Page 2164 - les-miserables

CHAPTER IV

HE ALSO BEARS HIS CROSS

Jean Valjean had resumed his march and had not again
paused.
This march became more and more laborious. The level
of these vaults varies; the average height is about five feet,
six inches, and has been calculated for the stature of a man;
Jean Valjean was forced to bend over, in order not to strike
Marius against the vault; at every step he had to bend, then
to rise, and to feel incessantly of the wall. The moisture of
the stones, and the viscous nature of the timber framework
furnished but poor supports to which to cling, either for
hand or foot. He stumbled along in the hideous dung-heap
of the city. The intermittent gleams from the air-holes only
appeared at very long intervals, and were so wan that the
full sunlight seemed like the light of the moon; all the rest
was mist, miasma, opaqueness, blackness. Jean Valjean was
both hungry and thirsty; especially thirsty; and this, like the
sea, was a place full of water where a man cannot drink. His
strength, which was prodigious, as the reader knows, and
which had been but little decreased by age, thanks to his
chaste and sober life, began to give way, nevertheless. Fa-

2164 Les Miserables