Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [402]
His position was visibly becoming critical.
If not to throw himself into the Seine, what was he going to do?
No means henceforth of getting up to the quai; no other slope, and no staircase; and they were very near the spot, marked by the turn of the Seine towards the Pont d‘Iéna, where the walkway, narrowing more and more, terminates in a slender tongue, and vanishes beneath the water. There he would inevitably find himself blockaded between the steep wall on his right, the river on the left and in front, and authority upon his heels.
It is true that this end of the quai was hidden by a mound of rubbish from six to seven feet high, the product of some demolition. But did this man hope to hide with any effect behind this heap of fragments, which the other had only to walk around. The expedient would have been puerile. He certainly did not dream of it. The innocence of robbers does not reach this extent.
The heap of rubbish made a sort of hillock at the edge of the water, and extended like a promontory, as far as the wall of the quai.
The man pursued reached this little hill and walked around it, so that he ceased to be seen by the other.
The latter, not seeing, was not seen; he took advantage of this to abandon all dissimulation, and to walk very rapidly. In a few seconds he came to the mound of rubbish, and went around. There, he stopped in amazement. The man whom he was hunting was gone.
The fugitive could not have thrown himself into the Seine nor scaled the quai without being seen by him who was following him. What had become of him?
The man in the closely buttoned coat walked to the end of the quai, and stopped there a moment thoughtful, his fists convulsive, his eyes ferreting. Suddenly he slapped his forehead. He had noticed, at the point where the land and the water began, an iron grating broad and low, arched, with a heavy lock and three massive hinges. This grating, a sort of door cut into the bottom of the quai, opened upon the river as much as upon the beach. A blackish stream flowed from beneath it. This stream emptied into the Seine.
Beyond its heavy rusty bars could be distinguished a sort of corridor arched and dark.
The man folded his arms and looked at the grating reproachfully.
This look not sufficing, he tried to push it; he shook it, it resisted firmly. It was probable that it had just been opened, although no sound had been heard, a singular circumstance with a grating so rusty; but it was certain that it had been closed again. That indicated that he before whom this door had just turned, had not a hook but a key.
This evident fact burst immediately upon the mind of the man who was exerting himself to shake the grating, and forced from him this indignant epiphonema:gq
“This is fine! a government key!”
4
HE ALSO BEARS HIS CROSSgr
JEAN VALJEAN had resumed his advance, and had not stopped again.
This advance became more and more laborious. The level of these arches varies; the medium height is about five feet six inches, and was calculated for the stature of a man; Jean Valjean was compelled to bend so, as not to hit Marius against the arch; he had to stoop every second, then rise up, to grope incessantly for the wall. The moisture of the stones and the sliminess of the floor made them bad points of support, whether for the hand or the foot. He was wading in the hideous muck of the city. The occasional gleams from the air-holes appeared only at long intervals, and so ghastly were they that the noonday seemed but moonlight; all the rest was mist, miasma, opacity, blackness. Jean Valjean was hungry and thirsty; thirsty especially; and this place, like the sea, is one full of water where you cannot drink. His strength, which was prodigious, and very little diminished by age, thanks to his chaste and sober life, began to give way notwithstanding. Fatigue grew upon him, and as his strength diminished the weight of his load increased. Marius, dead perhaps,