e?"

M. Leblanc looked him full in the face, and replied:--

"No."

Then Jondrette advanced to the table. He leaned across the candle,
crossing his arms, putting his angular and ferocious jaw close to M.
Leblanc's calm face, and advancing as far as possible without forcing M.
Leblanc to retreat, and, in this posture of a wild beast who is about to
bite, he exclaimed:--

"My name is not Fabantou, my name is not Jondrette, my name is
Thenardier. I am the inn-keeper of Montfermeil! Do you understand?
Thenardier! Now do you know me?"

An almost imperceptible flush crossed M. Leblanc's brow, and he replied
with a voice which neither trembled nor rose above its ordinary level,
with his accustomed placidity:--

"No more than before."

Marius did not hear this reply. Any one who had seen him at that moment
through the darkness would have perceived that he was haggard,
stupid, thunder-struck. At the moment when Jondrette said: "My name is
Thenardier," Marius 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 repeated, "Thenardier, do you
understand?" Marius's faltering fingers had come near letting the pistol
fall. Jondrette, by revealing 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 testament! He bore it at the bottom of his
mind, in the depths of his memory, in that sacred injunction: "A certain
Thenardier 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 remembered,
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 assassination! And against whom,
great God! what a fatality! What a bitter mocker