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<h2> CHAPTER XX—THE TRAP </h2>
<p>The door of the garret had just opened abruptly, and allowed a view of
three men clad in blue linen blouses, and masked with masks of black
paper. The first was thin, and had a long, iron-tipped cudgel; the second,
who was a sort of colossus, carried, by the middle of the handle, with the
blade downward, a butcher's pole-axe for slaughtering cattle. The third, a
man with thick-set shoulders, not so slender as the first, held in his
hand an enormous key stolen from the door of some prison.</p>
<p>It appeared that the arrival of these men was what Jondrette had been
waiting for. A rapid dialogue ensued between him and the man with the
cudgel, the thin one.</p>
<p>"Is everything ready?" said Jondrette.</p>
<p>"Yes," replied the thin man.</p>
<p>"Where is Montparnasse?"</p>
<p>"The young principal actor stopped to chat with your girl."</p>
<p>"Which?"</p>
<p>"The eldest."</p>
<p>"Is there a carriage at the door?"</p>
<p>"Yes."</p>
<p>"Is the team harnessed?"</p>
<p>"Yes."</p>
<p>"With two good horses?"</p>
<p>"Excellent."</p>
<p>"Is it waiting where I ordered?"</p>
<p>"Yes."</p>
<p>"Good," said Jondrette.</p>
<p>M. Leblanc was very pale. He was scrutinizing everything around him in the
den, like a man who understands what he has fallen into, and his head,
directed in turn toward all the heads which surrounded him, moved on his
neck with an astonished and attentive slowness, but there was nothing in
his air which resembled fear. He had improvised an intrenchment out of the
table; and the man, who but an instant previously, had borne merely the
appearance of a kindly old man, had suddenly become a sort of athlete, and
placed his robust fist on the back of his chair, with a formidable and
surprising gesture.</p>
<p>This old man, who was so firm and so brave in the presence of such a
danger, seemed to possess one of those natures which are as courageous as
they are kind, both easily and simply. The father of a woman whom we love
is never a stranger to us. Marius felt proud of that unknown man.</p>
<p>Three of the men, of whom Jondrette had said: "They are chimney-builders,"
had armed themselves from the pile of old iron, one with a heavy pair of
shears, the second with weighing-tongs, the third with a hammer, and had
placed themselves across the entrance without uttering a syllable. The old
man had remained on the bed, and had merely opened his eyes. The Jondrette
woman had seated herself beside him.</p>
<p>Marius decided that in a few seconds more the moment for intervention
would arrive, and he raised his right hand towards the ceiling, in the
direction of the corridor, in readiness to discharge his pistol.</p>
<p>Jondrette having terminated his colloquy with the man with the cudgel,
turned once more to M. Leblanc, and repeated his question, accompanying it
with that low, repressed, and terrible laugh which was peculiar to him:—</p>
<p>"So you do not recognize me?"</p>
<p>M. Leblanc looked him full in the face, and replied:—</p>
<p>"No."</p>
<p>Then Jondrette advanced to the table. He leaned across the candle,
crossing his arms, putting his angular and ferocious jaw close to M.
Leblanc's calm face, and advancing as far as possible without forcing M.
Leblanc to retreat, and, in this posture of a wild beast who is about to
bite, he exclaimed:—</p>
<p>"My name is not Fabantou, my name is not Jondrette, my name is Thenardier.
I am the inn-keeper of Montfermeil! Do you understand? Thenardier! Now do
you know me?"</p>
<p>An almost imperceptible flush crossed M. Leblanc's brow, and he replied
with a voice which neither trembled nor rose above its ordinary level,
with his accustomed placidity:—</p>
<p>"No more than before."</p>
<p>Marius did not hear this reply. Any one who had seen him at that moment
through the darkness would have perceived that he was haggard, stupid,
thunder-struck. At the moment when Jondrette said: "My name is
Thenardier," Marius had trembled in every limb, and had leaned against the
wall, as though he felt the cold of a steel blade through his heart. Then
his right arm, all ready to discharge the signal shot, dropped slowly, and
at the moment when Jondrette repeated, "Thenardier, do you understand?"
Marius's faltering fingers had come near letting the pistol fall.
Jondrette, by revealing his identity, had not moved M. Leblanc, but he had
quite upset Marius. That name of Thenardier, with which M. Leblanc did not
seem to be acquainted, Marius knew well. Let the reader recall what that
name meant to him! That name he had worn on his heart, inscribed in his
father's testament! He bore it at the bottom of his mind, in the depths of
his memory, in that sacred injunction: "A certain Thenardier saved my
life. If my son encounters him, he will do him all the good that lies in
his power." That name, it will be remembered, was one of the pieties of
his soul; he mingled it with the name of his father in his worship. What!
This man was that Thenardier, that inn-keeper of Montfermeil whom he had
so long and so vainly sought! He had found him at last, and how? His
father's saviour was a ruffian! That man, to whose service Marius was
burning to devote himself, was a monster! That liberator of Colonel
Pontmercy was on the point of committing a crime whose scope Marius did
not, as yet, clearly comprehend, but which resembled an assassination! And
against whom, great God! what a fatality! What a bitter mockery of fate!
His father had commanded him from the depths of his coffin to do all the
good in his power to this Thenardier, and for four years Marius had
cherished no other thought than to acquit this debt of his father's, and
at the moment when he was on the eve of having a brigand seized in the
very act of crime by justice, destiny cried to him: "This is Thenardier!"
He could at last repay this man for his father's life, saved amid a
hail-storm of grape-shot on the heroic field of Waterloo, and repay it
with the scaffold! He had sworn to himself that if ever he found that
Thenardier, he would address him only by throwing himself at his feet; and
now he actually had found him, but it was only to deliver him over to the
executioner! His father said to him: "Succor Thenardier!" And he replied
to that adored and sainted voice by crushing Thenardier! He was about to
offer to his father in his grave the spectacle of that man who had torn
him from death at the peril of his own life, executed on the Place
Saint-Jacques through the means of his son, of that Marius to whom he had
entrusted that man by his will! And what a mockery to have so long worn on
his breast his father's last commands, written in his own hand, only to
act in so horribly contrary a sense! But, on the other hand, now look on
that trap and not prevent it! Condemn the victim and to spare the
assassin! Could one be held to any gratitude towards so miserable a
wretch? All the ideas which Marius had cherished for the last four years
were pierced through and through, as it were, by this unforeseen blow.</p>
<p>He shuddered. Everything depended on him. Unknown to themselves, he held
in his hand all those beings who were moving about there before his eyes.
If he fired his pistol, M. Leblanc was saved, and Thenardier lost; if he
did not fire, M. Leblanc would be sacrificed, and, who knows? Thenardier
would escape. Should he dash down the one or allow the other to fall?
Remorse awaited him in either case.</p>
<p>What was he to do? What should he choose? Be false to the most imperious
souvenirs, to all those solemn vows to himself, to the most sacred duty,
to the most venerated text! Should he ignore his father's testament, or
allow the perpetration of a crime! On the one hand, it seemed to him that
he heard "his Ursule" supplicating for her father and on the other, the
colonel commending Thenardier to his care. He felt that he was going mad.
His knees gave way beneath him. And he had not even the time for
deliberation, so great was the fury with which the scene before his eyes
was hastening to its catastrophe. It was like a whirlwind of which he had
thought himself the master, and which was now sweeping him away. He was on
the verge of swooning.</p>
<p>In the meantime, Thenardier, whom we shall henceforth call by no other
name, was pacing up and down in front of the table in a sort of frenzy and
wild triumph.</p>
<p>He seized the candle in his fist, and set it on the chimney-piece with so
violent a bang that the wick came near being extinguished, and the tallow
bespattered the wall.</p>
<p>Then he turned to M. Leblanc with a horrible look, and spit out these
words:—</p>
<p>"Done for! Smoked brown! Cooked! Spitchcocked!"</p>
<p>And again he began to march back and forth, in full eruption.</p>
<p>"Ah!" he cried, "so I've found you again at last, Mister philanthropist!
Mister threadbare millionnaire! Mister giver of dolls! you old ninny! Ah!
so you don't recognize me! No, it wasn't you who came to Montfermeil, to
my inn, eight years ago, on Christmas eve, 1823! It wasn't you who carried
off that Fantine's child from me! The Lark! It wasn't you who had a yellow
great-coat! No! Nor a package of duds in your hand, as you had this
morning here! Say, wife, it seems to be his mania to carry packets of
woollen stockings into houses! Old charity monger, get out with you! Are
you a hosier, Mister millionnaire? You give away your stock in trade to
the poor, holy man! What bosh! merry Andrew! Ah! and you don't recognize
me? Well, I recognize you, that I do! I recognized you the very moment you
poked your snout in here. Ah! you'll find out presently, that it isn't all
roses to thrust yourself in that fashion into people's houses, under the
pretext that they are taverns, in wretched clothes, with the air of a poor
man, to whom one would give a sou, to deceive persons, to play the
generous, to take away their means of livelihood, and to make threats in
the woods, and you can't call things quits because afterwards, when people
are ruined, you bring a coat that is too large, and two miserable hospital
blankets, you old blackguard, you child-stealer!"</p>
<p>He paused, and seemed to be talking to himself for a moment. One would
have said that his wrath had fallen into some hole, like the Rhone; then,
as though he were concluding aloud the things which he had been saying to
himself in a whisper, he smote the table with his fist, and shouted:—</p>
<p>"And with his goody-goody air!"</p>
<p>And, apostrophizing M. Leblanc:—</p>
<p>"Parbleu! You made game of me in the past! You are the cause of all my
misfortunes! For fifteen hundred francs you got a girl whom I had, and who
certainly belonged to rich people, and who had already brought in a great
deal of money, and from whom I might have extracted enough to live on all
my life! A girl who would have made up to me for everything that I lost in
that vile cook-shop, where there was nothing but one continual row, and
where, like a fool, I ate up my last farthing! Oh! I wish all the wine
folks drank in my house had been poison to those who drank it! Well, never
mind! Say, now! You must have thought me ridiculous when you went off with
the Lark! You had your cudgel in the forest. You were the stronger.
Revenge. I'm the one to hold the trumps to-day! You're in a sorry case, my
good fellow! Oh, but I can laugh! Really, I laugh! Didn't he fall into the
trap! I told him that I was an actor, that my name was Fabantou, that I
had played comedy with Mamselle Mars, with Mamselle Muche, that my
landlord insisted on being paid tomorrow, the 4th of February, and he
didn't even notice that the 8th of January, and not the 4th of February is
the time when the quarter runs out! Absurd idiot! And the four miserable
Philippes which he has brought me! Scoundrel! He hadn't the heart even to
go as high as a hundred francs! And how he swallowed my platitudes! That
did amuse me. I said to myself: 'Blockhead! Come, I've got you! I lick
your paws this morning, but I'll gnaw your heart this evening!'"</p>
<p>Thenardier paused. He was out of breath. His little, narrow chest panted
like a forge bellows. His eyes were full of the ignoble happiness of a
feeble, cruel, and cowardly creature, which finds that it can, at last,
harass what it has feared, and insult what it has flattered, the joy of a
dwarf who should be able to set his heel on the head of Goliath, the joy
of a jackal which is beginning to rend a sick bull, so nearly dead that he
can no longer defend himself, but sufficiently alive to suffer still.</p>
<p>M. Leblanc did not interrupt him, but said to him when he paused:—</p>
<p>"I do not know what you mean to say. You are mistaken in me. I am a very
poor man, and anything but a millionnaire. I do not know you. You are
mistaking me for some other person."</p>
<p>"Ah!" roared Thenardier hoarsely, "a pretty lie! You stick to that
pleasantry, do you! You're floundering, my old buck! Ah! You don't
remember! You don't see who I am?"</p>
<p>"Excuse me, sir," said M. Leblanc with a politeness of accent, which at
that moment seemed peculiarly strange and powerful, "I see that you are a
villain!"</p>
<p>Who has not remarked the fact that odious creatures possess a
susceptibility of their own, that monsters are ticklish! At this word
"villain," the female Thenardier sprang from the bed, Thenardier grasped
his chair as though he were about to crush it in his hands. "Don't you
stir!" he shouted to his wife; and, turning to M. Leblanc:—</p>
<p>"Villain! Yes, I know that you call us that, you rich gentlemen! Stop!
it's true that I became bankrupt, that I am in hiding, that I have no
bread, that I have not a single sou, that I am a villain! It's three days
since I have had anything to eat, so I'm a villain! Ah! you folks warm
your feet, you have Sakoski boots, you have wadded great-coats, like
archbishops, you lodge on the first floor in houses that have porters, you
eat truffles, you eat asparagus at forty francs the bunch in the month of
January, and green peas, you gorge yourselves, and when you want to know
whether it is cold, you look in the papers to see what the engineer
Chevalier's thermometer says about it. We, it is we who are thermometers.
We don't need to go out and look on the quay at the corner of the Tour de
l'Horologe, to find out the number of degrees of cold; we feel our blood
congealing in our veins, and the ice forming round our hearts, and we say:
'There is no God!' And you come to our caverns, yes our caverns, for the
purpose of calling us villains! But we'll devour you! But we'll devour
you, poor little things! Just see here, Mister millionnaire: I have been a
solid man, I have held a license, I have been an elector, I am a
bourgeois, that I am! And it's quite possible that you are not!"</p>
<p>Here Thenardier took a step towards the men who stood near the door, and
added with a shudder:—</p>
<p>"When I think that he has dared to come here and talk to me like a
cobbler!"</p>
<p>Then addressing M. Leblanc with a fresh outburst of frenzy:—</p>
<p>"And listen to this also, Mister philanthropist! I'm not a suspicious
character, not a bit of it! I'm not a man whose name nobody knows, and who
comes and abducts children from houses! I'm an old French soldier, I ought
to have been decorated! I was at Waterloo, so I was! And in the battle I
saved a general called the Comte of I don't know what. He told me his
name, but his beastly voice was so weak that I didn't hear. All I caught
was Merci [thanks]. I'd rather have had his name than his thanks. That
would have helped me to find him again. The picture that you see here, and
which was painted by David at Bruqueselles,—do you know what it
represents? It represents me. David wished to immortalize that feat of
prowess. I have that general on my back, and I am carrying him through the
grape-shot. There's the history of it! That general never did a single
thing for me; he was no better than the rest! But none the less, I saved
his life at the risk of my own, and I have the certificate of the fact in
my pocket! I am a soldier of Waterloo, by all the furies! And now that I
have had the goodness to tell you all this, let's have an end of it. I
want money, I want a deal of money, I must have an enormous lot of money,
or I'll exterminate you, by the thunder of the good God!"</p>
<p>Marius had regained some measure of control over his anguish, and was
listening. The last possibility of doubt had just vanished. It certainly
was the Thenardier of the will. Marius shuddered at that reproach of
ingratitude directed against his father, and which he was on the point of
so fatally justifying. His perplexity was redoubled.</p>
<p>Moreover, there was in all these words of Thenardier, in his accent, in
his gesture, in his glance which darted flames at every word, there was,
in this explosion of an evil nature disclosing everything, in that mixture
of braggadocio and abjectness, of pride and pettiness, of rage and folly,
in that chaos of real griefs and false sentiments, in that immodesty of a
malicious man tasting the voluptuous delights of violence, in that
shameless nudity of a repulsive soul, in that conflagration of all
sufferings combined with all hatreds, something which was as hideous as
evil, and as heart-rending as the truth.</p>
<p>The picture of the master, the painting by David which he had proposed
that M. Leblanc should purchase, was nothing else, as the reader has
divined, than the sign of his tavern painted, as it will be remembered, by
himself, the only relic which he had preserved from his shipwreck at
Montfermeil.</p>
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