He still held Marius on high, and with an unheard-of expenditure of force, he advanced still; but he was sinking.
He had only his head above the water now and his two arms holding up Marius.
In the old paintings of the deluge there is a mother holding her child thus.
He sank still deeper, he turned his face to the rear, to escape the water, and in order that he might be able to breathe; anyone who had seen him in that gloom would have thought that what he beheld was a mask floating on the shadows; he caught a faint glimpse above him of the drooping head and livid face of Marius; he made a desperate effort and launched his foot forward; his foot struck something solid; a point of support.
It was high time.
He straightened himself up, and rooted himself upon that point of support with a sort of fury.
This produced upon him the effect of the first step in a staircase leading back to life.
The point of support, thus encountered in the mire at the supreme moment, was the beginning of the other watershed of the pavement, which had bent but had not given way, and which had curved under the water like a plank and in a single piece.
Well built pavements form a vault and possess this sort of firmness.
This fragment of the vaulting, partly submerged, but solid, was a veritable inclined plane, and, once on this plane, he was safe.
Jean Valjean mounted this inclined plane and reached the other side of the quagmire.
As he emerged from the water, he came in contact with a stone and fell upon his knees.
He reflected that this was but just, and he remained there for some time, with his soul absorbed in words addressed to God.
He rose to his feet, shivering, chilled, foul-smelling, bowed beneath the dying man whom he was dragging after him, all dripping with slime, and his soul filled with a strange light.
CHAPTER VII—ONE SOMETIMES RUNS AGROUND WHEN ONE FANCIES THAT ONE IS DISEMBARKING
He set out on his way once more.
However, although he had not left his life in the fontis, he seemed to have left his strength behind him there.
That supreme effort had exhausted him.
His lassitude was now such that he was obliged to pause for breath every three or four steps, and lean against the wall.
Once he was forced to seat himself on the banquette in order to alter Marius’ position, and he thought that he should have to remain there.
But if his vigor was dead, his energy was not.
He rose again.
He walked on desperately, almost fast, proceeded thus for a hundred paces, almost without drawing breath, and suddenly came in contact with the wall.
He had reached an elbow of the sewer, and, arriving at the turn with head bent down, he had struck the wall.
He raised his eyes, and at the extremity of the vault, far, very far away in front of him, he perceived a light.
This time it was not that terrible light; it was good, white light.
It was daylight.
Jean Valjean saw the outlet.
A damned soul, who, in the midst of the furnace, should suddenly perceive the outlet of Gehenna, would experience what Jean Valjean felt.
It would fly wildly with the stumps of its burned wings towards that radiant portal.
Jean Valjean was no longer conscious of fatigue, he no longer felt Marius’ weight, he found his legs once more of steel, he ran rather than walked.
As he approached, the outlet became more and more distinctly defined.
It was a pointed arch, lower than the vault, which gradually narrowed, and narrower than the gallery, which closed in as the vault grew lower.
The tunnel ended like the interior of a funnel; a faulty construction, imitated from the wickets of penitentiaries, logical in a prison, illogical in a sewer, and which has since been corrected.
Jean Valjean reached the outlet.
There he halted.
It certainly was the outlet, but he could not get out.
The arch was closed by a heavy grating, and the grating, which, to all appearance, rarely swung on its rusty hinges, was clamped to its stone jamb by a thick lock, which, red with rust, seemed like an enormous brick.
The keyhole could be seen, and the robust latch, deeply sunk in the iron staple.
The door was plainly double-locked. It was one of those prison locks which old Paris was so fond of lavishing.
Beyond the grating was the open air, the river, the daylight, the shore, very narrow but sufficient for escape. The distant quays, Paris, that gulf in which one so easily hides oneself, the broad horizon, liberty.
On the right, downstream, the bridge of Jena was discernible, on the left, upstream, the bridge of the Invalides; the place would have been a propitious one in which to await the night and to escape.
It was one of the most solitary points in Paris; the shore which faces the Grand-Caillou.
Flies were entering and emerging through the bars of the grating.
It might have been half-past eight o’clock in the evening.
The day was declining.
Jean Valjean laid Marius down along the wall, on the dry portion of the vaulting, then he went to the grating and clenched both fists round the bars; the shock which he gave it was frenzied, but it did not move.
The grating did not stir.
Jean Valjean seized the bars one after the other, in the hope that he might be able to tear away the least solid, and to make of it a lever wherewith to raise the door or to break the lock.
Not a bar stirred.