3 (4)
A ROSE IN DIRE POVERTY
A GIRL who was quite young, was standing in the half-opened door. The little round window through which the light found its way into the garret was exactly opposite the door, and lit up this form with a pallid light. It was a pale, puny, meagre creature, nothing but a chemise and a skirt covered a shivering and chilly nakedness. A string for a belt, a string for a head-dress, sharp shoulders protruding from the chemise, a blond and lymphatic pallor, dirty shoulder-blades, red hands, the mouth open and sunken, some teeth gone, the eyes dull, bold, and drooping, the form of an unripe young girl and the look of a corrupted old woman; fifty years joined with fifteen; one of those beings who are both feeble and horrible at once, and who make those shudder whom they do not make weep.
doMarius arose and gazed with a kind of astonishment upon this being, so much like the shadowy forms which pass across our dreams.
The most poignant thing about it was that this young girl had not come into the world to be ugly. In her early childhood, she must have even been pretty. The grace of her youth was still struggling against the hideous, premature old age brought on by debauchery and poverty. A remnant of beauty was dying out upon this face of sixteen, like the pale sun which is extinguished by frightful clouds at the dawn of a winter’s day.
The face was not absolutely unknown to Marius. He thought he remembered having seen it somewhere.
“What do you wish, mademoiselle?” asked he.
The young girl answered with her voice like a drunken galley-slave’s:
“Here is a letter for you, Monsieur Marius.”
She called Marius by his name; he could not doubt that her business was with him; but what was this girl? how did she know his name?
Without waiting for an invitation, she entered. She entered resolutely, looking at the whole room and the unmade bed with a sort of assurance which chilled the hearth
dp She was barefooted. Great holes in her skirt revealed her long limbs and her sharp knees. She was shivering.
She indeed had in her hand a letter which she presented to Marius.
Marius, in opening this letter, noticed that the enormously large seal was still wet. The message could not have come far. He read:
“My amiable neighbour, young man!
“I have lerned your kindness towards me, that you have paid my rent six months ago. I bless you, young man. My eldest daughter will tell you that we have been without a morsel of bread for two days, four persons, and my spouse sick. If I am not desseived by my thoughts, I think I may hope that your generous heart will soften at this account and that the desire will subjugate you of being propitious to me by deigning to lavish upon me some slight gift.
“I am with the distinguished consideration which is due to the benefactors of humanity,
“JONDRETTE
“P.S. My daughter will await your orders, dear Monsieur Marius.”
This letter, in the midst of the obscure accident which had occupied Marius’ thoughts since the previous evening, was a candle in a cave. Everything was suddenly cleared up.
This letter came from the same source as the other four. It was the same writing, the same style, the same orthography, the same paper, the same odour of tobacco.
There were five missives, five stories, five names, five signatures and a single signer. The Spanish Captain Don Alvarès, the unfortunate mother Balizard, the dramatic poet Genflot, the old comedy writer Fabantou, were all four named Jondrette, if indeed the name of Jondrette himself was Jondrette.
During the now rather long time that Marius had lived in the tenement, he had had, as we have said, but very few opportunities to see, or even catch a glimpse of his very few neighbours. His mind was elsewhere, and where the mind is, thither the eyes are directed. He must have met the Jondrettes in the passage and on the stairs, more than once, but to him they were only shadows; he had taken so little notice that on the previous evening he had brushed against the Jondrette girls upon the boulevard without recognising them; for it was evidently they; and it was with great difficulty that this girl, who had just come into his room, had awakened in him beneath his disgust and pity, a vague remembrance of having met with her elsewhere.
Now he saw everything clearly. He understood that the occupation of his neighbour Jondrette in his distress was to work upon the sympathies of benevolent persons; that he procured their addresses, and that he wrote under assumed names letters to people whom he deemed rich and compassionate, which his daughters carried, at their risk and peril; for this father was one who risked his daughters; he was playing a game with destiny, and he added them to the stake. Marius understood, to judge by their flight in the evening, by their breathlessness, by their terror, by those words of argot which he had heard, that probably these unfortunate things were carrying on also some of the secret trades of darkness, and that from all this the result was, in the midst of human society constituted as it is, two miserable beings who were neither children, nor girls, nor women, a species of impure yet innocent monsters produced by misery.
Sad creatures without name, without age, without sex, to whom neither good nor evil were any longer possible, and for whom, on leaving childhood, there is nothing more in this world, neither liberty, nor virtue, nor responsibility. Souls blooming yesterday, faded to-day, like those flowers which fall in the street and are bespattered by the mud before a wheel crushes them.
Meantime, while Marius fixed upon her an astonished and sorrowful look, the young girl was walking to and fro in the room with the boldness of a spectre. She bustled about regardless of her nakedness. At times, her chemise, unfastened and torn, fell almost to her waist. She moved the chairs, she disarranged the toilet articles on the bureau, she felt of Marius’ clothes, she searched over what there was in the corners.
“Ah,” said she, “you have a mirror!”
And she hummed, as if she had been alone, snatches of songs, light refrains which were made dismal by her harsh and guttural voice. Beneath this boldness could be perceived an indescribable constraint, restlessness, and humility. Effrontery is a form of shame.
Nothing was more sorrowful than to see her amusing herself, and, so to speak, fluttering about the room with the movements of a bird which is startled by the light, or which has a wing broken. One felt that under other conditions of up-bringing and of destiny, the gay and free manner of this young girl might have been something sweet and charming. Never among animals does the creature which is born to be a dove change into an osprey. That is seen only among men.
Marius was reflecting, and let her go on.
She went to the table.
“Ah!” said she, “books!”
A light flashed through her glassy eye. She resumed, and her tone expressed that happiness of being able to boast of something, to which no human creature is insensitive:
“I can read, I can.”
She hastily caught up the book which lay open on the table, and read fluently:
“—General Bauduin received the order to take five battalions of his brigade and carry the château of Hougomont, which is in the middle of the plain of Waterloo—”
She stopped:
“Ah, Waterloo! I know that. It is a battle in old times. My father was there; my father served in the armies. We are jolly good Bonapartists at home, that we are. Against the English, Waterloo was.”
She put down the book, took up a pen, and exclaimed:
“And I can write, too!”
She dipped the pen in the ink, and turning towards Marius:
“Would you like to see? Here, I am going to write a bit to show you.”
And before he had had time to answer, she wrote upon a sheet of blank paper which was on the middle of the table: “The cops are here.”
Then, throwing down the pen:
“There are no mistakes in spelling. You can look. We have received an education, my sister and I. We have not always been what we are. We were not made—”
Here she stopped, fixed her faded eye upon Marius, and burst out laughing, saying in a tone which contained complete anguish stifled by complete cynicism:
“Bah!”
And she began to hum these words, to a lively air:
J‘ai faim, mon père. Pas de fricot. J’ai froid, ma mere. Pas de tricot. Grelotte, Lolotte! Sanglote, Jacquot. dq Hardly had she finished this stanza when she exclaimed:
“Do you ever go to the theatre, Monsieur Marius? I do. I have a little brother who is a friend of some artists, and who gives me tickets sometimes. Now, I do not like the seats in the galleries. You are crowded, you are uncomfortable. There are sometimes coarse people there; there are also people who smell bad.”
Then she looked at Marius, put on a strange manner, and said to him:
“Do you know, Monsieur Marius, that you are a very pretty boy?”
And at the same time the same thought occurred to both of them, which made her smile and made him blush.
She went to him, and laid her hand on his shoulder: “You pay no attention to me, but I know you, Monsieur Marius. I meet you here on the stairs, and then I see you visiting a man named Father Mabeuf, who lives out by Austerlitz, sometimes, when I am walking that way. That becomes you very well, your tangled hair.”
Her voice tried to be very soft, but succeeded only in being very low. Some of her words were lost in their passage from the larynx to the lips, as upon a key-board in which some notes are missing.
Marius had drawn back quietly.
“Mademoiselle,” said he, with his cold gravity, “I have here a packet, which is yours, I think. Permit me to return it to you.”
And he handed her the envelope, which contained the four letters.
She clapped her hands and exclaimed:
“We have looked everywhere!”
Then she snatched the packet, and opened the envelope, saying:
“Lordy, Lordy, haven’t we looked, my sister and I? And you have found it! on the boulevard, didn’t you? It must have been on the boulevard? You see, this dropped when we ran. It was my brat of a sister who made the stupid blunder. When we got home we could not find it. As we did not want to be beaten, since that is pointless, since that is entirely pointless, since that is absolutely pointless, we said at home that we had carried the letters to the persons, and that they told us: Nix! Now here they are, these poor letters. And how did you know they were mine? Ah, yes! by the writing! It was you, then, that we knocked against last evening. We did not see you, really! I said to my sister: Is that a gentleman. My sister said:—I think it is a gentleman!”
Meanwhile she had unfolded the petition addressed “to the beneficent gentleman of the church Saint Jacques du Haut Pas.”
“Here!” said she, “this is for the old fellow who goes to mass. And this too is the hour. I am going to carry it to him. He will give us something perhaps for breakfast.”
Then she began to laugh, and added:
“Do you know what it will be if we have breakfast to-day? It will be that we shall have had our breakfast for day before yesterday, our dinner for day before yesterday, our breakfast for yesterday, our dinner for yesterday, all that at one time this morning. Yes! zounds! if you’re not satisfied, die, dogs!”
This reminded Marius of what the poor girl had come to his room for.
He felt in his waistcoat, he found nothing there.
The young girl continued, seeming to talk as if she were no longer conscious that Marius was there present.
“Sometimes I go away at night. Sometimes I do not come back. Before coming to this place, last winter, we lived under the arches of the bridges. We hugged close to each other so as not to freeze. My little sister cried. How chilly the water is! When I thought of drowning myself, I said: No; it is too cold. I go all alone when I want to, I sleep in the ditches sometimes. Do you know, at night, when I walk on the boulevards, I see the trees like gibbets, I see all the black houses as large as the towers of Notre Dame, I imagine that the white walls are the river, I say to myself: Here, there is water there! The stars are like spotlights, one would say that they are smoking, and that the wind is blowing them out, I am confused, as if I had horses panting in my ear; though it is night, I hear hand-organs and spinning wheels, I don’t know what. I think that somebody is throwing stones at me, I run without knowing it, it is all a whirl, all a whirl. When one has not eaten, it is very queer.”
5And she looked at him with a wandering eye.
After a thorough exploration of his pockets, Marius had at last got together five francs and sixteen sous. This was at the time all that he had in the world. “That is enough for my dinner to-day,” thought he, “to-morrow we will see.” He took the sixteen sous, and gave the five francs to the young girl.
She took the coin eagerly.
“Good,” said she, “there is some sunshine!”
And as if the sun had had the effect to loosen an avalanche of argot in her brain, she continued:
“Five francs! a shiner! a monarch! in this piolle! it is chendtre! You are a good mion. I give you my palpitant. Bravo for the fanandels! Two days of pivois! and of viandemuche! and of frictomar! we shall pitancer chenument! and bonne mouise!”
She drew her chemise up over her shoulders, made a low bow to Marius, then a familiar wave of the hand, and moved towards the door, saying:
“Good morning, monsieur. It is all the same. I am going to find my old man.”
On her way she saw on the bureau a dry crust of bread mouldering there in the dust; she sprang upon it, and bit it, muttering:
“That is good! it is hard! it breaks my teeth!”
Then she went out.