Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [338]
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:
Mon bras si dodu,
Ma jambe bien faite,
Et le temps perdu. ga
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