Marius had indeed been taken prisoner, but not by the soldiers. It was Jean Valjean's hand that had caught him as he fell. Valjean had taken no part in the battle. He had been looking after wounded men while bullets flew all around him. When Marius had been hit, Valjean ran to him at once, grabbed him before he fell and carried his unconscious body into a small alley behind the wine shop. Valjean lowered Marius to the ground, stood with his back to the wall and looked around him.

The situation was terrible. There seemed to be no escape. On one side of him was the field of battle. On the other side was the low barricade, behind which hundreds of soldiers waited for rebels trying to escape. Both ways meant certain death. It was a situation that only a bird could have escaped from. Valjean looked desperately around him, at the house opposite, the barricade, the ground. And then he had a sudden idea!

At the foot of the smaller barricade, half-hidden by broken stones and pieces of wood, there was a hole in the road covered with an iron grille. Valjean leapt forward and, using all his strength, he moved the stones and wood, opened the grille, lifted Marius on to his shoulders and climbed down into the darkness.

A few minutes later, he found himself in a long underground passage, a place of absolute peace and silence. He was inside the Paris sewers. He could just see, by the grey light from the grille above his head, that he was surrounded by walls. Ahead of him lay total darkness, but he had to go on. The soldiers might discover the grille by the barricade at any moment, and come down in search of him.

With Marius lying across his shoulders, Valjean walked forward into the darkness, feeling his way along the wet, slippery walls with his hands. He moved from one passage into another, slipping several times on the wet floor. He could not see where he was going, but he knew he had to follow the downward slope of the passages towards the river.

He walked blindly downwards in this way for a long time, his clothes wet with the blood from Marius's wound, the faint whisper of the young man's breath in his ear. He walked in total darkness, the silence broken occasionally by the thunder of gun carriages and horses racing along the streets of Paris far above his head.