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

by Victor Hugo

  This allusion to thunder, all the consequences of which Gavroche accepted as a philosopher of the nineteenth century, was followed by a very vivid flash, so blinding that something of it entered by the crevice into the belly of the elephant. Almost at the same instant the thunder burst forth very furiously. The two little boys uttered a cry, and rose so quickly that the trellis was almost thrown out of place; but Gavroche turned his bold face towards them, and took advantage of the clap of thunder to burst into a laugh.

  “Be calm, children. Don’t upset the edifice. That was fine thunder; give us some more. That wasn’t any fool of a flash. Bravo God! by jinks! that is most as good as it is at the theatre.”

  This said, he restored order in the trellis, gently pushed the two children to the head of the bed, pressed their knees to stretch them out at full length, and exclaimed:

  “As God is lighting his candle, I can blow out mine. Children, we must sleep, my young humans. It is very bad not to sleep. It would make you schlinguer in your strainer, or, as the big bugs say, stink in your jaws. Wind yourselves up well in the peel! I’m going to extinguish. Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” murmured the elder, “I am right. I feel as if I had feathers under my head.”

  “We don’t say head,” cried Gavroche, “we say tronche.”

  The two children hugged close to each other. Gavroche finished arranging them upon the mat, and pulled the blanket up to their ears, then repeated for the third time the injunction in hieratic language:

  “Pioncez!”

  And he blew out the taper.

  Hardly was the light extinguished when a singular tremor began to agitate the trellis under which the three children were lying. It was a multitude of dull rubbings, which gave a metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were grinding the copper wire. This was accompanied by all sorts of little sharp cries.

  The little boy of five, hearing this tumult over his head, and shivering with fear, pushed the elder brother with his elbow, but the elder brother had already “pioncé, according to Gavroche’s order. Then the little boy, no longer capable of fearing him, ventured to accost Gavroche, but very low, and holding his breath:

  “Monsieur?”

  “Hey?” said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.

  “What is that?”

  “It is the rats,” answered Gavroche.

  And he laid his head again upon the mat.

  The rats, in fact, which swarmed by thousands in the carcass of the elephant, and which were those living black spots of which we have spoken, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle so long as it burned, but as soon as this cavern, which was, as it were, their city, had been restored to night, smelling there what the good storyteller Perrault calls “some fresh meat,” they had rushed in en masse upon Gavroche’s tent, climbed to the top, and were biting its meshes as if they were seeking to get through this new-fashioned mosquito bar.

  Still the little boy did not go to sleep.

  “Monsieur!” he said again.

  “Hey?” said Gavroche.

  “What are the rats?”

  “They are mice.”

  This explanation reassured the child a little. He had seen some white mice in the course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. However, he raised his voice again:

  “Monsieur?”

  “Hey?” replied Gavroche.

  “Why don’t you have a cat?”

  “I had one,” answered Gavroche, “I brought one here, but they ate her on me.”

  This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little fellow again began to tremble. The dialogue between him and Gavroche was resumed for the fourth time.

  “Monsieur!”

  “Hey?”

  “Who was it that was eaten up?”

  “The cat.”

  “Who was it that ate the cat?”

  “The rats.”

  “The mice?”

  “Yes, the rats.”

  The child, dismayed by these mice who ate cats, continued:

  “Monsieur, would those mice eat us?”

  “Damn right!” said Gavroche.

  The child’s terror was complete. But Gavroche added:

  “Don’t be afraid! they can’t get in. And when I am here. Here, take hold of my hand. Be still and pioncez!”

  Gavroche at the same time took the little fellow’s hand across his brother. The child clasped his hand against his body, and felt safe. Courage and strength have such mysterious communications. It was once more silent about them, the sound of voices had startled and driven away the rats; in a few minutes they might have returned and done their worst in vain, the three mômes, plunged in slumber, heard nothing more.

  The hours of the night passed away. Darkness covered the immense Place de la Bastille; a wintry wind, which mingled with the rain, blew in gusts, the patrolmen ransacked the doors, alleys, yards and dark corners, and, looking for nocturnal vagabonds, passed silently by the elephant; the monster, standing, motionless, with open eyes in the darkness, appeared to be in reverie and well satisfied with his good deeds, and he sheltered from the heavens and from men the three poor sleeping children.

  To understand what follows, we must remember that at that period the guard-house of the Bastille was situated at the other extremity of the Square, and that what occurred near the elephant could neither be seen nor heard by the sentinel.

  Towards the end of the hour which immediately precedes daybreak, a man turned out of the Rue Saint Antoine, running, crossed the Square, turned the great inclosure of the Column of July, and glided between the palisades under the belly of the elephant. Had any light whatever shone upon this man, from his thoroughly wet clothing, one would have guessed that he had passed the night in the rain. When under the elephant he raised a grotesque call, which belongs to no human language and which a parrot alone could reproduce. He twice repeated this call, of which the following orthography gives but a very imperfect idea:

  “Kirikikiou!”

  At the second call, a clear, cheerful young voice answered from the belly of the elephant:

  “Yes!”

  Almost immediately the board which closed the hole moved away, and gave passage to a child, who descended along the elephant’s leg and dropped lightly near the man. It was Gavroche. The man was Montparnasse.

  As to this call, kirikikiou, it was undoubtedly what the child meant by, You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche.

  On hearing it he had waked with a spring, crawled out of his “alcove,” separating the netting a little, which he afterwards carefully closed again, then he had opened the trap and descended.

  The man and the child recognised each other silently in the dark; Montparnasse merely said:

  “We need you. Come and give us a lift.”

  The gamin did not ask any other explanation.

  “I’m on hand,” said he.

  And they both took the direction of the Rue Saint Antoine, whence Montparnasse came, winding their way rapidly through the long file of market waggons which go down at that hour towards the market.

  The market gardeners, crouching among the salads and vegetables, half asleep, buried up to the eyes in the trunks of their waggons on account of the driving rain, did not even notice these strange passengers.

  3

  THE FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES OF ESCAPE

  WHAT HAD TAKEN PLACE that same night at La Force was this:

  An escape had been concerted between Babet, Brujon, Gueulemer, and Thénardier, although Thénardier was in solitary. Babet had done the business for himself during the day, as we have seen from the account of Montparnasse to Gavroche. Montparnasse was to help them from without.

  Brujon, having spent a month in solitary, had had time, first, to twist a rope, secondly, to perfect a plan. Formerly these grim cells, in which prison discipline delivers the condemned to himself, were composed of four stone walls, a stone ceiling, a floor of paving-stones, a camp bed, a grated air-hole, a door reinforced with iro
n, and were called dungeons; but the dungeon came to be thought too horrible: today it is composed of an iron door, a grated air-hole, a camp bed, a floor of paving-stones, a stone ceiling, four stone walls, and it is called a punitive detention cell. There is little light in them even at noon. The disadvantage of these rooms which, as we see, are not dungeons, is that they allow beings to reflect who should be made to work.

  Brujon then had reflected, and he had left his punitive detention cell with a rope. As he was reputed very dangerous in the Charlemagne Court, he was put into the Bâtiment Neuf. The first thing which he found in the Bâtiment Neuf was Gueulemer, the second was a nail; Gueulemer, that is to say crime, a nail, that is to say liberty.

  Brujon, of whom it is time to give a complete idea, was, with an appearance of delicate complexion and a profoundly premeditated languor, a polished, gallant, intelligent robber, with an enticing look and a horrible smile. His look was a result of his will, and his smile of his nature. His first studies in his art were directed towards roofs; he had made a great improvement in the business of the lead strippers who strip roofing and tear off gutters by the process called: the double membrane.

  What rendered the moment peculiarly favourable for an attempt at escape, was that some workmen were taking off and relaying, at that very time, a part of the slating of the prison. The Cour Saint Bernard was not entirely isolated from the Charlemagne Court and the Cour Saint Louis. There were scaffoldings and ladders up aloft; in other words, bridges and stairways leading towards deliverance.

  Bâtiment Neuf, the most cracked and decrepit affair in the world, was the weak point of the prison. The walls were so much corroded by saltpetre that they had been obliged to put a facing of wood over the arches of the dormitories, because the stones detached themselves and fell upon the beds of the prisoners. Notwithstanding this decay, the blunder was committed of shutting up in the Bâtiment Neuf the most dangerous of the accused, of putting “the hard cases” in there, as they say in prison language.

  The Bâtiment Neuf contained four dormitories one above the other and an attic which was called the Bel Air. A large chimney, probably of some ancient kitchen of the Dukes de La Force, started from the ground floor, passed through the four stories, cutting in two all the dormitories in which it appeared to be a kind of flattened pillar, and went out through the roof.

  Gueulemer and Brujon were in the same dormitory. They had been put into the lower story by precaution. It happened that the heads of their beds rested against the flue of the chimney.

  Thénardier was exactly above them in the attic known as the Bel Air.

  The passer-by who stops in the Rue Culture Sainte Catherine beyond the barracks of the firemen, in front of the porte-cochère of the bath-house, sees a yard full of flowers and shrubs in boxes, at the further end of which is a little white rotunda with two wings enlivened by green blinds, the bucolic dream of Jean Jacques. Not more than ten years ago, above this rotunda there arose a black wall, enormous, hideous, and bare, against which it was built. This was the encircling wall of La Force.

  This wall, behind this rotunda, was Milton seen behind Berquin. eq

  High as it was, this wall was over-topped by a still blacker roof which could be seen behind. This was the roof of the Bâtiment Neuf. You noticed in it four dormer windows with gratings; these were the windows of the Bel Air. A chimney pierced the roof, the chimney which passed through the dormitories.

  The Bel Air, this attic of the Bâtiment Neuf, was a kind of large garret hall, closed with triple gratings and double sheet iron doors studded with monstrous nails. Entering at the north end, you had on your left the four windows, and on your right, opposite the windows, four large square cages, with spaces between, separated by narrow passages, built breast-high of masonry with bars of iron to the roof.

  Thénardier had been in solitary in one of these cages since the night of the 3rd of February. Nobody has ever discovered how, or by what contrivance, he had succeeded in procuring and hiding a bottle of that wine invented, it is said, by Desrues, with which a narcotic is mixed, and which the band of the Endormeurs has rendered celebrated.

  There are in many prisons treacherous employees, half jailers and half thieves, who aid in escapes, who sell a faithless service to the police, and who make much more than their salary.

  On this same night, then, on which little Gavroche had picked up the two wandering children, Brujon and Gueulemer, knowing that Babet, who had escaped that very morning, was waiting for them in the street as well as Montparnasse, got up softly and began to pierce the flue of the chimney which touched their beds with the nail which Brujon had found. The fragments fell upon Brujon’s bed, so that nobody heard them. The hail storm and the thunder shook the doors upon their hinges, and made a frightful and convenient uproar in the prison. Those of the prisoners who awoke made a feint of going to sleep again, and let Gueulemer and Brujon alone. Brujon was adroit; Gueulemer was vigorous. Before any sound had reached the watchman who was lying in the grated cell with a window opening into the sleeping room, the wall was pierced, the chimney scaled, the iron trellis which closed the upper orifice of the flue forced, and the two formidable bandits were upon the roof. The rain and the wind redoubled, the roof was slippery.

  “What a good sorgue for a crampe,”er said Brujon.

  A gulf of six feet wide and eighty feet deep separated them from the encircling wall. At the bottom of this gulf they saw a sentinel’s musket gleaming in the darkness. They fastened one end of the rope which Brujon had woven in his cell, to the stumps of the bars of the chimney which they had just twisted off, threw the other end over the encircling wall, cleared the gulf at a bound, clung to the coping of the wall, bestrode it, let themselves glide one after the other down along the rope upon a little roof which adjoined the bath-house, pulled down their rope, leaped into the bath-house yard, crossed it, pushed open the porter’s transom, near which hung the cord, pulled the cord, opened the porte-cochère, and were in the street.

  It was not three-quarters of an hour since they had risen to their feet on their beds in the darkness, their nail in hand, their project in their heads.

  A few moments afterwards they had rejoined Babet and Montparnasse, who were prowling about the neighbourhood.

  In drawing down their rope, they had broken it, and there was a piece remaining fastened to the chimney on the roof. They had received no other damage than having pretty thoroughly skinned their hands.

  That night Thénardier had received a warning, it never could be ascertained in what manner, and did not go to sleep.

  About one o‘clock in the morning, the night being very dark, he saw two shadows passing on the roof, in the rain and in the raging wind, before the window opposite his cage. One stopped at the window long enough for a look. It was Brujon. Thénardier recognised him, and understood. That was enough for him. Thénardier, described as an assassin, and detained under the charge of lying in wait by night with force and arms, was kept constantly in sight. A sentinel, who was relieved every two hours, marched with loaded gun before his cage. The Bel Air was lighted by a reflector. The prisoner had irons on his feet weighing fifty pounds. Every day, at four o’clock in the afternoon, a warden, escorted by two dogs—this was customary at that period—entered his cage, laid down near his bed a two pound loaf of black bread, a jug of water, and a dish full of very thin soup in which a few beans were swimming, examined his irons, and struck upon the bars. This man, with his dogs, returned twice in the night.

  Thénardier had obtained permission to keep a kind of an iron spike which he used to nail his bread into a crack in the wall, “in order,” said he, “to preserve it from the rats.” As Thénardier was constantly in sight, they imagined no danger from this spike. However, it was remembered afterwards that a warden had said: “It would be better to let him have nothing but a wooden pike.”

  At two o‘clock in the morning, the sentinel, who was an old soldier, was relieved, and his place was taken by a conscript. A few mo
ments afterwards, the man with the dogs made his visit, and went away without noticing anything, except the extreme youth and the “peasant air” of the “greenhorn.” Two hours afterwards, at four o’clock, when they came to relieve the conscript, they found him asleep, and lying on the ground like a log near Thénardier’s cage. As to Thénardier, he was not there. His broken irons were on the floor. There was a hole in the ceiling of his cage, and above, another hole in the roof A board had been torn from his bed, and doubtless carried away, for it was not found again. There was also seized in the cell a half empty bottle, containing the rest of the drugged wine with which the soldier had been put to sleep. The soldier’s bayonet had disappeared.

  At the moment of this discovery, it was supposed that Thénardier was out of all reach. The reality is, that he was no longer in the Bâtiment Neuf, but that he was still in great danger.

  Thénardier on reaching the roof of the Bâtiment Neuf, found the remnant of Brujon’s cord hanging to the bars of the upper trap of the chimney, but this broken end being much too short, he was unable to escape over the sentry’s path as Brujon and Gueulemer had done.

  On turning from the Rue des Ballets into the Rue du Roi de Sicile, on the right you meet almost immediately with a dirty recess. There was a house there in the last century, of which only the rear wall remains, a genuine ruin wall which rises to the height of the third story among the neighbouring buildings. This ruin can be recognised by two large square windows which may still be seen; the one in the middle, nearer the right gable, is crossed by a worm-eaten joist fitted like a cap-piece for a brace. Through these windows could formerly be discerned a high and dismal wall, which was a part of the encircling wall of La Force.

  The void which the demolished house left upon the street is half filled by a palisade fence of rotten boards, supported by five stone posts. Hidden in this inclosure is a little shanty built against that part of the ruin which remains standing. The fence has a gate which a few years ago was fastened only by a latch.