Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  ‘And anyway,’ ventured the older boy, who alone was brave enough to speak to Gavroche, ‘a drop of lighted wax on the straw might set the house on fire.’

  ‘Burn down the shack,’ said Gavroche. ‘That’s right. But not on a night like this.’

  The storm had increased, and between the bursts of thunder they could hear the drumming of rain on the monster’s back.

  ‘It’s coming down in bucketfuls,’ said Gavroche. ‘I like to hear it pouring down our house’s legs. The winter’s like another animal It gives us all it’s got, but it’s wasting its time and trouble, it can’t even wet us, and that makes it roar with fury, the old brute.’

  This allusion to the thunder, of which Gavroche, like the nineteenth-century philosopher he was, defied all the consequences, was followed by a particularly brilliant flash of lightning, so vivid that its reflection showed through the crevice in the elephant’s belly. At the same time there was another clap of thunder, so loud that the little boys started up in dismay, nearly dislodging the wire netting. Gavroche burst out laughing.

  ‘Easy does it, lads. Don’t go breaking up the home. That was a fine old bang, wasn’t it? Not one of your damp squibs. Well done, God! It was almost as good as the Théâtre de l’Ambigu.’

  This said, he put the netting to rights, thrust the little boys gently back against the straw, pushed down their knees so that they were lying straight and went on:

  ‘Well, as God has lit his candle I can blow out mine. We’ve got to sleep, my boys, being human. It’s bad to go without sleep. It gives you the collywobbles. So snuggle down and I’ll blow it out. Are you all right?’

  ‘It’s grand,’ said the older boy. ‘It feels as though I’d got feathers under my head.’

  ‘Not your head,’ said Gavroche. ‘Your napper. Now let’s hear you snore.’ And he blew out the taper.

  Scarcely was the light extinguished than a strange disturbance shook the netting in which the three children were enclosed, a multitude of small, metallic sounds, as though teeth and claws were worrying the wire, accompanied by small, piercing squeaks. The five-year-old boy, hearing this commotion above his head and petrified with alarm, nudged his brother, but the latter had already obeyed Gavroche’s injunction to snore. Finally, when he could bear it no longer, he ventured to address Gavroche, in the lowest of voices and with bated breath.

  ‘Monsieur…’

  ‘Well?’ said Gavroche with his eyes closed.

  ‘What’s that noise?’

  ‘Rats,’ said Gavroche, and turned on his side.

  The rats, which bred by the thousand in the elephant’s carcase and were the living patches of black of which we have spoken, had been kept at bay by the taper while it was alight, but directly that cavernous place, which was their stronghold, was plunged in darkness, and scenting what the excellent storyteller, Perrault, has called ‘young flesh’, they had swarmed over Gavroche’s tent, and were trying to gnaw through the meshes of this new-style mosquito-net.

  The little boy was still not happy.

  ‘Monsieur,’ he said again.

  ‘Well!’ said Gavroche.

  ‘Please, what are rats?’

  ‘A kind of mouse.’

  This was fairly reassuring. The little boy had seen white mice and had not been afraid of them. Nonetheless he had another question.

  ‘Monsieur…’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Why don’t you keep a cat?’

  ‘I had one,’ said Gavroche. ‘I brought one in, but they ate it.’

  This reply entirely undid the soothing effect of the previous one. The little boy began to tremble again, and the exchanges between him and Gavroche were resumed for the fourth time.

  ‘Monsieur…’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Who was it who ate the cat?’

  “The rats.’

  ‘The mice?’

  ‘Yes, the rats.’

  Appalled by this thought of mice that ate cats, the little boy asked:

  ‘But Monsieur, won’t they eat us too?’

  ‘Well, blow me!’ said Gavroche. But the little boy was now in a state of extreme terror and he turned to him. ‘Don’t worry, they can’t get in. And besides, I’m here. Here, take my hand. Now shut up and go to sleep.’

  Reaching across the elder brother, Gavroche gave the younger one his hand, and the little boy clasped it and was comforted. Courage and strength are thus mysteriously transmitted. There was again silence, the sound of voices having frightened the rats away; they were back a few minutes later, but not all their squeakings and gnawings could disturb the three children, who by then were sound asleep.

  The night hours passed. Darkness enveloped the immense Place de la Bastille, a winter’s wind blew gustily to mingle with the rain, police patrols, peering into doorways, alleyways, the dark corners in search of nocturnal vagabonds, passed indifferently by the elephant. The monster stood motionless, eyes open in the darkness, as though meditating with satisfaction upon its good deed in sheltering three homeless children from the elements and from man.

  To understand what follows the reader must recall that at that time the Bastille police-post was situated at the other end of the square, and that the officer on duty there could not see or hear anything that took place in the neighbourhood of the elephant. Towards the end of the last hour before dawn a man came running out of the Rue Saint-Antoine; he crossed the square, rounded the July Column, and, slipping through the palings, came to a stop under the elephant’s belly. Had there been any light to see him by, the drenched state of his clothing would have suggested that he had spent the night in the open. Having reached the elephant - he uttered a strange, parrot-cry which is best conveyed by the word kirikikioo. He uttered it twice, and the second time it was answered by a clear, youthful voice which simply said:

  ‘Right!’

  A moment later the plank masking the hole was removed and Gavroche slid down the elephant’s leg and dropped lightly at the man’s side. The man was Montparnasse. As for the mysterious call, it was doubtless what had been implied by the words, ‘Ask for Monsieur Gavroche.’ Upon hearing it Gavroche had crawled out of his sleeping-tent, carefully replaced the netting, and hastened to answer the summons.

  They nodded to each other in the darkness, and Montparnasse simply said:

  ‘We need help. Come and lend a hand.’

  ‘I’m ready,’ said Gavroche, and asked no further explanation.

  They headed for the Rue Saint-Antoine, by which Montparnasse had come, threading their way rapidly through the long file of carts which at that hour were making for the vegetable-market. The market-gardeners, crouched amid their lettuces and cabbages and swathed to the eyes in capes under the beating rain, paid no attention to them.

  III

  The hazards of an escape

  This is what had happened at the prison of La Force during that night.

  A plan of escape had been concerted between Babet, Brujon, Gueulemer, and Thénardier, although Thénardier was in solitary confinement. Babet had managed his own part of the business during the day, as we know from what Montparnasse had said to Gavroche. Montparnasse was to help from outside.

  Brujon, having spent a month in a punishment-cell, had had time, first, to plait a rope, and secondly to evolve the plan. At one time a solitary-confinement cell consisted of stone walls, a stone ceiling, a tiled floor, a camp bed, a small, barred window, and a door reinforced with iron bands, the whole being known as a cachot. But the cachot was considered too severe. The cell now consists of an iron door, a barred window, a camp bed, a tiled floor, stone walls, and a stone ceiling, and is called a ‘punishment-cell’. A faint light penetrates at mid-day. The drawback to these cells which, as we see, are not cachots, is that they leave men to their thoughts when they should be made to work.

  Brujon had taken thought and got out of the punishment-cell with his rope. Since he was reputed to be highly dangerous he was transferred from the Cour Charlemagne to the New
Building. Here he found, first Gueulemer and second a nail. The first meant crime and the second meant liberty.

  Brujon, at whom we must now take a closer look, was, beneath his carefully calculated appearance of fragility and languor, a well-mannered, intelligent, thieving rogue with a disarming gaze and an abominable grin. The gaze was rehearsed, but the grin was natural. He had first concentrated on roof-tops, and had made strides in the business of robbing roofs and gutters of their lead by the process known as gras-double, or tripe-stripping.

  What made that moment particularly favourable for a break-out was the fact that a part of the prison roof was being re-timbered and re-tiled. The Cour Saint-Bernard was no longer entirely cut off from the Cour Charlemagne and the Cour Saint-Louis. There were scaffolding and ladders; in other words, bridges and stairways for the use of the escaper.

  The so-called New Building, which was in a state of lamentable decrepitude, was the prison’s weakest point. Its walls had so crumbled under the effects of saltpetre that the dormitories had had to be lined with wooden panelling, because otherwise rubble was liable to fall on the sleepers in their beds. Despite its inadequacy, this New Building was where the most dangerous prisoners were housed, the ‘hard cases’, to use the prison term. The building contained four superimposed dormitories, with an attic above them known as the Bel-Air. A large chimney, probably a survival from the former kitchen of the Dukes of La Force, rose up from the ground floor, passing through the four dormitories like a flattered central column and emerging through the roof.

  Gueulemer and Brujon were in the same dormitory, having been put as a precaution on the lowest floor. The heads of their beds, as it happened, were both against this chimney. Thénardier was exactly above them in the Bel-Air attic.

  The stroller who pauses in the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, at the gateway of the bath-house beyond the fire-station, will see a courtyard filled with flowers and bushes in tubs, at the far end of which is a small rotunda with two wings, painted white with green blinds - the pastoral dream of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Not more than ten years ago it had at its back a tall, black wall, which was the outer wall of the prison of La Force. High though it was, this wall was over-topped by an even blacker roof rising behind it, that of the New Building, in which four barred dormer windows were to be seen. They were the windows of the Bel-Air attic dormitory, and the chimney rising above the roof was the one which passed through the lower dormitories.

  The Bel-Air attic was a kind of sloping-roofed gallery partitioned by triple-grilles and metal-lined doors studded with huge nail-heads. Entering it at the northern end one had the four windows on one’s left, and on one’s right, facing the windows, four fairly large square cages separated by narrow passage-ways and built of brickwork up to shoulder level and iron grilles reaching to the ceiling.

  Thénardier had been confined in one of these cages since the night of 3 February. No one ever discovered how, and with what assistance, he managed to obtain and hide a bottle of the wine invented, it is said, by the prisoner Desrues, which contains a narcotic and was made famous by the gang known as the Endormeurs, the ‘dopers’. There are in many prisons treacherous employees, thieves as well as gaolers, who sell a fraudulent loyalty to their masters and make their pickings on the side.

  And so it happened that on the night when the boy Gavroche gave shelter to two forlorn children, Brujon and Gueulemer, knowing that Babet, who had escaped that morning, was waiting for them with Montparnasse in the street outside, rose softly from their beds and began to burrow into the chimney, using the nail that Brujon had acquired. The debris fell on Brujon’s bed and made no sound. The noises of hail and thunder shook the doors on their hinges, filling the prison with an alarming but convenient din. Those of their fellow-inmates who were awakened pretended to be still asleep and did not interfere. Brujon was skilful and Gueulemer was powerful. Without any sound reaching the warder in the cell with a window looking into the dormitory, the chimney-flue was pierced, the chimney climbed, the grille at the top forced and the two redoubtable ruffians were out on the roof. The wind and rain were at their height and the roof was slippery. ‘A fine night for a getaway,’ said Brujon.

  A gap six feet wide and eighty feet deep separated them from the outer wall, and below them they could discern the faint gleam of a guard’s musket. They attached one end of the rope which Brujon had plaited to the bars of the metal grille, which they had twisted back, and flung the other end over the outer wall. Then, jumping the gap on to the top of the wall, they slid down the rope to the roof of a small building adjoining the bath-house, pulled the rope down after them, jumped over into the bath-house courtyard, crossed it and pushed open the porter’s window, beside which hung the cordon. They pulled the cordon, opened the gate, and walked out into the street.

  It was less than three-quarters of an hour since they had stood on their beds in the darkness, nail in hand and their plans all laid. Within a minute or so they had joined Babet and Montparnasse, who were lurking near by.

  They had broken their rope in retrieving it, so that a part remained still attached to the grille at the top of the chimney; otherwise no harm was done except that they had very little skin left on their hands.

  Thénardier had been warned of what was to happen, although it is not known how, and had stayed awake. At about one o’clock in the morning, the night being very dark, he had seen, through the window opposite his cage, two figures moving along the roof in the wind and rain. One of them stopped for an instant to look in at the window, and Thénardier recognized Brujon. It was all he needed to know.

  Being registered as a dangerous criminal sentenced for attempted armed robbery, Thénardier was kept under close surveillance. A warder with a loaded musket, who was relieved every two hours, did sentry-duty outside his cage. The attic was lighted by a wall-lantern. The prisoner had fifty-pound irons on his legs. At four o’clock every afternoon a prison guard accompanied by two police dogs –this was still customary in those days - entered the cage, deposited a loaf of black bread on the floor by the bed, together with a jug of water and a bowl of thin broth with a few beans swimming in it, examined the prisoner’s fetters and tapped on the bars of the cage. He and his dogs paid two further visits during the night.

  Thénardier had obtained permission to keep a small iron spike which he used to skewer his bread to a crack in the wall –‘to keep it out of reach of the rats,’ he said. Since he was under constant supervision this was not thought dangerous; but it was later recalled that one of the warders had remarked, ‘It would be better if he had a wooden spike.’

  At two in the morning the warder, a regular-army veteran, was relieved by a younger man, a conscript. Shortly afterwards the guard with the dogs paid his visit and noted nothing out of the way except the extreme youth and ‘doltish air’ of the new man. But two hours after this, at four o’clock, when it was the new man’s turn to be relieved he was found prostrate and sleeping like a log outside Thénardier’s cage. Thénardier was gone, and his broken leg-irons lay on the floor. There was a hole in the ceiling of the cage and another hole above it, in the roof of the building. A plank had been wrenched off the bed and presumably taken away, since it was not to be found. But a half-empty bottle was found containing the remains of the drugged wine that had put the soldier to sleep. His bayonet had disappeared.

  At the time when the discovery was made Thénardier was thought to be well out of reach; but the truth is that although he was no longer in the New Building he was still in considerable danger. He had not yet made good his escape. After climbing out on to the roof he had found the length of rope attached to the grille protecting the chimney, but this broken remnant was far too short for him to be able to negotiate the outside wall as Brujon and Gueulemer had done.

  Turning out of the Rue des Ballets into the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, one comes almost immediately to a sort of squalid recess. A house occupied it in the last century of which only the back wall is still standing, a dingy pile of m
asonry rising to a height of three storeys, with buildings on either side. It contains two square windows, one of which is partly blocked by a worm-eaten beam of the wood that props up the wall. At one time one could see through these windows a further expanse of forbidding masonry, the outer wall of the prison.

  The empty space left by the demolished house is half-filled by a fence of rotting planks reinforced by stone posts, and within this enclosure there is a small lean-to shed built against the remaining wall. There is a gate in the fence which, until a few years ago, was fastened only with a latch.

  Thénardier reached the top of this wall at about three o’clock in the morning.

  How had he got there? This is something that no one has ever been able to explain or understand. The lightning must have both hindered and helped him. Had he made use of the roof-menders’ scaffolding and ladders to convey himself from roof-top to roof-top over the ill-assorted cluster of buildings, from the Cour Charlemagne to the Cour Saint-Louis, thence to the outer wall of the prison, and so, eventually, to the ruined wall? But there were so many gaps in this route as to make it seem impossible. Had he made the plank from his bed serve as a bridge from the attic to the outer wall, and then crawled on his stomach along that wall until he came to the ruin? But the top of the outer wall of the prison presented a very jagged outline, with steep ups and downs; it went down at the firemen’s quarters and rose sharply at the bath-house; it was broken by intersections and was lower at the Hotel Lamoignon than over the Rue Pavée; there were sudden drops and right-angles. Taking all this into account, the exact manner of Thénardier’s escape becomes inexplicable. Escape by either of these two routes was virtually impossible. Had Thénardier, actuated by that overwhelming passion for liberty that turns precipices into ditches, iron bars into wooden slats, an office clerk into an athlete, stupidity into instinct, instinct into intelligence and intelligence into genius, devised some quite other method? This has never been known.