Les Misérables, v. 5/5: Jean Valjean

That same day, or, to speak more correctly, that same evening, as Marius was leaving the dinner-table to withdraw to his study, as he had a brief to get up, Basque handed him a...

The day after a wedding is solitary, for people respect the retirement of the happy, and to some extent their lengthened slumbers. The confusion of visits and congratulations do...

Javert retired slowly from the Rue de l'Homme Armé. He walked with drooping head for the first time in his life, and equally for the first time in his life with his hands behind...

"Cosette!" said Jean Valjean, and he sat up in his chair, with his arms outstretched and opened, haggard, livid, and sinister, but with an immense joy in his eyes. Cosette, suff...

To realize one's dream--to whom is this granted? There must be elections for this in heaven; we are the unconscious candidates, and the angels vote. Cosette and Marius had been...

The death-struggles of the barricade were about to begin, and everything added to the tragical majesty of this supreme moment,--a thousand mysterious sounds in the air, the brea...

There were at this very moment in the Luxembourg garden--for the eye of the drama must be everywhere present--two lads holding each other's hand. One might be seven, the other f...

Marius was overwhelmed; the sort of estrangement which he had ever felt for the man with whom he saw Cosette was henceforth explained. There was in this person something enigmat...

The day had been adorable; it was not the blue festival dreamed of by the grandfather, a fairy scene, with a confusion of cherubim and cupids above the head of the married coupl...

All preparations were made for the marriage, and the physician, on being consulted, declared that it might take place in February. It was now December; and a few ravishing weeks...

The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social diseases can mention do not belong to the period in which the action of this book is laid. These two barricades, b...

After the man, whoever he aright be, who decreed the "protest of corpses," had spokes, sad given the formula of the common soul, a strangely satisfied and terrible cry issued fr...

It was in the sewer of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself. This is a further resemblance of Paris with the sea, as in the ocean the diver can disappear there. It was an extra...

Basque and the porter had carried Marius, who was still lying motionless on the sofa on which he had been laid on arriving, into the drawing-room. The physician, who had been se...

He felt that he was entering water, and that he had under his feet no longer stone but mud. It often happens on certain coasts of Brittany or Scotland that a man, whether travel...

Cosette and Marius saw each other again. We will not attempt to describe the interview, for there are things which we must not attempt to paint: the sun is of the number. The wh...

Digging the sewerage of Paris was no small task. The last ten centuries have toiled at it without being able to finish, any more than they could finish Paris. The sewer, in fact...

Some one in this shadow? As nothing so resembles a dream as despair, Jean Valjean fancied that he was dreaming. He had not heard a footstep. Was it possible? He raised his eyes,...

Marius was for a long time neither dead nor alive. He had for several weeks a fever accompanied by delirium, and very serious brain symptoms caused by the shocks of the wounds i...

On the morrow, at nightfall, Jean Valjean tapped at the gateway of the Gillenormand mansion, and it was Basque who received him. Basque was in the yard at the appointed time, as...

This was the last occasion, and after this last flare total extinction took place. There was no more familiarity, no more good-day with a kiss, and never again that so deeply te...

The old formidable struggle, of which we have already seen several phases, began again. Jacob only wrestled with the angel for one night. Alas! how many times have we seen Jean...

The situation of the whole party in this fatal hour, and at this inexorable spot, had as result and pinnacle the supreme melancholy of Enjolras. Enjolras had within him the plen...

We must do the police of that day the justice of saying that even in the gravest public conjunctures they imperturbably accomplished their duties of watching the highways and of...

Suddenly the drum beat the charge, and the attack was a hurricane. On the previous evening the barricade had been silently approached in the darkness as by a boa; but at present...

The enchantment, great though it was, did not efface other thoughts from Marius's mind. While the marriage arrangements were being made, and the fixed period was waited for, he...

Day grew rapidly, but not a window opened, not a door was ajar; it was the dawn, not an awaking. The end of the Rue de la Chanvrerie opposed to the barricade had been evacuated...

Paris casts twenty-five millions of francs annually into the sea; and we assert this without any metaphor. How so, and in what way? By day and night. For what object? For no obj...

He let Marius slip down on to the bank. They were outside: the miasmas, the darkness, the horror, were behind him; the healthy, pure, living, joyous, freely respirable air inund...

At this moment Cosette awoke: her bed-room was narrow, clean, circumspect, with a long window on the east side looking out into the court-yard of the house. Cosette knew nothing...

Sixteen years count in the subterranean education of revolt, and June, 1848, knew a great deal more than June, 1832. Hence the barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie was only a s...

Jean Valjean had resumed his march, and had not stopped again. This march grew more and more laborious, for the level of these passages varies; the average height is about five...

The visit took place, and was a formidable campaign,--a nocturnal battle against asphyxia and plague. It was at the same time a voyage of discovery, and one of the survivors of...

We must lay a stress upon a psychological fact peculiar to barricades, for nothing which characterizes this surprising war of streets ought to be omitted. Whatever the internal...

If we imagine Paris removed like a cover, the subterranean network of sewers, regarded from a birds'-eye view, would represent on either bank a sort of large branch grafted upon...

Some time after the events which we have just recorded, the Sieur Boulatruelle had a lively emotion. The Sieur Boulatruelle is the road-mender of Montfermeil of whom we have alr...

When there were no chiefs left but Enjolras and Marius at the two ends of the barricade, the centre, which had so long been supported by Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Feuilly, and...

Those who have any recollection of this now distant epoch know that the suburban National Guards were valiant against the insurrection, and they were peculiarly brave and obstin...

At length, by employing the skeleton of the staircase, by climbing up the walls, clinging to the ceiling, and killing on the very edge of the trap the last who resisted, some tw...

One evening Jean Valjean had a difficulty in rising on his elbow; he took hold of his wrist and could not find his pulse; his breathing was short, and stopped every now and then...

One day M. Gillenormand, while his daughter was arranging the phials and cups on the marble slab of the sideboard, leaned over Marius, and said in his most tender accent,--

The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary. In the sixteenth century Henry II. attempted soundings which failed, and not a hundred years ago, as Mercier testifies, the...

The hand which had clutched him behind at the moment when he was falling, and of which he felt the pressure as he lost his senses, was that of Jean Valjean.

And he gazed fixedly at Marius with his epic effrontery: his eyes were dilated by the proud brightness which they contained. It was with a stern accent that Marius continued,--

The next day Jean Valjean came at the same hour, and Cosette asked him no questions, was no longer astonished, no longer exclaimed that it was cold, no longer alluded to the dra...

Courfeyrac all at once perceived somebody in the street, at the foot of the barricade, amid the shower of bullets. Gavroche had fetched a hamper from the pot-house, passed throu...

He set out once again; still, if he had not left his life in the fontis, he seemed to have left his strength there. This supreme effort had exhausted him, and his fatigue was no...

The lovers saw each other daily, and Cosette came with M. Fauchelevent. "It is turning things topsy-turvy," said Mademoiselle Gillenormand, "that the lady should come to the gen...

What had become of Jean Valjean? Directly after he had laughed in accordance with Cosette's request, as no one was paying any attention to him, Jean Valjean rose, and unnoticed...

It is a terrible thing to be happy! How satisfied people are! How sufficient they find it! How, when possessed of the false object of life, happiness, they forget the true one,...

Jean Valjean found himself in presence of a fontis: this sort of breaking-in was frequent at that day in the subsoil of the Champs Élysées, which was difficult to manage in hydr...

So soon as Jean Valjean was alone with Javert he undid the rope which fastened the prisoner round the waist, the knot of which was under the table. After this, he made him a sig...

On the day of June 6 a battue of the sewers was ordered, for it was feared lest the conquered should fly to them as a refuge, and Prefect Gisquet ordered occult Paris to be sear...

Courfeyrac, seated on a stone by the side of Enjolras, continued to insult the cannon, and each time that the gloomy shower of projectiles which is called a grape-shot passed wi...

During the last months of spring and the early months of summer, 1833, the scanty passers-by in the Marais, the shop-keepers, and the idlers in the door-ways, noticed an old gen...

In the chaos of feelings and passions which defend a barricade there is everything,--bravery, youth, the point of honor, enthusiasm, the ideal, conviction, the obstinacy of the...

Let us describe what was going on in Marius's thoughts. Our readers will remember his state of mind, for, as we just now said, everything was only a vision to him. His appreciat...

At each jolt over the pavement a drop of blood fell from Marius's hair. It was quite night when the hackney coach reached No. 6, Rue des Filles du Calvaire. Javert got out first...

One day Jean Valjean went down his staircase, took three steps in the street, sat down upon a post, the same one on which Gavroche had found him sitting in thought on the night...

They did not speak during the entire ride. What did Jean Valjean want? To finish what he had begun; to warn Cosette, tell her where Marius was, give her perhaps some other usefu...

Marius rushed out of the barricade, and Combeferre followed him; but it was too late, and Gavroche was dead. Combeferre brought in the hamper of cartridges, and Marius the boy....

Enjolras had gone out to reconnoitre, and had left by the Mondétour Lane, keeping in the shadow of the houses. The insurgents, we must state, were full of hope: the way in which...

Opinions varied in the barricade, for the firing of the piece was going to begin again, and the barricade could not hold out for a quarter of an hour under the grape-shot; it wa...

At the present day the sewer is clean, cold, straight, and correct, and almost realizes the ideal of what is understood in England by the word "respectable." It is neat and gray...

Of course our readers have understood, and no lengthened explanation will be required, that Jean Valjean after the Champmathieu affair was enabled by his escape for a few days t...

The fire of the assailants continued, and the musketry and grape-shot alternated, though without producing much mischief. The upper part of Corinth alone suffered, and the first...

There is at the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, in the vicinity of the poor side, far from the elegant quarter of this city of sepulchres, far from those fantastic tombs which displa...

I. THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG ST. ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE II. NOTHING TO DO IN THE ABYSS BUT TALK. III. CLEARING AND CLOUDING IV. FIVE LESS AND ONE M...

I. PITY THE UNHAPPY, BUT BE INDULGENT TO THE HAPPY II. THE LAST FLUTTERINGS OF THE LAMP WITHOUT OIL III. A PEN IS TOO HEAVY FOR THE MAN WHO LIFTED FAUCHELEVENT'S CART IV. A BOTT...

I. WHERE WE AGAIN MEET THE TREE WITH THE ZINC PATCH II. MARIUS, LEAVING CIVIL WAR, PREPARES FOR A DOMESTIC WAR III. MARIUS ATTACKS IV. MLLE. GILLENORMAND HAS NO OBJECTIONS TO TH...

I. THE CLOACA AND ITS SURPRISES II. EXPLANATION III. THE TRACKED MAN IV. HE TOO BEARS HIS CROSS V. SAND, LIKE WOMAN, HAS A FINENESS THAT IS PERFIDIOUS VI. THE FONTIS VII. SOMETI...