Page 1360 - les-miserables

in his hair.
At the trampling which ensued, the other ruffians rushed
up from the corridor. The old man on the bed, who seemed
under the influence of wine, descended from the pallet
and came reeling up, with a stone-breaker’s hammer in his
hand.
One of the ‘chimney-builders,’ whose smirched face was
lighted up by the candle, and in whom Marius recognized,
in spite of his daubing, Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Big-
renaille, lifted above M. Leblanc’s head a sort of bludgeon
made of two balls of lead, at the two ends of a bar of iron.
Marius could not resist this sight. ‘My father,’ he thought,
‘forgive me!’
And his finger sought the trigger of his pistol.
The shot was on the point of being discharged when
Thenardier’s voice shouted:—
‘Don’t harm him!’
This desperate attempt of the victim, far from exasperat-
ing Thenardier, had calmed him. There existed in him two
men, the ferocious man and the adroit man. Up to that mo-
ment, in the excess of his triumph in the presence of the
prey which had been brought down, and which did not stir,
the ferocious man had prevailed; when the victim struggled
and tried to resist, the adroit man reappeared and took the
upper hand.
‘Don’t hurt him!’ he repeated, and without suspecting it,
his first success was to arrest the pistol in the act of being
discharged, and to paralyze Marius, in whose opinion the
urgency of the case disappeared, and who, in the face of this

1360 Les Miserables