Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [336]
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.
4
CAB ROLLS IN ENGLISH AND YELPS IN ARGOT
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 cabfp in the garden?” asked another.
“I don’t know. At all events I have levéfq 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 cribleraft 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,