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Updated: June 12, 2025
The most "puzzled" were the school-master and Thenardier, the proprietor of the tavern, who was everybody's friend, and had not disdained to ally himself with Boulatruelle. "He has been in the galleys," said Thenardier. "Eh! Good God! no one knows who has been there or will be there."
Some time after the events which we have just recorded, Sieur Boulatruelle experienced a lively emotion. Sieur Boulatruelle was that road-mender of Montfermeil whom the reader has already seen in the gloomy parts of this book. Boulatruelle, as the reader may, perchance, recall, was a man who was occupied with divers and troublesome matters. He broke stones and damaged travellers on the highway.
However, apart from the identity which he could not manage to catch, Boulatruelle put things together and made calculations. This man did not belong in the country-side. He had just arrived there. On foot, evidently. No public conveyance passes through Montfermeil at that hour. He had walked all night. Whence came he? Not from a very great distance; for he had neither haversack, nor bundle.
At the bottom of the ravine he found water which he was obliged to traverse. At last he reached the Blaru-bottom, after the lapse of forty minutes, sweating, soaked, breathless, scratched, and ferocious. There was no one in the glade. Boulatruelle rushed to the heap of stones. It was in its place. It had not been carried off. As for the man, he had vanished in the forest. He had made his escape.
Where? in what direction? into what thicket? Impossible to guess. And, heartrending to say, there, behind the pile of stones, in front of the tree with the sheet of zinc, was freshly turned earth, a pick-axe, abandoned or forgotten, and a hole. The hole was empty. "Thief!" shrieked Boulatruelle, shaking his fist at the horizon. For a long time, Marius was neither dead nor alive.
The idea was a good one. On scrutinizing the solitary waste on the side where the forest is thoroughly entangled and wild, Boulatruelle suddenly caught sight of his man. Hardly had he got his eye upon him when he lost sight of him.
This Boulatruelle was a man who was viewed with disfavor by the inhabitants of the district as too respectful, too humble, too prompt in removing his cap to every one, and trembling and smiling in the presence of the gendarmes, probably affiliated to robber bands, they said; suspected of lying in ambush at verge of copses at nightfall. The only thing in his favor was that he was a drunkard.
The heap of stones, destined for no one knows what employment, which was visible there thirty years ago, is doubtless still there. Nothing equals a heap of stones in longevity, unless it is a board fence. They are temporary expedients. What a reason for lasting! Boulatruelle, with the rapidity of joy, dropped rather than descended from the tree.
One evening the schoolmaster affirmed that in former times the law would have instituted an inquiry as to what Boulatruelle did in the forest, and that the latter would have been forced to speak, and that he would have been put to the torture in case of need, and that Boulatruelle would not have resisted the water test, for example. "Let us put him to the wine test," said Thenardier.
He had a pickaxe somewhere in the heather, in a hiding-place known to himself alone. When he beheld Marius convalescent, feeling that the hour was at hand, when that money might prove of service, he had gone to get it; it was he again, whom Boulatruelle had seen in the woods, but on this occasion, in the morning instead of in the evening. Boulatreulle inherited his pickaxe.
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