1350 Les Miserables
ceived that he was haggard, stupid, thunder-struck. At the
moment when Jondrette said: ‘My name is Thenardier,’ Mar-
ius 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 re-
peated, ‘Thenardier, do you understand?’ Marius’s faltering
fingers had come near letting the pistol fall. Jondrette, by re-
vealing 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 tes-
tament! He bore it at the bottom of his mind, in the depths
of his memory, in that sacred injunction: ‘A certain Thenar-
dier 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 re-
membered, 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 assassina-
tion! 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