772 Les Miserables
fragment was much shorter, as far as the gloomy building
which we have mentioned and whose gable it intersected,
thus forming another retreating angle in the street. This ga-
ble was sombre of aspect; only one window was visible, or,
to speak more correctly, two shutters covered with a sheet of
zinc and kept constantly closed.
The state of the places of which we are here giving a de-
scription is rigorously exact, and will certainly awaken a
very precise memory in the mind of old inhabitants of the
quarter.
The niche was entirely filled by a thing which resem-
bled a colossal and wretched door; it was a vast, formless
assemblage of perpendicular planks, the upper ones being
broader than the lower, bound together by long transverse
strips of iron. At one side there was a carriage gate of the
ordinary dimensions, and which had evidently not been cut
more than fifty years previously.
A linden-tree showed its crest above the niche, and the
wall was covered with ivy on the side of the Rue Polonceau.
In the imminent peril in which Jean Valjean found
himself, this sombre building had about it a solitary and
uninhabited look which tempted him. He ran his eyes rap-
idly over it; he said to himself, that if he could contrive to
get inside it, he might save himself. First he conceived an
idea, then a hope.
In the central portion of the front of this building, on
the Rue Droit-Mur side, there were at all the windows of the
different stories ancient cistern pipes of lead. The various
branches of the pipes which led from one central pipe to all