Prisoner — Les Misérables

Marius was, in fact, a prisoner. The hand which had seized him from behind, at the moment of his fall, was that of Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean had taken no other part in the combat than to expose himself in it. Had it not been for him, no one, in that supreme phase of agony, would have thought of the wounded. He held his peace and lent succour. Nothing which could resemble a blow proceeded from his hands. He had received only a few scratches. The bullets would have none of him. In the thick cloud of the combat he did not appear to see Marius. The truth is that he never took his eyes from the latter. When a shot laid Marius low, Jean Valjean leaped forward with the agility of a tiger, fell upon him as on his prey, and bore him off.

The whirlwind of the attack was so violently concentrated upon Enjolras and the door of the wine-shop that no one saw Jean Valjean traverse the unpaved field and disappear behind the angle of the Corinthe building. That angle afforded shelter from the bullets and from all eyes. It was in this sort of fold that Eponine had breathed her last. There Jean Valjean halted, let Marius slide to the ground, and cast his eyes about him. The situation was alarming. Before him stood the deaf house, six stories high, inhabited only by a dead man leaning out of his window. On his right the rather low barricade shut off the lane; beyond its crest a line of bayonets was visible. To pass it was to go in quest of sixty shots. On his left he had the field of battle. Death lurked round the corner of that wall. What was to be done. Only a bird could have extricated itself from this predicament. And it was necessary to decide on the instant. If one single soldier turned the corner, all was over.

Jean Valjean gazed at the house, at the barricade, then at the ground, as though he would have liked to pierce a hole there with his eyes. A few paces distant, beneath a disordered mass of paving-stones, he perceived an iron grating, placed flat and on a level with the soil. Through the bars a view could be had of a dark aperture. Jean Valjean darted forward. His old art of escape rose to his brain like an illumination. To thrust aside the stones, to raise the grating, to lift Marius, who was as inert as a dead body, upon his shoulders, to descend with this burden on his loins, to let the heavy trap fall into its place behind him, all this was executed like that which one does in dreams. This took only a few minutes. Jean Valjean found himself with Marius, who was still unconscious, in a long subterranean corridor. There reigned profound peace, absolute silence, night. The impression which he had formerly experienced when falling from the wall into the convent recurred to him. Only, what he was carrying to-day was not Cosette. It was Marius. He could barely hear the formidable tumult in the wine-shop, taken by assault, like a vague murmur overhead.