2144 Les Miserables
safety had suddenly yawned beneath him. Celestial good-
ness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery. Adorable
ambuscades of providence!
Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean
did not know whether that which he was carrying in that
grave was a living being or a dead corpse.
His first sensation was one of blindness. All of a sud-
den, he could see nothing. It seemed to him too, that, in
one instant, he had become deaf. He no longer heard any-
thing. The frantic storm of murder which had been let loose
a few feet above his head did not reach him, thanks to the
thickness of the earth which separated him from it, as we
have said, otherwise than faintly and indistinctly, and like
a rumbling, in the depths. He felt that the ground was solid
under his feet; that was all; but that was enough. He ex-
tended one arm and then the other, touched the walls on
both sides, and perceived that the passage was narrow; he
slipped, and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. He
cautiously put forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some
gulf; he discovered that the paving continued. A gust of fet-
idness informed him of the place in which he stood.
After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind.
A little light fell through the man-hole through which he
had descended, and his eyes became accustomed to this
cavern. He began to distinguish something. The passage
in which he had burrowed—no other word can better ex-
press the situation—was walled in behind him. It was one of
those blind alleys, which the special jargon terms branches.
In front of him there was another wall, a wall like night. The