Page 1386 - les-miserables

her head with the gesture of a giantess on the point of hurl-
ing a rock.
‘Beware!’ she shouted.
All crowded back towards the corridor. A broad open
space was cleared in the middle of the garret.
The Thenardier woman cast a glance at the ruffians who
had allowed themselves to be pinioned, and muttered in
hoarse and guttural accents:—
‘The cowards!’
Javert smiled, and advanced across the open space which
the Thenardier was devouring with her eyes.
‘Don’t come near me,’ she cried, ‘or I’ll crush you.’
‘What a grenadier!’ ejaculated Javert; ‘you’ve got a beard
like a man, mother, but I have claws like a woman.’
And he continued to advance.
The Thenardier, dishevelled and terrible, set her feet far
apart, threw herself backwards, and hurled the paving-stone
at Javert’s head. Javert ducked, the stone passed over him,
struck the wall behind, knocked off a huge piece of plaster-
ing, and, rebounding from angle to angle across the hovel,
now luckily almost empty, rested at Javert’s feet.
At the same moment, Javert reached the Thenardier
couple. One of his big hands descended on the woman’s
shoulder; the other on the husband’s head.
‘The handcuffs!’ he shouted.
The policemen trooped in in force, and in a few seconds
Javert’s order had been executed.
The Thenardier female, overwhelmed, stared at her pin-
ioned hands, and at those of her husband, who had dropped

1386 Les Miserables