Page 1640 - les-miserables

The marvels of escape cannot always be accounted for.
The man who makes his escape, we repeat, is inspired; there
is something of the star and of the lightning in the mysteri-
ous gleam of flight; the effort towards deliverance is no less
surprising than the flight towards the sublime, and one says
of the escaped thief: ‘How did he contrive to scale that wall?’
in the same way that one says of Corneille: ‘Where did he
find the means of dying?’
At all events, dripping with perspiration, drenched with
rain, with his clothes hanging in ribbons, his hands flayed,
his elbows bleeding, his knees torn, Thenardier had reached
what children, in their figurative language, call the edge of
the wall of the ruin, there he had stretched himself out at
full length, and there his strength had failed him. A steep
escarpment three stories high separated him from the pave-
ment of the street.
The rope which he had was too short.
There he waited, pale, exhausted, desperate with all the
despair which he had undergone, still hidden by the night,
but telling himself that the day was on the point of dawn-
ing, alarmed at the idea of hearing the neighboring clock of
Saint-Paul strike four within a few minutes, an hour when
the sentinel was relieved and when the latter would be found
asleep under the pierced roof, staring in horror at a terrible
depth, at the light of the street lanterns, the wet, black pave-
ment, that pavement longed for yet frightful, which meant
death, and which meant liberty.
He asked himself whether his three accomplices in flight
had succeeded, if they had heard him, and if they would

1640 Les Miserables