Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [301]
One day, a few days after this visit of a “spirit” to Father Mabeuf, one morning—it was Monday, the day on which Marius borrowed the hundred-sous coin of Courfeyrac for Thénardier—Marius had put this hundred-sous coin into his pocket and before carrying it to the prison once, he had gone “to take a little walk,” hoping that it would enable him to work on his return. It was eternally so. As soon as he rose in the morning, he sat down before a book and a sheet of paper to work upon some translation; the work he had on hand at that time was the translation into French of a celebrated quarrel between two Germans, the controversy between Gans and Savigny; he took Savigny, he took Gans, read four lines, tried to write one of them, could not, saw a star between his paper and his eyes, and rose from his chair, saying: “I will go out. That will put me in trim.”
And he would go to the Field of the Lark.
There he saw the star more than ever, and Savigny and Gans less than ever.
He returned, tried to resume his work, and did not succeed; he found no means of tying a single one of the broken threads in his brain; then he would say: “I will not go out to-morrow. It prevents my working.” Yet he went out every day.
He lived in the Field of the Lark rather than in Courfeyrac’s room. This was his real address: Boulevard de la Santé, seventh tree from the Rue Croulebarbe.
That morning, he had left this seventh tree, and sat down on the bank of the brook of the Gobelins. The bright sun was gleaming through the new and glossy leaves.
He was thinking of “Her!” And his dreaminess, becoming reproachful, fell back upon himself; he thought sorrowfully of the idleness, the paralysis of the soul, which was growing up within him, and of that night which was thickening before him hour by hour so rapidly that he had already ceased to see the sun.
Meanwhile, through this painful evolution of indistinct ideas which were not even a soliloquy, so much had action become enfeebled within him, and he no longer had even strength to develop his grief—through this melancholy distraction, the sensations of the world without reached him. He heard behind and below him, on both banks of the stream, the washerwomen of the Gobelins beating their linen; and over his head, the birds chattering and singing in the elms. On the one hand the sound of liberty, of happy unconcern, of winged leisure; on the other, the sound of labour. A thing which made him muse profoundly, and almost reflect, these two joyous sounds.
All at once, in the midst of his ecstasy of exhaustion, he heard a voice which was known to him, say:
“Ah! there he is!”
He raised his eyes and recognised the unfortunate child who had come to his room one morning, the elder of the Thénardier girls, Eponine; he now knew her name. Singular fact, she had become more wretched and more beautiful, two steps which seemed impossible. She had accomplished a double progress towards the light, and towards distress. She was bare footed and in rags, as on the day when she had so resolutely entered his room, only her rags were two months older; the holes were larger, the tatters dirtier. It was the same rough voice, the same forehead tanned and wrinkled by exposure; the same free, wild, and wandering gaze. She had, in addition to her former expression, that mixture of fear and sorrow which the experience of a prison adds to misery.
She had spears of straw and grass in her hair, not like Ophelia from having gone mad through the contagion of Hamlet’s madness but because she had slept in some stable loft.
And with all this, she was beautiful. What a star thou art, O youth!
Meantime, she had stopped before Marius, with an expression of pleasure upon her livid face, and something which resembled a smile.
She stood for a few seconds, as if she could not speak.
“I have found you, then?” said she at last. “Father Mabeuf was right;