Page 2109 - les-miserables

of the small barrier so pitilessly guarded and watched on the
exterior, beneath a disordered mass of paving-stones which
partly concealed it, an iron grating, placed flat and on a
level with the soil. This grating, made of stout, transverse
bars, was about two feet square. The frame of paving-stones
which supported it had been torn up, and it was, as it were,
unfastened.
Through the bars a view could be had of a dark aperture,
something like the flue of a chimney, or the pipe of a cistern.
Jean Valjean darted forward. His old art of escape rose to
his brain like an illumination. To thrust aside the stones, to
raise the grating, to lift Marius, who was as inert as a dead
body, upon his shoulders, to descend, with this burden on
his loins, and with the aid of his elbows and knees into that
sort of well, fortunately not very deep, to let the heavy trap,
upon which the loosened stones rolled down afresh, fall into
its place behind him, to gain his footing on a flagged surface
three metres below the surface,—all this was executed like
that which one does in dreams, with the strength of a giant
and the rapidity of an eagle; this took only a few minutes.
Jean Valjean found himself with Marius, who was still
unconscious, in a sort of long, subterranean corridor.
There reigned profound peace, absolute silence, night.
The impression which he had formerly experienced when
falling from the wall into the convent recurred to him. Only,
what he was carrying to-day was not Cosette; it was Marius.
He could barely hear the formidable tumult in the wine-
shop, taken by assault, like a vague murmur overhead.

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