Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [250]
Marius went slowly up the boulevard towards the barrière,dl on the way to the Rue Saint Jacques. He was walking thoughtfully, with his head down.
Suddenly he felt that he was elbowed in the dusk; he turned, and saw two young girls in rags, one tall and slender, the other a little shorter, passing rapidly by, breathless, frightened, and apparently in flight; they had met him, had not seen him, and had jostled him in passing. Marius could see in the twilight their livid faces, their hair tangled and flying, their frightful bonnets, their tattered skirts, and their naked feet. As they ran they were talking to each other. The taller one said in a very low voice:
“The cognes came. They just missed pincer me at the demi-cercle.”
The other answered: “I saw them. I cavale, cavale, cavale.”dm
Marius understood, through this dismal argot, that the gendarmes, or the city police, had not succeeded in seizing these two girls, and that the girls had escaped.
They plunged in under the trees of the boulevard behind him, and for a few seconds made a kind of dim whiteness in the darkness which soon faded out.
Marius stopped for a moment.
He was about to resume his course when he perceived a little greyish packet on the ground at his feet. He stooped down and picked it up. It was a sort of envelope which appeared to contain papers.
“Well,” said he, “those poor creatures must have dropped this!”
He retraced his steps, he called, he did not find them; he concluded they were already beyond hearing, put the packet in his pocket and went to dinner.
On his way, in an alley on the Rue Mouffetard, he saw a child’s coffin covered with a black cloth, placed upon three chairs and lighted by a candle. The two girls of the twilight returned to his mind.
“Poor mothers,” thought he. “There is one thing sadder than to see their children die—to see them lead evil lives.”
Then these shadows which had distracted his sadness left his thoughts, and he fell back into his customary musings. He began to think of his six months of love and happiness in the open air and the broad daylight under the beautiful trees of the Luxembourg Gardens.
“How dark my life has become!” said he to himself. “Girls still pass before me. Only formerly they were angels; now they are ghouls.”
2 (3)
THE MAN WITH FOUR FACES
IN THE EVENING, as he was undressing to go to bed, he happened to feel in his coat-pocket the packet which he had picked up on the boulevard. He had forgotten it. He thought it might be well to open it, and that the packet might perhaps contain the address of the young girls, if, in reality, it belonged to them, or at all events the information necessary to restore it to the person who had lost it.
He opened the envelope.
It was unsealed and contained four letters, also unsealed.
The addresses were upon them.
All four exhaled an odour of wretched tobacco.
The first letter was addressed: To Madame, Madame the Marchioness de Grucheray, Square opposite the Chamber of Deputies, No.
Marius said to himself that he should probably find in this letter the information of which he was in search, and that, moreover, as the letter was not sealed, probably it might be read without impropriety.
It was in these words:
“Madame the Marchioness:
“The virtue of kindness and piety is that which binds sosiety most closely. Call up your christian sentiment, and cast a look of compassion upon this unfortunate Spanish victim of loyalty and attachment to the sacred cause of legitimacy, which he has paid for with his blood, consecrated his fortune, wholy, to defend this cause, and to day finds himself in the greatest povarty. He has no doubt that your honourable self will furnish him assistance to preserve an existence extremely painful for a soldier of education and of honour full of wounds, reckons in advance upon the humanity which animmates you and upon the interest which Madame the Marchioness feels in a nation so unfortunate. Their prayer will not be in vain, and their memory will retain herr