Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [329]
Thénardier had obtained permission to keep a kind of an iron spike which he used to nail his bread into a crack in the wall, “in order,” said he, “to preserve it from the rats.” As Thénardier was constantly in sight, they imagined no danger from this spike. However, it was remembered afterwards that a warden had said: “It would be better to let him have nothing but a wooden pike.”
At two o‘clock in the morning, the sentinel, who was an old soldier, was relieved, and his place was taken by a conscript. A few moments afterwards, the man with the dogs made his visit, and went away without noticing anything, except the extreme youth and the “peasant air” of the “greenhorn.” Two hours afterwards, at four o’clock, when they came to relieve the conscript, they found him asleep, and lying on the ground like a log near Thénardier’s cage. As to Thénardier, he was not there. His broken irons were on the floor. There was a hole in the ceiling of his cage, and above, another hole in the roof A board had been torn from his bed, and doubtless carried away, for it was not found again. There was also seized in the cell a half empty bottle, containing the rest of the drugged wine with which the soldier had been put to sleep. The soldier’s bayonet had disappeared.
At the moment of this discovery, it was supposed that Thénardier was out of all reach. The reality is, that he was no longer in the Bâtiment Neuf, but that he was still in great danger.
Thénardier on reaching the roof of the Bâtiment Neuf, found the remnant of Brujon’s cord hanging to the bars of the upper trap of the chimney, but this broken end being much too short, he was unable to escape over the sentry’s path as Brujon and Gueulemer had done.
On turning from the Rue des Ballets into the Rue du Roi de Sicile, on the right you meet almost immediately with a dirty recess. There was a house there in the last century, of which only the rear wall remains, a genuine ruin wall which rises to the height of the third story among the neighbouring buildings. This ruin can be recognised by two large square windows which may still be seen; the one in the middle, nearer the right gable, is crossed by a worm-eaten joist fitted like a cap-piece for a brace. Through these windows could formerly be discerned a high and dismal wall, which was a part of the encircling wall of La Force.
The void which the demolished house left upon the street is half filled by a palisade fence of rotten boards, supported by five stone posts. Hidden in this inclosure is a little shanty built against that part of the ruin which remains standing. The fence has a gate which a few years ago was fastened only by a latch.
Thénardier was upon the crest of this ruin a little after three o‘clock in the morning.
How had he got there? That is what nobody has ever been able to explain or understand. The lightning must have both confused and helped him. Did he use the ladders and the scaffoldings of the slaters to get from roof to roof, from inclosure to inclosure, from compartment to compartment, to the buildings of the Charlemagne court, then the buildings of the Cour Saint Louis, the encircling wall, and from thence to the ruin on the Rue du Roi de Sicile? But there were gaps in this route which seemed to render it impossible. Did he lay down the plank from his bed as a bridge from the roof of the Bel Air to the encircling wall, and did he crawl on his belly along the coping of the wall, all round the prison as far