, was a place full of water where a man cannot drink.
His strength, which was prodigious, as the reader knows, and which had been but little decreased by age, thanks to his chaste and sober life, began to give way, nevertheless.
Fatigue began to gain on him; and as his strength decreased, it made the weight of his burden increase.
Marius, who was, perhaps, dead, weighed him down as inert bodies weigh.
Jean Valjean held him in such a manner that his chest was not oppressed, and so that respiration could proceed as well as possible.
Between his legs he felt the rapid gliding of the rats. One of them was frightened to such a degree that he bit him. From time to time, a breath of fresh air reached him through the vent-holes of the mouths of the sewer, and re-animated him.
It might have been three hours past midday when he reached the belt-sewer.
He was, at first, astonished at this sudden widening.
He found himself, all at once, in a gallery where his outstretched hands could not reach the two walls, and beneath a vault which his head did not touch. The Grand Sewer is, in fact, eight feet wide and seven feet high.
At the point where the Montmartre sewer joins the Grand Sewer, two other subterranean galleries, that of the Rue de Provence, and that of the Abattoir, form a square.
Between these four ways, a less sagacious man would have remained undecided.