Mother Thénardier being dead, Boulatruelle being out of the question,
Claquesous having disappeared, and the principal accused having
escaped from prison, the trial for the trap in the Gorbeau attic had
pretty nearly failed. The affair had remained rather dark, and the
assize court had been compelled to satisfy itself with two subalterns,
Panchaud, _alias_ Printanier, _alias_ Bigrenaille, and Demi-Liard,
_alias_ Deux Milliards, who had been condemned, after hearing both
parties, to ten years at the galleys. Penal servitude for life was
passed against their accomplices who had escaped; Thénardier, as
chief and promoter, was condemned to death, also in default. This
condemnation was the only thing that remained of Thénardier, casting
on this buried name its sinister gleam, like a candle by the side of a
coffin. However, this condemnation, by thrusting Thénardier back into
the lowest depths through the fear of being recaptured, added to the
dense gloom which covered this man.
As for the other, the unknown man who had saved Marius, the researches
had at first some result, and then stopped short. They succeeded in
finding again the hackney coach which had brought Marius to the Rue des
Filles du Calvaire on the night of June 6. The driver declared that on
the 6th of June, by the order of a police agent, he had stopped from
three P. M. till nightfall on the quay of the Champs Élysées, above
the opening of the Great Sewer; that at about nine in the evening the
gate of the sewer which looks upon the river-bank opened; that a man
came out, bearing on his shoulders another man, who appeared to be
dead; that the agent, who was watching at this point, had arrested the
living man and seized the dead man; that he, the coachman, had taken
"all these people" into his hackney coach; that they drove first to
the Rue des Filles du Calvaire and deposited the dead man there; that
the dead man was M. Marius, and that he, the coachman, recognized him
thoroughly, though he was alive this time; that afterwards they got
into his coach again, and a few yards from the gate of the Archives he
was ordered to stop; that he was paid in the street and discharged,
and the agent took away the other man; that he knew nothing more, and
that the night was very dark. Marius, as we said, remembered nothing.
He merely remembered that he had been seized from behind by a powerful
hand at the moment when he fell backwards from the barricade, and then
all was effaced for him. He had only regained his senses when he was at
M. Gillenormand's.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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