These creatures have neither childhood nor youth.
At fifteen years of age they appear to be twelve, at sixteen they seem twenty.
To-day a little girl, to-morrow a woman.
One might say that they stride through life, in order to get through with it the more speedily.
At this moment, this being had the air of a child.
Moreover, no trace of work was revealed in that dwelling; no handicraft, no spinning-wheel, not a tool.
In one corner lay some ironmongery of dubious aspect.
It was the dull listlessness which follows despair and precedes the death agony.
Marius gazed for a while at this gloomy interior, more terrifying than the interior of a tomb, for the human soul could be felt fluttering there, and life was palpitating there.
The garret, the cellar, the lowly ditch where certain indigent wretches crawl at the very bottom of the social edifice, is not exactly the sepulchre, but only its antechamber; but, as the wealthy display their greatest magnificence at the entrance of their palaces, it seems that death, which stands directly side by side with them, places its greatest miseries in that vestibule.
The man held his peace, the woman spoke no word, the young girl did not even seem to breathe.
The scratching of the pen on the paper was audible.
The man grumbled, without pausing in his writing.
“Canaille! canaille! everybody is canaille!”
This variation to Solomon’s exclamation elicited a sigh from the woman.
“Calm yourself, my little friend,” she said.
“Don’t hurt yourself, my dear.
You are too good to write to all those people, husband.”
Bodies press close to each other in misery, as in cold, but hearts draw apart.
This woman must have loved this man, to all appearance, judging from the amount of love within her; but probably, in the daily and reciprocal reproaches of the horrible distress which weighed on the whole group, this had become extinct.
There no longer existed in her anything more than the ashes of affection for her husband.
Nevertheless, caressing appellations had survived, as is often the case.
She called him: My dear, my little friend, my good man, etc., with her mouth while her heart was silent.
The man resumed his writing.
CHAPTER VII—STRATEGY AND TACTICS
Marius, with a load upon his breast, was on the point of descending from the species of observatory which he had improvised, when a sound attracted his attention and caused him to remain at his post.
The door of the attic had just burst open abruptly.
The eldest girl made her appearance on the threshold.
On her feet, she had large, coarse, men’s shoes, bespattered with mud, which had splashed even to her red ankles, and she was wrapped in an old mantle which hung in tatters. Marius had not seen it on her an hour previously, but she had probably deposited it at his door, in order that she might inspire the more pity, and had picked it up again on emerging.
She entered, pushed the door to behind her, paused to take breath, for she was completely breathless, then exclaimed with an expression of triumph and joy:—
“He is coming!”
The father turned his eyes towards her, the woman turned her head, the little sister did not stir.
“Who?” demanded her father.
“The gentleman!”
“The philanthropist?”
“Yes.”
“From the church of Saint-Jacques?”
“Yes.”
“That old fellow?”
“Yes.”
“And he is coming?”
“He is following me.”
“You are sure?”
“I am sure.”
“There, truly, he is coming?”
“He is coming in a fiacre.”
“In a fiacre.
He is Rothschild.”
The father rose.
“How are you sure?