock or forcing a door and others capable of cutting or hacking,—the two families of sinister tools, which thieves call jimmies and bolt-cutters.

  The fireplace and the table, with the two chairs, were exactly opposite Marius. The furnace was hidden; the room was now lighted only by the candle ; the least thing upon the table or the mantel made a great shadow. A broken water-pitcher masked the half of one wall. There was in the room a calm which was inexpressibly hideous and threatening. The approach of some appalling thing could be felt.

  Jondrette had let his pipe go out—a sure sign that he was intensely absorbed—and had come back and sat down. The candle made the savage ends and corners of his face stand out prominently. There were contractions of his brows, and abrupt openings of his right hand, as if he were replying to the last counsels of a dark interior monologue. In one of these obscure replies which he was making to himself, he drew the table drawer out quickly towards him, took out a long carving knife which was hidden there, and tried its edge on his nail. This done, he put the knife back into the drawer, and shut it.

  Marius, for his part, grasped the pistol on his right side, pulled it out, and cocked it.

  The pistol in cocking gave a little, clear, sharp sound.

  Jondrette started, and half rose from his chair.

  “Who is there?” cried he.

  Marius held his breath; Jondrette listened a moment, then began to laugh, saying:—

  “What a fool I am! It is the partition cracking.”

  Marius kept the pistol in his hand.

  17 (18)

  MARIUS’ TWO CHAIRS FACE EACH OTHER

  JUST THEN the distant and melancholy vibration of a bell shook the windows. Six o‘clock struck on Saint Médard.

  Jondrette marked each stroke with a nod of his head. At the sixth stroke, he snuffed the candle with his fingers.

  Then he began to walk about the room, listened in the hall, walked, listened again: “Provided he comes!” muttered he; then he returned to his chair.

  He had hardly sat down when the door opened.

  The mother Jondrette had opened it, and stood in the hall making a horrible, amiable grimace, which was lighted up from beneath by one of t
he holes of the dark lantern.

  “Come in,” said she.

  “Come in, my benefactor,” repeated Jondrette, rising precipitately.

  Monsieur Leblanc appeared.

  He had an air of serenity which made him singularly venerable.

  He laid four louis upon the table.

  “Monsieur Fabantou,” said he, “that is for your rent and your pressing wants. We will see about the rest.”

  “God reward you, my generous benefactor!” said Jondrette, and rapidly approaching his wife:

  “Send away the fiacre!”

  She slipped away, while her husband was lavishing bows and offering a chair to Monsieur Leblanc. A moment afterwards she came back and whispered in his ear:

  “It is done.”

  The snow which had been falling ever since morning, was so deep that they had not heard the fiacre arrive, and did not hear it go away.

  Meanwhile Monsieur Leblanc had taken a seat.

  Jondrette had taken possession of the other chair opposite Monsieur Leblanc.

  Now, to form an idea of the scene which follows, let the reader call to mind the chilly night, the solitudes of La Salpêtrière covered with snow, and white in the moonlight, like immense shrouds, the flickering light of the street lamps here and there reddening these tragic boulevards and the long rows of black elms, not a passer-by perhaps within a mile around, the Gorbeau tenement at its deepest degree of silence, horror, and night, in that tenement, in the midst of these solitudes, in the midst of this darkness, the vast Jondrette garret lighted by a candle, and in this den two men seated at a table, Monsieur Leblanc tranquil, Jondrette smiling and terrible, his wife, the she-wolf, in a corner, and, behind the partition, Marius, invisible, alert, losing no word, missing no movement, his eye on the watch, the pistol in his grasp.

  Marius, moreover, was experiencing nothing but an emotion of horror, not fear. He clasped the butt of the pistol, and felt reassured. “I shall stop this wretch when I please,” thought he.

  He felt that the police was somewhere near by in ambush, awaiting the signal agreed upon, and all ready to stretch out its arm.

  He hoped, moreover, that from this terrible meeting between Jondrette and Monsieur Leblanc some light would be thrown upon all that he was interested to know.