rt was drawing up his
report, he had taken advantage of confusion, the crowd, the darkness,
and of a moment when the general attention was diverted from him, to
dash out of the window.

An agent sprang to the opening and looked out. He saw no one outside.

The rope ladder was still shaking.

"The devil!" ejaculated Javert between his teeth, "he must have been the
most valuable of the lot."

CHAPTER XXII--THE LITTLE ONE WHO WAS CRYING IN VOLUME TWO

On the day following that on which these events took place in the house
on the Boulevard de l'Hopital, a child, who seemed to be coming from the
direction of the bridge of Austerlitz, was ascending the side-alley on
the right in the direction of the Barriere de Fontainebleau.

Night had fully come.

This lad was pale, thin, clad in rags, with linen trousers in the month
of February, and was singing at the top of his voice.

At the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, a bent old woman was
rummaging in a heap of refuse by the light of a street lantern; the
child jostled her as he passed, then recoiled, exclaiming:--

"Hello! And I took it for an enormous, enormous dog!"

He pronounced the word enormous the second time with a jeering swell
of the voice which might be tolerably well represented by capitals: "an
enormous, ENORMOUS dog."

The old woman straightened herself up in a fury.

"Nasty brat!" she grumbled. "If I hadn't been bending over, I know well
where I would have planted my foot on you."

The boy was already far away.

"Kisss! kisss!" he cried. "After that, I don't think I was mistaken!"

The old woman, choking with indignation, now rose completely upright,
and the red gleam of the lantern fully lighted up her livid face, all
hollowed into angles and wrinkles, with crow's-feet meeting the corners
of her mouth.

Her body was lost in the darkness, and only her head was visible. One
would have pronounced her a mask of Decrepitude carved out by a light
from the night.

The boy surveyed her.

"Madame," said he, "does not possess that style of beauty which pleases
me."

He then pursued his road, and resumed his song:--

"Le roi Coupdesabot
S'en allait a la chasse,
A la chasse aux corbeaux--"

At the end of these three lines he paused. He had arrived in front of
No. 50-52, and finding the door fastened, he began to assault it with
resounding and heroic kicks, which betrayed rather the man's shoe