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She turned, chidden, but with a sort of wilful content. My heart bounded as I limped down the steps. I smiled to myself, safe in the dark, sardonically. Make what you will of it, with other men she was strong, womanly, serene; with me, she had the sweet grace to show weakness. The carriage bounded over the paving-stones and stopped at my hotel. The driver lifted his hat obsequiously.
But I was sternly determined to be faithful to my trust, and though for my greater comfort cold enough comfort it was I sat me down on the paving-stones, yet I kept my eyelids propped open, my eyes on Peyrot's door.
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.
In the meantime, in the space of a few minutes, twenty iron bars had been wrenched from the grated front of the wine-shop, ten fathoms of street had been unpaved; Gavroche and Bahorel had seized in its passage, and overturned, the dray of a lime-dealer named Anceau; this dray contained three barrels of lime, which they placed beneath the piles of paving-stones: Enjolras raised the cellar trap, and all the widow Hucheloup's empty casks were used to flank the barrels of lime; Feuilly, with his fingers skilled in painting the delicate sticks of fans, had backed up the barrels and the dray with two massive heaps of blocks of rough stone.
But what citizens should be charged with his torture, and why disappoint the rest? They would have liked a kind of death in which the whole town might take part, in which every hand, every weapon, everything Carthaginian, to the very paving-stones in the streets and the waves in the gulf, could rend him, and crush him, and annihilate him.
It did not seem to my unmilitary eye that two or three batteries of artillery could have any trouble in demolishing all the defenses, since a wall of paving-stones, four or five feet high, could hardly resist solid shot, or prove anything but a source of destruction to those behind it if attacked by artillery. But the capture was not so easy a matter as I had supposed.
The storms, meanwhile, have tossed up the shingle and paving-stones at each end of the valley, so as to form a barrier against the passage of any but such mighty waves as that which thundered through a year or two ago. The old inhabitants lived in the centre or towards the south of the island, and avoided the north and east because the latter were so much bleaker in winter.
"Yes," said the master of the house, "I believe it comes from the old ruined convent chapel; pulpit and gravestones, with all their epitaphs, were sold; my late father bought several of these; the others were broken into paving-stones, but this one was left unused, lying in the yard." "It is easy to know it for a gravestone," said the eldest of the children.
This gave me strength. Lie in that cell again I would not. With body bent forward, and my hands pressed hard against my left ribs to deaden the stings a little, I struggled on, keeping my eyes fastened upon the paving-stones that I might not be forced to bow to possible acquaintances, and hastened to the fire look-out.
"It's going to be war to the knife between Cotherstone and the town," remarked the ambassador, when he re-entered the big room and joined his own circle. "He passed me just now as if I were one of the paving-stones he trod on! And did you see his face as he went out? egad, instead of looking as if he'd had too much to drink, he looked too sober to please me.
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