Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (81 page)

She went to the window and looked out, speaking aloud in her half-crazy way.

“How ugly Paris is when he puts a white shirt on!” said she.

She returned to the mirror and renewed her grimaces, taking alternately front and the three-quarter views of herself.

“Well,” cried her father, “what are you doing now?”

“I am looking under the bed and the furniture,” answered she, continuing to arrange her hair; “there is nobody here.”

“Booby!” howled the father. “Here immediately, and let us lose no time.”

“I am coming! I am coming!” said she. “One has no time for anything in their shanty.”

She hummed:

She cast a last glance at the mirror, and went out, shutting the door after her.

A moment afterwards, Marius heard the sound of the bare feet of the two young girls in the passage, and the voice of Jondrette crying to them.

“Pay attention, now! one towards the barrière, the other at the corner of the Rue du Petit Banquier. Don’t lose sight of the house door a minute, and if you see the least thing, here immediately! tumble along! You have a key to come in with.”

The elder daughter muttered:

“To stand sentry barefoot in the snow!”

“To-morrow you shall have boots of scarab colour silk!” said the father.

They went down the stairs, and, a few seconds afterwards, the sound of the lower door shutting announced that they had gone out.

There were now in the house only Marius and the Jondrettes, and probably also the mysterious beings of whom Marius had caught a glimpse in the twilight behind the door of the untenanted garret.

MARIUS judged that the time had come to resume his place at his observatory. In a twinkling, and with the agility of his age, he was at the hole in the partition.

He looked in.

The interior of the Jondrette apartment presented a singular appearance, and Marius found the explanation of the strange light which he had noticed. A candle was burning in a verdigrised candlestick, but it was not that which really lighted the room. The entire den was, as it were, illuminated by the reflection of a large sheet iron furnace in the fireplace, which was filled with lighted charcoal. The fire which the female Jondrette had made ready in the daytime. The charcoal was burning and the furnace was red hot, a blue flame danced over it and helped to show the form of the chisel bought by Jondrette in the Rue Pierre Lombard, which was growing ruddy among the coals. In a corner near the door, and arranged as if for anticipated use, were two heaps which appeared to be, one a heap of old iron, the other a heap of ropes. All this would have made one, who had known nothing of what was going forward, waver between a very sinister idea and a very simple idea. The room thus lighted up seemed rather a smithy than a mouth of hell; but Jondrette, in that glare, had rather the appearance of a demon than of a blacksmith.

The heat of the glowing coals was such that the candle upon the table melted on the side towards the furnace and was burning fastest on that side. An old copper dark lantern, worthy of Diogenes turned Cartouche, stood upon the mantel.

The furnace, which was set into the fireplace, beside the almost extinguished embers, sent its smoke into the flue of the chimney and exhaled no odour.

The moon, shining through the four panes of the window, threw its whiteness into the ruddy and flaming garret; and to Marius’ poetic mind, a dreamer even in the moment of action, it was like a thought of heaven mingled with the shapeless nightmares of earth.

A breath of air, coming through the broken pane, helped to dissipate the charcoal odour and to conceal the furnace.

The Jondrette lair was, if the reader remembers what we have said of the Gorbeau house, admirably chosen for the theatre of a deed of darkness and violence, and for the concealment of a crime. It was the most retired room of the most isolated house of the most solitary boulevard in Paris. If ambush had not existed, it would have been invented there.

The whole depth of a house and a multitude of untenanted rooms separated this hole from the boulevard and its only window opened upon waste fields inclosed with walls and palisade fences.

Jondrette had lighted his pipe, sat down on the dismantled chair, and was smoking. His wife was speaking to him in a low tone.

Suddenly Jondrette raised his voice:

“By the way, now, I think of it. In such weather as this he will come in a fiacre. Light the lantern, take it, and go down. You will stay there behind the lower door. The moment you hear the carriage stop, you will open immediately, he will come up, you will light him up the stairs and above the hall, and when he comes in here, you will go down again immediately, pay the driver, and send the fiacre away.”

“And the money?” asked the woman.

Jondrette fumbled in his trousers, and handed her five francs.

“What is that?” she exclaimed.

Jondrette answered with dignity:

“It is the monarch which our neighbour gave this morning.”

And he added:—

“Do you know? we must have two chairs here.”

“What for?”

“To sit in.”

Marius felt a shiver run down his back on hearing the woman make this quiet reply:—

“Pardieu ! I will get our neighbour’s.”

And with rapid movement she opened the door of the den, and went out into the hall.

Marius physically had not the time to get down from the bureau, and go and hide himself under the bed.

“Take the candle,” cried Jondrette.

“No,” said she, “that would bother me; I have two chairs to bring. It is moonlight.”

Marius heard the heavy hand of mother Jondrette groping after his key in the dark. The door opened. He stood nailed to his place by apprehension and stupor.

The woman came in.

The gable window let in a ray of moonlight, between two great sheets of shadow. One of these sheets of shadow entirely covered the wall against which Marius was leaning, so as to conceal him.

Mother Jondrette raised her eyes, did not see Marius, took the two chairs, the only chairs which Marius had, and went out, slamming the door noisily behind her.

She went back into the den.

“Here are the two chairs.”

“And here is the lantern,” said the husband. “Go down quick.”

She hastily obeyed, and Jondrette was left alone.

He arranged the two chairs on the two sides of the table, turned the chisel over in the fire, put an old screen in front of the fireplace, which concealed the furnace, then went to the comer where the heap of ropes was, and stooped down, as if to examine something. Marius then perceived that what he had taken for a shapeless heap, was a rope ladder, very well made, with wooden rounds, and two large hooks to hang it by.

This ladder and a few big tools, actual masses of iron, which were thrown upon the pile of old iron heaped up behind the door, were not in the Jondrette den in the morning, and had evidently been brought there in the afternoon, during Marius’ absence.

“Those are metalworkers’ tools,” thought Marius.

Had Marius been a little better informed in this line, he would have recognised, in what he took for metalworkers’ tools, certain instruments capable of picking a lock or forcing a door and others capable of cutting or hacking,—the two families of sinister tools, which thieves call jimmies and bolt-cutters.

The fireplace and the table, with the two chairs, were exactly opposite Marius. The furnace was hidden; the room was now lighted only by the candle ; the least thing upon the table or the mantel made a great shadow. A broken water-pitcher masked the half of one wall. There was in the room a calm which was inexpressibly hideous and threatening. The approach of some appalling thing could be felt.

Jondrette had let his pipe go out—a sure sign that he was intensely absorbed—and had come back and sat down. The candle made the savage ends and corners of his face stand out prominently. There were contractions of his brows, and abrupt openings of his right hand, as if he were replying to the last counsels of a dark interior monologue. In one of these obscure replies which he was making to himself, he drew the table drawer out quickly towards him, took out a long carving knife which was hidden there, and tried its edge on his nail. This done, he put the knife back into the drawer, and shut it.

Marius, for his part, grasped the pistol on his right side, pulled it out, and cocked it.

The pistol in cocking gave a little, clear, sharp sound.

Jondrette started, and half rose from his chair.

“Who is there?” cried he.

Marius held his breath; Jondrette listened a moment, then began to laugh, saying:—

“What a fool I am! It is the partition cracking.”

Marius kept the pistol in his hand.

JUST THEN the distant and melancholy vibration of a bell shook the windows. Six o‘clock struck on Saint Médard.

Jondrette marked each stroke with a nod of his head. At the sixth stroke, he snuffed the candle with his fingers.

Then he began to walk about the room, listened in the hall, walked, listened again: “Provided he comes!” muttered he; then he returned to his chair.

He had hardly sat down when the door opened.

The mother Jondrette had opened it, and stood in the hall making a horrible, amiable grimace, which was lighted up from beneath by one of the holes of the dark lantern.

“Come in,” said she.

“Come in, my benefactor,” repeated Jondrette, rising precipitately.

Monsieur Leblanc appeared.

He had an air of serenity which made him singularly venerable.

He laid four louis upon the table.

“Monsieur Fabantou,” said he, “that is for your rent and your pressing wants. We will see about the rest.”

“God reward you, my generous benefactor!” said Jondrette, and rapidly approaching his wife:

“Send away the fiacre!”

She slipped away, while her husband was lavishing bows and offering a chair to Monsieur Leblanc. A moment afterwards she came back and whispered in his ear:

“It is done.”

The snow which had been falling ever since morning, was so deep that they had not heard the fiacre arrive, and did not hear it go away.

Meanwhile Monsieur Leblanc had taken a seat.

Jondrette had taken possession of the other chair opposite Monsieur Leblanc.

Now, to form an idea of the scene which follows, let the reader call to mind the chilly night, the solitudes of La Salpêtrière covered with snow, and white in the moonlight, like immense shrouds, the flickering light of the street lamps here and there reddening these tragic boulevards and the long rows of black elms, not a passer-by perhaps within a mile around, the Gorbeau tenement at its deepest degree of silence, horror, and night, in that tenement, in the midst of these solitudes, in the midst of this darkness, the vast Jondrette garret lighted by a candle, and in this den two men seated at a table, Monsieur Leblanc tranquil, Jondrette smiling and terrible, his wife, the she-wolf, in a corner, and, behind the partition, Marius, invisible, alert, losing no word, missing no movement, his eye on the watch, the pistol in his grasp.

Marius, moreover, was experiencing nothing but an emotion of horror, not fear. He clasped the butt of the pistol, and felt reassured. “I shall stop this wretch when I please,” thought he.

He felt that the police was somewhere near by in ambush, awaiting the signal agreed upon, and all ready to stretch out its arm.

He hoped, moreover, that from this terrible meeting between Jondrette and Monsieur Leblanc some light would be thrown upon all that he was interested to know.

NO SOONER was Monsieur Leblanc seated than he turned his eyes towards the empty pallets.

“How is the poor little injured girl?” he inquired.

“Badly,” answered Jondrette with a doleful yet grateful smile, “very badly, my worthy monsieur. Her eldest sister has taken her to the Bourbe to have her arm dressed. You will see them, they will be back directly.”

“Madame Fabantou appears to me much better?” resumed Monsieur Leblanc, casting his eyes upon the grotesque accoutrement of the female Jondrette, who, standing between him and the door, as if she were already guarding the exit, was looking at him in a threatening and almost a defiant posture.

“She is dying,” said Jondrette. “But you see, monsieur! she has so much courage, that woman! She is not a woman, she is an ox.”

The woman, touched by the compliment, retorted with the smirk of a flattered monster:

“You are always too kind to me, Monsieur Jondrette.”

“Jondrette!” said M. Leblanc, “I thought that your name was Fabantou?”

“Fabantou or Jondrette!” replied the husband hastily. “Stage name as an artist!”

And, directing a shrug of the shoulders towards his wife, which M. Leblanc did not see, he continued with an emphatic and caressing tone of voice:

“Ah! how long we have always got along together, this poor dear and I! What would be left to us, if it were not for that? We are so unfortunate, my respected monsieur! We have arms, no work! We have courage, no employment! I do not know how the government arranges it, but, upon my word of honour, I am no jacobin, monsieur, I am no brawler, I wish them no harm, but if I were the ministers, upon my most sacred word, it would go differently. Now, for example, I wanted to have my girls learn the trade of making cardboard boxes. You will say: What! a trade? Yes! a trade! a simple trade! a living! What a fall, my benefactor! What a degradation, when one has been what we were! Alas! we have nothing left from our days of prosperity! Nothing but one single thing, a painting, to which I cling, but yet which I shall have to part with, for we must live! item, we must live!”