3.V.3.1. 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 passersby 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 net-work, 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 Platriere, 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
Jeuneurs, 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
a petits materiaux — 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 water-sheds 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.