Old as he was, he was agile.
There stood close at hand a beech-tree of great size, worthy of Tityrus and of Boulatruelle.
Boulatruelle ascended the beech as high as he was able.
The idea was a good one.
On scrutinizing the solitary waste on the side where the forest is thoroughly entangled and wild, Boulatruelle suddenly caught sight of his man.
Hardly had he got his eye upon him when he lost sight of him.
The man entered, or rather, glided into, an open glade, at a considerable distance, masked by large trees, but with which Boulatruelle was perfectly familiar, on account of having noticed, near a large pile of porous stones, an ailing chestnut-tree bandaged with a sheet of zinc nailed directly upon the bark.
This glade was the one which was formerly called the Blaru-bottom.
The heap of stones, destined for no one knows what employment, which was visible there thirty years ago, is doubtless still there.
Nothing equals a heap of stones in longevity, unless it is a board fence.
They are temporary expedients. What a reason for lasting!
Boulatruelle, with the rapidity of joy, dropped rather than descended from the tree.
The lair was unearthed, the question now was to seize the beast.
That famous treasure of his dreams was probably there.
It was no small matter to reach that glade.
By the beaten paths, which indulge in a thousand teasing zigzags, it required a good quarter of an hour.
In a bee-line, through the underbrush, which is peculiarly dense, very thorny, and very aggressive in that locality, a full half hour was necessary.
Boulatruelle committed the error of not comprehending this.
He believed in the straight line; a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.
The thicket, bristling as it was, struck him as the best road.
“Let’s take to the wolves’ Rue de Rivoli,” said he.
Boulatruelle, accustomed to taking crooked courses, was on this occasion guilty of the fault of going straight.
He flung himself resolutely into the tangle of undergrowth.
He had to deal with holly bushes, nettles, hawthorns, eglantines, thistles, and very irascible brambles.
He was much lacerated.
At the bottom of the ravine he found water which he was obliged to traverse.
At last he reached the Blaru-bottom, after the lapse of forty minutes, sweating, soaked, breathless, scratched, and ferocious.
There was no one in the glade.
Boulatruelle rushed to the heap of stones.
It was in its place.
It had not been carried off.
As for the man, he had vanished in the forest.
He had made his escape.
Where? in what direction? into what thicket?
Impossible to guess.
And, heartrending to say, there, behind the pile of stones, in front of the tree with the sheet of zinc, was freshly turned earth, a pick-axe, abandoned or forgotten, and a hole.
The hole was empty.
“Thief!” shrieked Boulatruelle, shaking his fist at the horizon.
CHAPTER II—MARIUS, EMERGING FROM CIVIL WAR, MAKES READY FOR DOMESTIC WAR
For a long time, Marius was neither dead nor alive.
For many weeks he lay in a fever accompanied by delirium, and by tolerably grave cerebral symptoms, caused more by the shocks of the wounds on the head than by the wounds themselves.
He repeated Cosette’s name for whole nights in the melancholy loquacity of fever, and with the sombre obstinacy of agony.
The extent of some of the lesions presented a serious danger, the suppuration of large wounds being always liable to become re-absorbed, and consequently, to kill the sick man, under certain atmospheric conditions; at every change of weather, at the slightest storm, the physician was uneasy.
“Above all things,” he repeated, “let the wounded man be subjected to no emotion.”
The dressing of the wounds was complicated and difficult, the fixation of apparatus and bandages by cerecloths not having been invented as yet, at that epoch.
Nicolette used up a sheet “as big as the ceiling,” as she put it, for lint.
It was not without difficulty that the chloruretted lotions and the nitrate of silver overcame the gangrene.
As long as there was any danger, M. Gillenormand, seated in despair at his grandson’s pillow, was, like Marius, neither alive nor dead.
Every day, sometimes twice a day, a very well dressed gentleman with white hair,—such was the description given by the porter,—came to inquire about the wounded man, and left a large package of lint for the dressings.
Finally, on the 7th of September, four months to a day, after the sorrowful night when he had been brought back to his grandfather in a dying condition, the doctor declared that he would answer for Marius.