Page 1359 - les-miserables

In the midst of this silence, a cracked voice launched this
lugubrious sarcasm from the corridor:—
‘If there’s any wood to be split, I’m there!’
It was the man with the axe, who was growing merry.
At the same moment, an enormous, bristling, and clayey
face made its appearance at the door, with a hideous laugh
which exhibited not teeth, but fangs.
It was the face of the man with the butcher’s axe.
‘Why have you taken off your mask?’ cried Thenardier
in a rage.
‘For fun,’ retorted the man.
For the last few minutes M. Leblanc had appeared to be
watching and following all the movements of Thenardier,
who, blinded and dazzled by his own rage, was stalking to
and fro in the den with full confidence that the door was
guarded, and of holding an unarmed man fast, he being
armed himself, of being nine against one, supposing that
the female Thenardier counted for but one man.
During his address to the man with the pole-axe, he had
turned his back to M. Leblanc.
M. Leblanc seized this moment, overturned the chair
with his foot and the table with his fist, and with one bound,
with prodigious agility, before Thenardier had time to turn
round, he had reached the window. To open it, to scale the
frame, to bestride it, was the work of a second only. He
was half out when six robust fists seized him and dragged
him back energetically into the hovel. These were the three
‘chimney-builders,’ who had flung themselves upon him. At
the same time the Thenardier woman had wound her hands

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