The message contained in the lump of bread was as follows: ‘Babet. There’s a job in the Rue Plumet. Garden with a wrought-iron gate.’ This was what Brujon had written the previous night.
Although he was under close surveillance, Babet contrived to get the message passed from the La Force prison to that of the Salpêtrière, where a ‘lady friend’ of his was confined. The woman passed it on to an acquaintance of hers, a woman called Magnon who was being closely watched by the police but had not yet been arrested. This Magnon, of whom the reader has already heard, had a particular connection with the Thénardiers (to be described later) and by visiting Éponine could serve as a link between the Salpêtrière and Madelonnette prisons.
As it happened, the Thénardier daughters were released on the day she went to visit Éponine, the preliminary investigation into the affairs of their parents having disclosed insufficient evidence to warrant their detention. When Éponine came out, Magnon, who had been waiting at the prison gate, handed her Brujon’s note and asked her to spy out the land. Éponine, accordingly, went to the Rue Plumet, located the wrought-iron gate and garden, and after a careful study of the house and its inhabitants called upon Magnon, who was living in the Rue Clocheperce. She gave her a ‘biscuit’, to be passed on to Babet’s mistress in the Salpêtrière: the term, in the recondite jargon of the underworld, signifies ‘no good’.
A few days later, when Babet and Brujon passed one another in a corridor of La Force, the one going to interrogation and the other coming away from it, Brujon asked, ‘What about Rue P.?’ and Babet answered, ‘Biscuit.’ Thus a criminal operation conceived by Brujon in the prison of La Force was still-born.
But the miscarriage, as we shall see, had results quite outside Brujon’s intention. It happens often enough that, thinking to plan one event, we set in motion another.
III
Père Mabeuf’s apparition
Marius no longer called upon anyone, but it happened now and then that he saw Père Mabeuf. While he had been slowly descending that melancholy stairway which may be termed the steps to the underground, since it leads to that place of darkness where life can be heard passing over one’s head, Père Mabeuf, in his own fashion, had been making the same descent.
The sales of Flora of Coûterez had wholly ceased; nor had the attempt to develop a new strain of indigo been successful Monsieur Mabeuf’s small garden in Austerlitz had the wrong exposure: all he could grow in it were a few rare plants which flourished in damp and shade. Nevertheless he had persisted. He had acquired a plot of land in the Jardin des Plantes, where the conditions were more favourable, in order to continue his experiments at his own expense, having raised the money by pawning the plates of his Flora. His luncheon was restricted to two eggs, one of which went to his elderly housekeeper, whose wages he had not paid for fifteen months, and often this was his only meal in the day. He no longer laughed his childlike laugh; he had grown morose and did not receive visitors. Marius was wise in not attempting to call on him. Occasionally they passed one another on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital when the old man was on his way to the Jardin des Plantes. They did not speak, but merely exchanged gloomy nods. It is the sad fact about poverty that the moment comes when it destroys relationships. They had been friends but now were merely on nodding terms.
Royol, the bookseller, was dead. Monsieur Mabeuf now had nothing but his own books, his garden, and his indigo plants, all that remained to him of happiness, pleasure in life and hope for the future. They enabled him to go on living. He said to himself: ‘When I have grown my blue berries I shall be rich. I’ll get the plates out of pawn and make my Flora fashionable again by dressing it up with humbug, newspaper advertisements and so forth; and I’ll buy myself a copy of Pietro de Medino’s Art of Navigation, the 1559 edition, with woodcuts – I know where I can get one.’ In the meantime he worked all day on his indigo plot, returning home in the evening to water his garden and read his books. At this time Monsieur Mabeuf was very nearly eighty.
One evening he had a startling visitation.
He had returned home while it was still light. His housekeeper, Mère Plutarque, whose health was failing, was ill in bed. After dining off a bone on which a few scraps of meat remained and a piece of bread which he found on the kitchen table, Monsieur Mabeuf had gone to sit in the garden, on the old, overturned boundary-stone which served him as a garden bench. Close by this was a tumbledown wooden building of the kind commonly found in old orchard-gardens, with rabbit hutches on the ground floor and fruit-racks on its upper storey. There were no rabbits in the hutches but there were still a few apples on the racks, the last of the autumn crop.
Wearing his spectacles, Monsieur Mabeuf sat turning over the pages and re-reading passages of two books which delighted him and, which was more important at his age, greatly occupied his mind. The first of these was the famous treatise by Pierre de Lancre on The Inconstancy of Demons and the other was the discourse of Mutor de la Rubaudière on The Devils of Vauvers and the Goblins of La Bièvre. The latter was especially interesting to him because his own garden was one of those places believed in former times to be haunted by goblins. The sunset was beginning to cast a light on the upper half of things while it buried the lower half in darkness. While he read, glancing from time to time over the top of his book, Père Mabeuf was appraising his plants, among them a very fine rhododendron which was one of the consolations of his present life. They had had four dry days, wind and sun but not a drop of rain, and everywhere stems were wilting and buds drooping; everything needed to be watered, and the rhododendron was looking particularly sorry for itself. For Père Mabeuf plants were living beings. He had been working all day on his indigo plot and was tired out, but he got up nonetheless, put down his books on the bench and walked shakily to the well. He found, however, such was his state of exhaustion, that he had not the strength to pull up the bucket, and so he stood back, gazing wretchedly up at a sky that was now filling with stars.
The evening was one of those whose serenity allays the sufferings of man with a melancholy but timeless delight. The night promised to be as parched as the day had been. ‘Stars everywhere,’ the old man thought. ‘And nowhere a cloud, not even a teardrop of rain.’ His head sank on his breast, but then he looked up again. ‘A tear of sympathy!’ he prayed. ‘A drop of dew.’ Again he tried to raise the bucket but could not.
And at this moment a voice said:
‘Père Mabeuf, would you like me to water your garden?’
At the same time there came a rustling like that of an animal in the undergrowth, and from behind a shrub a tall, thin girl emerged who stood boldly confronting him, seeming less like a human being than a manifestation of the dusk.
Before Père Mabeuf, who as we know was timid by nature and easily alarmed, could say a word, this apparition, whose movements in the half-light had a sort of eerie abruptness, had drawn up the bucket and filled the watering-can. He watched while, bare-footed and clad in a ragged skirt, she bent over the flower-beds showering them with life; and the sound of water falling on the thirsty leaves was an enchantment to his ears. He felt that now the rhododendron was happy.
Having emptied the first bucketful, she drew a second and a third. She watered the whole garden. The sight of her striding along the paths, blackly silhouetted against the darkening sky with lanky arms outstretched under a tattered shawl, made him think of a large bat. When she had finished Père Mabeuf went up to her with tears in his eyes and laid a hand on her forehead.
‘God will reward you,’ he said. ‘You must be an angel since you care for flowers.’
‘I’m no angel,’ she replied. ‘I’m the devil, but it’s all the same to me.’
Without heeding her words he exclaimed:
‘How wretched it is that I’m too poor to be able to do anything for you!’
‘But there is something you can do,’ she said.
‘What is it?’
‘You can tell me where Monsieur Marius is living.’
He did not at first understand and stood with dim eyes gazing blankly at her.
‘What Monsieur Marius?’
‘The young man who used to come here.’
And now Monsieur Mabeuf had searched his memory.
‘Ah, yes. I know who you mean. Monsieur Marius … You mean the Baron Marius Pontmercy, of course. He lives … or rather, he doesn’t live there any more … I really don’t know.’ He had bent down while speaking to straighten a branch of the rhododendron. Still in this bowed position, he went on: ‘But I can tell you this. He very often goes along the boulevard to a place in the neighbourhood of the Glacière, the Lark’s Field. If you go that way you should have no difficulty in meeting him.’
When eventually Monsieur Mabeuf straightened himself he found that he was alone. The girl had disappeared. He was then genuinely a little apprehensive.
‘Really,’ he reflected, ‘if my garden hadn’t been watered I should think it was a spirit.’
Later, when he was in bed and on the verge of sleep, in that hazy moment when thought, like the fabulous bird that changes into a fish in order to cross the sea, takes on the form of dreaming in order to cross into slumber, this notion returned to him and he murmured confusedly:
‘After all, it was very like what La Rubaudière tells us about goblins. Was it a goblin, perhaps?’
IV
The goblin appears to Marius
On a morning a few days after Monsieur Mabeuf received this strange visitation – it was a Monday, the day on which Marius was accustomed to borrow five francs from Courfeyrac for Thénardier–Marius, having put the money in his pocket, decided to ‘go for a stroll’ before leaving it at the prison, hoping that this would make him more disposed to settle down to work on his return. It was his invariable procedure. First thing in the morning he would seat himself at the writing-table contemplating a blank sheet of paper and the text he was supposed to be translating, which at that time was an account of the celebrated controversy between two German jurists, Gans and Savigny, on the subject of hereditary rights. He would read a few lines and struggle to write one of his own, and, finding himself unable to do so, seeing a sort of haze between himself and the paper, he would get up saying, ‘I’ll go for a stroll. Then I shall be more in the mood.’ And he would go to the Field of the Lark, where the haze would be more pronounced than ever and his interest in Gans and Savigny proportionately less.
He would return home and again fail to work, being unable to bring order to his distracted thoughts. He would say to himself, ‘I won’t go out tomorrow. It stops me working.’ And the next day he would go out as usual. His dwelling-place was more the Lark’s Field than Courfeyrac’s lodging. His real address should have been: Boulevard de la Santé, seventh tree after the Rue Croulebarbe.
On this particular morning he had deserted the seventh tree and was seated on a parapet overlooking the stream, the Rivière des Gobelins. Bright sunshine pierced the fresh, gleaming leaves of the trees. He sat thinking of Her until his thoughts, turning to reproaches, rebounded upon himself, concentrating painfully on the indolence and spiritual paralysis that now possessed him, and the darkness that seemed to be thickening around him so that he could no longer see the sun.
And yet, amid the distressing incoherence of his meditations, which were not even a conscious process of thought, so far had he lost the will to action and the active sense of his despair; amid his melancholy self-absorption the stir of the outside world still reached him. He could hear, from either side of the little river, the sound of the Gobelins washerwomen pounding their linen in the stream, and above his head he could hear the birds singing and their wings fluttering in the elms – overhead the sounds of freedom, heedless happiness, winged leisure, and around him the sounds of daily work, joyous sounds which penetrated his abstraction, prompting him almost to conscious thought.
And suddenly, breaking in upon his state of tired ecstasy, a voice spoke, a voice known to him.
‘Ah! There he is!’
He looked up and recognized the unhappy girl who had called upon him one morning, the elder Thénardier daughter, Éponine, whose name he had subsequently learned. Strangely, she appeared at once more impoverished and more attractive, two things which he would not have thought her capable of. She had progressed in two directions, both upwards and downwards. She was still barefoot and ragged as she had been on the day when she had marched so resolutely into his room, except that her rags were two months older, dirtier, their tatters more evident. She had the same hoarse voice, the same chapped, weather-beaten skin, the same bold and shiftless gaze, and added to these the apprehensive, vaguely pitiable expression that a spell in prison lends to the face of ordinary poverty. She had wisps of straw in her hair, not because, like Ophelia, she had gone mad, but because she had spent the night in a stable-loft. And with it all she had grown beautiful! Such is the miracle of youth.
She was contemplating Marius with a look of pleasure on her pale face and something that was almost a smile. For some moments she seemed unable to speak.
‘So at last I’ve found you!’ she finally said. ‘Père Mabeuf was right. If you only knew how I’ve been looking for you. Did you know I’ve been in jug? Only for a fortnight and then they had to let me go because they’d got nothing against me and anyway I’m not old enough to be held responsible – two months under age. But if you knew how I’ve been searching – for six whole weeks. You aren’t living in the tenement any more?’
‘No,’ said Marius.
‘Well, I can understand that. Because of what happened. It’s not nice, that sort of thing. So you’ve moved. But why are you wearing that shabby old hat? A young man like you ought to be nicely dressed. You know, Monsieur Marius – Père Mabeuf called you Baron Marius Something-or-other, but that’s not right, is it? You can’t be a baron. Barons are old. They go and sit in the Luxembourg, on the sunny side of the château, and read the Quotidienne at a sou a copy. I once had to give a letter to a baron like that – he must have been at least a hundred. Where are you living now?’
Marius did not answer.
‘You’ve got a hole in your shirt,’ she said. ‘I’ll mend it for you.’ Her expression was changing. ‘You don’t seem very glad to see me.’
Marius still said nothing, and after a moment’s pause she exclaimed:
‘Well, I could make you look happy if I wanted to!’
‘How?’ said Marius. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You weren’t so unfriendly last time.’
‘I’m sorry. But what do you mean?’
She bit her lip and hesitated as though wrestling with some problem of her own. Finally she seemed to make up her mind.
‘Oh well, it can’t be helped. You look so miserable and I want you to be happy. But you must promise to smile. I want to hear you say, “Well done!” Poor Monsieur Marius! But you did promise, you know, that you’d give me anything I asked for.’
‘Yes, yes! But tell me!’
She looked steadily at him.
‘I’ve got the address.’
Marius had turned pale. His heart seemed to miss a beat.
‘You mean –’
‘The address you wanted me to find out. The young lady – you know …’ She spoke the words with a deep sigh.
Marius jumped down from the parapet where he had been sitting and took her by the hand.
‘You know it? You must take me there. You must tell me where it is. I’ll give you anything you ask.’
‘It’s right on the other side of town. I shall have to take you. I don’t know the number, but I know the house.’ She withdrew her hand and said in a tone of sadness that would have wrung the heart of any beholder, but of which Marius in his flurry was quite unconscious: ‘Oh, how excited you are!’
A thought had struck Marius and he frowned. He seized her by the arm.
‘You must swear one thing.’
‘Swear!’ and she burst out laughing. ‘You want me to swear!’
; ‘Your father. You must promise – Éponine, you must swear to me that you’ll never tell him where it is.’
She was gazing at him in astonishment.
‘Éponine! How did you know that was my name?’
‘Will you promise me?’
She seemed not to hear. ‘But it’s nice. I’m glad you’ve called me Éponine.’
He grasped her by both arms.
‘For Heaven’s sake, will you answer! Listen to what I’m saying. Swear that you won’t pass this address on to your father.’
‘My father …’ she repeated. ‘Oh, him. You needn’t worry about him, he’s in solitary. Anywya, what do I care about my father.’
‘But you still haven’t promised.’
‘Well, let me go,’ she cried, laughing, ‘instead of shaking me like that! All right, I promise. What difference does it make to me? I’ll say it. I swear I won’t tell my father the address. Will that do?’
‘Or anyone else?’
‘Or anyone else.’
‘Good,’ said Marius. ‘Now take me there.’
‘This minute?’
‘Yes, this minute.’
‘Well, come along. Heavens,’ she said, ‘how delighted you are!’ But after they had gone a little way she paused.’ You’re keeping too close to me, Monsieur Marius. Let me walk on ahead and you must follow as though you didn’t know me. It wouldn’t do for a respectable young man like you to be seen in company with a woman of my kind.
No words can convey the pathos of that word ‘woman’, spoken by that child.
She walked a few paces and then stopped again. Marius caught up with her. She spoke out of the side of her mouth, not looking at him.
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 89
