18 (19)
THE DISTRACTIONS OF DARK CORNERS
NO SOONER was Monsieur Leblanc seated than he turned his eyes towards the empty pallets.
“How is the poor little injured girl?” he inquired.
“Badly,” answered Jondrette with a doleful yet grateful smile, “very badly, my worthy monsieur. Her eldest sister has taken her to the Bourbe to have her arm dressed. You will see them, they will be back directly.”
“Madame Fabantou appears to me much better?” resumed Monsieur Leblanc, casting his eyes upon the grotesque accoutrement of the female Jondrette, who, standing between him and the door, as if she were already guarding the exit, was looking at him in a threatening and almost a defiant posture.
“She is dying,” said Jondrette. “But you see, monsieur! she has so much courage, that woman! She is not a woman, she is an ox.”
The woman, touched by the compliment, retorted with the smirk of a flattered monster:
“You are always too kind to me, Monsieur Jondrette.”
“Jondrette!” said M. Leblanc, “I thought that your name was Fabantou?”
“Fabantou or Jondrette!” replied the husband hastily. “Stage name as an artist!”
And, directing a shrug of the shoulders towards his wife, which M. Leblanc did not see, he continued with an emphatic and caressing tone of voice:
“Ah! how long we have always got along together, this poor dear and I! What would be left to us, if it were not for that? We are so unfortunate, my respected monsieur! We have arms, no work! We have courage, no employment! I do not know how the government arranges it, but, upon my word of honour, I am no jacobin, monsieur, I am no brawler, I wish them no harm, but if I were the ministers, upon my most sacred word, it would go differently. Now, for example, I wanted to have my girls learn the trade of making cardboard boxes. You will say: What! a trade? Yes! a trade! a simple trade! a living! What a fall, my benefactor! What a degradation, when one has been what we were! Alas! we have nothing left from our days of prosperity! Nothing but one single thing, a painting, to which I cling, but yet which I shall have to part with, for we must live! item, we must live!”
While Jondrette was talking, with an apparent disorder which detracted nothing from the crafty and cunning expression of his physiognomy, Marius raised his eyes, and perceived at the back of the room somebody whom he had not before seen. A man had come in so noiselessly that nobody had heard the door turn on its hinges. This man had a knit woollen waistcoat of violet colour, old, worn-out, stained, cut, and showing gaps at all its folds, full trousers of cotton velvet, socks on his feet, no shirt, his neck bare, his arms bare and tattooed, and his face stained black. He sat down in silence and with folded arms on the nearest bed, and as he kept behind the woman, he was only dimly visible.
That kind of magnetic instinct which warns the eye made M. Leblanc turn almost at the same time with Marius. He could not help a movement of surprise, which did not escape Jondrette:
“Ah! I see!” exclaimed Jondrette, buttoning up his coat with a complacent air, “you are looking at your overcoat. It’s a fit! my faith, it’s a fit!”
“Who is that man?” said M. Leblanc.
“That man?” said Jondrette, “that is a neighbour. Pay no attention to him.”
The neighbour had a singular appearance. However, factories of chemical products abound in Faubourg Saint Marceau. Many machinists might have their faces blacked. The whole person of M. Leblanc, moreover, breathed a candid and intrepid confidence. He resumed:
“Pardon me; what were you saying to me, Monsieur Fabantou?”
“I was telling you, monsieur and dear patron,” replied Jondrette, leaning his elbows on the table, and gazing at M. Leblanc with fixed and tender eyes, similar to the eyes of a boa constrictor, “I was telling you that I had a picture to sell.”
A slight noise was made at the door. A second man entered, and sat down on the bed behind the female Jondrette. He had his arms bare, like the first, and a mask of ink or of soot.
Although this man had, literally, slipped into the room, he could not prevent M. Leblanc from perceiving him.
“Do not mind them,” said Jondrette. “They are people of the house. I was telling you, then, that I have a valuable painting left. Here, monsieur, look.”
He got up, went to the wall, at the foot of which stood the panel of which we have spoken, and turned it round, still leaving it resting against the wall. It was something, in fact, that resembled a picture, and which the candle scarcely revealed. Marius could make nothing out of it, Jondrette being between him and the picture; he merely caught a glimpse of a coarse daub, with a sort of principal personage, coloured in the crude and glaring style of strolling panoramas and paintings upon screens.
“What is that?” asked M. Leblanc.
Jondrette exclaimed:
“A painting by a master; a picture of great price, my benefactor! I cling to it as to my two daughters, it calls up memories to me! but I have told you, and I cannot unsay it, I am so unfortunate that I would part with it.”
Whether by chance, or whether there was some beginning of distrust, while examining the picture, M. Leblanc glanced towards the back of the room. There were now four men there, three seated on the bed, one standing near the door-casing; all four bare-armed, motionless, and with blackened faces. One of those who were on the bed was leaning against the wall, with his eyes closed, and one would have said he was asleep. This one was old; his white hair over his black face was horrible. The two others appeared young; one was bearded, the other had long hair. None of them had shoes on; those who did not have socks were barefooted.
Jondrette noticed that M. Leblanc’s eye was fixed upon these men.
“They are friends. They live near by,” said he. “They are dark because they work in charcoal. They are chimney doctors.dx Do not occupy your mind with them, my benefactor, but buy my picture. Take pity on my misery. I shall not sell it to you at a high price. How much do you estimate it worth?”
“But,” said M. Leblanc, looking Jondrette full in the face and like a man who puts himself on his guard, “this is some tavern sign, it is worth about three francs.”
Jondrette answered calmly:
“Have you your wallet here? I will be satisfied with a thousand crowns.”
M. Leblanc rose to his feet, placed his back to the wall, and ran his eye rapidly over the room. He had Jondrette at his left on the side towards the window, and his wife and the four men at his right on the side towards the door. The four men did not stir, and had not even the appearance of seeing him; Jondrette had begun again to talk in a plaintive key, with his eyes so wild and his tones so mournful that M. Leblanc might have thought that he had before his eyes nothing more nor less than a man gone crazy from misery.
“If you do not buy my picture, dear benefactor,” said Jondrette, “I am without resources, I have only to throw myself into the river. When I think that I wanted to have my two girls learn to work on cardboard demi-fine, cardboard work for gift-boxes. Well! they must have a table with a board at the bottom so that the glasses shall not fall on the ground, they must have a furnace made on purpose, a pot with three compartments for the different degrees of strength which the paste must have according to whether it is used for wood, for paper, or for cloth, a knife to cut the paste-board, a gauge to adjust it, a hammer for the stamps, pincers, the devil, how do I know what else? and all this to earn four sous a day! and work fourteen hours! and every box passes through the girl’s hands thirteen times! and wetting the paper! and to stain nothing! and to keep the paste warm! the devil! I tell you! four sous a day! how do you think one can live?”
While speaking Jondrette did not look at M. Leblanc, who was watching him. M. Leblanc’s eye was fixed upon Jondrette, and Jondrette’s eye upon the door, Marius’ breathless attention went from one to the other. M. Leblanc appeared to ask himself, “Is this an idiot?” Jondrette repeated two or three times with all sorts of varied inflections in the drawling and begging style: “I can only throw myself into the river! I went down three steps for that the other day by the side of the bridge of Austerlitz!”
Suddenly his dull eye lighted up with a hideous glare, this little man straightened up and became horrifying, he took a step towards M. Leblanc and cried to him in a voice of thunder:
“But all this is not the question! do you know me?”