“You can do something,” said she.
“What?”
“Tell me where M. Marius lives.”
The old man did not understand.
“What Monsieur Marius?”
He raised his glassy eyes and seemed to be seeking something that had vanished.
“A young man who used to come here.”
In the meantime, M. Mabeuf had searched his memory.
“Ah! yes—” he exclaimed.
“I know what you mean.
Wait!
Monsieur Marius—the Baron Marius Pontmercy, parbleu!
He lives,—or rather, he no longer lives,—ah well, I don’t know.”
As he spoke, he had bent over to train a branch of rhododendron, and he continued:—
“Hold, I know now.
He very often passes along the boulevard, and goes in the direction of the Glaciere, Rue Croulebarbe.
The meadow of the Lark.
Go there.
It is not hard to meet him.”
When M. Mabeuf straightened himself up, there was no longer any one there; the girl had disappeared.
He was decidedly terrified.
“Really,” he thought, “if my garden had not been watered, I should think that she was a spirit.”
An hour later, when he was in bed, it came back to him, and as he fell asleep, at that confused moment when thought, like that fabulous bird which changes itself into a fish in order to cross the sea, little by little assumes the form of a dream in order to traverse slumber, he said to himself in a bewildered way:—
“In sooth, that greatly resembles what Rubaudiere narrates of the goblins.
Could it have been a goblin?”
CHAPTER IV—AN APPARITION TO MARIUS
Some days after this visit of a “spirit” to Farmer Mabeuf, one morning,—it was on a Monday, the day when Marius borrowed the hundred-sou piece from Courfeyrac for Thenardier—Marius had put this coin in his pocket, and before carrying it to the clerk’s office, he had gone “to take a little stroll,” in the hope that this would make him work on his return.
It was always thus, however.
As soon as he rose, he seated himself before a book and a sheet of paper in order to scribble some translation; his task at that epoch consisted in turning into French a celebrated quarrel between Germans, the Gans and Savigny controversy; he took Savigny, he took Gans, read four lines, tried to write one, could not, saw a star between him and his paper, and rose from his chair, saying:
“I shall go out.
That will put me in spirits.”
And off he went to the Lark’s meadow.
There he beheld more than ever the star, and less than ever Savigny and Gans.
He returned home, tried to take up his work again, and did not succeed; there was no means of re-knotting a single one of the threads which were broken in his brain; then he said to himself:
“I will not go out to-morrow.
It prevents my working.”
And he went out every day.
He lived in the Lark’s meadow more than in Courfeyrac’s lodgings.
That was his real address: Boulevard de la Sante, at the seventh tree from the Rue Croulebarbe.
That morning he had quitted the seventh tree and had seated himself on the parapet of the River des Gobelins.
A cheerful sunlight penetrated the freshly unfolded and luminous leaves.
He was dreaming of “Her.”
And his meditation turning to a reproach, fell back upon himself; he reflected dolefully on his idleness, his paralysis of soul, which was gaining on him, and of that night which was growing more dense every moment before him, to such a point that he no longer even saw the sun.
Nevertheless, athwart this painful extrication of indistinct ideas which was not even a monologue, so feeble had action become in him, and he had no longer the force to care to despair, athwart this melancholy absorption, sensations from without did reach him.
He heard behind him, beneath him, on both banks of the river, the laundresses of the Gobelins beating their linen, and above his head, the birds chattering and singing in the elm-trees.
On the one hand, the sound of liberty, the careless happiness of the leisure which has wings; on the other, the sound of toil.
What caused him to meditate deeply, and almost reflect, were two cheerful sounds.
All at once, in the midst of his dejected ecstasy, he heard a familiar voice saying:—
“Come! Here he is!”
He raised his eyes, and recognized that wretched child who had come to him one morning, the elder of the Thenardier daughters, Eponine; he knew her name now.