“What a grenadier!” ejaculated Javert; “you’ve got a beard like a man, mother, but I have claws like a woman.”
And he continued to advance.
The Thénardier, dishevelled and terrible, set her feet far apart, threw herself backwards, and hurled the paving-stone at Javert’s head. Javert ducked, the stone passed over him, struck the wall behind, knocked off a huge piece of plastering, and, rebounding from angle to angle across the hovel, now luckily almost empty, rested at Javert’s feet.
At the same moment, Javert reached the Thénardier couple. One of his big hands descended on the woman’s shoulder; the other on the husband’s head.
“The handcuffs!” he shouted.
The policemen trooped in in force, and in a few seconds Javert’s order had been executed.
The Thénardier female, overwhelmed, stared at her pinioned hands, and at those of her husband, who had dropped to the floor, and exclaimed, weeping:—
“My daughters!”
“They are in the jug,” said Javert.
In the meanwhile, the agents had caught sight of the drunken man asleep behind the door, and were shaking him:—