1.C.5.5. WHICH WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE WITH GAS LANTERNS
AT that moment a heavy and measured sound began to be
audible at some distance. Jean Valjean risked a glance round
the corner of the street. Seven or eight soldiers, drawn up in
a platoon, had just debouched into the Rue Polonceau. He
saw the gleam of their bayonets. They were advancing
towards him; these soldiers, at whose head he distinguished
Javert's tall figure, advanced slowly and cautiously. They
halted frequently; it was plain that they were searching all
the nooks of the walls and all the embrasures of the doors
and alleys.
This was some patrol that Javert had encountered— there
could be no mistake as to this surmise— and whose aid he had
demanded.
Javert's two acolytes were marching in their ranks.
At the rate at which they were marching, and in consideration
of the halts which they were making, it would take them
about a quarter of an hour to reach the spot where Jean Valjean
stood. It was a frightful moment. A few minutes only
separated Jean Valjean from that terrible precipice which
yawned before him for the third time. And the galleys now
meant not only the galleys, but Cosette lost to him forever;
that is to say, a life resembling the interior of a
tomb.
There was but one thing which was possible.
Jean Valjean had this peculiarity, that he carried, as one
might say, two beggar's pouches: in one he kept his saintly
thoughts; in the other the redoubtable talents of a convict.
He rummaged in the one or the other, according to circumstances.
Among
his other resources, thanks to his numerous escapes
from the prison at Toulon, he was, as it will be remembered, a
past master in the incredible art of crawling up without ladder
or climbing-irons, by sheer muscular force, by leaning on
the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his hips, and his knees, by
helping himself on the rare projections of the stone, in the
right angle of a wall, as high as the sixth story, if need be; an
art which has rendered so celebrated and so alarming that
corner of the wall of the Conciergerie of Paris by which
Battemolle, condemned to death, made his escape twenty years
ago.
Jean Valjean measured with his eyes the wall above which
he espied the linden; it was about eighteen feet in height. The
angle which it formed with the gable of the large building was
filled, at its lower extremity, by a mass of masonry of a triangular
shape, probably intended to preserve that too convenient
corner from the rubbish of those dirty creatures called the passers-by.
This practice of filling up corners of the wall is much
in use in Paris.
This mass was about five feet in height; the space above the
summit of this mass which it was necessary to climb was not
more than fourteen feet.
The wall was surmounted by a flat stone without a
coping.
Cosette was the difficulty, for she did not know how to climb
a wall. Should he abandon her? Jean Valjean did not once
think of that. It was impossible to carry her. A man's whole
strength is required to successfully carry out these singular ascents.
The least burden would disturb his centre of gravity
and pull him downwards.
A rope would have been required; Jean Valjean had none.
Where was he to get a rope at midnight, in the Rue Polonceau?
Certainly, if Jean Valjean had had a kingdom, he would have
given it for a rope at that moment.
All extreme situations have their lightning flashes which
sometimes dazzle, sometimes illuminate us.
Jean Valjean's despairing glance fell on the street lantern-post
of the blind alley Genrot.
At that epoch there were no gas-jets in the streets of Paris.
At nightfall lanterns placed at regular distances were lighted;
they were ascended and descended by means of a rope, which
traversed the street from side to side, and was adjusted in a
groove of the post. The pulley over which this rope ran was
fastened underneath the lantern in a little iron box, the key to
which was kept by the lamp-lighter, and the rope itself was
protected by a metal case.
Jean Valjean, with the energy of a supreme struggle, crossed
the street at one bound, entered the blind alley, broke the latch
of the little box with the point of his knife, and an instant
later he was beside Cosette once more. He had a rope. These
gloomy inventors of expedients work rapidly when they are
fighting against fatality.
We have already explained that the lanterns had not been
lighted that night. The lantern in the Cul-de-Sac Genrot was
thus naturally extinct, like the rest; and one could pass directly
under it without even noticing that it was no longer in
its place.
Nevertheless, the hour, the place, the darkness, Jean Valjean's
absorption, his singular gestures, his goings and comings,
all had begun to render Cosette uneasy. Any other child
than she would have given vent to loud shrieks long before.
She contented herself with plucking Jean Valjean by the skirt
of his coat. They could hear the sound of the patrol's approach
ever more and more distinctly.
"Father," said she, in a very low voice, "I am afraid. Who
is coming yonder?"
"Hush!" replied the unhappy man; "it is Madame Thenardier."
Cosette shuddered. He added:—
"Say nothing. Don't interfere with me. If you cry out, if
you weep, the Thenardier is lying in wait for you. She is coming
to take you back."
Then, without haste, but without making a useless movement,
with firm and curt precision, the more remarkable at a
moment when the patrol and Javert might come upon him at
any moment, he undid his cravat, passed it round Cosette's
body under the armpits, taking care that it should not hurt the
child, fastened this cravat to one end of the rope, by means of
that knot which seafaring men call a "swallow knot," took the
other end of the rope in his teeth, pulled off his shoes and
stockings, which he threw over the wall, stepped upon the
mass of masonry, and began to raise himself in the angle of the
wall and the gable with as much solidity and certainty as
though he had the rounds of a ladder under his feet and
elbows. Half a minute had not elapsed when he was resting
on his knees on the wall.
Cosette gazed at him in stupid amazement, without uttering
a word. Jean Valjean's injunction, and the name of Madame
Thenardier, had chilled her blood.
All at once she heard Jean Valjean's voice crying to her,
though in a very low tone:—
"Put your back against the wall."
She obeyed.
"Don't say a word, and don't be alarmed," went on Jean
Valjean.
And she felt herself lifted from the ground.
Before she had time to recover herself, she was on the top of
the wall.
Jean Valjean grasped her, put her on his back, took her two
tiny hands in his large left hand, lay down flat on his stomach
and crawled along on top of the wall as far as the cant. As he
had guessed, there stood a building whose roof started from the
top of the wooden barricade and descended to within a very
short distance of the ground, with a gentle slope which grazed
the linden-tree. A lucky circumstance, for the wall was much
higher on this side than on the street side. Jean Valjean could
only see the ground at a great depth below him.
He had just reached the slope of the roof, and had not yet
left the crest of the wall, when a violent uproar announced the
arrival of the patrol. The thundering voice of Javert was
audible:—
"Search the blind alley! The Rue Droit-Mur is guarded!
so is the Rue Petit-Picpus. I'll answer for it that he is in the
blind alley."
The soldiers rushed into the Genrot alley.
Jean Valjean allowed himself to slide down the roof, still
holding fast to Cosette, reached the linden-tree, and leaped to
the ground. Whether from terror or courage, Cosette had not
breathed a sound, though her hands were a little abraded.