At the very spot where Jean Valjean went underground, Hugo halts his story and gives a whole book over to the sewers of Paris. Every year, he argues, Paris pours into the river what could have fertilised its fields. He records how a man named Bruneseau, in 1805, became the first to walk that maze to its end and map it. The sewer, he says, is the conscience of the city. Everything hidden above collects down there and drops its mask.
It was in that sewer that Jean Valjean now stood. In the time it takes to lift a lid and let it fall, he had passed from noon to midnight, from uproar to stillness. He had dropped from a street strewn with death into a safety as quiet as a grave. At first he seemed to have lost both sight and hearing. Stretching out his arms, he touched a wall on either side, and the stone underfoot was wet and slippery. The stench told him where he was.
He did not know whether the man he had carried down was alive or dead. Marius’s arms were looped round his neck and his feet hung down behind. The bloody cheek clung to his own, and something lukewarm was trickling inside his clothes. Yet there was a damp warmth at his ear where Marius’s mouth touched it. He was still breathing.