بخش 4 کتاب 14

BOOK FOURTEEN

THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR

THE FLAG—ACT ONE

STILL NOTHING HAPPENED. Ten o’clock had sounded at Saint-Merry, Enjolras and Combeferre had gone and sat, carbines in hand, near the opening in the main barricade. They were not talking; they were listening, trying to catch even the most muffled and most remote sound of marching feet.

Suddenly, in the middle of this gloomy calm, a clear, young, cheery voice, which seemed to come from the rue Saint-Denis, rose and began distinctly to sing to the tune of the old popular ditty “Au clair de la lune,” these lines ending in a sort of cry similar to the crow of a cock: My nose is in tears,

My dear friend Bugeaud,

Lend me your gendarmes

For a word or so.

In their big blue jackets,

Hens on their shakos

Here come the suburbs!1

Cock-a-doodle-do!2

They shook hands.

“It’s Gavroche,” said Enjolras.

“He’s warning us,” said Combeferre.

Running footsteps startled the deserted street, you could see a creature nimbler than a clown clambering over the omnibus, and Gavroche bounded into the barricade, all out of breath, saying: “My gun! Here they are.” An electric thrill ran through the entire barricade and the sound of hands fumbling for muskets could be heard.

“Would you like my carbine?” Enjolras asked the gamin.

“I want the big gun,” replied Gavroche.

And he grabbed Javert’s musket.

Two sentries had fallen back and returned almost at the same time as Gavroche. These were the sentinel at the end of the street and the scout at de la Petite-Truanderie; the scout at the rue des Prêcheurs lane had stayed at his post, which indicated that nothing was coming from the direction of the bridges or Les Halles.

The rue de la Chanvrerie, in which only a few cobblestones were dimly visible in the reflection of the light falling on the flag, looked to the insurgents like some grand black porch opening onto a cloud of smoke.

Everyone had taken up his battle station.

Forty-three insurgents, among them Enjolras, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and Gavroche, were kneeling inside the main barricade, their heads level with the top of the barrier, the barrels of their muskets and their carbines positioned on the cobblestones as though through gun slits, alert, silent, ready to open fire. Six others, commanded by Feuilly, were stationed at the windows of both upper floors of the Corinthe, guns aimed.

A few more moments passed; then the sound of footfalls, measured, heavy, numerous, was distinctly heard coming from the direction of Saint-Leu. This sound, at first faint, then precise, then heavy and resonant, came nearer slowly, without stopping, without interruption, with a calm and terrible persistence. It was all that could be heard. It was altogether the silence and the sound of the statue of the Commendatore3 in one, but this stony tread had such an indescribably enormous and multiple quality that it called up the notion of a crowd at the same time as the notion of a ghost. You would have thought you were hearing some frightening statue of a legion on the march. The footfalls came closer; closer still, and stopped. It felt as though you could hear a whole host of men breathing at the end of the street. They couldn’t see a thing, though, only, right at the back, in the dense blackness, they could make out a multitude of metal wires, as fine as needles and almost imperceptible, waving around like the indescribable phosphorous networks we see on our closed eyelids just as we fall into the first mists of sleep. They were bayonets and musket barrels dimly lit by the distant reflection from the torch.

There was another pause, as though both sides were waiting. All of a sudden, from the depths of the shadows, a voice, all the more sinister because nobody could be seen and so it seemed that the darkness itself was speaking, cried: “Who’s there?” At the same time, they heard the clatter of guns being levelled.

Enjolras answered in a vibrant and haughty tone: “French Revolution.”

“Fire!” said the voice.

A flash turned all the façades of the street crimson as though the door of a furnace had suddenly opened and shut.

A dreadful explosion burst over the barricade. The red flag fell. The shooting had been so heavy and so dense that it had cut the pole, that is, the very tip of the shaft of the bus. Bullets ricocheted off the cornices of the houses, bored into the barricade, and wounded several men.

The impression produced by this opening volley was chilling. The attack was rude, so rude as to give the boldest pause for thought. It was obvious that they were dealing with a whole regiment, at least.

“Comrades,” cried Courfeyrac, “let’s not waste powder. Let’s wait for them to come into the street before we retaliate.” “And before we do anything else,” said Enjolras, “let’s hoist the flag back up!” He picked up the flag which had fallen right at his feet.

They could hear outside the clang of ramrods in muskets; the troop was reloading their weapons. Enjolras went on: “Who here has the courage? Who will plant the flag back on the barricade?” Not one responded. To climb onto the barricade at the moment they were undoubtedly aiming at it once more—that meant death, pure and simple. The bravest hesitate to condemn themselves. Enjolras himself gave a shudder. He repeated: “No volunteers?” THE FLAG—ACT TWO

SINCE THEY HAD arrived at the Corinthe and had begun building the barricade, no one had paid much attention anymore to old Father Mabeuf. Monsieur Mabeuf, however, had not left the group. He had gone into the ground floor of the tavern and sat behind the bar. There he had sunk into himself, so to speak. He seemed to stop looking or thinking. Courfeyrac and others had spoken to him once or twice, warning him of the danger, advising him to withdraw, but he didn’t seem to hear them. When nobody was talking to him, his mouth moved as though he were answering someone, and as soon as someone did speak to him, his lips froze and his eyes no longer looked alive. A few hours before the barricade was assailed, he had adopted a position and he had not moved since, his two hands on his two knees and his head bent forward as though he were looking into a gorge. Nothing had been able to drag him out of this position; it did not look as though his mind was on the barricade. When everyone had gone to take their place for combat, no one was left in the downstairs room except Javert, tied to the post, an insurgent with his sabre drawn, keeping watch over Javert, and Mabeuf himself. When the attack occurred, when the explosion erupted, the physical shock reached him and sort of woke him up; he swiftly got to his feet, crossed the room, and, the second Enjolras repeated his appeal, “No volunteers?” they saw the old man appear in the doorway of the tavern.

His presence created a sort of commotion in the ranks. A cry went up: “It’s the voter! It’s the Conventionist! It’s the representative of the people!” He probably did not hear.

He walked straight up to Enjolras, the insurgents parted in front of him with a religious fear, he ripped the flag from Enjolras, who stepped back, petrified, and then, since no one dared either to stop him or help him, this old man of eighty, his head shaky, his foot firm, slowly began to climb the stairway of cobblestones built into the barricade. This was so grim and so grand that everyone around him cried: “Hats off!” Every step he climbed was torture; his white hair, his decrepit face, his high forehead, bald and wrinkled, his hollow eyes, his mouth gaping open in amazement, his old arm holding up the red banner, emerged from the shadows and grew bigger in the bloodred glare of the torch; and it felt like they were seeing the ghost of ‘93 emerging from the ground, the flag of the Terror in his hand.

When he was on top of the last step, when this trembling and terrible phantom, standing on that mound of debris before twelve hundred invisible guns, straightened up, in the face of death and as though he were stronger than it, the whole barricade took on a supernatural and colossal look in the darkness. There was one of those silences that only happen in the face of feats of wonder.

In the midst of this silence the old man waved the red flag and cried: “Long live the Revolution! Long live the Republic! Fraternity! Equality! And Death!” A low rush of whispering could be heard from the barricade, similar to the muttering of a hurrying priest whipping off a quick prayer. It was probably the police chief issuing the customary warnings at the other end of the street. Then the same booming voice that had shouted, “Who’s there?” cried: “Get down!” Monsieur Mabeuf, pallid, haggard, his eyes alight with the wild flames of madness, raised the flag over his head and repeated: “Long live the Republic!” “Fire!” said the voice.

A second volley, like a shower of grapeshot, came raining down on the barricade.

The old man buckled at the knees, then straightened up, let go of the flag and fell flat on his back on the pavement, like a board, laid out full length with his arms stretched out to the sides like a man on a cross. Streams of blood ran out from under him. His old face, pale and sad, seemed to be looking at the sky.

One of those emotions that are bigger than man and that even make you forget to defend yourself, took hold of the insurgents and they approached the dead body with terror-stricken respect.

“What men these regicides are!” said Enjolras.

Courfeyrac bent down to Enjolras’ ear: “This is for your ears only, and I don’t want to dampen your enthusiasm. But he was anything but a regicide. I knew him. His name was Father Mabeuf. I don’t know what got into him today. But he was a good old codger. Just look at his face.” “The face of an old codger and the heart of a Brutus,” answered Enjolras.

Then he raised his voice: “Citizens! This is the example the old give to the young. We were hesitating, he came along! We were backing away, he came forward! This is what those trembling with old age teach those trembling with fear! This old man is august in the eyes of his country. He had a long life and a magnificent death! Now let’s cover his corpse and let every one of us defend this old man dead the way he would defend his father alive, and let his presence in our midst make the barricade unassailable!” A murmur of mournful and impassioned assent followed these words.

Enjolras bent down, lifted the old man’s head, and fiercely kissed him on the forehead before folding his arms down; handling the dead man with loving care as though afraid to hurt him, he then took off the old man’s coat, showed everyone the bleeding holes in it, and said: “This is our flag now.” GAVROCHE WOULD HAVE DONE BETTER TO ACCEPT ENJOLRAS’ CARBINE

THEY THREW A long black shawl belonging to the widow Hucheloup over Father Mabeuf. Six men made a stretcher out of their muskets, placed the body on it and carried it, with their heads bared and with slow solemnity, to the big table in the downstairs room.

These men, completely absorbed as they were in the grave and holy thing they were doing, no longer gave a thought to the perilous situation they were in.

When the corpse passed close to the ever imperturbable Javert, Enjolras snapped at the spy: “You! Not long, now.” While this was happening, little Gavroche, who had remained at his post keeping watch, thought he saw men approaching the barricade, stealthy as wolves. Suddenly he yelled: “Look out!” Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre, Joly, Bahorel, Bossuet, all bundled out of the tavern in turmoil. Already it was almost too late. They could see a sparkling hedge of bayonets rippling above the barricade. Tall Municipal Guards were coming in, some by leaping over the omnibus, the others via the opening, driving before them the gamin who fell back but did not run away.

The moment was critical. It was that first frightening minute of a flood, when the river rises to the level of the levee and the water begins to seep through the cracks in the dike. A second more and the barricade would have been taken.

Bahorel rushed at the first Municipal Guard to come in and killed him point-blank with a shot of his carbine; the second guard killed Bahorel with a thrust of his bayonet. Another had already brought down Courfeyrac who cried: “My turn!” The biggest of them all, a kind of colossus, marched on Gavroche with his bayonet thrust forward. The kid took Javert’s enormous musket in his tiny arms, resolutely took aim at the giant, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Javert had not loaded his gun. The Municipal Guard burst out laughing and raised his bayonet over the child.

Before the bayonet touched Gavroche, the gun slipped from the soldier’s hands, a bullet had hit him in the middle of his forehead, and he fell on his back. A second bullet struck the other guard, who had assailed Courfeyrac, full in the chest and threw him onto the pavement.

Marius had just stepped into the barricade.

THE POWDER KEG

STILL HIDDEN IN the crook of the rue Mondétour, Marius had watched the first phase of the battle, irresolute and shivering. But he could not resist that mysterious and imperious rush of blood to the head we might name the call of the abyss. Before the imminence of the danger, before the death of Monsieur Mabeuf, that bleak enigma, before Bahorel killed, Courfeyrac crying, “My turn!,” this child threatened, his friends to help or to avenge, all hesitation melted away and he leaped into the fray, his two pistols in hand. With the first shot he had saved Gavroche, with the second freed Courfeyrac.

At the gunshots, at the cries of the guards who had been hit, the assailants had scaled the entrenchment, and a throng of Municipal Guards, soldiers of the line, and National Guards from the suburbs could now be seen over the top of it, more than waist-high, with guns in hand. They already covered two thirds of the barrier but they did not jump down into the enclosure, as though weighing things up, fearing some trap. They peered into the dark barricade as you would peer into a lion’s den. The glare of the torch lit up only the bayonets, the fur caps, and the upper part of angry, anxious faces.

Marius now had no weapon; he had chucked his pistols once they were discharged, but he had spotted the powder keg next to the door in the downstairs room.

As he half turned round, looking in that direction, a soldier drew a bead on him. Just as the soldier aimed at Marius, a hand planted itself over the end of the gun barrel and blocked it. It was somebody who had rushed forward—the young workman in the velvet trousers. The shot went off, the bullet passed through his hand and perhaps through the workman, too, for he fell, but the bullet did not reach Marius. In the smoke all this was glimpsed rather than seen.

Marius, who was stepping into the downstairs room, scarcely noticed. Yet he had dimly seen the gun barrel directed at him and the hand that had blocked it and he heard the shot. But at moments like these, the things you see waver and rush on and you stop for nothing. You feel yourself obscurely driven into even greater darkness and everything turns foggy.

Surprised but not frightened, the insurgents had rallied. Enjolras had cried: “Wait! Don’t shoot at random!” In the initial confusion they might indeed have wounded each other with friendly fire. Most had gone up to the window on the first floor and to the dormer windows in the attic, from where they dominated the assailants. The most determined had joined Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, and Combeferre, and had proudly backed against the houses at the end of the street, out in the open and facing the rows of soldiers and guards that crowned the barricade.

All this was achieved without any haste, with that strange and menacing gravity that precedes a mêlée. Both sides took aim, at point-blank range, so close they were within earshot and could talk without raising their voices. Just as sparks were about to fly, an officer in a gorget and with huge epaulets raised his sword and said: “Lay down your arms!” “Fire!” said Enjolras.

The two sets of explosions went off at the same time and everything disappeared in smoke. Acrid suffocating smoke in which the dying and the wounded crawled with weak and muffled groans.

When the smoke cleared, you could see the combatants on both sides, a bit thinned out but still in the same places, reloading their weapons in silence. All of a sudden a thundering voice was heard, shouting: “Clear out or I’ll blow up the barricade!” Everyone turned to where the voice had come from.

Marius had gone down into the downstairs room, had taken the powder keg that was there, then had taken advantage of the smoke and the kind of black fog that filled the entrenched enclosure to slip along the barricade to the cage full of cobblestones where the torch was propped up. To pull out the torch, put the powder keg in its place, shove the pile of cobblestones under the keg, which had suddenly caved in with a terrible show of compliance—all this had taken Marius the time it took to bend down and straighten up again; and now every one of them, National Guards, Municipal Guards, soldiers, huddled together at the far end of the barricade, looked at him flabbergasted as he stood there with his foot on the cobblestones, the torch in his hand, his proud face lit up with a deadly resolve, tipping the flame of the torch toward the fearful pile where the broken powder keg could be made out, and letting out this terrifying cry: “Clear out or I’ll blow up the barricade!” Marius atop the barricade, following in the octogenarian’s footsteps, was a vision of the young revolution after the apparition of the old.

“Blow up the barricade, then!” said a sergeant. “And yourself with it!”

Marius retorted: “And myself with it.”

And he brought the torch closer to the powder keg.

But already there was no one left on the roadblock. The assailants, leaving their dead and their wounded behind them, were racing back toward the end of the street pell-mell in chaos, and were once more swallowed up by the night. It was a stampede.

END OF JEAN PROUVAIRE’S POEM

EVERYONE SURROUNDED MARIUS. Courfeyrac threw his arms around his neck.

“There you are!”

“Marvellous!” said Combeferre.

“You got here just in time!” said Bossuet.

“Without you I was dead!” continued Courfeyrac.

“Without you, I was a goner!” added Gavroche.

Marius asked: “Where’s the chief?”

“You’re it,” said Enjolras.

Marius had had a furnace burning in his brain all day, now there was a whirlwind. This whirlwind inside him felt like it was outside him, carrying him away. He felt like he was already an immense distance away from life. His two luminous months of love and joy had suddenly ended at this terrifying precipice, Cosette lost to him, this barricade, Monsieur Mabeuf getting himself killed for the Republic, himself the leader of the insurgents—all these things seemed like some monstrous nightmare. He was forced to make a mental effort to remember that all that surrounded him was real. Marius had not lived enough yet to know that nothing is more inevitable than the impossible and that what you must always foresee is the unforeseeable. He was the spectator of his own drama, like a person at a play he doesn’t understand.

In this fog where his thoughts were scrambled, he did not recognize Javert. Tied to his post, Javert had not even moved his head during the attack on the barricade. He watched the revolt going on around him with the resignation of a martyr and the majesty of a judge. Marius did not even see him.

Meanwhile the assailants made no further move; you could hear them stamping and swarming at the end of the street, but they did not venture forward, either because they were awaiting orders or awaiting reinforcements before charging at this impregnable redoubt again. The insurgents had posted sentinels and some who were students of medicine had started bandaging the wounded.

All the tables had been thrown out of the tavern except for two tables reserved for lint and cartridges and the table where Father Mabeuf lay dead; they had been added to the barricade and been replaced in the downstairs room by the mattresses from the beds of the widow Hucheloup and her servants. The wounded were laid out on these mattresses. As for the three poor things who inhabited Corinthe, nobody knew what had become of them. They found them in the end, though, hiding in the cellar.

A poignant emotion came to darken the joy of the redeemed barricade.

They called the roll. One of the insurgents was missing. Who was it? One of the most loved, one of the most valiant. Jean Prouvaire. They looked for him among the wounded, he wasn’t there. They looked for him among the dead, he wasn’t there. He had obviously been taken prisoner.

Combeferre said to Enjolras: “They’ve got our friend; but we have their agent. Have you got your heart set on the death of that spy?” “Yes,” answered Enjolras, “but not as much as on the life of Jean Prouvaire.” This took place in the downstairs room near Javert’s post.

“Well, then,” Combeferre went on, “I’m going to tie my handkerchief to my walking stick and go out and negotiate with them by offering to swap their man for ours.” “Listen,” said Enjolras, laying his hand on Combeferre’s arm.

At the end of the street there was an ominous clatter of arms.

A manly voice was heard to cry out: “Long live France! Long live the future!” They recognized the voice of Prouvaire.

There was a sudden flash and an explosion.

Silence fell once more.

“They’ve killed him,” cried Combeferre.

Enjolras looked at Javert and said to him: “Your friends have just shot you.” THE AGONY OF DEATH AFTER THE AGONY OF LIFE

A FEATURE OF this kind of warfare is that an attack on the barricades is almost always frontal and that, generally, the assailants refrain from rotating their posts, either because they are worried about ambushes or because they are frightened of committing themselves to the winding streets. All the insurgents’ attention, therefore, was centred on the main barricade, which was obviously the point still under threat and where the battle would infallibly start up again. Marius, though, thought about the small barricade and went off there. It was deserted and guarded only by the paper lantern flickering between the cobblestones. Otherwise Mondétour lane and the side streets forking off it—the rue de la Petit-Truanderie and the rue du Cygne—were dead calm.

Just as Marius was withdrawing after his inspection, he heard someone calling his name softly in the dark: “Monsieur Marius!” He gave a start, for he recognized the voice that had called him two hours earlier through the gate in the rue Plumet. Only, this voice now seemed no more than a breath.

He looked around him and couldn’t see anything. Marius thought he’d dreamed it and that his mind was adding hallucinations to the extraordinary events that were piling up around him. He took a step away from the hidden recess where the barricade was tucked away.

“Monsieur Marius!” came the voice again.

This time there could be no doubt, he had distinctly heard it; he looked but still couldn’t see anything.

“At your feet,” said the voice.

He bent down and saw a shape in the shadows creeping toward him, crawling along the pavement. It was this that had spoken to him.

The paper lantern allowed him to make out a smock, torn trousers of coarse velvet, bare feet, and something that looked like a pool of blood. Marius glimpsed a pale face looking up at him and this face said to him: “Don’t you recognize me?” “No.”

“Éponine.”

Marius swiftly crouched down. It was indeed that poor girl. She was dressed like a man.

“How did you get here? What are you doing here?”

“I’m dying,” she told him.

There are words and incidents that wake up even those in the depths of despair. Marius cried with a start: “You’re hurt! Wait, I’ll carry you to the room. We’ll get you bandaged up. Is it serious? How should I pick you up so as not to hurt you? Where does it hurt? Over here, help! My God! Whatever did you come here for?” And he tried to pass his arm under her to lift her up.

As he lifted her up, he touched her hand.

She let out a feeble cry.

“Did I hurt you?” Marius asked.

“A bit.”

“But I only touched your hand.”

She raised her hand to Marius’s eyes and Marius saw that the hand had a black hole in the middle.

“What’s wrong with your hand?” he said.

“It’s been ripped open.”

“Ripped open!”

“Yes.”

“What by?”

“A bullet.”

“How?”

“Didn’t you see a gun that was aimed at you?”

“Yes, and a hand that blocked it.”

“That was my hand.”

Marius gave a shudder.

“What madness! You poor girl! But so much the better, if that’s all it is, it’s nothing. Let me carry you to a bed. We’ll get you fixed up, you don’t die because your hand’s been ripped open.” She murmured: “The bullet passed through my hand, but it came out my back. There’s no point taking me anywhere. I’ll tell you how you can fix me up, better than any surgeon. Sit next to me on that stone.” Marius did as he was told; she laid her head on his knees, and, without looking at him, she said: “Oh! This is so good! Isn’t this cosy! See, I’m not in pain anymore.” She remained silent for a while, then she turned her head with effort and looked at Marius.

“You know, Monsieur Marius? It bothered me that you went into that garden, it was silly of me since it was me who showed you the house, and then, in the end, I should have known that a young man like you—” She broke off and, leaping over the sombre hurdles that were no doubt in her mind, she went on with a heartbreaking smile: “You found me ugly, didn’t you?” She went on: “You see, you’re finished! Nobody’s going to get out of the barricade alive now. I’m the one who led you here, ha! You’re going to die, I should damn well hope so. And yet, when I saw they were aiming at you, I stuck my hand over the mouth of the gun barrel. Funny, isn’t it! But it’s only because I wanted to die before you did. When the bullet hit me, I crawled over here, no one saw me, no one picked me up. I was waiting for you. I said: Isn’t he coming, then? Oh, if you only knew, I was chewing my shirt, it hurt so much! Now I’m fine. Do you remember the day I came into your room and I looked at myself in your mirror, and the day I ran into you on the boulevard near those women on the day shift? How the birds sang! Not all that long ago. You gave me a hundred sous, and I said to you: I don’t want your money. Did you pick up your coin, at least? You’re not rich. I didn’t think to tell you to pick it up. The sun was shining bright, we weren’t cold for once. Do you remember, Monsieur Marius? Oh, I’m so happy! Everyone’s going to die.” She had a wild, grave, and harrowing air about her. Her torn blouse showed her bare throat. While she was talking, she rested her wounded hand on her chest where there was another hole and where a stream of blood spurted at intervals like a jet of wine from an open stopper.

Marius studied this unhappy creature with deep compassion.

“Oh!” she went on suddenly. “It’s coming back. I can’t breathe!”

She bunched her blouse and bit into it and her legs went stiff on the pavement.

At that moment the young cock’s voice of little Gavroche rang out through the barricade. The boy had climbed up on a table to load his gun and was gaily singing the song so popular at the time: At the sight of Lafayette,

The gendarme lost his head:

Run! Run! Run! he said.1

Éponine lifted herself up and listened, then she murmured: “It’s him.”

And she turned to Marius: “My brother’s here. He mustn’t see me. He’d only scold me.” “Your brother?” asked Marius, who was thinking in the bitterest and most painful recesses of his heart of the duties to the Thénardiers that his father had bequeathed to him. “Who is your brother?” “The little one.”

“The one singing?”

“Yes.”

Marius made a move.

“Oh, don’t go!” she said. “It won’t be long now.”

She was almost sitting upright, but her voice was very faint and broken by hiccups. At times a death rattle interrupted her. She brought her face as close as she could to Marius’s face and added with a strange expression: “Listen. I don’t want to play any dirty tricks on you. I have a letter in my pocket for you. I’ve had it since yesterday. I was told to put it in the post. But I kept it. I didn’t want you to get it. But you’d hold it against me, maybe, when we see each other again in a little while. We will see each other again, won’t we? Take your letter!” She seized Marius’s hand convulsively with her wounded hand, but she no longer seemed to feel pain. She stuck Marius’s hand in the pocket of her smock. Marius felt a piece of paper there.

“Take it,” she said.

Marius took the letter. She gave a sign of satisfaction and contentment.

“Now, for my pains, promise me …”

She stopped.

“What?” asked Marius.

“Promise me!”

“I promise you.”

“Promise me you’ll kiss me on the forehead when I’m dead … I will feel it.” She let her head fall on Marius’s knees and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Éponine remained motionless; then, all of a sudden, at the very moment when Marius thought she had gone to sleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes and death appeared in their gloomy depths, and she said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to come from another world: “And then, you see, Monsieur Marius, I think I was a little bit in love with you.” She tried to smile again and died.

GAVROCHE A PROFOUND CALCULATOR OF DISTANCES

MARIUS KEPT HIS promise. He placed a kiss on that pale forehead beaded with ice-cold sweat. It was not an act of infidelity to Cosette; it was a thoughtful and sweet farewell to a poor unhappy soul.

He had not taken the letter Éponine had given him without a thrill. He had immediately felt that it was an event. He was longing to read it. Thus is the heart of man made—scarcely had the poor unhappy girl closed her eyes than Marius was thinking about opening the note. He laid her gently on the ground and moved away. Something told him he could not read the letter in front of that corpse.

He ran to a candle in the downstairs room. It was a little note, folded and sealed with a woman’s elegant care. The address was in a woman’s handwriting and ran: To Monsieur, Monsieur Marius Pontmercy, care of Monsieur Courfeyrac, rue de la Verrerie, no. 16.

He broke the seal and read:

My beloved, alas! My father wants us to leave right away. We will be at the rue de l’Homme-Armé, no. 7, this evening. In a week we will be in England. Cosette. June 4.

Such was the freshness of this love affair that Marius did not even know Cosette’s writing.

What had happened can be told in a few words. Éponine had done it all. After the evening of June 3, she had dreamed up a twin plot, to undo the schemes of her father and his cohorts on the house in the rue Plumet, and to separate Marius and Cosette. She had swapped rags with the first young rogue to come along who had found it fun to dress up as a woman while Éponine disguised herself as a man. It was Éponine who, at the Champ de Mars, had given Jean Valjean that evocative warning: “Clear out!” Jean Valjean had in fact gone home and said to Cosette: “We’re leaving this evening and we’re going to the rue de l’Homme-Armé with Toussaint. Next week we will be in London.” Cosette, floored by this unexpected blow, had dashed off a couple of lines to Marius. But how could she get the letter to the post? She did not go out alone and Toussaint, surprised by such an errand, would most certainly have shown the letter to Monsieur Fauchelevent. In her anxiety, Cosette had looked through the gate and spotted Éponine in her man’s getup, now prowling endlessly about the garden. Cosette had called over this “young working lad” and given him five francs and the letter, with the instructions: “To carry this letter immediately to the address on it.” Éponine had pocketed the letter. The next day, June 5, she had gone to Courfeyrac’s to ask for Marius, not to hand him the letter but, something every jealous and loving heart will understand, “to see.” There, she had waited for Marius, or, at least Courfeyrac—yet again, to see. When Courfeyrac had told her, “We’re going to the barricades,” she had had an idea. To throw herself into that very death just as she would have thrown herself into any other, and drag Marius in, too. She had followed Courfeyrac, had made sure exactly where the barricade was being built, and had made very sure, since Marius had had no notice and since she had intercepted the letter, that he would be at his usual evening rendezvous. And so she had gone to the rue Plumet, had waited for Marius there and sent him, on his friends’ behalf, the appeal that should, she thought, send him to the barricade. She was counting on Marius’s despair when he did not find Cosette, and she was not mistaken. She had gone back, for her part, to the rue de la Chanvrerie. We have just seen what she did there. She died with the tragic joy of jealous souls who drag the one they love down into death with them, telling themselves: No one else will have him!

Marius covered Cosette’s letter with kisses. So she loved him after all! For a moment, he had the idea that he must not die now. Then he told himself: She is going away. Her father is taking her to England and my grandfather refuses to consent to the marriage. Nothing has changed fate. Dreamers like Marius feel such extreme devastation and only desperate measures result. When you are tired of living because life is unbearable, death is soon over with.

He then thought that there were two duties he had yet to perform: to inform Cosette of his death and send her one last farewell, and to save that poor boy, Éponine’s brother and Thénardier’s son, from the catastrophe that was coming.

He had a wallet on him; the same one that had contained the notebook in which he had written so many loving thoughts for Cosette. He ripped out a page from it and pencilled these few lines: Our marriage was impossible. I asked my grandfather and he refused; I have no money and neither do you. I ran to your place, but I did not find you there. You know the promise I made to you and I will keep it. I am dying. I love you. When you read this, my soul will be near you, and will smile at you.

Having nothing to seal this letter with, he merely folded the page in four and wrote this address out: To Mademoiselle Cosette Fauchelevent, care of Monsieur Fauchelevent, rue de l’Homme-Armé, no. 7.

The letter folded, he remained lost in thought for a moment, grabbed his wallet again, opened it, and wrote with the same pencil on the first page these four lines: My name is Marius Pontmercy. Carry my body to my grandfather, Monsieur Gillenormand, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, no. 6, in the Marais.

He put the wallet in his coat and then he called Gavroche. The gamin came running at the sound of Marius’s voice, with his face full of joy and devotion.

“Would you like to do something for me?”

“Anything,” said Gavroche. “God Almighty! Without you, hell, I’d have bitten the dust!” “You see this letter?”

“Yep.”

“Take it. Go out of the barricade as fast as you can”—Gavroche, anxious, started to scratch his ear—“and tomorrow morning, take it to the address on it, to Mademoiselle Cosette at Monsieur Fauchelevent’s place, rue de l’Homme-Armé, number seven.” The heroic child answered: “Ah, well, but in that time, they’ll storm the barricade and I won’t be there.” “The barricade won’t be attacked again before daybreak as far as I can tell, and it won’t be taken before tomorrow afternoon.” The new respite that the assailants were allowing the barricade had indeed been extended. It was one of those intermissions, frequent in night combat, that are always followed by a redoubling of fury.

“In that case,” said Gavroche, “suppose I go and take your letter tomorrow morning?” “It will be too late. The barricade will probably be blocked off, all the streets will be guarded, and you won’t be able to get out. Go now.” Gavroche was stuck for a reply, so he stayed there, undecided and scratching his ear sadly. All of a sudden, with one of those birdlike movements of his, he took the letter.

“All righty,” he said.

And he ran off down Mondétour lane.

Gavroche had had an idea that had decided him, but he did not tell Marius for fear that he would object to it.

The idea was this: “It’s not yet midnight, the rue de l’Homme-Armé isn’t far, I’ll take the letter there right away and I’ll be back in plenty of time.”