Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (79 page)

Alone with his wife, Jondrette began to walk the room again, and took two or three turns in silence. Then he spent a few minutes in tucking the bottom of the woman’s chemise which he wore into the waist of his trousers.

Suddenly he turned towards the woman, folded his arms, and exclaimed:

“And do you want to know something? the young lady—”

“Well, what?” said the woman, “the young lady?”

Marius could doubt no longer, it was indeed of her that they were talking. He listened with an intense anxiety. His whole life was concentrated in his ears.

But Jondrette stooped down, and whispered to his wife. Then he straightened up and finished aloud:

“It is she!”

“That girl?” said the wife.

“That girl!” said the husband.

No words could express what there was in the
that girl
of the mother. It was surprise, rage, hatred, anger, mingled and combined in a monstrous intonation. The few words that had been spoken, some name, doubtless, which her husband had whispered in her ear had been enough to rouse this huge drowsy woman and to change her repulsiveness to hideousness.

“Impossible!” she exclaimed, “when I think that my daughters go barefoot and have not a dress to put on! What! a satin pelisse, a velvet hat, buskins, and all! more than two hundred francs’ worth! one would think she was a lady! no, you are mistaken! why, in the first place she was horrid, this one is not bad! she is really not bad! it cannot be she!”

“I tell you it is she. You will see.”

At this absolute affirmation, the woman raised her big red and blond face and looked at the ceiling with a hideous expression. At that moment she appeared to Marius still more terrible than her husband. She was a swine with the look of a tigress.

“What!” she resumed, “this horrible beautiful young lady who looked at my girls with an appearance of pity, can she be that beggar! Oh, I would like to stamp her heart out!”

She sprang off the bed, and remained a moment standing, her hair flying, her nostrils distended, her mouth half open, her fists clenched and drawn back. Then she fell back upon the pallet. The man still walked back and forth, paying no attention to his female.

After a few moments of silence, he approached her and stopped before her, with folded arms, as before.

“And do you want to know something?”

“What?” she asked.

He answered in a quick and low voice:

“My fortune is made.”

The woman stared at him with that look which means: Has the man who is talking to me gone crazy?

He continued:

“Thunder! it is a good long time now that I have been a parishioner of the die-of-hunger-if-you-have-any-fire-and-die-of-cold-if-you-have-any-bread parish! I have had misery enough! my burden and the burden of other people! It’s not time for jokes anymore, it’s not funny anymore, enough puns, good God! No more farces, Father Eternal! I want food for my hunger, I want drink for my thirst! to stuff! to sleep! to do nothing! I want to have my turn, I do! before I burst! I want to be a bit of a millionaire!”

He took a turn about the garret and added:

“Like other people.”

“What do you mean?” asked the woman.

He shook his head, winked and lifted his voice like a street doctor about to make a demonstration:

“What do I mean? listen!”

“Hist!” muttered the woman, “not so loud! if it means business nobody must hear.”

“Pshaw! who is there to hear? our neighbour? I saw him go out just now. Besides, does he hear, that big dummy? and then I tell you that I saw him go out.”

Nevertheless, by a sort of instinct, Jondrette lowered his voice, not enough, however, for his words to escape Marius. A favourable circumstance, and one which enabled Marius to lose nothing of this conversation, was that the fallen snow muffled the sound of the carriages on the boulevard.

Marius heard this:

“Listen up. He is caught, the Crœsus! or he might as well be. It is already done. Everything is arranged. I have seen the men. He will come this evening at six o‘clock. To bring his sixty francs, the rascal! did you see how I got that out, my sixty francs, my landlord, my 4th of February! it is not even a quarter! was that stupid! He will come then at six o’clock! our neighbour is gone to dinner then. Mother Bougon is washing dishes in the city. There is nobody in the house. Our neighbour never comes back before eleven o‘clock. The girls will stand watch. You shall help us. He will comply.”

“And if he should not be his own executor,” asked the wife.

Jondrette made a sinister gesture and said:

“We will execute him.”
^du

And he burst into a laugh.

It was the first time that Marius had seen him laugh. This laugh was cold and soft, and made him shudder.

Jondrette opened a closet near the chimney, took out an old cap and put it on his head after brushing it with his sleeve.

“Now,” said he, “I am going out. I have still some men to see. Some good ones. You will see how it is going to work. I shall be back as soon as possible, it is a great hand to play, watch the house.”

And with his two fists in the two pockets of his trousers, he stood a moment in thought, then exclaimed:

“Do you know that it is very lucky indeed that he did not recognise me? If he had been the one to recognise me he would not have come back. He would escape us! It is my beard that saved me! my romantic goatee! my pretty little romantic beard!”

And he began to laugh again.

He went to the window. The snow was still falling, and blotted out the grey sky.

“What villainous weather!” said he.

Then folding his coat:

“The skin is too large. It doesn’t matter,” added he, “he did devilish well to leave it for me, the old scoundrel! Without this I should not have been able to go out and the whole thing would have been spoiled! But on what do things hang!”

And pulling his cap over his eyes, he went out.

Hardly had he had time to take a few steps in the hall, when the door opened and his tawny and cunning face again appeared.

“I forgot,” said he. “You will have a charcoal fire.”

And he threw into his wife’s apron the five-franc coin which the “philanthropist” had left him.

“A charcoal fire?” asked the woman.

“Yes.”

“How many bushels?”

“Two good ones.”

“That will be thirty sous. With the rest, I will buy something for dinner.”

“The devil, no.”

“Why?”

“The coin of a hundred sous is not to be spent.”

“Why?”

“Because I shall have something to buy.”

“What?”

“Something.”

“How much will you need?”

“Where is there a hardware store near here?”

“Rue Mouffetard.”

“Oh! yes, at the corner of some street; I remember the shop.”

“But tell me now how much you will need for what you have to buy?”

“Fifty sous or three francs.”

“There won’t be much left for dinner.”

“Don’t bother about eating to-day. There is better business.”

“All right, my jewel.”

At this word from his wife, Jondrette closed the door, and Marius heard his steps recede along the hall and go rapidly down the stairs.

Just then the clock of Saint Médard struck one.

MARIUS, all dreamer as he was, was, as we have said, of a firm and energetic nature. His habits of solitary meditation, while developing sympathy and compassion in him, had perhaps diminished his liability to become irritated, but left intact the faculty of indignation; he had the benevolence of a brahmin and the severity of a judge; he would have pitied a toad, but he would have crushed a viper. Now it was into a viper’s hole that he had just been looking; it was a nest of monsters that he had before his eyes.

“I must put my foot on these wretches,” said he.

None of the enigmas which he hoped to see unriddled were yet cleared up; on the contrary, all had perhaps become still darker; he knew nothing more of the beautiful child of the Luxembourg Gardens or of the man whom he called M. Leblanc, except that Jondrette knew them. Across the dark words which had been uttered, he saw distinctly but one thing, that an ambush was in the works, obscure, but terrible; that they were both running a great risk, she probably, her father certainly; that he must foil the hideous schemes of the Jondrettes and break the web of these spiders.

He looked for a moment at the female Jondrette. She had pulled an old sheet-iron furnace out of a corner and she was fumbling among the old scraps of iron.

He got down from the bureau as quietly as he could, taking care to make no noise.

In the midst of his dread at what was in preparation, and the horror with which the Jondrettes had inspired him, he felt a sort of joy at the idea that it would perhaps be given to him to render so great a service to her whom he loved.

But what was he to do? warn the persons threatened? where should he find them? He did not know their address. They had reappeared to his eyes for an instant, then they had again plunged into the boundless depths of Paris. Wait at the door for M. Leblanc at six o‘clock in the evening, the time when he would arrive, and warn him of the plot? But Jondrette and his men would see him watching, the place was solitary, they would be stronger than he, they would find means to seize him or get him out of the way, and he whom Marius wished to save would be lost. One o’clock had just struck, the ambush was to be carried out at six. Marius had five hours before him.

There was but one thing to be done.

He put on his presentable coat, tied a cravat about his neck, took his hat, and went out, without making any more noise than if he had been walking barefooted upon moss.

Besides the Jondrette woman was still fumbling with her old scrap iron.

Once out of the house, he went to the Rue du Petit Banquier.

He was about midway of that street near a very low wall which he could have stepped over in some places and which bordered a broad field, he was walking slowly, absorbed in his thoughts as he was, and the snow deafened his steps; all at once he heard voices talking very near him. He turned his head, the street was empty, there was nobody in it, it was broad daylight, and yet he heard voices distinctly.

It occurred to him to look over this wall.

There were in fact two men there with their backs to the wall, seated in the snow, and talking in a low tone.

These two forms were unknown to him, one was a bearded man in a smock, and the other a long-haired man in tatters. The bearded man had on a Greek cap, the other was bare-headed, and there was snow in his hair.

By bending his head over above them, Marius could hear.

The long-haired one jogged the other with his elbow, and said:

“With Patron-Minette, it can’t fail.”

“Do you think so?” said the bearded one; and the long-haired one replied:

“It will be a
fafiot
of five hundred
balles
for each of us, and the worst that can happen: five years, six years, ten years at most!”
^dw

The other answered hesitatingly, shivering under his Greek cap:

“Yes, that’s real money. We can’t pass it up.”

“I tell you that the deal can’t fail,” replied the long-haired one. “We’ll fix Old What‘s-his-name’s waggon for him.”

Then they began to talk about a melodrama which they had seen the evening before at La Gaîté.

Marius went on his way.

It seemed to him that the obscure words of these men, so strangely hidden behind that wall, and crouching down in the snow, were not perhaps without some connection with Jondrette’s terrible projects. That must be
the deal.

He went towards the Faubourg Saint Marceau, and asked at the first shop in his way where he could find a chief of police.

Number 14, Rue de Pontoise, was pointed out to him.

Marius went thither.

Passing a baker’s shop, he bought a two-sou loaf and ate it, foreseeing that he would have no dinner.

On his way he rendered to Providence its due. He thought that if he had not given his five francs to the Jondrette girl in the morning, he would have followed M. Leblanc’s fiacre, and consequently known nothing of this, so that there would have been no obstacle to the ambush of the Jondrettes, and M. Leblanc would have been lost, and doubtless his daughter with him.

ON REACHING Number 14, Rue de Pontoise, he went upstairs and asked for the chief of police.

“The chief of police is not in,” said one of the office boys; “but there is an inspector who answers for him. Would you like to speak to him? is it urgent?”

“Yes,” said Marius.

The office boy introduced him into the chiefs office. A man of tall stature was standing there, behind a railing, in front of a stove, and holding up with both hands the flaps of a huge overcoat with three layered flaps. He had a square face, a thin and firm mouth, very fierce, bushy, greyish whiskers, and an eye that would turn your pockets inside out. You might have said of this eye, not that it penetrated, but that it ransacked.

This man’s appearance was not much less ferocious or formidable than Jondrette’s; it is sometimes no less startling to meet the dog than the wolf.

“What do you wish?” said he to Marius, without adding monsieur.

“The chief of police?”

“He is absent. I answer for him.”

“It is a very secret affair.”

“Speak, then.”

“And very urgent.”