By dint of toil, perseverance, courage, and will, he had managed to draw from his work about seven hundred francs a year.
He had learned German and English; thanks to Courfeyrac, who had put him in communication with his friend the publisher, Marius filled the modest post of utility man in the literature of the publishing house.
He drew up prospectuses, translated newspapers, annotated editions, compiled biographies, etc.; net product, year in and year out, seven hundred francs.
He lived on it.
How? Not so badly.
We will explain.
Marius occupied in the Gorbeau house, for an annual sum of thirty francs, a den minus a fireplace, called a cabinet, which contained only the most indispensable articles of furniture.
This furniture belonged to him.
He gave three francs a month to the old principal tenant to come and sweep his hole, and to bring him a little hot water every morning, a fresh egg, and a penny roll.
He breakfasted on this egg and roll.
His breakfast varied in cost from two to four sous, according as eggs were dear or cheap.
At six o’clock in the evening he descended the Rue Saint-Jacques to dine at Rousseau’s, opposite Basset’s, the stamp-dealer’s, on the corner of the Rue des Mathurins.
He ate no soup.
He took a six-sou plate of meat, a half-portion of vegetables for three sous, and a three-sou dessert.
For three sous he got as much bread as he wished.
As for wine, he drank water.
When he paid at the desk where Madam Rousseau, at that period still plump and rosy majestically presided, he gave a sou to the waiter, and Madam Rousseau gave him a smile.
Then he went away.
For sixteen sous he had a smile and a dinner.
This Restaurant Rousseau, where so few bottles and so many water carafes were emptied, was a calming potion rather than a restaurant.
It no longer exists.
The proprietor had a fine nickname: he was called Rousseau the Aquatic.
Thus, breakfast four sous, dinner sixteen sous; his food cost him twenty sous a day; which made three hundred and sixty-five francs a year.
Add the thirty francs for rent, and the thirty-six francs to the old woman, plus a few trifling expenses; for four hundred and fifty francs, Marius was fed, lodged, and waited on.
His clothing cost him a hundred francs, his linen fifty francs, his washing fifty francs; the whole did not exceed six hundred and fifty francs.
He was rich.
He sometimes lent ten francs to a friend. Courfeyrac had once been able to borrow sixty francs of him.
As far as fire was concerned, as Marius had no fireplace, he had “simplified matters.”
Marius always had two complete suits of clothes, the one old, “for every day”; the other, brand new for special occasions.
Both were black.
He had but three shirts, one on his person, the second in the commode, and the third in the washerwoman’s hands.
He renewed them as they wore out.
They were always ragged, which caused him to button his coat to the chin.
It had required years for Marius to attain to this flourishing condition.
Hard years; difficult, some of them, to traverse, others to climb.
Marius had not failed for a single day.
He had endured everything in the way of destitution; he had done everything except contract debts.
He did himself the justice to say that he had never owed any one a sou.
A debt was, to him, the beginning of slavery.
He even said to himself, that a creditor is worse than a master; for the master possesses only your person, a creditor possesses your dignity and can administer to it a box on the ear.
Rather than borrow, he went without food. He had passed many a day fasting.
Feeling that all extremes meet, and that, if one is not on one’s guard, lowered fortunes may lead to baseness of soul, he kept a jealous watch on his pride.
Such and such a formality or action, which, in any other situation would have appeared merely a deference to him, now seemed insipidity, and he nerved himself against it.
His face wore a sort of severe flush. He was timid even to rudeness.
During all these trials he had felt himself encouraged and even uplifted, at times, by a secret force that he possessed within himself.
The soul aids the body, and at certain moments, raises it.
It is the only bird which bears up its own cage.
Besides his father’s name, another name was graven in Marius’ heart, the name of Thenardier.
Marius, with his grave and enthusiastic nature, surrounded with a sort of aureole the man to whom, in his thoughts, he owed his father’s life,—that intrepid sergeant who had saved the colonel amid the bullets and the cannon-balls of Waterloo.
He never separated the memory of this man from the memory of his father, and he associated them in his veneration.