, now of the wall which he touched, now of the vault beneath which he was passing.
The pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune and ends by finding God there.
It was not easy to direct his course.
The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of the streets which lie above it.
There were then in Paris two thousand two hundred streets.
Let the reader imagine himself beneath that forest of gloomy branches which is called the sewer. The system of sewers existing at that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of eleven leagues.
We have said above, that the actual net-work, thanks to the special activity of the last thirty years, was no less than sixty leagues in extent.
Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder.
He thought that he was beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it was a pity that it was not so. Under the Rue Saint-Denis there is an old stone sewer which dates from Louis XIII.
and which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the Grand Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation of the ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-Martin sewer, whose four arms describe a cross.
But the gut of the Petite-Truanderie the entrance to which was in the vicinity of the Corinthe wine-shop has never communicated with the sewer of the Rue Saint-Denis; it ended at the Montmartre sewer, and it was in this that Jean Valjean was entangled.