Summary of chapters 5.1.24-5.2.6:

The hand that seized Marius as he fell was Jean Valjean, who Hugo says did not fire a single shot during the battle but did repair the barricade and help others when needed. No one saw Valjean leap toward Marius and grab him to take him from the barricade toward a sheltered area of the street. Realizing there is truly no safety to be had in the vicinity, and, seeing a grating, Valjean takes hold of the unconscious Marius and drops into the sewer below the street, feeling the similarity to when he dropped from the street into the safety of the convent years before with Cosette. Into the sewers we go with Hugo, Valjean, Marius, and the rats and slimy things. Hugo lauds the “human fertilization” which Paris puts into the sea each year and the ingenious sewers which man has invented to deal with it. The sewers of Paris are a replica of the city itself and have served as a place of “crime, intelligence, social protest, liberty of conscience, thought, theft,” and many other things of which human nature consists. Everything converges and splits off in the sewer because “a sewer in a cynic. It tells all.” The sewer of Paris, in the Middle Ages, played an important role in society, as it did in the 16th century and about a century ago, as Hugo is writing. Sometimes, the sewer overflowed, serving as a warning to the people. At the start of the 19th century, then, people in Paris began to realize the largeness of the caves beneath them and someone was wanted to explore them and possibly clean them—around 1805, a man called Bruneseau came forward to undertake this task. Bruneseau enlisted twenty laborers to help him and eight of them quit before they were very far into the tunnels. Bruneseau himself carried on and found the various dates of construction stamped along the sewer, some walled-up dungeon cells, and a piece of Marat’s burial sheet. After this exploration, Bruneseau spent seven years mapping, updating, fixing, extending, and cleaning the entire network of pipes. This was the former sewer, Hugo says, and the current one is “neat, cold, straight, and correct.” Still, in 1832 (when the novel is actually set, not when Hugo is writing), the sewer is stagnant, disease-ridden, and full of rats and crime.

Questions for 5.2.6:

1. Did you have a favorite line or passage from this chapter? If so, what made it stand out to you?
2. Were there any instances of figurative language you thought added to the narrative of this chapter?
3. Do you have any other comments or questions about this chapter?

Final line:

It required high wages [...] the rag of Marat.

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