Les Misérables, v. 3

M. Leblanc rose, set his back against the wall, and took a hurried glance round the room. He had Jondrette on his left by the window, and on his right the woman and the four men by the door. The four men did not stir, and did not even appear to see him. Jondrette had begun talking again with a plaintive accent, and with such a wandering eye that M. Leblanc might fairly believe that he simply had before him a man driven mad by misery.

"If you do not buy my picture, dear benefactor," Jondrette said, "I have no resource remaining, and nothing is left me but to throw myself into the river. When I think that I wished my two daughters to learn how to make paper boxes for new-year's gifts – Well, for that you require a table with a backboard to prevent the glasses falling on the ground, a stove made expressly, a pot with three compartments for the three different degrees of strength which the glue must have, according as it is used for wood, paper, and cloth; a board to cut pasteboard on, a hammer, a pair of pincers, and the deuce knows what, and all that to gain four sous a day! And you must work fourteen hours; and each box passes thirteen times through the hands of the work-girl; and moistening the paper, and not spoiling anything; and keeping the glue hot – the devil! I tell you, four sous a day! How do you expect them to live?"

While speaking, Jondrette did not look at M. Leblanc, who was watching him. M. Leblanc's eye was fixed on Jondrette, and Jondrette's on the door, while Marius's gasping attention went from one to the other. M. Leblanc seemed to be asking himself. Is he a lunatic? And Jondrette repeated twice or thrice with all sorts of varied inflections in the suppliant style, "All that is left me is to throw myself into the river! The other day I went for that purpose down three steps by the side of the bridge of Austerlitz." All at once his eyes glistened with a hideous radiance, the little man drew himself up and became frightful, he walked a step toward M. Leblanc, and shouted in a thundering voice, —

"All this is not the question! Do you recognize me?"

CHAPTER XX

THE TRAP

The attic door was torn open, and three men in blue cloth blouses and wearing masks of black paper came in. The first was thin, and carried an iron – shod cudgel; the second, who was a species of Colossus, held a butcher's pole-axe by the middle of the handle, with the hatchet down; while the third, a broad-shouldered fellow, not so thin as the first but not stout as the second, was armed with an enormous key stolen from some prison-gate. It seemed as if Jondrette had been awaiting the arrival of these men, and a hurried conversation took place between him and the man with the cudgel.

"Is all ready?" asked Jondrette.

"Yes," the thin man replied.

"Where is Montparnasse?"

"That jeune premier has stopped to talk to your eldest daughter."

"Is there a coach down there?"

"Yes."

"With two good horses?"

"Excellent."

"Is it waiting where I ordered?"

"Yes."

"All right," said Jondrette.

M. Leblanc was very pale. He looked all round the room like a man who understands into what a snare he has fallen, and his head, turned toward all the heads that surrounded him, moved on his neck with an attentive and surprised slowness, but there was nothing in his appearance that resembled fear. He had formed an improvised bulwark of the table, and this man, who a moment before merely looked like an old man, had suddenly become an athlete, and laid his robust fist on the back of his chair with a formidable and surprising gesture. This old man, so firm and brave in the presence of such a danger, seemed to possess one of those natures which are courageous in the same way as they are good, – easily and simply. The father of a woman we love is never a stranger to us, and Marius felt proud of this unknown man.

Three of the men whom Jondrette called chimney-menders had taken from the mass of iron, one a large pair of shears, another a crowbar for moving weights, and the third a hammer, and posted themselves in front of the door without saying a word. The old man remained on the bed, merely opening his eyes, and Mother Jondrette was sitting by his side. Marius thought that the moment for interference was at hand, and raised his right hand to the ceiling in the direction of the passage, ready to fire his pistol. Jondrette, after finishing his colloquy with the three men, turned again to M. Leblanc, and repeated the question with that low, restrained, and terrible laugh of his, —

"Do you not recognize me?"

M. Leblanc looked him in the face and answered, "No!"

Jondrette then went up to the table; he bent over the candle with folded arms, and placed his angular and ferocious face as close as he could to M. Leblanc's placid face, and in this posture of a wild beast which is going to bite he exclaimed, —

"My name is not Fabantou or Jondrette, but my name is Thénardier, the landlord of the inn at Montfermeil! Do you hear me, – Thénardier? Now do you recognize me?"

An almost imperceptible flush shot athwart M. Leblanc's forehead, and he answered, with his ordinary placidity, and without the slightest tremor in his voice, —

"No more than before."

Marius did not hear this answer, and any one who had seen him at this moment in the darkness would have found him haggard, stunned, and crushed. At the moment when Jondrette said, "My name is Thénardier," Marius trembled in all his limbs, and he leaned against the wall, as if he felt a cold sword-blade thrust through his heart. Then his right hand, raised in readiness to fire, slowly dropped, and at the moment when Jondrette repeated, "Do you hear me, – Thénardier?" Marius's relaxing fingers almost let the pistol fall. Jondrette, by revealing who he was, did not affect M. Leblanc, but he stunned Marius, for he knew this name of Thénardier, which was apparently unknown to M. Leblanc. Only remember what that name was for him! He had carried it in his heart, recorded in his father's will! He bore it in the deepest shrine of his memory in the sacred recommendation, – "A man of the name of Thénardier saved my life; if my son meet this man he will do all he can for him." This name, it will be remembered, was one of the pieties of his soul, and he blended it with his father's name in his worship. What! this man was Thénardier, the landlord of Montfermeil, whom he had so long and so vainly sought! He found him now, and in what a state! His father's savior was a bandit! This man, to whom Marius burned to devote himself, was a monster! The liberator of Colonel Pontmercy was on the point of committing a crime whose outline Marius could not yet see very distinctly, but which resembled an assassination! And on whom? Great Heaven, what a fatality; what a bitter mockery of fate! His father commanded him from his tomb to do all in his power for Thénardier. During four years Marius had had no other idea but to pay this debt of his father's; and at the very moment when he was about to deliver over to justice a brigand in the act of crime, destiny cried to him, "It is Thénardier!" and he was at length about to requite this man for saving his father's life amid a hailstorm of grape-shot on the heroic field of Waterloo, by sending him to the scaffold! He had vowed that if ever he found this Thénardier he would throw himself at his feet; and he had found him, but for the purpose of handing him over to the executioner! His father said to him, "Help Thénardier," and he was about to answer that adored and sacred voice by crushing Thénardier; to show his father in his grave the spectacle of the man who had dragged him from death at the peril of his own life being executed on the Place St. Jacques by the agency of his son, that Marius to whom he bequeathed this name! And then what a derision it was to have so long carried in his heart the last wishes of his father in order to perform exactly the contrary! But, on the other hand, how could he witness a murder and not prevent it? What! should he condemn the victim and spare the assassin? Could he be bound by any ties of gratitude to such a villain? All the ideas which Marius had entertained for four years were, as it were, run through the body by this unexpected stroke. He trembled; all depended on him; and he held in his hands the unconscious beings who were moving before his eyes. If he fired the pistol, M. Leblanc was saved and Thénardier lost; if he did not fire, M. Leblanc was sacrificed and Thénardier might, perhaps, escape. Must he hunt down the one, or let the other fall? There was remorse on either side. What should he do? Which should he choose, – be a defaulter to the most imperious recollections, to so many profound pledges taken to himself, to the most sacred duty, to the most venerated commands, disobey his father's will, or let a crime be accomplished? On one side he fancied he could hear "his Ursule" imploring him for her father, on the other the Colonel recommending Thénardier to him. He felt as if he were going mad. His knees gave way under him, and he had not even time to deliberate, as the scene he had before him was being performed with such furious precipitation. It was a tornado of which he had fancied himself the master, but which was carrying him away: he was on the verge of fainting.

In the mean while Thénardier (we will not call him otherwise in future) was walking up and down before the table with a sort of wild and frenzied triumph. He seized the candlestick and placed it on the chimney-piece with such a violent blow that the candle nearly went out, and the tallow spattered the wall. Then he turned round furiously to M. Leblanc and spat forth these words: —

"Done brown! grilled, fricasseed! spatch-cocked!"

And he began walking again with a tremendous explosion.

"Ah! I have found you again, my excellent philanthropist, my millionnaire with the threadbare coat, the giver of dolls, the old niggard! Ah, you do not recognize me! I suppose it was n't you who came to my inn at Montfermeil just eight years ago, on the Christmas night of 1823! It was n't you who carried off Fantine's child, the Lark! It was n't you who wore a yellow watchman's coat, and had a parcel of clothes in your hand, just as you had this morning! Tell me, wife! It is his mania, it appears, to carry to houses bundles of woollen stockings, – the old charitable humbug! Are you a cap-maker, my Lord Millionnaire? You give your profits to the poor – what a holy man! what a mountebank! Ah, you do not recognize me! Well, I recognize you, and did so directly you thrust your muzzle in here. Ah, you will be taught that it is not a rosy game to go like that to people's houses, under the excuse that they are inns, with such a wretched coat and poverty-stricken look that they feel inclined to give you a son, and then, to play the generous, rob them of their bread-winner and threaten them in the woods! I'll teach you that you won't get off by bringing people when they are ruined a coat that is too large, and two paltry hospital blankets, you old scamp, you child-stealer!"

He stopped, and for a moment seemed to be speaking to himself. It appeared as if his fury fell into some hole, like the Rhone: then, as if finishing aloud the things he had just been saying to himself, he struck the table with his fist, and cried, —

"With his simple look!"

Then he apostrophized M. Leblanc.

"By heaven! you made a fool of me formerly, and are the cause of all my misfortunes. You got for fifteen hundred francs a girl who certainly belonged to rich parents, who had already brought me in a deal of money, and from whom I should have got an annuity! That girl would have made up to me all I lost in that wretched pot-house, where I threw away like an ass all my blessed savings! Oh, I wish that what was drunk at my house were poison to those who drank it! However, no matter! Tell me, I suppose you thought me a precious fool when you went off with the Lark! You had your cudgel in the forest, and were the stronger. To-day I shall have my revenge, for I hold all the trumps; you are done, my good fellow! Oh, how I laugh when I think that he fell into the trap! I told him that I was an actor, that my name was Fabantou, that I had played comedy with Mamselle Mars, with Mamselle Muche, and that my landlord insisted on being paid the next day; and he did not even remember that January 8 and not February 4 is quarter-day, – the absurd idiot! And he has brought me these four paltry philippes, the ass! He had not the pluck to go as far as five hundred francs. And how he swallowed my platitudes! It amused me, and I said to myself, 'There's an ass for you! Well, I have got you; this morning I licked your paws, and to-night I shall gnaw your heart!'"

Thénardier stopped, out of breath. His little narrow chest panted like a forge-bellows; his eye was full of the ignoble happiness of a weak, cruel, and cowardly creature who is at length able to trample on the man he feared, and insult him whom he flattered; it is the joy of a dwarf putting his heel on the head of Goliath, the joy of a jackal beginning to rend a sick bull so near death as to be unable to defend itself, but with enough vitality to still suffer. M. Leblanc did not interrupt him, but said, when he ceased speaking, —

"I do not know what you mean, and you are mistaken. I am a very poor man, and anything but a millionnaire. I do not know you, and you take me for somebody else."

"Ah!" Thénardier said hoarsely, "a fine dodge! So you adhere to that joke, eh, old fellow? Ah, you do not remember, you do not see who I am!"

"Pardon me, sir," M. Leblanc replied, with a polite accent, which had something strange and grand about it at such a moment, "I see that you are a bandit."

We may remind those who have not noticed the fact, that odious beings possess a susceptibility, and that monsters are ticklish. At the word "bandit," Mother Thénardier leaped from the bed, and her husband clutched a chair as if about to break it in his hand. "Don't stir, you!" he shouted to his wife, and then turning to M. Leblanc, said, —

"Bandit! yes, I know that you rich swells call us so. It is true that I have been bankrupt. I am in hiding, I have no bread, I have not a farthing, and I am a bandit! For three days I have eaten nothing, and I am a bandit! Ah, you fellows warm your toes, your wear pumps made by Sakoski, you have wadded coats like archbishops, you live on the first floors of houses where a porter is kept, you eat truffles, asparagus at forty francs the bundle in January, and green peas. You stuff yourselves, and when you want to know whether it is cold you look in the newspaper to see what Chevalier's thermometer marks; but we are the thermometers. We have no call to go and look at the corner of the Jour d'Horloge how many degrees of cold there are, for we feel the blood stopped in our veins, and the ice reach our hearts, and we say, 'There is no God!' and you come into our caverns, – yes, our caverns, – to call us bandits! But we will eat you, we will devour you, poor little chap! Monsieur le Millionnaire, learn this: I was an established man, I held a license, I was an elector, and am still a citizen, while you, perhaps, are not one!"

Here Thénardier advanced a step toward the men near the door, and added with a quiver, —

"When I think that he dares to come and address me like a cobbler!"

Then he turned upon M. Leblanc with a fresh outburst of frenzy, —

"And know this, too, my worthy philanthropist, I am not a doubtful man, or one whose name is unknown, and carries off children from houses! I am an ex-French soldier, and ought to have the cross! I was at Waterloo, and in the battle I saved the life of a General called the Comte de – I don't know what. He told me his name, but his dog of a voice was so feeble that I did not understand it. I only understood Merci. I should have liked his name better than his thanks. It would have helped me find him, by all that's great and glorious! The picture you see here, and which was painted by David at Bruqueselles, do you know whom it represents? It represents me, for David wished to immortalize the exploit. I have the General on my back, and I am carrying him through the grape-shot. That is the story! The General never did anything for me, and he is no better than the rest; but, for all that, I saved his life at the peril of my own, and I have my pockets filled with certificates of the fact. I am a soldier of Waterloo! And now that I have had the goodness to tell you all this, let us come to a finish; I want money, I want a deal of money, an enormous amount of money, or I shall exterminate you, by the thunder of heaven!"

Marius had gained a little mastery over his agony, and was listening. The last possibility of doubt had vanished, and it was really the Thénardier of the will. Marius shuddered at the charge of ingratitude cast at his father, and which he was on the point of justifying so fatally, and his perplexities were redoubled. Besides, there was in Thénardier's every word, in his accent and gestures, in his glance, which caused flames to issue from every word, in this explosion of an evil nature displaying everything, in this admixture of boasting and abjectness, pride and meanness, rage and folly, in this chaos of real griefs and false sentiments, in this impudence of a wicked man enjoying the pleasure of violence, in this daring nudity of an ugly soul, and in this conflagration of every suffering combined with every hatred, something which was hideous as evil and poignant as truth.

The masterpiece, the picture by David, which he offered M. Leblanc, was, as the reader will have perceived, nought else than his public-house sign, painted by himself, and the sole relic he had preserved from his shipwreck at Montfermeil. As he had stepped aside Marius was now enabled to look at this thing, and in the daub he really recognized a battle, a background of smoke, and one man carrying another. It was the group of Thénardier and Pontmercy, – the savior sergeant and the saved colonel. Marius felt as if intoxicated, for this picture represented to some extent his loving father; it was no longer an inn sign-board but a resurrection; a tomb opened, a phantom rose. Marius heard his heart ringing at his temples; he had the guns of Waterloo in his ears; his bleeding father vaguely painted on this ill-omened board startled him, and he fancied that the shapeless figure was gazing fixedly at him. When Thénardier regained breath he fastened his bloodshot eyes on M. Leblanc, and said to him in a low, sharp voice, —

"What have you to say before we put the screw on you?"

M. Leblanc was silent. In the midst of this silence a hoarse voice uttered this grim sarcasm in the passage, —

"If there's any wood to be chopped, I'm your man."

It was the fellow with the pole-axe amusing himself. At the same time an immense, hairy, earth-colored face appeared in the door with a frightful grin, which displayed not teeth but tusks. It was the face of the man with the pole-axe.

"Why have you taken off your mask?" Thénardier asked him furiously.

"To laugh," the man answered.

For some minutes past M. Leblanc seemed to be watching and following every movement of Thénardier, who, blinded and dazzled by his own rage, was walking up and down the room, in the confidence of knowing the door guarded, of holding an unarmed man, and of being nine against one, even supposing that his wife only counted for one man. In his speech to the man with the pole-axe he turned his back to M. Leblanc; the latter seizing the moment, upset the chair with his foot, the table with his fist, and with one bound, ere Thénardier was able to turn, he was at the window. To open it and bestride the sill took only a second, and he was half out, when six powerful hands seized him and energetically dragged him back into the room. The three "chimney-sweeps" had rushed upon him, and at the same time Mother Thénardier seized him by the hair. At the noise which ensued the other bandits ran in from the passage, and the old man on the bed, who seemed the worse for liquor, came up tottering with a road-mender's hammer in his hand. One of the sweeps, whose blackened face the candle lit up, and in whom Marius recognized, in spite of the blackening, Panchaud alias Printanier alias Bigrenaille, raised above M. Leblanc's head a species of life-preserver, made of two lumps of lead at the ends of an iron bar. Marius could not resist this sight. "My father," he thought, "forgive me!" and his finger sought the trigger. He was on the point of firing, when Thénardier cried, —

"Do not hurt him!"

This desperate attempt of the victim, far from exasperating Thénardier, had calmed him. There were two men in him, – the ferocious man and the skilful man. Up to this moment, in the exuberance of triumph, and while standing before his motionless victim, the ferocious man had prevailed; but when the victim made an effort and appeared inclined to struggle, the skilful man reappeared and took the mastery.

"Do him no harm!" he repeated; and his first service was, though he little suspected it, that he stopped the discharge of the pistol and paralyzed Marius, to whom the affair did not appear so urgent, and who in the presence of this new phase saw no harm in waiting a little longer. Who knew whether some accident might not occur which would deliver him from the frightful alternative of letting Ursule's father perish, or destroying the Colonels savior? A herculean struggle had commenced. With one blow of his fist in the chest M. Leblanc sent the old man rolling in the middle of the room, and then with two back-handers knocked down two other assailants, and held one under each of his knees. The villains groaned under this pressure as under a granite mill-stone; but the four others had seized the formidable old man by the arms and neck, and were holding him down upon the two "chimney-menders." Thus, master of two, and mastered by the others, crushing those beneath him, and crushed by those above him, M. Leblanc disappeared beneath this horrible group of bandits, like a boar attacked by a howling pack of dogs. They succeeded in throwing him on to the bed nearest the window, and held him down. Mother Thénardier did not once let go his hair.

"Don't you interfere," Thénardier said to her; "you will tear your shawl."

The woman obeyed, as the she-wolf obeys the wolf, with a snarl.

"You fellows," Thénardier continued, "can search him."

M. Leblanc appeared to have given up all thought of resistance, and they searched him. He had nothing about him but a leathern purse containing six francs and his handkerchief. Thénardier put the latter in his own pocket.

"What! no pocket-book?" he asked.

"No, and no watch," one of the "chimney-menders" replied.

"No matter," the masked man who held the large key muttered in the voice of a ventriloquist, "he is a tough old bird."

Thénardier went to the corner near the door, and took up some ropes, which he threw to them.

"Fasten him to the foot of the bed," he said; and noticing the old man whom M. Leblanc had knocked down still motionless on the floor, he asked, —

"Is Boulatruelle dead?"

"No," Bigrenaille answered, "he's drunk."

"Sweep him into a corner," Thénardier said.

Two of the "chimney-menders" thrust the drunkard with their feet to the side of the old iron.

"Babet, why did you bring so many?" Thénardier said in a whisper to the man with the cudgel; "it was unnecessary."

"They all wanted to be in it," the man answered, "for the season is bad, and there's nothing doing."

The bed upon which M. Leblanc had been thrown was a sort of hospital bed, on four clumsy wooden legs. M. Leblanc made no resistance. The bandits tied him firmly in an upright posture to the end of the bed, farthest from the window and nearest the chimney-piece. When the last knot was tied, Thénardier took a chair and sat down almost facing the prisoner. He was no longer the same man; in a few minutes his countenance had passed from frenzied violence to tranquil and cunning gentleness. Marius had a difficulty in recognizing in this polite smile of an official the almost bestial mouth which had been foaming a moment previously; he regarded this fantastic and alarming metamorphosis with stupor, and he felt as a man would feel who saw a tiger changed into an attorney.

"Sir," said Thénardier, and made a sign to the bandits who still held M. Leblanc to fall back; – "leave me to talk with the gentleman," he said. All withdrew to the door, and he resumed, —