Page 1641 - les-miserables

come to his assistance. He listened. With the exception
of the patrol, no one had passed through the street since
he had been there. Nearly the whole of the descent of the
market-gardeners from Montreuil, from Charonne, from
Vincennes, and from Bercy to the markets was accom-
plished through the Rue Saint-Antoine.
Four o’clock struck. Thenardier shuddered. A few mo-
ments later, that terrified and confused uproar which
follows the discovery of an escape broke forth in the pris-
on. The sound of doors opening and shutting, the creaking
of gratings on their hinges, a tumult in the guard-house,
the hoarse shouts of the turnkeys, the shock of musket-
butts on the pavement of the courts, reached his ears. Lights
ascended and descended past the grated windows of the
dormitories, a torch ran along the ridge-pole of the top story
of the New Building, the firemen belonging in the barracks
on the right had been summoned. Their helmets, which the
torch lighted up in the rain, went and came along the roofs.
At the same time, Thenardier perceived in the direction of
the Bastille a wan whiteness lighting up the edge of the sky
in doleful wise.
He was on top of a wall ten inches wide, stretched out
under the heavy rains, with two gulfs to right and left, un-
able to stir, subject to the giddiness of a possible fall, and
to the horror of a certain arrest, and his thoughts, like the
pendulum of a clock, swung from one of these ideas to the
other: ‘Dead if I fall, caught if I stay.’ In the midst of this
anguish, he suddenly saw, the street being still dark, a man
who was gliding along the walls and coming from the Rue

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