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 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.