"What are you doing here, and who is that man?"
Jean Valjean replied, and the sound of his voice seemed to awaken
Javert,--
"It is of him that I wished to speak. Do with me as you please, but
help me first to carry him home. I only ask this of you."
Javert's face was contracted in the same way as it always was when any
one believed him capable of a concession; still he did not say no. He
stopped again, took from his pocket a handkerchief, which he dipped in
the water, and wiped Marius's ensanguined forehead.
"This man was at the barricade," he said in a low voice, and as if
speaking to himself; "he was the one whom they called Marius."
He was a first-class spy, who had observed everything, listened to
everything, heard everything, and picked up everything, when he
believed himself a dead man; who spied even in his death agony, and,
standing on the first step of the sepulchre, took notes. He seized
Marius's hand, and felt his pulse.
"He is wounded," said Jean Valjean.
"He is a dead man," said Javert.
Jean Valjean replied,--
"No; not yet."
"Then you brought him from the barricade here?" Javert observed.
His preoccupation must have been great for him not to dwell on this
alarming escape through the sewers, and not even remark Jean Valjean's
silence after his question. Jean Valjean, on his side, seemed to have a
sole thought; he continued,--
"He lives in the Marais, in the Rue des Filles du Calvaire, with his
grandfather. I do not know his name."
Jean Valjean felt in Marius's pocket, took out the portfolio, opened
it at the page on which Marius had written in pencil, and offered
it to Javert. There was still sufficient floating light in the air
to be able to read, and Javert, besides, had in his eyes the feline
phosphorescence of night-birds. He deciphered the few lines written by
Marius, and growled, "Gillenormand, No. 6, Rue des Filles du Calvaire."
Then he cried, "Driver!"
Our readers will remember the coachman waiting above in case of
need. A moment after the hackney, which came down the incline leading
to the watering-place, was on the bank. Marius was deposited on the
back seat, and Javert sat down by Jean Valjean's side on the front
one. When the door was closed the fiacre started off rapidly along
the quays in the direction of the Bastille. They quitted the quay and
turned into the streets; and the driver, a black outline on his seat,
lashed his lean horses. There was an icy silence in the hackney coach;
Marius motionless, with his body reclining in one corner, his head on
his chest, his arms pendent, and his legs stiff, appeared to be only
waiting for a coffin. Jean Valjean seemed made of gloom, and Javert of
stone; and in this fiacre full of night, whose interior, each time that
it passed a lamp, seemed to be lividly lit up as if by an intermittent
flash, accident united and appeared to confront the three immobilities
of tragedy,--the corpse, the spectre, and the statue.
CHAPTER X.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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