Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [274]
The furnace, which was set into the fireplace, beside the almost extinguished embers, sent its smoke into the flue of the chimney and exhaled no odour.
The moon, shining through the four panes of the window, threw its whiteness into the ruddy and flaming garret; and to Marius’ poetic mind, a dreamer even in the moment of action, it was like a thought of heaven mingled with the shapeless nightmares of earth.
A breath of air, coming through the broken pane, helped to dissipate the charcoal odour and to conceal the furnace.
The Jondrette lair was, if the reader remembers what we have said of the Gorbeau house, admirably chosen for the theatre of a deed of darkness and violence, and for the concealment of a crime. It was the most retired room of the most isolated house of the most solitary boulevard in Paris. If ambush had not existed, it would have been invented there.
The whole depth of a house and a multitude of untenanted rooms separated this hole from the boulevard and its only window opened upon waste fields inclosed with walls and palisade fences.
Jondrette had lighted his pipe, sat down on the dismantled chair, and was smoking. His wife was speaking to him in a low tone.
Suddenly Jondrette raised his voice:
“By the way, now, I think of it. In such weather as this he will come in a fiacre. Light the lantern, take it, and go down. You will stay there behind the lower door. The moment you hear the carriage stop, you will open immediately, he will come up, you will light him up the stairs and above the hall, and when he comes in here, you will go down again immediately, pay the driver, and send the fiacre away.”
“And the money?” asked the woman.
Jondrette fumbled in his trousers, and handed her five francs.
“What is that?” she exclaimed.
Jondrette answered with dignity:
“It is the monarch which our neighbour gave this morning.”
And he added:—
“Do you know? we must have two chairs here.”
“What for?”
“To sit in.”
Marius felt a shiver run down his back on hearing the woman make this quiet reply:—
“Pardieu ! I will get our neighbour’s.”
And with rapid movement she opened the door of the den, and went out into the hall.
Marius physically had not the time to get down from the bureau, and go and hide himself under the bed.
“Take the candle,” cried Jondrette.
“No,” said she, “that would bother me; I have two chairs to bring. It is moonlight.”
Marius heard the heavy hand of mother Jondrette groping after his key in the dark. The door opened. He stood nailed to his place by apprehension and stupor.
The woman came in.
The gable window let in a ray of moonlight, between two great sheets of shadow. One of these sheets of shadow entirely covered the wall against which Marius was leaning, so as to conceal him.
Mother Jondrette raised her eyes, did not see Marius, took the two chairs, the only chairs which Marius had, and went out, slamming the door noisily behind her.
She went back into the den.
“Here are the two chairs.”
“And here is the lantern,” said the husband. “Go down quick.”
She hastily obeyed, and Jondrette was left alone.
He arranged the two chairs on the two sides of the table, turned the chisel over in the fire, put an old screen in front of the fireplace, which concealed the furnace, then went to the comer where the heap of ropes was, and stooped down, as if to examine something. Marius then perceived that what he had taken for a shapeless heap, was a rope ladder, very well made, with wooden rounds, and two large hooks to hang it by.
This ladder and a few big tools, actual masses of iron, which were thrown upon the pile of old iron heaped up behind the door, were not in the Jondrette den in the morning, and had evidently been brought there in the afternoon, during Marius’ absence.
“Those are metalworkers’ tools,” thought Marius.
Had Marius been a little better informed in this line, he would have recognised, in