Condemn the victim and to spare the assassin!
Could one be held to any gratitude towards so miserable a wretch?
All the ideas which Marius had cherished for the last four years were pierced through and through, as it were, by this unforeseen blow.
He shuddered.
Everything depended on him.
Unknown to themselves, he held in his hand all those beings who were moving about there before his eyes.
If he fired his pistol, M. Leblanc was saved, and Thenardier lost; if he did not fire, M. Leblanc would be sacrificed, and, who knows? Thenardier would escape.
Should he dash down the one or allow the other to fall?
Remorse awaited him in either case.
What was he to do?
What should he choose?
Be false to the most imperious souvenirs, to all those solemn vows to himself, to the most sacred duty, to the most venerated text!
Should he ignore his father’s testament, or allow the perpetration of a crime!
On the one hand, it seemed to him that he heard “his Ursule” supplicating for her father and on the other, the colonel commending Thenardier to his care.
He felt that he was going mad.
His knees gave way beneath him. And he had not even the time for deliberation, so great was the fury with which the scene before his eyes was hastening to its catastrophe.
It was like a whirlwind of which he had thought himself the master, and which was now sweeping him away.
He was on the verge of swooning.
In the meantime, Thenardier, whom we shall henceforth call by no other name, was pacing up and down in front of the table in a sort of frenzy and wild triumph.
He seized the candle in his fist, and set it on the chimney-piece with so violent a bang that the wick came near being extinguished, and the tallow bespattered the wall.
Then he turned to M. Leblanc with a horrible look, and spit out these words:—
“Done for! Smoked brown! Cooked!
Spitchcocked!”
And again he began to march back and forth, in full eruption.
“Ah!” he cried, “so I’ve found you again at last, Mister philanthropist!
Mister threadbare millionnaire!
Mister giver of dolls! you old ninny!
Ah! so you don’t recognize me!
No, it wasn’t you who came to Montfermeil, to my inn, eight years ago, on Christmas eve, 1823!
It wasn’t you who carried off that Fantine’s child from me! The Lark!
It wasn’t you who had a yellow great-coat!
No!
Nor a package of duds in your hand, as you had this morning here!
Say, wife, it seems to be his mania to carry packets of woollen stockings into houses!
Old charity monger, get out with you!
Are you a hosier, Mister millionnaire?
You give away your stock in trade to the poor, holy man!
What bosh! merry Andrew!
Ah! and you don’t recognize me?
Well, I recognize you, that I do!
I recognized you the very moment you poked your snout in here.
Ah! you’ll find out presently, that it isn’t all roses to thrust yourself in that fashion into people’s houses, under the pretext that they are taverns, in wretched clothes, with the air of a poor man, to whom one would give a sou, to deceive persons, to play the generous, to take away their means of livelihood, and to make threats in the woods, and you can’t call things quits because afterwards, when people are ruined, you bring a coat that is too large, and two miserable hospital blankets, you old blackguard, you child-stealer!”
He paused, and seemed to be talking to himself for a moment.
One would have said that his wrath had fallen into some hole, like the Rhone; then, as though he were concluding aloud the things which he had been saying to himself in a whisper, he smote the table with his fist, and shouted:—
“And with his goody-goody air!”
And, apostrophizing M. Leblanc:—
“Parbleu! You made game of me in the past!
You are the cause of all my misfortunes!
For fifteen hundred francs you got a girl whom I had, and who certainly belonged to rich people, and who had already brought in a great deal of money, and from whom I might have extracted enough to live on all my life!
A girl who would have made up to me for everything that I lost in that vile cook-shop, where there was nothing but one continual row, and where, like a fool, I ate up my last farthing!