بخش 4 کتاب 2

BOOK TWO

ÉPONINE

THE LARK’S FIELD

MARIUS HAD WITNESSED the unexpected denouement of the ambush he had put Javert onto, but Javert had barely left the tumbledown building, hauling his prisoners away in three fiacres, when Marius, too, slipped out of the house. It was still only nine o’clock at night. Marius went to Courfeyrac’s place. Courfeyrac was no longer the imperturbable local of the quartier Latin; he had gone to live in the rue de la Verrerie “for political reasons.” This quartier was one of those that insurrection was only too happy to move to in those days. Marius told Courfeyrac: “I’ve come to sleep at your place.” Courfeyrac pulled a mattress off his bed, which had two of them, laid it on the floor, and said: “There you go.” By seven o’clock the next day, Marius was back at the slum. He paid his rent and whatever else he owed Ma Bougon, loaded his books, his bed, his table, his chest of drawers, and his two chairs onto a wheelbarrow and trundled off without leaving his address, so that when Javert came back later that morning to question Marius about the events of the previous night, he found only Ma Bougon, who barked: “Gone!” Ma Bougon was convinced that Marius was somehow in cahoots with the robbers seized in the night. “Who’d have thought it?” she cried, as she made the rounds of the neighbourhood porters. “A young wisp of a thing like that, you’d have taken him for a girl!” Marius had two reasons for clearing out so swiftly. The first was that he now had a horror of this house where he had seen, so very close and in all its most repulsive and its most ferocious variations, a social deformity perhaps even more awful than the evil rich: the evil poor. The second was that he did not want to feature in whatever trial would probably ensue and so be called on to testify against Thénardier.

Javert thought the young man, whose name he had not retained, had been frightened off or, perhaps, had not made it home when the ambush was taking place; he did make some attempts to find him, though, but he did not succeed.

A month went by, then another. Marius was still at Courfeyrac’s. He had learned from a law student who regularly paced the salle des pas perdus1 at the Palais de Justice that Thénardier was in solitary confinement. Every Monday, Marius had the clerk of La Force prison send five francs to Thénardier.

Having no money left, Marius borrowed the five francs from Courfeyrac. It was the first time in his life that he had borrowed money. Those regular five francs were a double enigma—for Courfeyrac, who gave them, and for Thénardier, who received them. “Who can it be going to?” Courfeyrac wondered. “Where can it be coming from?” Thénardier asked himself.

Marius was otherwise devastated. Everything had gone down the drain again. He could no longer see what was in front of him; his life had plunged back into this mystery in which he staggered along clutching at support. For a moment he had seen, once more, up close in the darkness, the young girl he loved and the old man who seemed to be her father, these unknown beings who were his only interest and his only hope in this world; and at the point where he thought he had them in his grasp, a blast of air had swept all these shadows away. Not one spark of certainty or truth had shot out even from the most horrifying shock. No conjecture was possible. He no longer even knew the name he had thought he knew. One thing for sure, it was not Ursula. And the Lark was a nickname. And what to make of the old man? Was he, in fact, hiding from the police? The worker with the white hair whom Marius had come across near the Invalides came back to him. He guessed now that this worker and Monsieur Leblanc were probably the same man. So he wore a disguise? This man had a heroic side and a shady side. Why didn’t he call out for help? Why did he run away? Was he the young girl’s father—yes or no? Was he, lastly, really the man Thénardier thought he recognized? Could Thénardier have been mistaken? So many unresolvable problems. All this, it is true, did not detract in any way from the angelic charm of the young girl from the Luxembourg. Poignant distress; Marius had passion in his heart and darkness over his eyes. He was driven, he was drawn, and yet he couldn’t move. Everything had gone up in smoke, except love. But even there, he had lost love’s instincts and sudden illuminations. Normally this flame that burns us also enlightens us a little, shedding a little helpful light around us. Marius could not even pick up the mute promptings of passion anymore. Never did he say to himself: “What if I went there? What if I tried that?” The girl he could no longer call Ursula was obviously somewhere, but nothing alerted Marius as to where he should look for her. His whole life now came down to two words: absolute uncertainty, in an impenetrable fog. He still yearned to see her again, but he no longer hoped to.

To cap it off, destitution returned. He felt its icy breath brush right up against him, at his back. For a long time already, with all his torment, he had stopped working, and nothing is more dangerous than stopping work; it means the habit goes. A habit that is easy to let go of, hard to get back.

A certain amount of daydreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It sedates the sometimes high fevers of the overwrought brain at work and produces a soft fresh vapour in the mind that smooths out the oversharp points of pure thought, fills up the gaps and holes here and there, binds things together and blunts the jagged corners of ideas. But too much daydreaming drags you under and drowns you. Woe to the person who works with their brain who lets themselves sink completely from thinking to daydreaming! That person thinks they’ll climb out again easily, and tells themself that it’s the same thing, after all. Wrong!

Thinking is the labour of the intellect, daydreaming is its sensual pleasure. To replace thinking with daydreaming is to confound poison with food.

Marius, you will recall, had started off this way. Passion had reared its lovely head and had wound up plunging him headlong into bottomless and aimless fantasies. In that state, you no longer leave the house except to wander in a dream. A lazy childbirth. A tempestuous yet stagnant pit. And as work decreases, need increases. This is a law. Man, in this dreamy state, is naturally extravagant and limp; the slack mind cannot tightly embrace life. There is, in this way of living, some good mingled with the bad, for if enfeeblement is harmful, generosity is healthful and good. But the poor man, generous and noble, who does not work, is lost. Resources dry up, necessities loom.

A fatal slope, down which the strongest and most honest are dragged just like the weakest and most vicious. It ends in one of two holes, suicide or crime. By dint of going out every day to dream, there comes a day when you go out to throw yourself in the water. Too much dreaming produces men like Escousse and Lebras.2 Marius was walking slowly down this slope, his eyes fixed on someone he could no longer see. What we have just written seems strange and yet it is true. The memory of an absent being lights up the darkness of the heart; the longer they have been gone, the brighter they shine; the desperate and gloomy soul sees this light on its horizon; the star of inner night. All Marius could think about was Her. He dreamed of nothing else; he felt dimly that his old coat was becoming unacceptable and that his new coat was becoming an old coat, that his shirts were wearing out, that his hat was wearing out, that his boots were wearing out, in other words, that his life was wearing out, and he said to himself: “If only I could see her before I die!” A single sweet idea remained to him and that was that She had loved him, that her eyes had told him so, that she might not know his name, but she knew his soul, and that, perhaps, wherever she was, whatever that mysterious place might be, she loved him still. Who knows if she wasn’t dreaming of him the way he dreamed of her? Sometimes, in those unaccountable moments every heart that loves has, with reasons only to feel pain and yet feeling an obscure thrill of joy, he said to himself: “These thoughts are coming to me from her!” Then he added: “Perhaps my thoughts reach her, too.” This illusion, which he would shake his head at a moment later, still managed to cast a ray of light into his soul that sometimes resembled hope. From time to time, especially at that blue hour of the evening when dreamers are at their saddest, he would drop into a notebook devoted to the purpose the purest, the most impersonal, the most ideal of reveries that love filled his brain with. He called this “writing to her.” You must not think his reason was disturbed. Quite the contrary. He had lost the capacity to work and to move firmly toward a determined goal, but he was even more clear-sighted and honourable than ever. Odd as it may seem, Marius saw, in the calm light of reality, what was happening under his nose, even the most indifferent deeds of men; he always found the right word for everything in a sort of honest dejectedness and frank disinterestedness. His judgment, very nearly dissociated from hope, held its head high and soared.

In this state of mind nothing escaped him, nothing fooled him, and he saw to the bottom of life, of humanity, of destiny, at every instant. Happy, even in his anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of calamity! Whoever has not seen the things of this world and the heart of men in this double light has seen nothing of the truth and knows nothing.

The soul that loves and that suffers has attained the sublime.

Otherwise, the days went by, one after the other, and nothing new cropped up. Only, it seemed to him that the gloomy time left to him was getting shorter by the minute. He thought he could already distinctly make out the brink of the bottomless pit.

“God!” he would say to himself over and over, “Won’t I ever see her again before … I go?”

When you go up the rue Saint-Jacques, and cross over the barrière side and follow the old inner boulevard on the left for a while, you come to the rue de la Santé, followed by La Glacière and, shortly before you get to the little Gobelins stream, you find a sort of field that is, in the whole, long, monotonous belt of the boulevards around Paris, the only spot where Ruisdael3 would be tempted to sit down.

That magic thing from which grace springs was there, a green meadow crisscrossed with taut ropes from which rags hung to dry in the wind, an old market-garden farmhouse built in the days of Louis XIII, with its great roof bizarrely punctuated with dormers, dilapidated paling fences, a tiny pond between the poplars, women, laughter, voices; on the horizon, the Panthéon, the tree of the Deaf-Mutes, the Val-de-Grâce, black, squat, fantastical, amusing, magnificent, and in the background the severe square crest of the towers of Notre-Dame.

As the place is worth seeing, nobody goes there. Barely a cart or a wagon every fifteen minutes.

Once it happened that Marius’s solitary walks took him to this wasteland by this pond. That particular day there was something rare on the boulevard, a person. Marius was vaguely struck by the almost wild charm of the place and asked this person: “What’s this place called?” The person answered: “It’s the Field of the Lark.”

And he added: “It’s here that Ulbach killed the shepherdess from Ivry.”

But after the word Lark, Marius heard nothing. There are sudden crystallizations in the dream state that need only one word to be triggered. Suddenly all thought is condensed around an idea, and the mind is no longer capable of any other perception. The Lark was the name that, in the depths of Marius’s melancholy, had replaced “Ursula.” “Fancy!” he said, in the kind of irrational stupor peculiar to these mysterious asides. “This is her field. Now I’ll find out here where she lives.” This was absurd but irresistible.

And he went every day to the Field of the Lark.

EMBRYONIC DEVELOPMENT OF CRIMES IN PRISON INCUBATORS

JAVERT’S TRIUMPH IN the old Gorbeau slum had looked to be total, but was not.

In the first place, and this was his main worry, Javert had not taken the prisoner, prisoner. The victim of an assassination who gets away is more suspect than the assassin; and it is likely that this character, such a precious haul for the bandits, was no less a good catch for the authorities. After that, Montparnasse had eluded Javert.

He would have to wait for another opportunity to lay his hand once more on that “fiend of a fop.” Montparnasse, in fact, had run into Éponine on the boulevard where she was keeping watch under the trees and had taken her with him, preferring to play Némorin to the daughter rather than Schinderhannes1 to the father. Just as well for him that he did. He was free. As for Éponine, Javert saw to it that she was “nabbed” again. Not much of a consolation. Éponine had joined Azelma in Les Madelonnettes.

In the end, on the trip from the Gorbeau slum to La Force, one of the principal felons arrested, Claquesous, had been lost. No one knew how it could have happened, the officers and sergeants “didn’t get it,” the man had disappeared into thin air, he had slipped through the thumbscrews, he had poured through the cracks in the cab, the fiacre had leaked and he had fled; no one knew what to say, except that when they reached the prison, no Claquesous. Either the fairies or the police had something to do with this. Had Claquesous melted in the darkness like a snowflake in water? Was there some secret connivance on the part of the officers? Did this man belong to the twin enigma of disorder and order? Was he concentric to the felony and repression? Did this sphinx have his front paws in crime and his hind paws in authority? Javert could not accept those particular tricks and his hackles rose at the thought of such compromises; but his squadron included other inspectors besides himself, ones who, though his subordinates, were, perhaps, more experienced than he was in the secrets of the prefecture, and Claquesous was such a scoundrel that he would have made a very good policeman. To be on such intimate terms with the trick of vanishing into the night is an excellent thing for armed robbery and marvellously useful for the police. Such two-faced rogues exist. Whatever the case might be, Claquesous was mislaid and was not found again. Javert seemed more annoyed than surprised by this.

As for Marius, “that drip of a lawyer who probably took fright” and whose name Javert had forgotten, Javert didn’t give two hoots about him. Besides, a lawyer can always be found. But was he just a lawyer?

The preliminary investigation was under way. The examining magistrate found it useful not to put one of the men from the Patron-Minette gang into solitary confinement, hoping he would reveal something while chatting. This man was Brujon, the hairy one from the rue du Petit-Banquier. He had been released into the Charlemagne yard and the prison guards’ eyes were on him.

That name, Brujon, is still remembered in La Force. In the ghastly courtyard known as that of the New Building, which the administration used to call Saint-Bernard yard and the thieves called the Lions’ Den, on the wall covered with scales and damp that rose on the left to the same level as the rooftops, next to an old rusty iron gate that led to the old chapel of the La Force ducal mansion, which had become a dormitory for crooks, you could still see even twelve years ago a sort of fortress roughly carved in the stone with a nail, and below it this signature: BRUJON, 1811.

The Brujon of 1811 was the father of the Brujon of 1832. The latter, of whom we only caught a glimpse in the Gorbeau ambush, was a strapping young lad, extremely cunning and extremely adroit, with a stunned, mournful look. It is because of this stunned look that the examining magistrate let him go, thinking he would be more useful in the Charlemagne yard than in a cell in solitary.

Thieves don’t cease operating because they are in the hands of justice. They are not so easily put off. Being in jail for a crime does not prevent a person from getting another crime off the ground. They are artists who already have a painting in the Salon2 but who are nonetheless working on a new work in their studio.

Brujon seemed stupefied by prison. He could sometimes be seen for hours at a stretch in the Charlemagne yard, standing next to the canteen window staring like an idiot at that grimy notice that listed the canteen’s prices, starting with garlic, 62 centimes and ending with cigar, five centimes. Or else he would spend his time shivering, his teeth actually chattering, claiming he had a fever and asking if one of the twenty-eight beds in the fever ward was vacant.

All of a sudden, about the second fortnight in February 1832, it was discovered that Brujon, this sleepwalking lump, had had, through brokers of the house, not in his name but in the names of three of his mates, three different commissions carried out, which had cost him in all fifty sous, an exorbitant expense that attracted the attention of the prison brigadier.

Inquiries were made and, after consulting the price list for errands posted in the detainees’ visitors’ room, it emerged that the fifty sous were broken down as follows: three errands; one for the Panthéon, ten sous; one for the Val-de-Grâce, fifteen sous; one for the barrière de la Grenelle, twenty-five sous. This one was the most expensive on the price list. Now, the Panthéon, the Val-de-Grâce, and the barrière de la Grenelle just happened to be the precise locales of three of the most dreaded barrière prowlers, Kruideniers alias Bizarro, Glorieux, a freed convict, and Barrecarrosse, all of whom now came under the surveillance of the police. It was thought that these men were somehow affiliated with the Patron-Minette gang, two of whose chiefs, Babet and Gueulemer, had been locked up. It was assumed that in Brujon’s dispatches, delivered by hand not to residential addresses but to people waiting in the street, there must have been information to do with some planned felony. There were further indications still; the three prowlers were arrested and Brujon’s scheme, whatever it was, was thought to have been nipped in the bud.

About a week after these measures were taken, a warden doing the rounds one night was inspecting the dormitory in the basement of the New Building, and just as he was about to drop his chestnut in the chestnut box—this was the method then employed to ensure that wardens performed their duties correctly: every hour a chestnut was supposed to fall into all the boxes nailed to the dormitory doors—this warden saw, through the dormitory peephole, Brujon sitting up in bed writing something by the light of the wall lamp. The warden stepped in. Brujon was thrown into the dungeon for a month but they could not find what he had written. The police had nothing to add, either.

What is certain is that the next day “a postilion” was lobbed from the Charlemagne yard into the Lions’ Den over the five-story building that separated the two yards.

The detainees gave the name postilion to a tiny pellet of artfully kneaded bread which is sent to Ireland, that is, over a prison’s roof, from one courtyard to another. Etymology: over England; from one territory to another; to Ireland. This small pellet falls into the courtyard. Whoever picks it up and breaks it open finds in it a note addressed to some prisoner in the courtyard. If a detainee finds it, he hands the note over to the person it is intended for; if it is a warden, or one of those prisoners who have secretly sold out, known as sheep in prisons and foxes in galleys, the note is taken to the clerk and delivered to the police.

This time, the postilion reached its address, though the person the message was meant for was at that moment in solitary. This addressee was none other than Babet, one of the four leaders of Patron-Minette.

The postilion contained a screwed up piece of paper on which there was nothing but these two lines: “Babet. There is something going down rue Plumet. A garden gate.” That was what Brujon had written in the middle of the night.

Despite the male and female officers carrying out body searches, Babet found a way of getting the note from La Force to La Salpêtrière to a “good friend” he had there—behind bars. This girl in turn transmitted the note to another woman she knew, a woman called Magnon, closely watched by the police but not yet arrested. This Magnon, whose name the reader has already come across, was linked to the Thénardiers in a way that will be clarified later, and could, by going to see Éponine, serve as a bridge between La Salpêtrière and Les Madelonnettes.

It happened that, just at that very moment, proof being lacking in the preliminary investigation into the daughters’ involvement in Thénardier’s case, Éponine and Azelma were released.

When Éponine came out, Magnon, who was watching for her at the doors of Les Madelonnettes, handed her Brujon’s note to Babet, urging her to clarify the matter.

Éponine went to the rue Plumet, recognized the gate and garden, observed the house, spied, watched, and a few days later, took the Magnon woman, who lived in the rue Clocheperce, a biscuit that Magnon then transmitted to Babet’s mistress at La Salpêtrière. A biscuit in the murky symbolism of prisons signifies: nothing doing.

So that less than a week after that, Babet and Brujon ran into each other in the covered way that ringed La Force, as one was heading for “the preliminary” and the other was returning from it: “Well, then,” asked Brujon, “the rue P.?”

“A biscuit,” answered Babet.

And so this foetus of crime conceived at La Force was aborted. But this abortion had repercussions completely foreign to Brujon’s program. We will see what they were.

Often when we think we are tying a knot with a simple thread, we don’t notice we’ve caught up another thread as well.

FATHER MABEUF’S APPARITION

MARIUS NO LONGER went to see anyone, but it did sometimes happen that he ran into Father Mabeuf.

While Marius was slowly going down the gloomy steps we might call the cellar stairs, which lead to places without light where you hear the happy walking over your head, Monsieur Mabeuf was also going down.

The Flora of Cauteretz was no longer selling at all—not a single copy. The experiments with indigo had not succeeded in the little Austerlitz garden so badly exposed. Monsieur Mabeuf could grow only a few rare plants that like rain and shade there. He was not discouraged, though. He had obtained a bit of ground in the Jardin des Plantes, in a good spot in terms of exposure, to conduct his indigo trials “at his own expense.” For this, he had pawned the copperplates of his Flora. He had cut his breakfast down to two eggs and one of those he left to his old servant whose wages he had not paid now for fifteen months. And often this breakfast was his only meal. He no longer laughed his childlike laugh, he had grown morose and no longer received visitors. Marius was right not to think of calling anymore. Sometimes, at the hour at which Monsieur Mabeuf went to the Jardin des Plantes, the old man and the young man would cross paths on the boulevard de l’Hôpital. They would not stop to speak but would just nod to each other sadly. It is heartrending that there comes a time when misery undoes the ties that bind people! You were once two friends, you are now just two passersby.

The bookseller Royol had died. Monsieur Mabeuf now had only his books, his garden, and his indigo; these things were, for him, the three forms happiness, pleasure, and hope had taken. That was enough for him to live on. He said to himself: “When I’ve finished my balls of blue, I’ll be rich, I’ll get my copperplates out of hock, I’ll get my Flora back on the shelves with a bit of charlatanism, some hefty handouts under the counter, and a few ads in the papers, and I’ll buy, and I know exactly where, a copy of Pierre de Médine’s The Art of Sailing, the edition of 1559, with woodcuts.” Meanwhile, he worked all day on his patch of indigo and at night he went home to water his garden and read his books. Monsieur Mabeuf was very close to eighty at the time.

One night he saw a strange apparition.

He had gone home while the sun was still high in the sky. Mother Plutarch, whose health was not the best, was in bed sick. He had dined on a bone that still had a bit of meat on it and a bit of bread that he’d found on the kitchen table and he was sitting on an overturned block of stone that substituted for a bench in his garden.

Near this seat there rose, in the manner of old orchard gardens, a sort of large, extremely weathered hut made of boards and joists, a rabbit hutch on the ground floor, a storeroom for fruit upstairs. There were no rabbits in the hutch, but there were a few apples in the fruit storeroom, the remains of the provisions for winter.

Monsieur Mabeuf had begun to flick through a book and to read, with the aid of his spectacles, two books that fascinated him and even totally absorbed him, which is more serious at his age. His native timidity made him susceptible to a certain acceptance of superstitions. The first of these books was the famous treatise of president Delancre, De l’inconstance des démons, the other was the quarto of Mutor de la Rubaudière, Sur les diables de Vauvert et les gobelins de la Bièvre. This last book fascinated him even more because his garden had been one of the places once haunted by goblins. Twilight was starting to turn anything high up white and to turn whatever was down low black. As he read, Father Mabeuf was looking over the book in hand at his plants, among others a magnificent rhododendron that was one of his consolations; four days of dryness, of sun and wind, without a drop of rain, had just passed; the branches were hanging down, the buds drooping, the leaves dropping, everything needed watering; the rhododendron especially was sad. Father Mabeuf was one of those for whom plants have souls. The old man had toiled all day at his indigo patch, he was completely exhausted, and yet he got up, laid his books down on the seat, and walked over to the well, all hunched over and tottering; but when he grabbed the chain, he could not pull hard enough on it to unhook it and lower it down. He turned back and cast eyes full of anguish up at the sky that was filling with stars.

The evening had that serenity that rolls over the sorrows of man and buries them under some unfathomable joy, mournful yet eternal. The night promised to be as arid as the day had been.

“Stars everywhere!” thought the old man. “Not the merest wisp of a cloud! Not the tiniest drop of water!” And his head, which he had held up for a moment, fell back on his chest.

He raised it again and looked at the sky once more, muttering: “The tiniest drop of dew! A dollop of pity!” He tried again to disengage the chain from the well and could not do it.

At that moment, he heard a voice say: “Father Mabeuf, would you like me to water your garden for you?” At the same time, a noise like a wild animal going by came from the hedge, and he saw a sort of tall, thin girl emerge from the bushes and stand before him, eyeing him boldly. This looked less like a human being than some sort of shade that the twilight had just hatched.

Before Father Mabeuf, who frightened easily and was, as we said, always ready to be scared, could get out a syllable in reply, this creature, whose movements in the dusk were weirdly brusque, had unhooked the chain, dropped the bucket in, and pulled it back out and filled the watering can, and the good man saw the apparition, which had bare feet and a skirt of rags, race through the flower beds distributing life all around it. The sound of the water on the leaves filled Father Mabeuf’s soul with rapture. It seemed to him that the rhododendron was happy now.

When the first bucket was empty, the girl drew a second, then a third. She watered the whole garden.

Walking like this through the flowerbeds along paths where her silhouette appeared all black, shaking her badly torn shawl over her long bony arms, she looked somehow like a bat.

When she had finished, Father Mabeuf approached with tears in his eyes and placed his hand on her forehead.

“May God bless you,” he said, “you are an angel, since you care for flowers.”

“No,” she replied, “I am the devil, but I don’t care.”

Without waiting for and without hearing her reply, the old man cried out: “What a pity I’m so poor and wretched and I can’t do anything for you!” “You can do something,” she said.

“What?”

“Tell me where Monsieur Marius lives.”

The old man didn’t understand.

“What Monsieur Marius?”

He raised his rheumy eyes and seemed to be looking for something that had evaporated.

“A young man who used to come here once.”

Meanwhile, Monsieur Mabeuf was foraging through his memory.

“Ah, yes!” he cried. “I know who you mean. Hang on! Monsieur Marius … Baron Marius Pontmercy, by Jove! He lives … Actually, he doesn’t live there anymore … Ah, well, I don’t know.” As he spoke, he had bent down to tie up a branch of the rhododendron and he went on: “Wait, I remember now. He passes by the boulevard all the time and he heads for La Glacière. Rue Croulebarbe. The Field of the Lark. Start there. He isn’t hard to find.” When Monsieur Mabeuf stood up again, there was no one there anymore. The girl had vanished.

He definitely felt a little afraid.

“Really,” he thought, “if my garden wasn’t watered, I’d think it was a spirit.”

An hour later, when he had gone to bed, this came back to him and, as he fell asleep, at that disturbing moment when thought, like that fabulous bird that turns into a fish to slide through the sea, gradually takes the form of dreaming to cross through sleep, he said to himself vaguely: “In fact, this is a lot like what Rubaudière says about goblins. Could it have been a goblin?” MARIUS’S APPARITION

ONE MORNING, A few days after this visit by a “spirit” to Father Mabeuf—it was a Monday, the day on which Marius borrowed the hundred-sou piece from Courfeyrac for Thénardier—Marius had put this hundred-sou piece in his pocket and, before taking it to the prison clerk, had gone off “for a bit of a stroll,” hoping that this would make him work on his return. This was what always happened, actually. As soon as he got out of bed, he would sit down in front of a book and a sheet of paper to hack away at some translation or other; at the time, he had the job of translating into French a celebrated quarrel between Germans, the controversy between Gans and Savigny;1 he took up Savigny, he took up Gans, read four lines, tried to get one of them down, could not, saw a star between the paper and his eyes and rose from his chair, saying: “I’m going out. That’ll put me in the right frame of mind.” And off he’d go to the Field of the Lark. There, more than ever, he would see that star and, less than ever, Savigny and Gans.

He would go back home, try to resume his labours, and not manage; there was no way to tie a single one of the broken threads in his brain; so then he would say: “I won’t go out tomorrow. It stops me working.” Yet out he would go, every day.

He spent more time in the Field of the Lark than he did in Courfeyrac’s cubbyhole. His true address was this: boulevard de la Santé, seventh tree from the rue Croulebarbe.

That particular morning, he had quit the seventh tree and gone to sit on the parapet along the Gobelins stream. Cheery sunshine shone through the glossy green leaves, freshly unfurled.

He was dreaming of “Her.” But his dreaming turned into reproof and then turned back on himself; he thought painfully of the laziness, the paralysis of the soul that was overcoming him and of that night which was growing darker from one moment to the next to the point where he could already no longer even see the sun.

Yet through this painful emanation of indistinct ideas that was not even a monologue—so much had action been stifled within him that he no longer even had the strength to want to grieve—through this melancholy absorption, sensations from the world outside came to him. He heard behind him, below him, on both riverbanks, the washerwomen of the Gobelins beating their washing, and, overhead, the birds twittering and singing in the elms. On one side, the sound of freedom, of happy insouciance, of spare time with wings; on the other, the sound of work. Both were joyful sounds—something that set him musing deeply, almost reflecting.

All of a sudden, in the middle of his overwhelming ecstasy, he heard a voice he knew saying: “Hey! Here he is!” He looked up and recognized the unhappy waif who had come to his place one morning, the elder of the Thénardier girls, Éponine, for he now knew her name. The odd thing was that she looked both poorer and prettier; two steps you would not have thought possible for her to take. She had brought off a dual progress—toward the light and toward distress. She was barefoot and in rags like the day she strode so resolutely into his room, only her rags were two months older; the holes were bigger, the tatters more sordid. It was the same hoarse voice, the same forehead, browned and wrinkled by the sun, the same open, wild, and wandering gaze. She had in her countenance, more than before, that indefinably frightened and pathetic look that a stint in jail adds to misery.

She had bits of straw and hay in her hair, not like Ophelia2 from having gone mad after catching Hamlet’s contagious madness, but because she had slept in some stable loft.

Yet with all that, she was beautiful. What a star you are, O youth!

Meanwhile, she had planted herself in front of Marius with a trace of joy visible on her livid face and something that resembled a smile.

She looked for a few moments as though she couldn’t speak.

“So, I’ve caught up with you!” she said at last. “Father Mabeuf was right, it was this boulevard here! I’ve looked everywhere for you! If you only knew! You know what? I’ve been in the clink. A fortnight! They let me go! Since they had nothing on me and, anyway, I hadn’t reached the age of consent. I was underage. By two months. Oh, I’ve looked everywhere for you! For six weeks now. You don’t live over there anymore, then?” “No,” said Marius.

“Oh, I understand. Because of that business. It’s not nice, that sort of carry-on. You moved. Listen! What are you getting about in an old hat like that for, then? A young man like you should have nice stuff. You know what, Monsieur Marius? Father Mabeuf calls you Baron Marius something-or-other. But you’re not a baron, are you? Barons are old geezers, they go to the Luxembourg and sit in front of the château where there’s more sun, they read the Quotidienne for a sou. Once I went and took a letter to a baron who was like that. He was over a hundred. So, tell me, where do you live these days?” Marius did not answer.

“Ah!” she went on. “You’ve got a hole in your shirt. I’ll have to sew that up for you.”

She went on with an expression that gradually clouded over.

“You don’t seem happy to see me?”

Marius said nothing; for a second she remained silent, too, then she cried: “If I wanted to, but, I could make you pretty happy!” “What?” asked Marius. “What are you talking about?”

“Ah, you used to talk to me more friendly!” she said.

“Well, then, would you please tell me what you’re talking about?”

She bit her lip; she seemed to hesitate as though in the grip of some sort of inner struggle. Finally she seemed to reach a decision.

“Never mind, it doesn’t matter. You look sad and I want you to be happy. Just promise me you’ll laugh. I want to see you laugh and see you say: ‘Well, now, that’s good.’ Poor Monsieur Marius! You know! You promised me you’d give me anything I wanted—” “Yes! But you have to tell me!”

She looked Marius straight in the eye and told him: “I have the address.”

Marius went white. All his blood rushed to his heart.

“What address?”

“The address you asked me for!”

She added, as though making an effort: “The address—you know very well!”

“Yes!” Marius stammered.

“Of the young lady!”

That word out of the way, she sighed deeply.

Marius jumped down from the parapet he was sitting on and wildy clutched her hand.

“Oh! Well! Take me there! Tell me! Ask me for anything you like! Where is it?”

“Come with me,” she answered. “I don’t know the street or the number all that well. It’s quite a way away from here, but I know the house real well, I’ll take you there.” She pulled her hand away and went on, in a tone that would have broken the heart of any observer but that did not remotely move Marius, intoxicated, in raptures as he was: “Oh, how happy you are!” A cloud passed over Marius’s forehead. He seized Éponine by the arm.

“Swear to me one thing!”

“Swear?” she said. “What does that mean? Fancy wanting me to swear!”

And she laughed.

“Your father! Promise me, Éponine! Swear to me that you won’t say anything to your father about this address!” She turned toward him with a stunned look.

“Éponine! How did you know my name’s Éponine?”

“Promise me what I say!”

But she didn’t seem to hear him.

“I like that! You called me Éponine!”

Marius grabbed both her arms.

“Answer me, for Christ’s sake! Listen carefully to what I’m saying, swear to me that you won’t tell your father the address that you know!” “My father?” she said. “Ah, yes, my father! Don’t worry. He’s in solitary. Anyway, do you think I care about my father!” “But you haven’t promised me!” Marius shouted.

“Let go of me, then!” she said, bursting out laughing. “Look how you’re shaking me! All right! All right! I promise you! I swear to you! What’s it to me? I won’t tell my father the address. There! How’s that? Is that it?” “Or anybody else!” said Marius.

“Or anybody else.”

“Now,” said Marius, “take me there.”

“Right away?”

“Right away.”

“Come. Oh, look how happy he is!” she said.

After a few steps, she stopped.

“You’re too close behind me, Monsieur Marius. Let me go ahead, and follow me like this, like you haven’t seen me. A fine-looking young man like you shouldn’t be seen with a woman like me.” No tongue could tell all that this word, woman, contained, uttered the way it was by that child.

She took a dozen steps and stopped again; Marius joined her. She spoke to him out of the corner of her mouth without turning round: “By the way, you know you promised me something?” Marius fumbled in his pocket. All he had in the whole world was the five francs destined for father Thénardier. He took it and put it in Éponine’s hand.

She opened her fingers and let it fall to the ground and shot him a dark look: “I don’t want your money,” she said.