Thenardier shuddered.
A few moments later, that terrified and confused uproar which follows the discovery of an escape broke forth in the prison.
The sound of doors opening and shutting, the creaking of gratings on their hinges, a tumult in the guard-house, the hoarse shouts of the turnkeys, the shock of musket-butts on the pavement of the courts, reached his ears.
Lights ascended and descended past the grated windows of the dormitories, a torch ran along the ridge-pole of the top story of the New Building, the firemen belonging in the barracks on the right had been summoned.
Their helmets, which the torch lighted up in the rain, went and came along the roofs.
At the same time, Thenardier perceived in the direction of the Bastille a wan whiteness lighting up the edge of the sky in doleful wise.
He was on top of a wall ten inches wide, stretched out under the heavy rains, with two gulfs to right and left, unable to stir, subject to the giddiness of a possible fall, and to the horror of a certain arrest, and his thoughts, like the pendulum of a clock, swung from one of these ideas to the other:
“Dead if I fall, caught if I stay.”
In the midst of this anguish, he suddenly saw, the street being still dark, a man who was gliding along the walls and coming from the Rue Pavee, halt in the recess above which Thenardier was, as it were, suspended.
Here this man was joined by a second, who walked with the same caution, then by a third, then by a fourth.
When these men were re-united, one of them lifted the latch of the gate in the fence, and all four entered the enclosure in which the shanty stood.
They halted directly under Thenardier.
These men had evidently chosen this vacant space in order that they might consult without being seen by the passers-by or by the sentinel who guards the wicket of La Force a few paces distant.
It must be added, that the rain kept this sentinel blocked in his box.
Thenardier, not being able to distinguish their visages, lent an ear to their words with the desperate attention of a wretch who feels himself lost.
Thenardier saw something resembling a gleam of hope flash before his eyes,—these men conversed in slang.
The first said in a low but distinct voice:—
“Let’s cut. What are we up to here?”
The second replied:
“It’s raining hard enough to put out the very devil’s fire.
And the bobbies will be along instanter.
There’s a soldier on guard yonder.
We shall get nabbed here.”
These two words, icigo and icicaille, both of which mean ici, and which belong, the first to the slang of the barriers, the second to the slang of the Temple, were flashes of light for Thenardier.
By the icigo he recognized Brujon, who was a prowler of the barriers, by the icicaille he knew Babet, who, among his other trades, had been an old-clothes broker at the Temple.
The antique slang of the great century is no longer spoken except in the Temple, and Babet was really the only person who spoke it in all its purity.
Had it not been for the icicaille, Thenardier would not have recognized him, for he had entirely changed his voice.
In the meanwhile, the third man had intervened.
“There’s no hurry yet, let’s wait a bit.
How do we know that he doesn’t stand in need of us?”
By this, which was nothing but French, Thenardier recognized Montparnasse, who made it a point in his elegance to understand all slangs and to speak none of them.
As for the fourth, he held his peace, but his huge shoulders betrayed him.
Thenardier did not hesitate. It was Guelemer.
Brujon replied almost impetuously but still in a low tone:—
“What are you jabbering about?
The tavern-keeper hasn’t managed to cut his stick.
He don’t tumble to the racket, that he don’t!
You have to be a pretty knowing cove to tear up your shirt, cut up your sheet to make a rope, punch holes in doors, get up false papers, make false keys, file your irons, hang out your cord, hide yourself, and disguise yourself!
The old fellow hasn’t managed to play it, he doesn’t understand how to work the business.”
Babet added, still in that classical slang which was spoken by Poulailler and Cartouche, and which is to the bold, new, highly colored and risky argot used by Brujon what the language of Racine is to the language of Andre Chenier:—
“Your tavern-keeper must have been nabbed in the act.
You have to be knowing. He’s only a greenhorn.
He must have let himself be taken in by a bobby, perhaps even by a sheep who played it on him as his pal.
Listen, Montparnasse, do you hear those shouts in the prison?
You have seen all those lights.
He’s recaptured, there!
He’ll get off with twenty years.
I ain’t afraid, I ain’t a coward, but there ain’t anything more to do, or otherwise they’d lead us a dance.
Don’t get mad, come with us, let’s go drink a bottle of old wine together.”
“One doesn’t desert one’s friends in a scrape,” grumbled Montparnasse.