Chapter 324 twenty four captives

Marius was indeed captured, and he was Jean Valjean's prisoner. When he fell, an arm which clasped him from behind, which he felt seized even though he was unconscious, was Jean Valjean's. Jean Valjean did not take part in the battle, he was only there at his peril.Without him, no one would have thought of the wounded at this critical juncture.Fortunately, he was there. During the massacre, he was everywhere like a god-man, picking up the fallen and sending them to the basement to be bandaged.Between intervals, he repaired the barricades.But things like hitting, attacking, or personal self-defense never come from his hands.He helps people in silence.Besides, he had only a few scrapes.Bullets looked down on him.If suicide had been a dream he had come to this tomb, he hadn't succeeded in that, but we doubt he would have contemplated it as an unreligious act.

Jean Valjean, in the smoke of the struggle, did not seem to see Marius, although his eyes never left him.When a shot knocked Marius down, Jean Valjean sprang at him with the swiftness of a tiger, and carried him away as if he were a prey. The whirlwind of the attack was now concentrated so violently on the entrance of the hotel and on Enjolras that no one saw Jean Valjean, supporting Marius, who had fainted, on his arms, across the field of barricades that had lost the paving stones. , disappeared around the corner of the Corinthian house. We remember that this corner formed a headland jutting out to the street, which formed a place a few feet square that protected from bullets and shot, and also from people's sight.Sometimes in the midst of a fire there is a room that is not burning, and on the wildest sea, on the other side of the headland or at the end of the reef, there is a little corner of calm, in the trapezoidal shelter of the interior of this barricade Éponine Died.

Here Jean Valjean stopped, and putting Marius down gently on the ground, he leaned against the wall and glanced around. The situation was critical. At present, perhaps for two or three minutes, the wall is still a bunker, but how can one escape from this killing field?He recalled eight years ago, his anxiety in Rue Polonceau, how he had escaped, which was difficult then and is impossible today.In front of him was a pitiless seven-storey deaf house, inhabited only by the dead man who looked out the window, and to his right was a rather low barricade blocking the little boy's den. A row of bayonet points could be seen on the top, the combat squad, standing outside the barricade, in ambush.There is no doubt that crossing this barricade will attract a volley of guns, and whoever ventures to poke his head over the wall of this paving stone will become the target of sixty bullets.To his left is the battlefield, and death is behind this corner.

what to do? Only one bird can escape. A decision must be made immediately, a solution must be found, a decision must be made.A few paces away from him was fighting, and fortunately all men were vying for one point, the door of the tavern; but if any soldier, if any, thought of going round the house, or attacking from the side, everything would It's all over. Jean Valjean looked at the houses in front of him, at the barricades beside him, and then at the ground with the intensity of his despair, and was so confused that he wanted to dig a hole in the ground with his eyes. In the concentration of his gaze, something indistinct but catchable appeared in this moment of death-struggle and took shape at his feet, as though the power of the gaze had made a wish come true.He saw a few steps away, at the foot of the low wall outside which was mercilessly guarded and watched, an iron grating gate, partly covered by a pile of fallen paving stones, resting on the ground.This iron gate is made of thick horizontal iron rods, roughly two square feet.The paving stone framework supporting it had been dug away, and the iron fence seemed to have been dismantled.A dark opening could be seen through the bars, a sort of chimney-pipe or sump main.Jean Valjean rushed forward, and his old skill of escape was like a flash of light in his mind.Remove the paving-stones, throw up the iron bars, and descend Marius, motionless as a corpse, on his back; bearing this burden, on elbows and knees, down into this fortunately not deep well, and let The heavy iron gate overhead fell again; the paving stones fell again after being shaken, and some of them fell on the gate. At this moment, Jean Valjean stepped on the paved ground three meters below the ground; Like an excited person, he completed these actions with the strength of a giant and the agility of an eagle, and it took only a few minutes.

Jean Valjean and the unconscious Marius enter a kind of subterranean corridor. Here, it is extremely safe, extremely silent, and it is dark night. The image of the time when he had fallen from the street into the convent came back before him, but today it was not Cosette, but Marius. Above him now he could just barely hear, like an indistinct whisper, the startling uproar of the storming of the hotel.