tite Truanderie;
to pass this obstacle seemed easy, but beyond the crest of the barrier a
line of bayonets was visible. The troops of the line were posted on the
watch behind that barricade. It was evident, that to pass the barricade
was to go in quest of the fire of the platoon, and that any head which
should run the risk of lifting itself above the top of that wall of
stones would serve as a target for 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, to devise some expedient,
to come to some decision. Fighting was going on a few paces away;
fortunately, all were raging around a single point, the door of the
wine-shop; but if it should occur to one soldier, to one single soldier,
to turn the corner of the house, or to attack him on the flank, all was
over.

Jean Valjean gazed at the house facing him, he gazed at the barricade at
one side of him, then he looked at the ground, with the violence of the
last extremity, bewildered, and as though he would have liked to pierce
a hole there with his eyes.

By dint of staring, something vaguely striking in such an agony began
to assume form and outline at his feet, as though it had been a power
of glance which made the thing desired unfold. A few paces distant he
perceived, at the base of the small barrier so pitilessly guarded and
watched on the exterior, beneath a disordered mass of paving-stones
which partly concealed it, an iron grating, placed flat and on a level
with the soil. This grating, made of stout, transverse bars, was about
two feet square. The frame of paving-stones which supported it had been
torn up, and it was, as it were, unfastened.

Through the bars a view could be had of a dark aperture, something like
the flue of a chimney, or the pipe of a cistern. 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, and with the aid of his elbows and knees into that
sort of well, fortunately not very deep, to let the heavy trap, upon
which the loosened stones rolled down afresh, fall into its place behind
him, to gain his footing on a flagged surface three metres below the
surface,--all