Marius's enchantment, great as it was, could not efface from his mind other pre-occupations. While the wedding was in preparation, he caused difficult and scrupulous retrospective researches to be made. He owed gratitude in various quarters: on his father's account, on his own. There was Thenardier. There was the unknown man who had brought him back to the grandfather. He endeavored to find these two men, not intending to marry, to be happy, and to forget them. Were these debts of gratitude not discharged, they would leave a shadow on a life that promised so brightly. He wished, before entering joyously into the future, to obtain a quittance from the past. That Thenardier was a villain detracted nothing from the fact that he had saved the colonel. Marius, ignorant of the real scene on the field of Waterloo, was not aware that his father was indebted to that man for his life without being indebted to him for any gratitude.
None of the agents discovered any trace of Thenardier. Obliteration appeared to be complete. The wife had died in prison. Thenardier and his daughter Azelma had plunged back into the gloom. The trial of the Gorbeau ambush had come to nothing. Thenardier, through contumacy, had been condemned to death. This sentence was the only information remaining about him, casting upon that buried name its sinister light like a candle beside a bier. As for the unknown savior, the researches were at first to some extent successful, then came to an abrupt conclusion. They found the carriage that had brought Marius home on the evening of the sixth of June. The coachman declared that, in obedience to a police-agent, he had waited above the outlet of the Grand Sewer; that toward nine o'clock a man had emerged bearing on his shoulders another man who seemed to be dead; that the agent had arrested the living man and seized the dead man; that they had deposited the dead man, who was Marius, at the grandfather's door; and that afterwards, a few paces from the gate of the Archives, the agent had led the other man away. He knew nothing more. The night had been very dark.
Marius recalled nothing but an energetic hand at the moment when he was falling backwards into the barricade. Some one had carried him from the market quarter to the river through the sewer. Unheard-of devotion. Some one. Who. Of this man, nothing: not a trace. He pushed his inquiries as far as the prefecture. The prefecture knew less than the coachman. The matter was regarded as a fable, the invention of a coachman who wanted a gratuity. Marius could not doubt it, unless he doubted his own identity. Why had the agent preserved silence. Why did this man give no sign of life to the person who owed him everything. Perhaps he was above compensation, but no one is above gratitude. The servants had looked only at their young master covered with blood. The porter, whose candle had lighted the arrival, had been the only one to take note of the man. That man was terrible. On the preserved coat, one skirt had been torn in a singular way. A piece was missing. One evening, speaking of the fruitless inquiries in the presence of Cosette and Jean Valjean, the cold countenance of Fauchelevent angered him. That man was sublime, he exclaimed. He must have carried him more than a league and a half through those galleries, with a corpse upon his back, and that corpse I was. He had no recompense to expect. What was I. An insurgent. One of the conquered. Oh, if Cosette's six hundred thousand francs were mine. They are yours, interrupted Jean Valjean. Well, resumed Marius, I would give them all to find that man once more. Jean Valjean remained silent.
