Page 2195 - les-miserables

He turned round.
Some one was, in fact, behind him, as there had been a
short while before.
A man of lofty stature, enveloped in a long coat, with
folded arms, and bearing in his right fist a bludgeon of which
the leaden head was visible, stood a few paces in the rear of
the spot where Jean Valjean was crouching over Marius.
With the aid of the darkness, it seemed a sort of appari-
tion. An ordinary man would have been alarmed because of
the twilight, a thoughtful man on account of the bludgeon.
Jean Valjean recognized Javert.
The reader has divined, no doubt, that Thenardier’s
pursuer was no other than Javert. Javert, after his unlooked-
for escape from the barricade, had betaken himself to the
prefecture of police, had rendered a verbal account to the
Prefect in person in a brief audience, had then immedi-
ately gone on duty again, which implied— the note, the
reader will recollect, which had been captured on his per-
son—a certain surveillance of the shore on the right bank
of the Seine near the Champs-Elysees, which had, for some
time past, aroused the attention of the police. There he had
caught sight of Thenardier and had followed him. The read-
er knows the rest.
Thus it will be easily understood that that grating, so
obligingly opened to Jean Valjean, was a bit of cleverness
on Thenardier’s part. Thenardier intuitively felt that Javert
was still there; the man spied upon has a scent which never
deceives him; it was necessary to fling a bone to that sleuth-
hound. An assassin, what a godsend! Such an opportunity

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