Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [457]
Marius read. There was evidence, certain date, unquestionable proof; these two newspapers had not been printed expressly to support Thénardier’s words. The note published in the Moniteur was an official communication from the prefecture of police. Marius could not doubt. The information derived from the cashier was false, and he himself was mistaken. Jean Valjean, suddenly growing grand, arose from the cloud. Marius could not restrain a cry of joy:
“Well, then, this unhappy man is a wonderful man! all that fortune was really his own! he is Madeleine, the providence of a whole region! he is Jean Valjean, the saviour of Javert! he is a hero! he is a saint!”
“He is not a saint, and he is not a hero,” said Thénardier. “He is an assassin and a robber.”
And he added with the tone of a man who begins to feel some authority in himself: “Let us be calm.”
Robber, assassin; these words, which Marius supposed were gone, yet which came back, fell upon him like a shower of ice.
“Let’s start again,” said he.
“Still,” said Thénardier. “Jean Valjean did not rob Madeleine, but he is a robber. He did not kill Javert, but he is a murderer.”
“Are you referring,” resumed Marius, “to that petty theft of forty years ago, expiated, as appears from your newspapers themselves, by a whole life of repentance, abnegation, and virtue?”
“I said assassination and robbery, Monsieur Baron. And I repeat that I speak of recent facts. What I have to reveal to you is absolutely unknown. It belongs to the unpublished. And perhaps you will find in it the source of the fortune adroitly presented by Jean Valjean to Madame the Baroness. I say adroitly, for, by a donation of this kind, to glide into an honourable house, the comforts of which he will share, and, by the same stroke, to conceal his crime to enjoy his robbery, to bury his name, and to create himself a family, that would not be very unskilful.”
“I might interrupt you here,” observed Marius; “but continue.”
“Monsieur Baron, I will tell you all, leaving the recompense to your generosity. This secret is worth a pile of gold. You will say to me: why have you not gone to Jean Valjean? For a very simple reason: I know that he has dispossessed himself, and dispossessed in your favour, and I think the contrivance ingenious; but he has not a sou left, he would show me his empty hands, and, since I need some money for my voyage to La Joya, I prefer you, who have all, to him who has nothing. I am somewhat fatigued; allow me to take a chair.”
Marius sat down, and made sign to him to sit down.
Thénardier installed himself in an upholstered chair, took up the two newspapers, thrust them back into the envelope, and muttered, striking the Drapeau Blanc with his nail: “It cost me some hard work to get this one.” This done, he crossed his legs and lay back in his chair, an attitude characteristic of people who are sure of what they are saying, then entered into the subject seriously, and emphasising his words:
“Monsieur Baron, on the 6th of June, 1832, about a year ago, the day of the émeute, a man was in the Grand Sewer of Paris, near where the sewer empties into the Seine, between the Pont des Invalides and the Pont d‘Iéna.”
Marius suddenly drew his chair near Thénardier’s. Thénardier noticed this movement, and continued with the deliberation of a speaker who holds his interlocutor fast, and who feels the palpitation of his adversary beneath his words:
“This man, compelled to conceal himself, for reasons foreign to politics, however, had taken the sewer for his dwelling, and had a key to it. It was, I repeat it, the 6th of June; it might have been eight o‘clock in