Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [425]
“You are well acquainted with that street?”
“What street?”
“The Rue de la Chanvrerie.”
“I have no idea of the name of that street,” answered M. Fauchelevent in the most natural tone in the world.
The answer, which bore upon the name of the street, and not upon the street itself, appeared to Marius more conclusive than it was.
“Decidedly,” thought he, “I have been dreaming. I have had a hallucination. It was somebody who resembled him. M. Fauchelevent was not there.”
7 (8)
TWO MEN IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND
THE ENCHANTMENT, great as it was, did not efface other preoccupations from Marius’ mind.
During the preparations for the marriage, and while waiting for the time fixed upon, he had some difficult and careful retrospective researches made.
He owed gratitude on several sides, he owed some on his father’s account, he owed some on his own.
There was Thénardier; there was the unknown man who had brought him, Marius, to M. Gillenormand’s.
Marius persisted in trying to find these two men, not intending to marry, to be happy, and to forget them, and fearing lest these debts of duty unpaid might cast a shadow over his life, so luminous henceforth. It was impossible for him to leave all these arrears unsettled behind him; and he wished, before entering joyously into the future, to have a quittance from the past.
That Thénardier was a scoundrel, took away nothing from this fact that he had saved Colonel Pontmercy. Thénardier was a bandit to everybody except Marius.
And Marius, ignorant of the real scene of the battle-field of Waterloo, did not know this peculiarity, that his father was, with reference to Thénardier, in this singular situation, that he owed his life to him without owing him any thanks.
None of the various agents whom Marius employed succeeded in finding Thénardier’s track. Effacement seemed complete on that side. The Thénardiess had died in prison pending the examination on the charge. Thénardier and his daughter Azelma, the two who alone remained of that woeful group, had plunged back into the shadow. The gulf of the social Unknown had silently closed over these beings. There could no longer even be seen on the surface that quivering, that trembling, those dark concentric circles which announce that something has fallen there, and that we might drag the bottom.
As for the other, as for the unknown man who had saved Marius, the researches at first had some result, then stopped short. They succeeded in finding the fiacre which had brought Marius to the Rue des Filles du Calvaire on the evening of the 6th of June. The driver declared that on the 6th of June, by order of a police officer, he had been “stationed,” from three o‘clock in the afternoon until night, on the quai of the Champs-Elysées, above the outlet of the Grand Sewer; that, about nine o’clock in the evening, the grating of the sewer, which overlooks the river beach, was opened; that a man came out, carrying another man on his shoulders, who seemed to be dead; that the officer, who was watching at that point, arrested the living man, and seized the dead man; that, on the order of the officer, he, the driver, received “all those people” into the fiacre; that they went first to the Rue des Filles du Calvaire; that they left the dead man there; that the dead man was Monsieur Marius, and that he, the driver, recognised him plainly, although he was alive “this time”; that they then got into his carriage again; that he whipped up his horses; that, within a few steps of the door of the Archives, he had been called to stop; that there, in the street, he had been paid and left, and that the officer took away the other man; that he knew nothing more, that the night was very dark.
Marius, we have said, recollected nothing. He merely remembered having been seized from behind by a vigorous hand at the moment he fell backwards into the barricades, then all became a blank to him. He had recovered consciousness only at M. Gillenormand’s.
He was lost in conjectures.
He could not doubt