Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [276]
He felt that the police was somewhere near by in ambush, awaiting the signal agreed upon, and all ready to stretch out its arm.
He hoped, moreover, that from this terrible meeting between Jondrette and Monsieur Leblanc some light would be thrown upon all that he was interested to know.
18 (19)
THE DISTRACTIONS OF DARK CORNERS
NO SOONER was Monsieur Leblanc seated than he turned his eyes towards the empty pallets.
“How is the poor little injured girl?” he inquired.
“Badly,” answered Jondrette with a doleful yet grateful smile, “very badly, my worthy monsieur. Her eldest sister has taken her to the Bourbe to have her arm dressed. You will see them, they will be back directly.”
“Madame Fabantou appears to me much better?” resumed Monsieur Leblanc, casting his eyes upon the grotesque accoutrement of the female Jondrette, who, standing between him and the door, as if she were already guarding the exit, was looking at him in a threatening and almost a defiant posture.
“She is dying,” said Jondrette. “But you see, monsieur! she has so much courage, that woman! She is not a woman, she is an ox.”
The woman, touched by the compliment, retorted with the smirk of a flattered monster:
“You are always too kind to me, Monsieur Jondrette.”
“Jondrette!” said M. Leblanc, “I thought that your name was Fabantou?”
“Fabantou or Jondrette!” replied the husband hastily. “Stage name as an artist!”
And, directing a shrug of the shoulders towards his wife, which M. Leblanc did not see, he continued with an emphatic and caressing tone of voice:
“Ah! how long we have always got along together, this poor dear and I! What would be left to us, if it were not for that? We are so unfortunate, my respected monsieur! We have arms, no work! We have courage, no employment! I do not know how the government arranges it, but, upon my word of honour, I am no jacobin, monsieur, I am no brawler, I wish them no harm, but if I were the ministers, upon my most sacred word, it would go differently. Now, for example, I wanted to have my girls learn the trade of making cardboard boxes. You will say: What! a trade? Yes! a trade! a simple trade! a living! What a fall, my benefactor! What a degradation, when one has been what we were! Alas! we have nothing left from our days of prosperity! Nothing but one single thing, a painting, to which I cling, but yet which I shall have to part with, for we must live! item, we must live!”
While Jondrette was talking, with an apparent disorder which detracted nothing from the crafty and cunning expression of his physiognomy, Marius raised his eyes, and perceived at the back of the room somebody whom he had not before seen. A man had come in so noiselessly that nobody had heard the door turn on its hinges. This man had a knit woollen waistcoat of violet colour, old, worn-out, stained, cut, and showing gaps at all its folds, full trousers of cotton velvet, socks on his feet, no shirt, his neck bare, his arms bare and tattooed, and his face stained black. He sat down in silence and with folded arms on the nearest bed, and as he kept behind the woman, he was only dimly visible.
That kind of magnetic instinct which warns the eye made M. Leblanc turn almost at the same time with Marius. He could not help a movement of surprise, which did not escape Jondrette:
“Ah! I see!” exclaimed Jondrette, buttoning up his coat with a complacent air, “you are looking at your overcoat. It’s a fit! my faith, it’s a fit!”
“Who is that man?” said M. Leblanc.
“That man?” said Jondrette, “that is a neighbour. Pay no attention to him.”
The neighbour had a singular appearance. However, factories of chemical products abound in Faubourg Saint Marceau. Many machinists might have their faces blacked. The whole person of M. Leblanc, moreover, breathed a candid and intrepid confidence. He resumed:
“Pardon me; what were you saying to me, Monsieur Fabantou?”
“I was telling you, monsieur and dear patron,” replied Jondrette, leaning his elbows on the table, and gazing