Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (89 page)

It happened just at that very moment, the proofs in the prosecution of Thénardier failing in regard to his daughters, that Eponine and Azelma were released.

When Eponine came out, Magnon, who was watching for her at the door of Les Madelonnettes, handed her Brujon’s note to Babet, charging her to scout out the affair.

Eponine went to the Rue Plumet, reconnoitred the grating and the garden, looked at the house, spied, watched, and, a few days after, carried to Magnon, who lived in the Rue Clocheperce, a biscuit, which Magnon transmitted to Babet’s mistress at La Salpêtrière. A biscuit, in the dark symbolism of the prisons, signifies:
nothing to do.

So that in less than a week after that, Babet and Brujon, meeting on the way from La Force, as one was going “to examination,” and the other was returning from it: “Well,” asked Brujon, “the Rue P.?” “Biscuit,” answered Babet.

This was the end of that foetus of crime, engendered by Brujon in La Force.

This abortion, however, led to results entirely foreign to Brujon’s programme. We shall see them.

Often, when thinking to knot one thread, we tie another.

 

One day, a few days after this visit of a “spirit” to Father Mabeuf, one morning—it was Monday, the day on which Marius borrowed the hundred-sous coin of Courfeyrac for Thénardier—Marius had put this hundred-sous coin into his pocket and before carrying it to the prison once, he had gone “to take a little walk,” hoping that it would enable him to work on his return. It was eternally so. As soon as he rose in the morning, he sat down before a book and a sheet of paper to work upon some translation; the work he had on hand at that time was the translation into French of a celebrated quarrel between two Germans, the controversy between Gans and Savigny; he took Savigny, he took Gans, read four lines, tried to write one of them, could not, saw a star between his paper and his eyes, and rose from his chair, saying: “I will go out. That will put me in trim.”

And he would go to the Field of the Lark.

There he saw the star more than ever, and Savigny and Gans less than ever.

He returned, tried to resume his work, and did not succeed; he found no means of tying a single one of the broken threads in his brain; then he would say: “I will not go out to-morrow. It prevents my working.” Yet he went out every day.

He lived in the Field of the Lark rather than in Courfeyrac’s room. This was his real address: Boulevard de la Santé, seventh tree from the Rue Croulebarbe.

That morning, he had left this seventh tree, and sat down on the bank of the brook of the Gobelins. The bright sun was gleaming through the new and glossy leaves.

He was thinking of “Her!” And his dreaminess, becoming reproachful, fell back upon himself; he thought sorrowfully of the idleness, the paralysis of the soul, which was growing up within him, and of that night which was thickening before him hour by hour so rapidly that he had already ceased to see the sun.

Meanwhile, through this painful evolution of indistinct ideas which were not even a soliloquy, so much had action become enfeebled within him, and he no longer had even strength to develop his grief—through this melancholy distraction, the sensations of the world without reached him. He heard behind and below him, on both banks of the stream, the washerwomen of the Gobelins beating their linen; and over his head, the birds chattering and singing in the elms. On the one hand the sound of liberty, of happy unconcern, of winged leisure; on the other, the sound of labour. A thing which made him muse profoundly, and almost reflect, these two joyous sounds.

All at once, in the midst of his ecstasy of exhaustion, he heard a voice which was known to him, say:

“Ah! there he is!”

He raised his eyes and recognised the unfortunate child who had come to his room one morning, the elder of the Thénardier girls, Eponine; he now knew her name. Singular fact, she had become more wretched and more beautiful, two steps which seemed impossible. She had accomplished a double progress towards the light, and towards distress. She was bare footed and in rags, as on the day when she had so resolutely entered his room, only her rags were two months older; the holes were larger, the tatters dirtier. It was the same rough voice, the same forehead tanned and wrinkled by exposure; the same free, wild, and wandering gaze. She had, in addition to her former expression, that mixture of fear and sorrow which the experience of a prison adds to misery.

She had spears of straw and grass in her hair, not like Ophelia from having gone mad through the contagion of Hamlet’s madness but because she had slept in some stable loft.

And with all this, she was beautiful. What a star thou art, O youth!

Meantime, she had stopped before Marius, with an expression of pleasure upon her livid face, and something which resembled a smile.

She stood for a few seconds, as if she could not speak.

“I have found you, then?” said she at last. “Father Mabeuf was right; it was on this boulevard. How I have looked for you! if you only knew! Do you know? I have been in the jug. A fortnight! They have let me out! seeing that there was nothing against me and then I was not of the age of discernment. It lacked two months. Oh! how I have looked for you! it is six weeks now. You don’t live down there any longer?”

“No,” said Marius.

“Oh! I understand. On account of the affair. Such scares are disagreeable. You have moved. What! why do you wear such an old hat as that? a young man like you ought to have fine clothes. Do you know, Monsieur Marius? Father Mabeuf calls you Baron Marius, I forget what more. It’s not true that you are a baron? barons are old fellows, they go to the Luxembourg Gardens in front of the château where there is the most sun, they read the
Quotidienne
for a sou. I went once for a letter to a baron’s like that. He was more than a hundred years old. But tell me, where do you live now?”

Marius did not answer.

“Ah!” she continued, “you have a hole in your shirt. I must mend it for you.”

She resumed with an expression which gradually grew darker:

“You don’t seem to be glad to see me?”

Marius said nothing; she herself was silent for a moment, then exclaimed:

“But if I would, I could easily make you glad!”

“How?” inquired Marius. “What does that mean?”

“Ah! you used to speak more kindly to me!” replied she.

“Well, what is it that you mean?”

She bit her lip; she seemed to hesitate, as if passing through a kind of interior struggle. At last, she appeared to decide upon her course.

“So much the worse, it makes no difference. You look sad, I want you to be glad. But promise me that you will laugh, I want to see you laugh and hear you say: Ah, well! that is good. Poor Monsieur Marius! you know, you promised me that you would give me whatever I should ask—”

“Yes! but tell me!”

She looked into Marius’ eyes and said:

“I have the address.”

Marius turned pale. All his blood flowed back to his heart.

“What address?”

“The address you asked me for.”

She added as if she were making an effort:

“The address—you know well enough!”

“Yes!” stammered Marius.

“Of the young lady!”

Having pronounced this word, she sighed deeply.

Marius sprang up from the bank on which he was sitting, and took her wildly by the hand.

“Oh! come! show me the way, tell me! ask me for whatever you will! Where is it?”

“Come with me,” she answered. “I am not sure of the street and the number; it is away on the other side from here, but I know the house very well. I will show you.”

She withdrew her hand and added in a tone which would have pierced the heart of an observer, but which did not even touch the intoxicated and transported Marius:

“Oh! how glad you are!”

A cloud passed over Marius’ brow. He seized Eponine by the arm:

“Swear to me one thing!”

“Swear?” said she, “what does that mean? Ah! you want me to swear?”

And she laughed.

“Your father! promise me, Eponine! swear to me that you will not give this address to your father!”

She turned towards him with an astounded appearance.

“Eponine! How do you know that my name is Eponine?”

“Promise what I ask you!”

But she did not seem to understand.

“That is nice! you called me Eponine!”

Marius caught her by both arms at once. “But answer me now, in heaven’s name! pay attention to what I am saying, swear to me that you will not give the address you know to your father!”

“My father?” said she. “Oh! yes, my father! Do not be concerned on his account. He is in solitary. Besides, do I busy myself about my father!”

“But you don’t promise me!” exclaimed Marius.

“Let me go then!” said she, bursting into a laugh, “how you shake me! Yes! yes! I promise you that! I swear to you that! What is it to me? I won’t give the address to my father. There! will that do? is that it?”

“Nor to anybody?” said Marius.

“Nor to anybody.”

“Now,” added Marius, “show me the way.”

“Right away?”

“Right away.”

“Come. Oh! how glad he is!” said she.

After a few steps, she stopped.

“You follow too near me, Monsieur Marius. Let me go forward, and follow me like that, without seeming to. It won’t do for a fine young man, like you, to be seen with a woman like me.”

No tongue could tell all that there was in that word, woman, thus uttered by this child.

She went on a few steps, and stopped again; Marius rejoined her. She spoke to him aside and without turning:

“By the way, you know you have promised me something?”

Marius fumbled in his pocket. He had nothing in the world but the five francs intended for Thénardier. He took it, and put it into Eponine’s hand.

She opened her fingers and let the coin fall on the ground, and, looking at him with a gloomy look:

“I don’t want your money,” said she.

TOWARDS THE MIDDLE of the last century, a velvet-capped president of the Parlement of Paris having a mistress and concealing it, for in those days the great lords exhibited their mistress and the bourgeois concealed theirs, had
“une petite maison”
built in the Faubourg Saint Germain, in the deserted Rue de Blomet, now called the Rue Plumet, not far from the spot which then went by the name of the
Combat des Animaux.

This was a summer-house of but two stories; two rooms on the ground floor, two rooms in the second story, a kitchen below, a boudoir above, a garret next the roof, the whole fronted by a garden with a large iron grated gate opening on the street. This garden contained about an acre. This was all that the passers-by could see; but in the rear of the house there was a small yard, at the further end of which there was a low building, two rooms only and a cellar, a convenience intended to conceal a child and nurse in case of need. This building communicated, from the rear, by a masked door opening secretly, with a long narrow passage, paved, winding, open to the sky, bordered by two high walls, and which, concealed with wonderful art, and as it were lost between the inclosures of the gardens and fields, all the corners and turnings of which it followed, came to an end at another door, also concealed, which opened a third of a mile away, almost in another neighbourhood, upon the unbuilt end of the Rue de Babylone.

The president came in this way, so that those even who might have watched and followed him, and those who might have observed that the president went somewhere mysteriously every day, could not have suspected that going to the Rue de Babylone was going to the Rue Blomet. By skilful purchases of land, the ingenious magistrate was enabled to have this secret route to his house made upon his own ground, and consequently without supervision. He had afterwards sold off the lots of ground bordering on the passage in little parcels for flower and vegetable gardens, and the proprietors of these lots of ground supposed on both sides that what they saw was a partition wall, and did not even suspect the existence of that long ribbon of pavement winding between two walls among their beds and fruit trees. The birds alone saw this curiosity. It is probable that the larks and the sparrows of the last century had a good deal of chattering about the president.

The house, built of stone in the Mansard style, wainscoted, and furnished in the Watteau style, rococo within, old-fashioned without, walled about with a triple hedge of flowers, had a discreet, coquettish, and solemn appearance about it, suitable to a caprice of love and of magistracy.

This house and this passage, which have since disappeared, were still in existence fifteen years ago. In ‘93, a coppersmith bought the house to pull it down, but not being able to pay the price for it, the nation sent him into bankruptcy. So that it was the house that pulled down the coppersmith. Thereafter the house remained empty, and fell slowly into ruin, like all dwellings to which the presence of man no longer communicates life. It remained, furnished with its old furniture, and always for sale or to let, and the ten or twelve persons who passed through the Rue Plumet in the course of a year were notified of this by a yellow and illegible piece of paper which had hung upon the railing of the garden since 1810.

Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers-by might have noticed that the paper had disappeared, and that, also, the shutters of the upper story were open. The house was indeed occupied. The windows had “little curtains,” a sign that there was a woman there.