Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER I—THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES
2514 words | Chapter 410
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.
Reading Tips
Use arrow keys to navigate
Press 'N' for next chapter
Press 'P' for previous chapter