He had improvised an intrenchment out of the table; and the man, who but an instant previously, had borne merely the appearance of a kindly old man, had suddenly become a sort of athlete, and placed his robust fist on the back of his chair, with a formidable and surprising gesture.
This old man, who was so firm and so brave in the presence of such a danger, seemed to possess one of those natures which are as courageous as they are kind, both easily and simply.
The father of a woman whom we love is never a stranger to us.
Marius felt proud of that unknown man.
Three of the men, of whom Jondrette had said:
“They are chimney-builders,” had armed themselves from the pile of old iron, one with a heavy pair of shears, the second with weighing-tongs, the third with a hammer, and had placed themselves across the entrance without uttering a syllable.
The old man had remained on the bed, and had merely opened his eyes.
The Jondrette woman had seated herself beside him.
Marius decided that in a few seconds more the moment for intervention would arrive, and he raised his right hand towards the ceiling, in the direction of the corridor, in readiness to discharge his pistol.
Jondrette having terminated his colloquy with the man with the cudgel, turned once more to M. Leblanc, and repeated his question, accompanying it with that low, repressed, and terrible laugh which was peculiar to him:— “So you do not recognize me?”
M. Leblanc looked him full in the face, and replied:— “No.”
Then Jondrette advanced to the table.
He leaned across the candle, crossing his arms, putting his angular and ferocious jaw close to M. Leblanc’s calm face, and advancing as far as possible without forcing M. Leblanc to retreat, and, in this posture of a wild beast who is about to bite, he exclaimed:—
“My name is not Fabantou, my name is not Jondrette, my name is Thenardier.
I am the inn-keeper of Montfermeil!
Do you understand?
Thenardier!
Now do you know me?”
An almost imperceptible flush crossed M. Leblanc’s brow, and he replied with a voice which neither trembled nor rose above its ordinary level, with his accustomed placidity:—
“No more than before.”
Marius did not hear this reply.
Any one who had seen him at that moment through the darkness would have perceived that he was haggard, stupid, thunder-struck.
At the moment when Jondrette said:
“My name is Thenardier,” Marius had trembled in every limb, and had leaned against the wall, as though he felt the cold of a steel blade through his heart.
Then his right arm, all ready to discharge the signal shot, dropped slowly, and at the moment when Jondrette repeated, “Thenardier, do you understand?”
Marius’s faltering fingers had come near letting the pistol fall.
Jondrette, by revealing his identity, had not moved M. Leblanc, but he had quite upset Marius.
That name of Thenardier, with which M. Leblanc did not seem to be acquainted, Marius knew well.
Let the reader recall what that name meant to him!
That name he had worn on his heart, inscribed in his father’s testament! He bore it at the bottom of his mind, in the depths of his memory, in that sacred injunction:
“A certain Thenardier saved my life.
If my son encounters him, he will do him all the good that lies in his power.”
That name, it will be remembered, was one of the pieties of his soul; he mingled it with the name of his father in his worship.
What! This man was that Thenardier, that inn-keeper of Montfermeil whom he had so long and so vainly sought!
He had found him at last, and how?
His father’s saviour was a ruffian!
That man, to whose service Marius was burning to devote himself, was a monster!
That liberator of Colonel Pontmercy was on the point of committing a crime whose scope Marius did not, as yet, clearly comprehend, but which resembled an assassination!
And against whom, great God! what a fatality!
What a bitter mockery of fate!
His father had commanded him from the depths of his coffin to do all the good in his power to this Thenardier, and for four years Marius had cherished no other thought than to acquit this debt of his father’s, and at the moment when he was on the eve of having a brigand seized in the very act of crime by justice, destiny cried to him:
“This is Thenardier!”
He could at last repay this man for his father’s life, saved amid a hail-storm of grape-shot on the heroic field of Waterloo, and repay it with the scaffold!
He had sworn to himself that if ever he found that Thenardier, he would address him only by throwing himself at his feet; and now he actually had found him, but it was only to deliver him over to the executioner!
His father said to him:
“Succor Thenardier!”
And he replied to that adored and sainted voice by crushing Thenardier!
He was about to offer to his father in his grave the spectacle of that man who had torn him from death at the peril of his own life, executed on the Place Saint-Jacques through the means of his son, of that Marius to whom he had entrusted that man by his will!
And what a mockery to have so long worn on his breast his father’s last commands, written in his own hand, only to act in so horribly contrary a sense!
But, on the other hand, now look on that trap and not prevent it!