AFTER WITNESSING the unexpected outcome of the plot of which he had warned Javert, and directly after Javert had left the building, taking with him his prisoners in three fiacres, Marius himself slipped out It was still only nine o’clock. Marius went to Courfeyrac, who was no longer the unshakeable inhabitant of the Latin Quarter but ‘for political reasons’ had gone to live in the Rue de la Verrerie, this being one of the quarters favoured by the insurrectionists at that time. ‘I’ve come to lodge with you,’ Marius said, and Courfeyrac pulled one of the two mattresses off his bed, spread it on the floor and said, ‘You’re welcome.’
At seven the next morning Marius returned to the tenement, paid his rent and what he owed Ma’am Bougon, had his books, his bed, his work-table, his chest of drawers, and his two chairs loaded on to a handcart, and departed leaving no address, so that when Javert came round during the morning to question him further about the previous night’s affair he found no one there but Ma’am Bougon, who simply said, ‘He’s cleared out.’
Ma’am Bougon was convinced that Marius was in some way hand-in-glove with the criminals. ‘Who’d have thought it?’ she said to her friends in the quarter. ‘A young man who looked as innocent as a newborn babe!’
Marius had two reasons for this prompt removal. In the first place, he now had a horror of that house in which he had encountered, at such close quarters, and in its most noisome and ferocious aspects, a form of social ugliness that was perhaps even more repulsive than the evil rich: namely, the evil poor. The second reason was that he did not want to be involved in the criminal proceedings which must surely ensue, when he would have been obliged to testify against Thénardier.
Javert assumed that the young man, whose name he had not noted, had taken fright and bolted, or possibly had not even gone back to his lodging at the time when the trap was sprung. He nevertheless endeavoured to find him, but without success.
Two months passed. Marius was still lodging with Courfeyrac. He learned from a friend at the law-courts that Thénardier was in solitary confinement, and every Monday he sent the clerk of the prison of La Force five francs for his benefit. Being now entirely out of funds, he had to borrow the sum from Courfeyrac. It was the first time in his life he had ever borrowed money, and these weekly subscriptions were an enigma both to Courfeyrac, who supplied them, and to Thénardier, who received them. ‘Who on earth is the money going to?’ wondered Courfeyrac, and ‘Where on earth is it coming from?’ wondered Thénardier.
Marius was deeply unhappy, his whole world in confusion and nothing good in prospect that he could see – once more blindly groping in the mystery that entangled him. He had had a brief, shadowy glimpse of the girl with whom he had fallen in love and the elderly man whom he presumed to be her father, those two unknown beings who were his sole interest and hope in life; and at the moment when he had thought to draw near them a puff of wind had borne them away like shadows. Not a spark of certainty or truth had emerged from the dreadful shock he had sustained, no possible basis of conjecture. He no longer even knew the girl’s name, which he thought he had discovered. Certainly it was not Ursula, and ‘the Lark’ was only a nickname. And what was he to make of the man? Was he really hiding from the police? Recalling the white-haired workman he had seen near the Invalides, Marius now felt tolerably sure that he and Monsieur Leblanc were the same. Was he in the habit of disguising himself? He was both heroic and two-faced – why had he not shouted for help? Why had he run away? Was he in fact the girl’s father? And finally, was he really the man Thénardier claimed to have recognized? … A string of unanswerable questions which, however, did nothing to diminish the angelic charm of the girl he had seen in the Luxembourg. Marius was in utter despair, his heart aflame and his eyes blinded, driven and drawn but unable to move. Everything was lost to him except love itself, even the instinctive perceptions of love. Ordinarily that flame which consumes us brings with it a hint of divination, something for the mind to work on. But Marius had none of these obscure inklings. He could not say to himself, ‘– if I were to go there, or try that? …’ She must be somewhere, the girl who was no longer Ursula, but there was nothing to tell Marius where to look. His life could be summed up in very few words: absolute uncertainty and impenetrable fog. To see her again was his constant longing, but he had lost hope.
And to crown it all he was again in the grip of penury. Drawn close to him, hard on his heels, he felt that icy breath. For a long time now, in his state of torment, he had ceased to work. Nothing is more dangerous than to stop working. It is a habit that can soon be lost, one that is easily neglected and hard to resume. A measure of day-dreaming is a good thing, like a drug prudently used; it allays the sometimes virulent fever of the over-active mind, like a cool wind blowing through the brain to smooth the harshness of untrammelled thought; it bridges here and there the gaps, brings things into proportion and blunts the sharper angles. But too much submerges and drowns. Woe to the intellectual worker who allows himself to lapse wholly from positive thinking into day-dreaming. He dunks he can easily change back, and tells himself that it is all one. He is wrong! Thought is the work of the intellect, reverie is its self-indulgence. To substitute day-dreaming for thought is to confuse a poison with a source of nourishment.
This, as we may recall, was how it had been with Marius at the beginning, before love had come to plunge him wholly into that world of aimless and meaningless fantasies. A world in which we leave home only to go on dreaming elsewhere, indolently astray in a tumultuous but stagnant void. And the less we work the more do our needs increase. That is a law. A man in that dream state is naturally prodigal and compliant; the slackened spirit cannot keep a firm hold on life. There is good as well as bad in this, for if the slackening is perilous, generosity of spirit is healthy and sound. But the poor man who does not work, generous and high-minded as he may be, is lost. His resources dwindle while his necessities increase.
It is a slippery slope on to which the most honourable and strong-willed man may be drawn, no less than the weakest and most vicious; and it ends in one of two things, suicide or crime. Marius was slowly descending it, his eyes fixed on a figure that he could no longer see. This may sound strange, but it is true. The memory of an absent person shines in the deepest recesses of the heart, shining the more brightly the more wholly its object has vanished: a light on the horizon of the despairing, darkened spirit; a star gleaming in our inward night. This vision wholly occupied the mind of Marius, so that he could think of nothing else. In a remote way he was conscious of the fact that his older suit was becoming unwearable and the new one growing old, that his shirts and hat and boots were all wearing out; that is to say, that his very life was wearing out, so that he said to himself: ‘If I could see her only once more before I die!’
He had but one consolation, that she had loved him, that her eyes had told him so, that although she did not know his name she knew his heart, and that perhaps, wherever she now was, in whatever undiscoverable place, she loved him still. Perhaps she even thought of him as constantly as he did of her. Sometimes, in those unaccountable moments known to every lover, when the heart feels a strange stirring of delight although there is no cause for anything but grief, he reflected: ‘It is her own thoughts that are reaching meh! … And perhaps my thoughts are reaching her!’
Fancies such as these, which an instant later he brushed aside, nevertheless sufficed to kindle a glow in him which was something near to hope. Occasionally, and particularly in those night hours which most fill the dreamer with melancholy, he would write down in a notebook which he reserved wholly for that purpose the purest, most impersonal and loftiest of the meditations which love inspired in him. In this fashion he wrote to her.
But that is not to say that his reason was impaired. The reverse was true. He had lost the will to work and to pursue any positive aims, but he was more than ever clear-thinking and right-minded. He was calmly and realistically aware, if with a singular detachment, of what was going on around him, even of events and people for whom he cared nothing; he summed things up correctly, but with a sort of honest indifference, a frank lack of interest. His judgements, being almost absolved from hope, soared on a lofty plane.
Nothing escaped or deceived him in his present frame of mind; he saw into the depths of life, mankind and destiny. Happy is he, even though he suffers, whom God has endowed with a spirit worthy of both love and misfortune. Those for whom human affairs and the hearts of men have not been informed by this double light have seen and learned nothing. The state of the soul that loves and suffers is sublime.
So the days drifted by, bringing nothing new. It seemed to Marius only that the dark distance left for him to travel was rapidly growing shorter. He believed already that he could clearly see the threshold of the bottomless abyss. ‘And shall I not see her even once more before I come to it?’ he thought.
After walking up the Rue Saint-Jacques, by-passing the barrier and going some way along the former boulevard intérieur, one comes to the Rue de la Santé, then to the Glacière and finally, a little before the stream of Les Gobelins, to something like an open field which, in all the long, monotonous girdle of the outer boulevards of Paris, is the one place where Ruysdael might have cared to set up his easel. That indefinable something which we term charm is to be found there, in that green patch of grass strung with washing-lines and worn garments, in an old market-garden farmhouse built in the time of Louis XIII, with its tall roof eccentrically pierced with attic windows, and within the sound of laughter and women’s voices. In the near distance are the Panthéon, the Tree of the Deaf Mutes, the Val-de-Grâce, black, squat, fantastical and magnificent; and somewhat lower, the staunch, square thrust of the towers of Notre-Dame. Because the place is worth seeing no one visits it; at the most a handcart or carter’s waggon may pass by every quarter of an hour.
It happened, however, that Marius, in the course of one of his solitary walks, went that way, and that on this occasion there was a great rarity on the boulevard, another pedestrian. Vaguely struck by the picturesque look of the place, Marius turned to him and asked its name. ‘It’s called Lark’s Field,’ the stranger said; and he added: ‘This is where Ulbach murdered the Ivry shepherdess.’
But after hearing the word ‘lark’ Marius had ceased to listen. In the state of dreaming there are sudden crystallizations that a word may suffice to bring about; the thoughts fix suddenly upon a single notion and nothing will dispel it. ‘The lark’ was the name which had replaced ‘Ursula’ in Marius’s doleful musings. ‘So this is her field,’ he thought with the kind of irrational amazement proper to these fancies. ‘Now I shall find out where she lives.’
It was absurd but irresistible. Every day thereafter he visited the Field of the Lark.
Javert’s triumph in the Gorbeau tenement had seemed complete but was not. In the first place, and it was his chief vexation, he had not laid hands on the victim of the plot. The prospective victim who escapes is even more suspect than the prospective murderer, and it seemed likely that this person, if he represented so rich a haul for the band of ruffians, must have been no less valuable a capture for the authorities.
Montparnasse had also escaped. They would have to wait for another chance to lay hands on that ‘devil’s playmate’. Montparnasse had in fact run into Éponine when she was keeping watch under the trees of the boulevard and had gone off with her, deciding that he was more in a mood to amuse himself with the daughter than play hired assassin for the father. It was a fortunate impulse and he was still at large. As for Éponine, Javert had picked her up later and she had gone to join her sister in the Madelonnette prison.
And finally, while the band were being conveyed from the tenement to the prison of La Force, one of its leading members, Claquesous, had got away. None of the police escort could say how it happened. He had simply vanished like a puff of smoke, handcuffed though he was, and all that could be said was that when they reached the prison he was no longer with them. It sounded like a fairy-tale – or perhaps it was something more sinister. Had he really melted like a snowflake into the shadows, or had he been assisted? Was he in fact one of those double-agents, much employed by the police in that unruly time, with one foot in the world of crime and one on the other side of the fence? Javert did not approve of these stratagems and would have nothing to do with them; but there were other police-officers in his section, his subordinates in rank but possibly more in touch with the workings of high authority, and Claquesous was so-notable a villain that he would make an excellent informer. The thing was by no means impossible. However this might be, Claquesous had vanished and was not to be found, and Javert was more enraged than surprised.
As for Marius, ‘that little nincompoop of a lawyer who had probably been scared out of his wits’, and whose name Javert had forgotten, he was of trifling importance. In any event, a lawyer was easy to lay hands on – if, that is to say, he really was a lawyer.
The investigation had begun. The examining magistrate had thought it expedient to release one of the Patron-Minette gang from close confinement, hoping that he would talk. The one in question was Brujon, the long-haired man whose conversation Marius had overheard in the Rue du Petit-Banquier. He had been quartered in one of the prison yards, the Cour Charlemagne, where the warders were keeping an eye on him.
The name of Brujon is still remembered in La Force. In the hideous courtyard of the New Building, officially the Cour Saint-Bernard but known to the criminal world as the‘ Lion’s Den ’, on one of the foul, gangrenous walls reaching to the roof of the building, close by a rusty iron door, once that of the chapel of the ducal palace of La Force, which was later converted into a prisoners’ dormitory, there was to be seen, as recently as twelve years ago, a crude drawing of a bastille, a prison-fortress, carved with a nail and bearing the name of the artist: BRUJON, 1811.
This Brujon of 1811 was the father of the Brujon of 1832.
The son, of whom we caught only a glimpse in the Gorbeau tenement, was an artful and decidedly capable young rogue whose general expression was one of innocent bewilderment. It was this look of innocence which had prompted the magistrate to release him from solitary, feeling that he might be of more value in the Cour Charlemagne than confined in a cell.
Criminals do not cease their activities because they have fallen into the hands of the law; they are not to be deterred by trifles. To be imprisoned for one crime does not prevent the planning of the next. They are like an artist with a picture hanging in the salon who nevertheless keeps busy in the studio.
Brujon seemed quite lost in prison. He was seen to stand about the courtyard for hours at a time, blankly contemplating the squalid list of canteen prices, which begins, ‘Garlic, 62 centimes’ and ends with ‘Cigar, five centimes’. Or else he stood about shivering, with chattering teeth, saying that he had a fever and asking if any of the twenty-eight beds in the fever-ward was vacant.
But towards the end of February 1832, it transpired that the witless Brujon had dispatched three missives by prison messengers, sending them out not under his own name but under those of three of his fellow-prisoners. The three missives had cost him a total of fifty sous, a lavish expenditure which attracted the notice of the prison governor.
The matter was inquired into, and by consulting the record of such services posted up in the prisoners’ common-room it was found that the sum had been divided as follows: three letters, one to the Panthéon, costing ten sous, one to the Val-de-Grâce, costing fifteen, and one to the Barrière de Grenelle, costing twenty-five sous, this last being the most expensive commission on the list. But it so happened that the Panthéon, the Val-de-Grâce, and the Barrière de Grenelle were the pitches of three of the most formidable ‘barrier-prowlers’, namely, Kruideniers alias Bizarro, Glorieux, a released convict, and Barrecarrosse, all of whom thus came under police observation, the presumption being that they were connected with Patron-Minette, two of whose leaders, Babet and Gueulemer, were now in custody. The three missives had been delivered, not to addresses but to persons waiting for them in the street, and it was believed that they had to do with a criminal enterprise in process of being planned. There were other reasons for suspecting this; the three men were accordingly arrested and it was assumed that Brujon’s operation, whatever it was, had been nipped in the bud.
But about a week later one of the night warders, going his rounds on the ground-floor of the New Building, peered through the peep-hole in the door of Brujon’s dormitory while he was slipping his time-disc into the box, known as the boîte à marrons, which was fixed to the wall outside every dormitory for that purpose, the system being designed to ensure that the warders performed their duties faithfully. He saw Brujon sitting up in bed and writing some-thing by the dim light of the wall-lamp. He went in and Brujon was sent back to solitary for a month, but they were not able to discover what he had been writing. The police outside could not help them.
What is certain is that the next day a ‘postillon’ was flung from the Cour Charlemagne into the Lions’ Den, clearing the intervening five-storey building. A postilion is convict slang for a carefully kneaded lump of bread which is flung ‘into Ireland’, that is to say, over a prison roof from one courtyard into another, the term being of English origin, meaning from one country into another. Whoever picks up the missile will find a message inside it. If it is picked up by a prisoner, he passes it on to the person it is intended for; if by a warder – or by one of those secretly bribed prisoners known as ‘sheep’ in ordinary places of detention and ‘foxes’ in hard-labour prisons – it is handed in at the office and passed on to the police. On this occasion the postillon was delivered to the right address, although the addressee was at the time in a solitary-confinement cell. He was none other than Babet, one of the four leading spirits of Patron-Minette.
The message contained in the lump of bread was as follows: ‘Babet. There’s a job in the Rue Plumet. Garden with a wrought-iron gate.’ This was what Brujon had written the previous night.
Although he was under close surveillance, Babet contrived to get the message passed from the La Force prison to that of the Salpêtrière, where a ‘lady friend’ of his was confined. The woman passed it on to an acquaintance of hers, a woman called Magnon who was being closely watched by the police but had not yet been arrested. This Magnon, of whom the reader has already heard, had a particular connection with the Thénardiers (to be described later) and by visiting Éponine could serve as a link between the Salpêtrière and Madelonnette prisons.
As it happened, the Thénardier daughters were released on the day she went to visit Éponine, the preliminary investigation into the affairs of their parents having disclosed insufficient evidence to warrant their detention. When Éponine came out, Magnon, who had been waiting at the prison gate, handed her Brujon’s note and asked her to spy out the land. Éponine, accordingly, went to the Rue Plumet, located the wrought-iron gate and garden, and after a careful study of the house and its inhabitants called upon Magnon, who was living in the Rue Clocheperce. She gave her a ‘biscuit’, to be passed on to Babet’s mistress in the Salpêtrière: the term, in the recondite jargon of the underworld, signifies ‘no good’.
A few days later, when Babet and Brujon passed one another in a corridor of La Force, the one going to interrogation and the other coming away from it, Brujon asked, ‘What about Rue P.?’ and Babet answered, ‘Biscuit.’ Thus a criminal operation conceived by Brujon in the prison of La Force was still-born.
But the miscarriage, as we shall see, had results quite outside Brujon’s intention. It happens often enough that, thinking to plan one event, we set in motion another.
Marius no longer called upon anyone, but it happened now and then that he saw Père Mabeuf. While he had been slowly descending that melancholy stairway which may be termed the steps to the underground, since it leads to that place of darkness where life can be heard passing over one’s head, Père Mabeuf, in his own fashion, had been making the same descent.
The sales of Flora of Coûterez had wholly ceased; nor had the attempt to develop a new strain of indigo been successful Monsieur Mabeuf’s small garden in Austerlitz had the wrong exposure: all he could grow in it were a few rare plants which flourished in damp and shade. Nevertheless he had persisted. He had acquired a plot of land in the Jardin des Plantes, where the conditions were more favourable, in order to continue his experiments at his own expense, having raised the money by pawning the plates of his Flora. His luncheon was restricted to two eggs, one of which went to his elderly housekeeper, whose wages he had not paid for fifteen months, and often this was his only meal in the day. He no longer laughed his childlike laugh; he had grown morose and did not receive visitors. Marius was wise in not attempting to call on him. Occasionally they passed one another on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital when the old man was on his way to the Jardin des Plantes. They did not speak, but merely exchanged gloomy nods. It is the sad fact about poverty that the moment comes when it destroys relationships. They had been friends but now were merely on nodding terms.
Royol, the bookseller, was dead. Monsieur Mabeuf now had nothing but his own books, his garden, and his indigo plants, all that remained to him of happiness, pleasure in life and hope for the future. They enabled him to go on living. He said to himself: ‘When I have grown my blue berries I shall be rich. I’ll get the plates out of pawn and make my Flora fashionable again by dressing it up with humbug, newspaper advertisements and so forth; and I’ll buy myself a copy of Pietro de Medino’s Art of Navigation, the 1559 edition, with woodcuts – I know where I can get one.’ In the meantime he worked all day on his indigo plot, returning home in the evening to water his garden and read his books. At this time Monsieur Mabeuf was very nearly eighty.
One evening he had a startling visitation.
He had returned home while it was still light. His housekeeper, Mère Plutarque, whose health was failing, was ill in bed. After dining off a bone on which a few scraps of meat remained and a piece of bread which he found on the kitchen table, Monsieur Mabeuf had gone to sit in the garden, on the old, overturned boundary-stone which served him as a garden bench. Close by this was a tumbledown wooden building of the kind commonly found in old orchard-gardens, with rabbit hutches on the ground floor and fruit-racks on its upper storey. There were no rabbits in the hutches but there were still a few apples on the racks, the last of the autumn crop.
Wearing his spectacles, Monsieur Mabeuf sat turning over the pages and re-reading passages of two books which delighted him and, which was more important at his age, greatly occupied his mind. The first of these was the famous treatise by Pierre de Lancre on The Inconstancy of Demons and the other was the discourse of Mutor de la Rubaudière on The Devils of Vauvers and the Goblins of La Bièvre. The latter was especially interesting to him because his own garden was one of those places believed in former times to be haunted by goblins. The sunset was beginning to cast a light on the upper half of things while it buried the lower half in darkness. While he read, glancing from time to time over the top of his book, Père Mabeuf was appraising his plants, among them a very fine rhododendron which was one of the consolations of his present life. They had had four dry days, wind and sun but not a drop of rain, and everywhere stems were wilting and buds drooping; everything needed to be watered, and the rhododendron was looking particularly sorry for itself. For Père Mabeuf plants were living beings. He had been working all day on his indigo plot and was tired out, but he got up nonetheless, put down his books on the bench and walked shakily to the well. He found, however, such was his state of exhaustion, that he had not the strength to pull up the bucket, and so he stood back, gazing wretchedly up at a sky that was now filling with stars.
The evening was one of those whose serenity allays the sufferings of man with a melancholy but timeless delight. The night promised to be as parched as the day had been. ‘Stars everywhere,’ the old man thought. ‘And nowhere a cloud, not even a teardrop of rain.’ His head sank on his breast, but then he looked up again. ‘A tear of sympathy!’ he prayed. ‘A drop of dew.’ Again he tried to raise the bucket but could not.
And at this moment a voice said:
‘Père Mabeuf, would you like me to water your garden?’
At the same time there came a rustling like that of an animal in the undergrowth, and from behind a shrub a tall, thin girl emerged who stood boldly confronting him, seeming less like a human being than a manifestation of the dusk.
Before Père Mabeuf, who as we know was timid by nature and easily alarmed, could say a word, this apparition, whose movements in the half-light had a sort of eerie abruptness, had drawn up the bucket and filled the watering-can. He watched while, bare-footed and clad in a ragged skirt, she bent over the flower-beds showering them with life; and the sound of water falling on the thirsty leaves was an enchantment to his ears. He felt that now the rhododendron was happy.
Having emptied the first bucketful, she drew a second and a third. She watered the whole garden. The sight of her striding along the paths, blackly silhouetted against the darkening sky with lanky arms outstretched under a tattered shawl, made him think of a large bat. When she had finished Père Mabeuf went up to her with tears in his eyes and laid a hand on her forehead.
‘God will reward you,’ he said. ‘You must be an angel since you care for flowers.’
‘I’m no angel,’ she replied. ‘I’m the devil, but it’s all the same to me.’
Without heeding her words he exclaimed:
‘How wretched it is that I’m too poor to be able to do anything for you!’
‘But there is something you can do,’ she said.
‘What is it?’
‘You can tell me where Monsieur Marius is living.’
He did not at first understand and stood with dim eyes gazing blankly at her.
‘What Monsieur Marius?’
‘The young man who used to come here.’
And now Monsieur Mabeuf had searched his memory.
‘Ah, yes. I know who you mean. Monsieur Marius … You mean the Baron Marius Pontmercy, of course. He lives … or rather, he doesn’t live there any more … I really don’t know.’ He had bent down while speaking to straighten a branch of the rhododendron. Still in this bowed position, he went on: ‘But I can tell you this. He very often goes along the boulevard to a place in the neighbourhood of the Glacière, the Lark’s Field. If you go that way you should have no difficulty in meeting him.’
When eventually Monsieur Mabeuf straightened himself he found that he was alone. The girl had disappeared. He was then genuinely a little apprehensive.
‘Really,’ he reflected, ‘if my garden hadn’t been watered I should think it was a spirit.’
Later, when he was in bed and on the verge of sleep, in that hazy moment when thought, like the fabulous bird that changes into a fish in order to cross the sea, takes on the form of dreaming in order to cross into slumber, this notion returned to him and he murmured confusedly:
‘After all, it was very like what La Rubaudière tells us about goblins. Was it a goblin, perhaps?’
On a morning a few days after Monsieur Mabeuf received this strange visitation – it was a Monday, the day on which Marius was accustomed to borrow five francs from Courfeyrac for Thénardier–Marius, having put the money in his pocket, decided to ‘go for a stroll’ before leaving it at the prison, hoping that this would make him more disposed to settle down to work on his return. It was his invariable procedure. First thing in the morning he would seat himself at the writing-table contemplating a blank sheet of paper and the text he was supposed to be translating, which at that time was an account of the celebrated controversy between two German jurists, Gans and Savigny, on the subject of hereditary rights. He would read a few lines and struggle to write one of his own, and, finding himself unable to do so, seeing a sort of haze between himself and the paper, he would get up saying, ‘I’ll go for a stroll. Then I shall be more in the mood.’ And he would go to the Field of the Lark, where the haze would be more pronounced than ever and his interest in Gans and Savigny proportionately less.
He would return home and again fail to work, being unable to bring order to his distracted thoughts. He would say to himself, ‘I won’t go out tomorrow. It stops me working.’ And the next day he would go out as usual. His dwelling-place was more the Lark’s Field than Courfeyrac’s lodging. His real address should have been: Boulevard de la Santé, seventh tree after the Rue Croulebarbe.
On this particular morning he had deserted the seventh tree and was seated on a parapet overlooking the stream, the Rivière des Gobelins. Bright sunshine pierced the fresh, gleaming leaves of the trees. He sat thinking of Her until his thoughts, turning to reproaches, rebounded upon himself, concentrating painfully on the indolence and spiritual paralysis that now possessed him, and the darkness that seemed to be thickening around him so that he could no longer see the sun.
And yet, amid the distressing incoherence of his meditations, which were not even a conscious process of thought, so far had he lost the will to action and the active sense of his despair; amid his melancholy self-absorption the stir of the outside world still reached him. He could hear, from either side of the little river, the sound of the Gobelins washerwomen pounding their linen in the stream, and above his head he could hear the birds singing and their wings fluttering in the elms – overhead the sounds of freedom, heedless happiness, winged leisure, and around him the sounds of daily work, joyous sounds which penetrated his abstraction, prompting him almost to conscious thought.
And suddenly, breaking in upon his state of tired ecstasy, a voice spoke, a voice known to him.
‘Ah! There he is!’
He looked up and recognized the unhappy girl who had called upon him one morning, the elder Thénardier daughter, Éponine, whose name he had subsequently learned. Strangely, she appeared at once more impoverished and more attractive, two things which he would not have thought her capable of. She had progressed in two directions, both upwards and downwards. She was still barefoot and ragged as she had been on the day when she had marched so resolutely into his room, except that her rags were two months older, dirtier, their tatters more evident. She had the same hoarse voice, the same chapped, weather-beaten skin, the same bold and shiftless gaze, and added to these the apprehensive, vaguely pitiable expression that a spell in prison lends to the face of ordinary poverty. She had wisps of straw in her hair, not because, like Ophelia, she had gone mad, but because she had spent the night in a stable-loft. And with it all she had grown beautiful! Such is the miracle of youth.
She was contemplating Marius with a look of pleasure on her pale face and something that was almost a smile. For some moments she seemed unable to speak.
‘So at last I’ve found you!’ she finally said. ‘Père Mabeuf was right. If you only knew how I’ve been looking for you. Did you know I’ve been in jug? Only for a fortnight and then they had to let me go because they’d got nothing against me and anyway I’m not old enough to be held responsible – two months under age. But if you knew how I’ve been searching – for six whole weeks. You aren’t living in the tenement any more?’
‘No,’ said Marius.
‘Well, I can understand that. Because of what happened. It’s not nice, that sort of thing. So you’ve moved. But why are you wearing that shabby old hat? A young man like you ought to be nicely dressed. You know, Monsieur Marius – Père Mabeuf called you Baron Marius Something-or-other, but that’s not right, is it? You can’t be a baron. Barons are old. They go and sit in the Luxembourg, on the sunny side of the château, and read the Quotidienne at a sou a copy. I once had to give a letter to a baron like that – he must have been at least a hundred. Where are you living now?’
Marius did not answer.
‘You’ve got a hole in your shirt,’ she said. ‘I’ll mend it for you.’ Her expression was changing. ‘You don’t seem very glad to see me.’
Marius still said nothing, and after a moment’s pause she exclaimed:
‘Well, I could make you look happy if I wanted to!’
‘How?’ said Marius. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You weren’t so unfriendly last time.’
‘I’m sorry. But what do you mean?’
She bit her lip and hesitated as though wrestling with some problem of her own. Finally she seemed to make up her mind.
‘Oh well, it can’t be helped. You look so miserable and I want you to be happy. But you must promise to smile. I want to hear you say, “Well done!” Poor Monsieur Marius! But you did promise, you know, that you’d give me anything I asked for.’
‘Yes, yes! But tell me!’
She looked steadily at him.
‘I’ve got the address.’
Marius had turned pale. His heart seemed to miss a beat.
‘You mean –’
‘The address you wanted me to find out. The young lady – you know …’ She spoke the words with a deep sigh.
Marius jumped down from the parapet where he had been sitting and took her by the hand.
‘You know it? You must take me there. You must tell me where it is. I’ll give you anything you ask.’
‘It’s right on the other side of town. I shall have to take you. I don’t know the number, but I know the house.’ She withdrew her hand and said in a tone of sadness that would have wrung the heart of any beholder, but of which Marius in his flurry was quite unconscious: ‘Oh, how excited you are!’
A thought had struck Marius and he frowned. He seized her by the arm.
‘You must swear one thing.’
‘Swear!’ and she burst out laughing. ‘You want me to swear!’
‘Your father. You must promise – Éponine, you must swear to me that you’ll never tell him where it is.’
She was gazing at him in astonishment.
‘Éponine! How did you know that was my name?’
‘Will you promise me?’
She seemed not to hear. ‘But it’s nice. I’m glad you’ve called me Éponine.’
He grasped her by both arms.
‘For Heaven’s sake, will you answer! Listen to what I’m saying. Swear that you won’t pass this address on to your father.’
‘My father …’ she repeated. ‘Oh, him. You needn’t worry about him, he’s in solitary. Anywya, what do I care about my father.’
‘But you still haven’t promised.’
‘Well, let me go,’ she cried, laughing, ‘instead of shaking me like that! All right, I promise. What difference does it make to me? I’ll say it. I swear I won’t tell my father the address. Will that do?’
‘Or anyone else?’
‘Or anyone else.’
‘Good,’ said Marius. ‘Now take me there.’
‘This minute?’
‘Yes, this minute.’
‘Well, come along. Heavens,’ she said, ‘how delighted you are!’ But after they had gone a little way she paused.’ You’re keeping too close to me, Monsieur Marius. Let me walk on ahead and you must follow as though you didn’t know me. It wouldn’t do for a respectable young man like you to be seen in company with a woman of my kind.
No words can convey the pathos of that word ‘woman’, spoken by that child.
She walked a few paces and then stopped again. Marius caught up with her. She spoke out of the side of her mouth, not looking at him.
‘By the way, you remember you promised me something?’
Marius felt in his pocket. All he had in the world was the five-franc piece intended for her father. He got it out and thrust it into her hand, and she opened her fingers and let the coin fall to the ground. She looked sombrely at him.
‘I don’t want your money,’ she said.