Chapter 334 4 He also carried his cross

Jean Valjean went on again without stopping. Walking has become increasingly difficult.The height of the dome varies, but the general height is five feet six inches, which is designed according to the height of a person.Jean Valjean was obliged to stoop, so that Marius would not bump against the vault; he had to stoop at any moment, and then raise himself, so as to keep touching the wall.Wet stones and slimy grooves are bad support points for hands and feet.He staggers through the filth of the city.The light of the spaced ventilation holes is so far apart that the great sun is as dim as the moonlight; besides is the mist, the smell of decay, the opacity, the darkness.Jean Valjean was both thirsty and hungry, especially thirsty. Here, as at sea, there was water everywhere, but he could not drink it.His prodigious physical strength, we have seen, and seldom diminished by age, for he lived a chaste and simple life, was now beginning to fail.He was weary, and his weakening strength made the burden heavier.Marius, probably dead, weighs like an immobile body.Jean Valjean carried him on his back, so that Marius's chest would not be compressed, and his breathing could be as unobstructed as possible.He felt the rat slithering swiftly between his legs.One of them was so frightened that it came to bite him.A gust of fresh air from the gutter cover kept him awake for a while.

It was about three o'clock in the afternoon when he reached the steward. At first he was surprised that the sewer suddenly widened. He suddenly found himself in an alleyway where he couldn't touch the walls on both sides and couldn't even touch the top with his head.The Great Yinqu is indeed eight feet wide and seven feet high. At the junction of the Montmartre sewer and the great sewer, there are two other underground tunnels, one for the Rue de Provence and the other for the slaughterhouse, forming a crossroads.Among these four paths, those who are not as wise as him will definitely hesitate.Jean Valjean chose the widest, the main ditch.But this raises the question: downhill, or uphill?He considered the urgency of the situation, and therefore he must now go to the Seine, in other words, downhill, whatever the danger.So he turned left.

Thankfully he did.It would be a mistake to think that the steward has two exits, one to Bercy and the other to Bassie, as the name suggests, this is the steward on the right side of the Paris Underground.This great sewer is no other, we should remember, the old Menilmontan creek, which, if it goes up, leads to a dead end, which is its original starting point, the source of the river, in Menilmontant. Down the hill of the street.It is not directly connected with the branch of the Seine, which gathers the waters of Paris from the Bourboncourt district and enters the Seine at the former Ile Louvier through the Amelot Sewer.This branch, which serves as an auxiliary to the main, is separated from the main just below the Rue Menilmontant by a rise which divides the water into upstream and downstream.If Jean Valjean had gone up the ditch, he would have run into a wall in the dark, at the end of his toil, exhausted and dying, and that would have ruined him.

If necessary, you can also take a few steps back and enter the alley of the Rue des Calvary, just take the St. Louis Trench Canal without hesitation at the underground intersection of the Rue Bushela, then take the St. Gilles Trench Canal, and then Avoiding the San Sebastian gutter to the right, he may reach the rue d'Amelot ditch, from here, as long as he does not get lost in the "F" gutter under the Bastille prison, he will come to the exit of the Seine near the Arsenal .But to proceed in this way, it is necessary to know thoroughly all the branches and straight pipes of this great coral-shaped sewer.But, we repeat, Jean Valjean was ignorant of the terrible line he had taken.If someone had asked him where he was, he might have replied, "In the dark."

His instincts served him well, and downhill could indeed be saved. He gave up the ditch below the rue Lafitte and the Rue St. Georges, which diverged like claws on the right, and the laneway under the rue d'Antin with its branches. Passing a branch, probably a branch of the Madeleine church, he stopped to rest.He is very tired.There was a rather large vent, probably the hole in the Rue Anjou, into which an almost luminous light entered.Jean Valjean placed Marius on the bench in the gutter, with the gentle gesture of an elder brother to a wounded brother.Marius' bloody face loomed in the white light of the vent as if from the depths of a grave.His eyes were closed, his hair stuck to his temples like dried red paint brushes, his hands were hanging motionless, his limbs were cold, and blood clotted at the corners of his lips.A blood clot clotted in the tie knot; the shirt went into the wound, the cloth scraped against the wide-open flesh.Jean Valjean tore off the dress with his fingers, and laid his hand on his breast, while his heart was still beating.Jean Valjean tore off his shirt, bandaged the wound as well as he could, and stopped the bleeding.Then, in the twilight, he looked down at Marius, who had been unconscious and hardly breathing, and gazed at him with an indescribable hatred.

In unpacking Marius' clothes, he found two things in his pocket, a piece of bread which he had forgotten there the night before, and Marius' notebook.He ate his bread and opened his notebook.On the first page he found a few lines written by Marius.We also remember that it was written like this: "My name is Marius Pontmerche. Please send my body to the house of my grandfather, Monsieur Gillenormand, at the address: 6 Rue des Sisters, Marais." By the light of the vent hole, Jean Valjean read these lines, paused for a moment, as if in thought, and repeated in a low voice: "6 Rue des Sisters, Monsieur Gillenormand." He returned the notebook to Marius. Having recovered his strength after eating the bread, he took Marius up again, placed his head carefully on his right shoulder, and began to walk downhill in the ditch.

This ditch, which follows the bottom line of the deepest valley of the Menilmontan valley, is about two leagues long, and is paved for the greater part of the way. We use the street names of Paris, like a torch, to illuminate Jean Valjean's underground route in Paris for readers.But Jean Valjean had no such torch.Nothing told him what part of the city he was passing through or what streets he had walked.Only intermittent twilights that were fading told him that the sun was leaving the road and dusk was approaching.The constant rolling of the wheels above his head had become staccato, then almost stopped again.He came to the conclusion that he was no longer under the center of Paris and was approaching some remote area, such as near the end of a suburban road or a river bank.Where there are fewer houses and streets, there are fewer ventilation holes for the gutters.It was getting darker and darker around Jean Valjean, and he was still groping his way in the dark.

Suddenly this darkness became very scary.