Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (100 page)

It is a mistake to suppose that passion, when it is fortunate and pure, leads man to a state of perfection; it leads him simply, as we have said, to a state of forgetfulness. In this situation man forgets to be bad, but he also forgets to be good. Gratitude, duty, necessary and troublesome memories, vanish. At any other time Marius would have felt very differently towards Eponine. Absorbed in Cosette he had not even clearly in his mind that this Eponine’s name was Eponine Thénardier, and that she bore a name written in his father’s will, that name to which he would have been, a few months before, so ardently devoted. We show Marius just as he was. His father himself, disappeared somewhat from his soul beneath the splendour of his love.

He answered with some embarrassment:

“What! is it you, Eponine?”

“Why do you say
vous?
Have I done anything to you?”

“No,” answered he.

Certainly, he had nothing against her. Far from it. Only, he felt that he could not do otherwise, now that he had whispered to Cosette, than speak coldly to Eponine.

As he was silent, she exclaimed:

“Tell me now—”

Then she stopped. It seemed as if words failed this creature, once so reckless and so bold. She attempted to smile and could not. She resumed:

“Well?—”

Then she was silent again, and stood with her eyes cast down.

“Good evening, Monsieur Marius,” said she all at once abruptly, and she went away.

THE NEXT DAY, it was the 3rd of June, the 3rd of June, 1832, a date which must be noted on account of the grave events which were at that time suspended over the horizon of Paris like thunder-clouds. Marius, at nightfall, was following the same path as the evening before, with the same rapturous thoughts in his heart, when he perceived, under the trees of the boulevard, Eponine approaching him. Two days in succession, this was too much. He turned hastily, left the boulevard, changed his route, and went to the Rue Plumet through the Rue Monsieur.

This caused Eponine to follow him to the Rue Plumet, a thing which she had not done before. She had been content until then to see him on his way through the boulevard without even seeking to meet him. The evening previous, only, had she tried to speak to him.

Eponine followed him then, without a suspicion on his part. She saw him push aside the bar of the grating, and glide into the garden.

“Why!” said she, “he is going into the house.”

She approached the grating, felt of the bars one after another, and easily recognised the one which Marius had displaced.

She murmured in an undertone, with a mournful accent:

“None of that, Lisette!”

She sat down upon the sill of the grating, close beside the bar, as if she were guarding it. It was just at the point at which the grating joined the neighbouring wall. There was a dark corner there, in which Eponine was entirely hidden.

She remained thus for more than an hour, without stirring and without breathing, a prey to her own thoughts.

About ten o‘clock in the evening, one of the two or three passers-by in the Rue Plumet, a belated old bourgeois who was hurrying through this deserted and ill-famed place, keeping close to the garden grating, on reaching the angle which the grating made with the wall, heard a sullen and threatening voice which said:

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he came every evening!”

He cast his eyes about him, saw nobody, dared not look into that dark corner, and was very much frightened. He doubled his pace.

This person had reason to hasten, for a very few moments afterwards six men, who were walking separately and at some distance from each other along the wall, and who might have been taken for a tipsy patrol, entered the Rue Plumet.

The first to arrive at the grating of the garden stopped and waited for the others; in a second they were all six together.

These men began to talk in a low voice.

“It is
icicaille,”
said one of them.

“Is there a
cab
^fp
in the garden?” asked another.

“I don’t know. At all events I have
levé
^fq
a ball of drugged bread which we will make him
morfiler.”
^fr

“Have you some mastic to
frangir
the
vanterne?”
^fs

“Yes.”

“The grating is old,” added a fifth, who had a voice like a ventriloquist.

“So much the better,” said the second who had spoken. “It will not
criblera
^ft
under the
bastringue,
^fu
and will not be so hard to
faucher.
^fv

The sixth, who had not yet opened his mouth, began to examine the grating as Eponine had done an hour before, grasping each bar successively and shaking it carefully. In this way he came to the bar which Marius had loosened. Just as he was about to lay hold of this bar, a hand, starting abruptly from the shadow, fell upon his arm, he felt himself pushed sharply back by the middle of his breast, and a roughened voice said to him without crying out:

“There is a
cab.”

At the same time he saw a pale girl standing before him.

The man felt that commotion which is always given by the unexpected. He bristled up hideously; nothing is so frightful to see as ferocious beasts which are startled, their appearance when terrified is terrifying. He recoiled, and stammered:

“What is this creature?”

“Your daughter.”

It was indeed Eponine who was speaking to Thénardier.

On the appearance of Eponine the five others, that is to say, Claquesous, Gueulemer, Babet, Montparnasse, and Brujon, approached without a sound, without haste, without saying a word, with the ominous slowness peculiar to these men of the night.

In their hands might be distinguished some strangely hideous tools. Gueulemer had one of those crooked crowbars which the prowlers call
fanchons.

“Ah, there, what are you doing here? what do you want of us? are you crazy?” exclaimed Thénardier, as much as one can exclaim in a whisper. “What do you come and hinder us in our work for?”

Eponine began to laugh and sprang to his neck.

“I am here, my darling father, because I am here. Is there any law against sitting upon the stones in these days? It is you who shouldn’t be here. What are you coming here for, since it is a biscuit? I told Magnon so. There is nothing to do here. But embrace me now, my dear good father! What a long time since I have seen you! You are out then?”

Thénardier tried to free himself from Eponine’s arms, and muttered:

“Very well. You have embraced me. Yes, I am out. I am not in. Now, be off.”

But Eponine did not loose her hold and redoubled her caresses.

“My darling father, how did you do it? You must have a good deal of wit to get out of that! Tell me about it! And my mother? where is my mother? Give me some news of mamma.”

Thénardier answered:

“She is well, I don’t know, let me alone, I tell you to be off.”

“I don’t want to go away just now,” said Eponine, with the pettishness of a spoiled child, “you send me away when here it is four months that I haven’t seen you, and when I have hardly had time to embrace you.”

And she caught her father again by the neck.

“Ah! come now, this is foolish,” said Babet.

“Let us hurry!” said Gueulemer, “the
coqueurs
may come along.”

The ventriloquist sang this distich:

Eponine turned towards the five bandits.

“Why, this is Monsieur Brujon. Good-day, Monsieur Babet. Good-day, Monsieur Claquesous. Don’t you remember me, Monsieur Gueulemer? How goes it, Montparnasse?”

“Yes, they recognise you,” said Thénardier. “But good-day, good-night, keep off! don’t disturb us!”

“It is the hour for foxes, and not for pullets,” said Montparnasse.

“You see well enough that we are going to
goupiner icigo,
”
^fx
added Babet.

Eponine took Montparnasse’s hand.

“Take care,” said he, “you will cut yourself, I have a
lingre
^fy
open.”

“My darling Montparnasse,” answered Eponine very gently, “we must have confidence in people. I am my father’s daughter, perhaps. Monsieur Babet, Monsieur Gueulemer, it is I who was charged with finding out about this affair.”

It is noteworthy that Eponine was not speaking argot. Since she had known Marius, that horrid language had become impossible to her.

She pressed in her little hand, as bony and weak as the hand of a corpse, the great rough fingers of Gueulemer, and continued:

“You know very well that I am not a fool. Ordinarily you believe me. I have done you service on occasion. Well, I have learned all about this, you would expose yourself uselessly, do you see. I swear to you that there is nothing to be done in that house.”

“There are lone women,” said Gueulemer.

“No. The people have moved away.”

“The candles have not, anyhow!” said Babet.

And he showed Eponine, through the top of the trees, a light which was moving about in the garret of the cottage. It was Toussaint, who had sat up to hang out her clothes to dry.

Eponine made a final effort.

“Well,” said she, “they are very poor people, and it is a shanty where there isn’t a sou.”

“Go to the devil!” cried Thénardier. “When we have turned the house over, and when we have put the cellar at the top and the garret at the bottom, we will tell you what there is inside, and whether it is
balles, ronds,
or
broques.”
^fz

And he pushed her to pass by.

“My good friend Monsieur Montparnasse,” said Eponine, “I beg you, you who are a good boy, don’t go in!”

“Take care, you will cut yourself,” replied Montparnasse.

Thénardier added, with his decisive tone:

“Clear
out,fée,
and let men do their work!”

Eponine let go of Montparnasse’s hand, which she had taken again, and said:

“You will go into that house then?”

“Just a little!” said the ventriloquist, with a sneer.

Then she placed her back against the grating, faced the six bandits who were armed to the teeth, and to whom the night gave faces of demons, and said in a low and firm voice:

“Well, I, I won’t have it.”

They stopped astounded. The ventriloquist, however, finished his sneer. She resumed.

“Friends! listen to me. That isn’t the thing. Now I speak. In the first place, if you go into the garden, if you touch this grating, I shall cry out, I shall rap on doors, I shall wake everybody up, I shall have all six of you arrested, I shall call the sergents de ville.”

“She would do it,” said Thénardier in a low tone to Brujon and the ventriloquist.

She shook her head, and added:

“Beginning with my father!”

Thénardier approached.

“Not so near, goodman!” said she.

He drew back, muttering between his teeth: “Why, what is the matter with her?” and he added:

“Slut!”

She began to laugh in a terrible way:

“As you will, you shall not go in, I am not the daughter of a dog, for I am the daughter of a wolf. There are six of you, what is that to me? You are men. Now, I am a woman. I am not afraid of you, not a bit. I tell you that you shall not go into this house, because it does not please me. If you approach, I shall bark. I told you so, I am the cab, I don’t care for you. Go your ways, you annoy me. Go where you like, but don’t come here, I forbid it! You have knives, I have feet and hands. That makes no difference, come on now!”

She took a step towards the bandits, she was terrible, she began to laugh. “The devil! I am not afraid. This summer, I shall be hungry; this winter, I shall be cold. Are they fools, these geese of men, to think that they can make a girl afraid! Of what! afraid? Ah, pshaw, indeed! Because you have hussies of mistresses who hide under the bed when you raise your voice, it won’t do here! I, I am not afraid of anything!”

She kept her eye fixed upon Thénardier, and said:

“Not even you, father!”

Then she went on, casting her ghastly bloodshot eyes over the bandits:

“What is it to me whether somebody picks me up to-morrow on the pavement of the Rue Plumet, beaten to death with a club by my father, or whether they find me in a year in the ditches of Saint Cloud, or at the Ile de Cygnes, among the old rotten rubbish and the dead dogs?”

She was obliged to stop; a dry cough seized her, her breath came like a rattle from her narrow and feeble chest.

She resumed:

“I have but to cry out, they come, bang! You are six; but I am everybody.”

Thénardier made a movement towards her.

“‘Proach not!” cried she.

He stopped, and said to her mildly:

“Well, no; I will not approach, but don’t speak so loud. Daughter, you want then to hinder us in our work? Still we must earn our living. Have you no love for your father now?”

“You bother me,” said Eponine.

“Still we must live, we must eat——”

“Die.”

Saying which, she sat down on the sill of the grating, humming:

She had her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, and she was swinging her foot with an air of indifference. Her dress was full of holes, and showed her sharp shoulder-blades. The neighbouring lamp lit up her profile and her attitude. Nothing could be more resolute or more surprising.