had been brought back to his grandfather preserved, in the hope that it would prove of service in his researches.
On examining the coat, it was found that one skirt had been torn in a singular way.
A piece was missing.
One evening, Marius was speaking in the presence of Cosette and Jean Valjean of the whole of that singular adventure, of the innumerable inquiries which he had made, and of the fruitlessness of his efforts. The cold countenance of "Monsieur Fauchelevent" angered him.
He exclaimed, with a vivacity which had something of wrath in it:
"Yes, that man, whoever he may have been, was sublime. Do you know what he did, sir?
He intervened like an archangel. He must have flung himself into the midst of the battle, have stolen me away, have opened the sewer, have dragged me into it and have carried me through it!
He must have traversed more than a league and a half in those frightful subterranean galleries, bent over, weighed down, in the dark, in the cess-pool,--more than a league and a half, sir, with a corpse upon his back!
And with what object? With the sole object of saving the corpse.
And that corpse I was. He said to himself:
`There may still be a glimpse of life there, perchance; I will risk my own existence for that miserable spark!'' And his existence he risked not once but twenty times!