第 三百二十九 章 · THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES

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 network, 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

Plâtrière, 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 Jeûneurs, 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 _à petits

matériaux_—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 watersheds

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 Michel-le-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.